Songs for a Teenage Nomad (9 page)

When I’m sure he’s a good distance away, I look up from my scrawl and watch his retreating back, the orange sweater, his washed jeans the color of the ocean. Even in the warmth of the day, I shiver, my tears cold on my face.

***

Winter break passes. A Christmas tree goes up, then down. I listen to music and go to some movies with Alexa and Drew. I search Google and Yahoo People for Jake Winter. There are two in California, so I call both numbers. One guy is a doctor. I call the number anyway. A little girl answers the phone, and I hear laughing in the background. I hang up without saying anything. The other number is disconnected. A couple of musicians turn up, but they are all from the East Coast. I even try to find jail records, but nothing comes up. Either he’s not out there, or I’m just lousy at finding things.

My mother and Rob take me to Greta’s Diner for my fifteenth birthday on New Year’s Eve before they go to a party at Rob’s office. I eat chicken soup and think of Eli. His visit to my house. His joke about the chicken and the French chef that I can never remember but that makes me laugh.

I do not talk with my mom about my father.

***

The first day back at school, I push open the thick glass doors of the Little Theatre and walk into darkness. Only the footlights glow at the base of the stage. Confused, I check my watch. Three-thirty. I’m on time for rehearsal, but no one else is. Considering most of the drama kids live in the theater, I check my watch again.

Footsteps echo on the empty stage. Looking up, I see Eli walk across, carrying a paper coffee cup from a nearby café. He stops and looks around, his confusion mirroring mine.

“Hey,” he says, spotting me. He takes a short drink from the sippy lid, and comes down the middle staircase and up the aisle. “What’s the scoop? Rehearsal’s three-thirty, right?”

“I thought so.”

“We should check Hecca’s office,” he says, passing by me toward the back of the room. Ms. Hecca has a tiny windowed-in office just off the lighting booth where she posts rehearsal schedules and flyers for plays in the city or at the community college.

“It’s at five-thirty,” Eli calls back. “Heck’s got some sort of emergency. I better call my parents. I was supposed to work at the restaurant tonight.” He flips open his cell phone and starts dialing.

I join him at her office. On the door is posted a sign lettered in Hecca’s large, swelled writing:

Sorry, guys! Emergency.

We’ll have rehearsal today

at 5:30 SHARP! Kisses—H.

Eli closes his phone and takes a sip of coffee. “Maybe I can just set lights early,” he suggests, avoiding my eyes.

“Sure.” I walk away from the office and sit in one of the back theater seats. Outside, it has started to rain, erasing a four-day stretch of January sun. Through the smoky glass of the theater, the world is a swirl of gray. The lights on the stage snap on. I squint at the blinding white wash.

“Sorry,” Eli says through the speakers. The lights fade to blue; with the rain streaming down the window, we could be underwater.

The winter show, a festival piece Hecca wrote, opens in two weeks, and the set is nearly finished. The play is set in a fairy-tale world, and Alexa designed a large storybook whose pages turn for the six scene changes. We’ve been laboring over the canvas all week, at times frustrated with the lumpy un-fairytale-like quality of our images.

But with the wash of Eli’s lighting design, the blues and the ambers and the pale reds, the pages come alive. Alexa spent yesterday threading silvery strands of paint for accent—an accent I couldn’t see until now that the scenes are bathed in stage light.

“Wow,” Eli breathes, sliding in next to me. “It looks awesome.”

Eli is the only person I know besides my mom who says “awesome,” and I love it about him. “Thanks. Alexa’s so talented.”

“Not just Alexa,” he says.

My face burns, and I’m glad he has the lights on low wash so that I’m currently in shadow. “It looks good because of your lighting. Especially the moon.”

Alexa and I made a five-foot moon and suspended it from the ceiling on fishing line. Although two-dimensional, with Alexa’s creamy shading and Eli’s clever spotlight, the moon looms full bodied in the air above the stage.

