The Academy (51 page)

This was a couple hundred kids packed into what might have been an indoor basketball court, judging from the painted wooden floor that Alex could see peeking out from underneath the black foam mat that had been put down over it. The DJ was in the far corner of the room, spinning tribal-infused trance at a deafening volume, the sound system massively oversized for the space. A few long cloth curtains and a handful of black lights seemed to constitute the whole of the décor for the otherwise naked building.

The promoters had seemed leery of police attention, given the number of hoops they’d had to jump through to get here – a phone number on the back of a flier that Eerie had selected from the stack of them she had collected while shopping which rang endlessly until after nine, when a voicemail message appeared and gave directions to what turned out to be an alley in the Tenderloin. Alex found the whole thing sketchy, walking between two dark brick buildings and past overflowing dumpsters, the whole narrow alley reeking of urine and rotting food, up a set of stairs and into a small enclosed parking lot. There they bought tickets, and got a sheet of photocopied directions from a Mexican guy in a wife beater, and a blond girl with at least a dozen piercings in her face.

The party wasn’t anywhere close to the ticket location, and they’d ended up taking a bus back to Soma, Eerie leaning her forehead against the window, staring out into the intermittent darkness on Market Street. Alex stood next to her, clutching an overhead pole, wondering how long it would take them to get to the party, wondering if the bus driver planned to let them live long enough to get there in the first place. He was a little bit sick to his stomach. Alex stopped counting, but it was at least a dozen stops before Eerie abruptly stood up, grabbed his arm, and dragged him wordlessly from the bus and down a side street. There was a short line in front of the building, which looked like an old, anonymous commercial property. While waiting, Alex noticed that SF police impound lot was directly next-door, a couple of uniformed officers lounging by the closed gates, laughing at the party-goers attire. He swore to himself and wondered what the purpose of all that had been.

Eerie seemed pleased, however, and started bouncing up and down almost as soon as they were admitted into the flyer-strewn lobby, her eyes sparkling and her pale skin flushed.

“Uh,” Alex said, hands shoved deep in his pockets, casting about desperately for something to say. “Do you want a drink or something?”

Eerie laughed, pulling the lollipop out of her mouth so she could talk.

“Alex, they don’t sell alcohol here,” she chided him, amused. “Those big guys by the door, they sell drugs.” Eerie gestured around them. “Pretty much everyone here takes them. That’s why we came.”

Alex looked around apprehensively. The crowd was a strange blend of club kids and hippies, most of them covered in glitter and shining with sweat, dancing with abandon on the makeshift dance floor, despite the oppressive heat. They looked a bit loopy, Alex decided, but pleasant enough, and they did seem be to having a good time.

“Okay, so, do you want me to go buy some of… those?” Alex asked, unable to keep the nervousness out of his voice. Thanks to years of court-ordered supervision and unscheduled drug testing, he hadn’t gotten high much. Outside of smoking pot a few times while he was in the Youth Facility, and once with Rebecca, he hadn’t taken any drugs at all. He wasn’t even sure what kind of drugs they would sell here, or if the money Eerie had given him would be enough.

Eerie looked at him thoughtfully.

“You could do that,” she said mischievously. “Or, if you wanted, you could try something else.”

Eerie held out her lollipop expectantly, holding it in front of Alex’s face, near his mouth. Alex recoiled, and looked aversely at the wet, rounded piece of red candy.

“W-why exactly would I…” Alex looked at Eerie desperately, but she continued to stare blankly, while offering the lollipop. “What is it?”

“It’s a Blow Pop.”

“No, I mean, you know,” Alex protested. “What is it?”

“It’s cherry,” Eerie said flatly. “Do you want it, or what?”

Alex looked at Eerie, and then hesitantly took the proffered candy from the smiling, sparkling girl, trying not to make a face as he stuck it in his mouth. He sucked on it cautiously, but it tasted like any other cherry-flavored candy he’d ever had. He wanted to ask her again what it was, what it was she had given him, but she was already pulling him toward the dance floor, closer to the giant stacks of speakers and the devastating pulse of the bass, her hands wrapped around his own.

Alex shook his head, confused, and tried haplessly to pull away. To him, somehow, it appeared that Eerie was sheathed in a soft golden light, a gentle luminescence that pervaded her, radiating out from a core that smoldered somewhere within her. She stepped backwards through the crowd thoughtlessly, somehow never touching anyone in the press of bodies, pulling him along through the haze of golden dust that trailed behind her. He gave a worried glance at the people around them, but none of them seemed to find anything unusual in the glowing girl trailing luminescent dust in their midst.

Alex wondered again about the candy. For some reason, he found himself thinking about the cloud of monarch butterflies from his dream, orange wings against a blue sky, somewhere he couldn’t remember visiting, somewhere he could hear the ocean. There was sadness in the memory, a sweet kind of sadness that he wasn’t exactly adverse to.

He managed to extricate himself when they reached the dance floor, batting her away gently and making excuses, eventually making his way alone to one arm of the speaker array, sitting down on top of the vibrating pile of speakers, next to an intertwined couple and a passed-out teenager in drag. They all seemed very young, somehow, Alex thought, though he wasn’t sure that he was actually older than they were. He wasn’t certain, but he thought he might have actually been more embarrassed sitting there then he would have been staying on the dance floor.