He shrugs. “That moon was a great idea.” He knows the actual idea of the moon was mine, and I smile. I don’t deserve Eli. We haven’t talked for weeks. Before break, he avoided my eyes; during break, he was in Hawaii with his parents. His kiss seems far away in another world. Now, I just want to be near him. He smells like rain and coffee.

“I don’t think any fairy tale is complete without a moon,” I tell him. “Moons are so lonely and hopeful.” I sit up straighter, feeling silly. The light in the room, the quiet rain, have induced a trance. “I guess that’s sort of stupid.”

“No, it’s not,” he says quickly. “I think the whole play is sort of lonely and hopeful. I hope it’s good, that people like it.”

“They will.”

“Today’s our first day with partial costumes,” he says. “It should be fun to see the whole thing coming together.”

“I’m just looking forward to seeing you in a bunny suit.”

He laughs. Hecca has Eli as the White Rabbit from
Alice in Wonderland
. He’s sort of half-narrator, half-character in the play. “Um. I’m a rabbit, thank you very much.”

“Sorry. Rabbit suit.”

He sighs as we watch the light on the stage. Then, he says, almost in a whisper, “I’m sorry about…about the thing at your house.”

I shake my head, knowing we’ve already moved past it. “You shouldn’t be sorry, Eli. I’m the one who ran you out of there. You’re the sweetest person I know. I don’t deserve you.”

“That’s true,” he says, and I swat him lightly with the cuff of my sweatshirt.

“Anyway, I hope we’re friends,” I say.

“Now you’re being stupid.” But he seems to swell with it, our clearing this hurdle in our friendship. He stands. “I better check the second-act lights—make sure we don’t have any shadows.” As he stands, a human shadow moves outside the window. I look in time to see Cass disappear around the corner.

“What the hell?” Eli goes to the window, looking after her. “What was she doing here?”

I shrug. “What’s her deal?” I try to sound casual.

“You don’t know?”

“I mean, I know she’s a loner or whatever, but why is she like that?”

Eli climbs over the row of theater seats, sitting on the top of one of the chairs and planting his green-leather Converse-clad feet where his butt should be. Hecca would kill him if she saw him sitting in the chair like that.

He sighs. “Cass’s got a totally screwed-up family. She doesn’t have a dad. Her mom’s a fugitive.”

“What?”

Eli nods. “Seriously. She’s, like, wanted by the FBI. Cass never sees her mom. She lives with her uncle over on Sanderson Street. He owns that bar—Lucky’s.”

“Whoa,” I breathe. Maybe Cass and I have more in common than I thought.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know. It’s a small town. Word gets around.”

“What’d her mom do?”

“She’s some activist or something. And I heard that, like, twenty years ago she was with a bunch of people who blew something up, something major. I mean, a guy died in it.”

“Seriously?” The word catches slightly in my throat and comes out staggered, airless.

He shakes his head. “Yeah, I know. It’s wild. Like something out of a movie or something.”

“Whoa,” I say again.

“Yeah.” He looks out toward where Cass had been a dark flash outside the window. Was she looking for me?

Sara comes walking across the stage, sucking a lollipop. She extracts it and points it at us. “Hey!” she says. “You two made up! Eli, don’t sit in the chair like that.”

“Okay, Mom.” He slides into the seat.

She waggles the lollipop at us. “This is so great. If you two stayed mad for the show, I would have had a nervous breakdown or something.”

Eli, fond of Sara’s exaggerations, winks at me. “Now your nervous breakdown will have to be about something else,” he tells her. She sticks out her tongue, green from the lollipop.

“Pretty,” Eli says.

“Oh, my god!” she shrieks, turning to see the set. “The moon looks incredible. Oh my god, this is going to be the best play we’ve ever done here.”

Of course, Sara says this about every play. Smiling, I gaze at the glowing white moon, and, hanging there bathed in light and shadowed with lonely sweeps of silver paint, it gazes back.