Eerie pouted briefly, tapping her foot and glaring at him. Then she shrugged, and turned away from him, gliding to the center of the humid floor, and then spinning around in a slow circle, her eyes closed. Alex sat with his legs dangling off a column of stacked woofers, the surface beneath him pulsating with the music, his skull reverberating with the bass beat, and he watched Eerie dance.

Later, he would not be able to describe it, although he would remember it clearly. She was not, he would say haltingly, an amazing dancer, not exactly. Not that he would know, having never danced in his life. But, he didn’t think it was entirely whatever she had given him, though he felt an exhilarating combination of calm and elation that he could only attribute to drugs. No, he would try and explain, there was something special about Eerie dancing.

Margot would tell him much later about other nights the same thing had happened; at retro-styled swing clubs in Los Angeles or hip-hop clubs in Baltimore, in the parking lot of a Phish show outside Phoenix, minutes before closing at a basement club in London, where a small crowd of puzzled transvestites had watched her dance to electro. Eerie, she would tell him, simply liked to dance.

Also, Margot would add, frowning, she has a thing for fucked up people.

But he found out those things later, after he had watched her dance, after he had fallen for her a little bit, in that intense and irrevocably irrational way that even he knew was a hallmark of total naivety. Still, that knowledge didn’t change anything for Alex. Watching Eerie dance, knowing that eventually she would come back to sit next to him, that was the first truly good thing that had happened to him since his home had burned to the ground. Maybe before that, too. He couldn’t remember that well.

She spun and twirled and the light around her had the quality of honey, warm and amber-toned, ambient and soothing. She was not athletic, not flashy, and not dramatic. Her hair hung down in front of her eyes, her sweatshirt slipped down to expose the gentle slope of shoulders, the rise of her collarbone above her tight black top. She moved with a self-assurance and grace he had never seen in her, not in any previous circumstance, but he found himself wondering how it was that he hadn’t always seen it.

People should have stared. They must have seen the sparkling girl, making slow revolutions through the dance floor like she was alone on it, in the midst of the press of bodies but never actually touching anyone. She was vibrant, gleaming with an inner radiance, a honey light. They must have seen her.

Alex couldn’t see anyone or anything else. He stared, his head pleasantly spinning, his heart filled with a benign euphoria, a mild intoxication. The world around him softened, became universally warm and gentle. The light around Eerie seemed to pass right through him, like a current of warm water, or the sound of a summer wind brushing over long brown grass. He tried to hold up his hands to the light, and he could not, or he did not want to. There was no way to be certain. He sat and watched Eerie dance.

And eventually, she came back to him, smiling and breathing hard, her face flushed, soaked with sweat. Alex reached for her without thinking, watching it happen without a trace of panic or anxiety, and she took his hand and squeezed it with her own for a moment, before letting go with a smile.

“What…” Alex croaked, pausing to drink greedily from the bottle of water that she offered him. “What was in the candy you gave me?”

Eerie laughed and patted him on the head. Her smile was benign, tolerant and amused. She beamed at him indulgently, like a favored child.

“Bubble gum, Alex.” She paused, then her expression turned suspicious. “You didn’t swallow it, did you?”

“What? No,” Alex shook his head, confused. He found himself wondering what he had done with the gum, anyway. All he had in his mouth was a soggy paper stick. “I didn’t mean that. What made me all fucked up?”

“Oh,” Eerie said with concern, sitting down next to him on the speaker. “Is it bad?”

She peered into his eyes, concerned, and Alex couldn’t help but grin at her until she smiled back.

“No, not at all,” he said earnestly. “I was wondering, you know, because I don’t really have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.”

Eerie looked at her hands shyly.

“It’s just me, Alex.” She smiled at him hesitantly. “Because I… because it was in my mouth, you see? Because my whole body is like a drug, Alex.”

“No shit?”

At the time, anyway, it sounded reasonable enough.

“Uh-huh,” Eerie said, nodding. “For normal people, anyway. That’s how the Fey communicate with each other, chemically. Pheromones and particular compounds in… you know,” she said, clearly embarrassed. “Sweat. Saliva. That sort of thing.”

Eerie blushed, and Alex wished he could think of something cool to say to change the mood. Alex snuck a look at her out of the corner of his eye. Her small round face was earnest, and it was easy to see how nervous she was. His eyes drifted down to her lap, to the strip of thigh that showed between the hem of her skirt and the top of her black knee socks, and for a moment, his train of thought disintegrated. Then he caught himself, and quickly looked back up at Eerie’s face, but she did not appear to have noticed anything. She was staring off at the still-packed dance floor, the crowd increasingly disheveled, energetic and sweaty.

“Is this like empathy?” Alex asked doubtfully. It didn’t feel anything like what Rebecca did – he had no special awareness of Eerie, her thoughts, or her feelings; rather, a general sense of well-being, a fading physical high, and a strange, benign fuzziness.

Eerie shook her head emphatically.

“No, not at all. It’s all chemistry. I like being around parties. They make me happy. When I’m happy, the people who, you know, come into contact with me, they are too.”

Alex sat next to her, and wondered why he couldn’t think of anything at all to talk about. Eerie sat restlessly beside him, kicking her legs against the speaker they hung off of, watching the people dance with obvious desire to rejoin them. He wished he could have thought of a good reason to make her stay there, beside him.

Eventually, she climbed back up to her feet, brushing off the back of her black skirt where she’d sat down, and smiled coyly at Alex.

“I’m going to go dance now. Will you come this time?”