People Talkin’

…cars snake up the mountain, their taillights rows of red glowing eyes in the darkness. With all of the headlights beamed forward, the mountain and the gash of sky behind shine faintly purple. My mother sings quietly to the Lucinda Williams song on the radio and inches forward in the car. All of the spiritual people have come to Sedona to sit on the mountain and commune with the energy. Mom says a little spiritual energy in our life couldn’t hurt…

The note is a poem, puzzling and strange. After PE today, I find it crammed into the edge of my gym locker. The writing looks knifed onto the page in thick black marker, but the words, locked together in crisp staccato, are music.

Words, hurled as whispered bombs,

Trap, attack, hack at your soul

Until you fall back into the darkness,

Into the hanging arms of a stranger,

Kicking and biting, crying, knowing

You will never be home again, never

Find home at the end of that strange,

Familiar road you’ve always walked

Softly on. The bombs are buried deep

In the soil of our hearts, our heads, our dreams—

But you slip, you clutch the whisper

That’s not a bomb, a crutch, that’s lurking under

The wind, the waves, the breaking glass of trust,

That hovers, like a waiting fox, in the corner

Of your eye to guide you, to hide you from the

Darkness. Only this fox, this curled silent sadness,

Needs you more than you need
him
.

Don’t be fooled by fools.

Meet at Lucky’s tonight at 8. For Sam.

Outside, in the shallow, wet air that promises rain tonight, I tuck the note deep into the front pocket of my jeans and decide on which of the dozen lies racing through my mind I will tell my mother.

***

The road to Lucky’s is not well lighted. I have a few street lamps but no yellow squares of lit windows to guide me. I stuff my hands, already gloved, into the front pocket of my sweatshirt and wish a flashlight would appear in the dark air in front of my eyes. No such luck.

I told my mother that I was going to the movies with Alexa and Drew. Distracted, she gave me a little wave but did not look up from the onions she was chopping at the kitchen counter. Since any announcement of movie-going usually results in a full-fledged interrogation—What movie? What is it rated? What is the running time?—her small wave and lack of eye contact surprised me. Something is wrong with her lately. Still, I was lying to her, so I guess her distraction was in my favor. She didn’t even give me a curfew.

I stumble down Sanderson Street, straining my eyes against the shadows. The few scattered street lamps give out a smudgy light. The sound of the ocean grows louder with each deserted block I pass. As I walk, I pass some boarded-up buildings and a few vacant lots, and then I come upon a stretch of train tracks that have clearly not been used in years. Even so, I look both ways before stepping across them, navigating my way around broken bottles, candy and condom wrappers, and a blue running shoe.

I hear music under the crash of waves before I see any place that could be producing it. Soon, though, hovering in the distant dark appears a ripple of red neon, a sign that becomes legible only when I am standing directly in front of it: Lucky’s.

I extract my hands from my pockets and study the outside of the bar. Below the cherry Slurpee red of the sign is a blank cement block of a building, which would undoubtedly be gray in the light of day.

Rain starts, a light mist on my face that clings to my eyelashes and cheeks. Not wanting to look too much like a drowned rat, I hurry inside.

Jingle bells ring the door, either left a month after Christmas or always there, but no one looks up as I enter. The light is as dim as the doorway outside, and the place smells of old cigarettes, grease, and something sharper and unidentifiable.

A sign that reads: “
No Persons Under 21 Permitted
” hangs faded by the inside of the door. Someone has crossed out the “1” with heavy blue pen but the number still shows faintly beneath the ink. Low country music infuses the room.

There are four or five people at the bar—all men, all shoulders and raincoats, with beer glasses in varying stages of empty. A man eyes me from behind the counter, and my heart beats erratically. In no way could I pass for twenty-one.

“You looking for Cass?” His voice is surprisingly low and soft, awkward in the sandpaper edges of his face.

“Yes,” I manage.

He nods to the back of the bar, a smattering of tables and an elevator-sized stage set with a single chair and microphone. Several people sit at the tables. Barely visible from the door, crammed into a corner table, are Cass and Sam. They are whispering quietly, sodas half finished in front of them. Cass looks up and notices me.

“Hey.” She waves me over.

Sam turns his head and sees me, and the surprise that seizes his features is not quickly masked. He, clearly, did not get a note in his PE locker. His gaze darts back to Cass, but she is standing, sliding her chair in.

“You want a Coke?” she asks.

“Sure.”

She goes behind the bar, her motions familiar, scooping ice and spurting soda from a tube into the glass. She pauses and looks at me. “You want cherry in it?”

“No thanks.”

I stuff my hands into the pockets of my raincoat and stare at the wall behind Sam’s head, trying not to notice his lack of eye contact. He studies the table, sips his drink, and runs his finger through the rings of moisture his glass has left.

“Here.” Cass plunks the soda onto the table. “Sit down,” she says, her normally gruff voice softened.

I sit where she had been sitting since there are only two chairs at the table.

“I have to work,” she tells us, and disappears through a swinging door next to the bar.

“So you know Cass?” Sam asks, his eyes settling on me for the first time.

I sip my Coke. “We have PE the same period.”

He nods and swirls the ice in his drink. “She’s a good person,” he says after a minute.

“Seems so.”

“People think she’s a freak but she’s not.” The music in the room is suddenly shut off mid-song and, though the music was low, its absence creates a hollow, empty feel to the bar.

“How do you know her?” I ask.

Cass reemerges through the swing of the door. She has pulled her hair into a ponytail and removed her sweatshirt. She wears a black shirt that says “GIRL,” and her studded black belt balances her baggy army cargo pants precariously on her hips.

I wait for Sam’s answer, but he just watches her as she steps onto the small stage, moves the chair, and adjusts the microphone.

“Is she going to sing?” I ask, surprised.

“Not really,” Sam says.

“Good evening, folks,” she says into the microphone, her voice clear and strong. The casual buzz of conversation at the tables stops, and the men at the bar swivel in their seats to watch her.

I am struck by the strangeness of her clear voice, her straight shoulders. At school, she is ghost-like, the shadow of a storm cloud. Here she is neither ghost nor shadow.

“I thought it was time for a little spoken word,” she says, to a sprinkling of applause from some of the tables. “I wrote some new ones for tonight’s performance.”

Performance? I look at Sam, who is watching her, chin in hand.

She speaks, low lidded, into the microphone. “This first one is about identity. Most of you went to AB High, so you know a little something about having this spelled out to you by a bunch of bastards who don’t know anything about you.” The tables cheer and applaud, hands over heads. Sam whistles through his teeth.

She puts her hand around the stem of the microphone. “It’s called…‘YOU.’”

Then she begins.

YOU see me each day, YOU with your yellow cellophane eyes

Blind to the clarity of what is me, of what is under the tough of my skin,

YOU with your varnished truth, your shoe-shined words that scuff

And cut me. That carve me up and break me into tiny puzzle pieces

Of lies.

Don’t look at me. You don’t see what you think you see.

I have heard only a few spoken-word poems before, some of Ani DiFranco’s and a short movie clip Mr. Ericson showed us during the poetry unit, but they were not like seeing it live. Throughout the piece, Cass becomes every word, her body swaying, her arms punctuating, her voice both accusatory and sympathetic.

She finishes:

And YOU with your Oedipus eyes, with your gold-plated lies,

YOU won’t wrap me, package me, trap and fasten me to who you MAKE me—daily.

To who I have to be so YOU can be who you think YOU are.

Even though,

In the dark decay of your soul, you know you aren’t

That girl, that boy, that face, that smile that disgraces the loneliness

You hold down, down under the black water of your heart,

The loneliness

That knows that even as it gasps for air,

YOU are losing your hold on it; we’re ALL losing our hold on it,

And it has only to wait minutes more for the clean honest air

To fill its lungs with success, for it to beat us,

Defeat us, forever.

She closes her eyes, nods into the microphone, and says, “Thank you.”

After a brief hush and a quick intake of air, the room breaks into applause. I am caught between feeling like I’ve had ice water dumped down the back of my shirt and like I’ve taken a punch to the stomach. Even with all of the performances I’ve seen from Drew and Sara and Eli, nothing has ever hit me like this one, the sheer energy of it pounded into me for two breathless minutes. In those 120 seconds, she transformed the shape of the room.

“Wow,” I say. And I suddenly know who the bathroom poet is.

“I know,” Sam says, watching as Cass drinks the last of her Coke several steps from the microphone. “She’s amazing.”

“I just need a refill,” Cass tells the audience before dashing to the bar.

“I had no idea she could do that.” I drink my Coke, my senses whirling: cold, sweet, bubbles, ice against my lips.

“She’s up there every Friday,” Sam explains. “This is all the stuff she writes during the week.”

I take a deep breath. “You’ve seen her before?” Somehow the thought of Sam alone at the corner table seems too bizarre.

“A few times.” He hesitates, attempting to wipe the wet from the table with a white square of napkin. “When I need to get away.”

“From your mom?” If I’m too bold here, he doesn’t show it.

“Did Cass tell you about my mom?” He digs an ice cube out of the glass with his finger and chews it.

“Not really,” I shrug. “I’ve heard some things.”

“What things?” His eyes darken, immediately guarded.

“That it’s alcohol. That she gets sent away.”

Red crawls over his face. “It’s not alcohol,” he says gruffly. “People should keep their mouths shut.”

I watch him steadily, hoping my face doesn’t betray the ragged beating in my chest. “People need reasons. Explanations. If they aren’t given them, they create them.” These words echo in my ears. I think of my father, imagine him sitting alone in a jail cell. Wrongly accused. He must have been.

Cass stops by our table, her eyes absorbing my stare and Sam’s red face. “Things okay?” she asks, her glass newly filled and fizzing.

“Yeah, sure.” Sam looks up at her. “Great.”

“You’re amazing,” I tell her.

A flicker of a smile catches her mouth. “Stick around.” She makes her way to the stage.

“It’s depression,” Sam says, watching Cass set her drink on the chair and fiddle with the microphone. His eyes slip to me. “My mom. Clinical depression. She gets sent away for it.”

I want to respond, but Cass is starting her next poem. As the words wash over me, her pulsing, rhythmic anger charging the air, I watch Sam’s face and feel the pain there.

***

Sam doesn’t show up at school for three days. He was in English class Monday, in the hall, by his locker, in the lunch line, with my eyes tracking him like a Sherpa. Then he was gone. No Tuesday. No Wednesday.

Now, Thursday, his plastic seat sits empty in English. Amber hovers around it, her pink-nailed hands curled protectively over the back of the chair.

“He’s been calling me like three times a night,” she announces loudly to Kandace Jones, a bird-boned fake blond from the cheerleading squad who never seems to do anything other than fix her makeup and echo whatever Amber says like a parrot.

“Three times,” she says, looking up from her chair into Amber’s smug face, a mascara wand poised before her compact.

But Amber is not talking to her. She’s talking to me. Even from halfway across the room. Her eyes flit occasionally to Kandace’s narrow painted face to keep up the façade, but she stares mostly in my direction. I bury my face in my English book,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, which I’ve read three times already, and will myself not to meet her eyes.

“Family emergency,” she says, sighing heavily. “His mom again, poor thing. They took her to a special hospital. In San Francisco.”

“San Francisco,” Kandace breathes, more impressed, it appears, by the city than by the reason Sam’s there.

“Yeah.” Amber nods dramatically. “Thank God he has me. I don’t know what he’d do if he had to go through this alone.”

Alexa rolls her eyes at Drew. “Well, thanks to you now, Amber, and your public service announcement, he has the whole school behind him.”

Amber ignores her. Her eyes bore into my skull, but I read the same line over and over, hum a Jack Johnson song under my breath, and don’t meet her stare.