The Disenchantments (12 page)

“Okay,” I say.

“Just for the record, I’m not hitting on you,” Meg says.

“Yeah, I know. I’m not hitting on you, either.”

“Oh,
I know
,” Meg says, meaningfully, and even though I don’t know what’s happening with Bev and me, it still feels kind of good for Meg to say that. It makes it feel like there is something between us.

“So, what’s going on with her?” Meg asks.

“What do you mean?”

She moves her hand slowly across the surface of the water.

“What kind of secrets is the girl keeping.”

“I have no idea,” I say.

The ends of her hair are wet now, turning a deeper pink, closer to red.

“I mean, I don’t blame her. I’ve had my darker moments,” she says. She changes positions and the surface of the water moves. “But why do you think she’s keeping things from us?”

Light shines through slats in the roof. Steam rises. No explanation comes to me.

“I’ve never understood Bev less than I do right now,” I say.

Meg reaches around the back of her neck, gathers her hair in one hand, and brings it around to one shoulder.

“That sounds really simple,” I add, “but it isn’t.”

“It’s just weird,” Meg says. “I always count on Bev to be blunt about everything. Like during the play last year, she would always say if we made a choice that didn’t work for her. I don’t know why she wouldn’t just tell us.”

She wrings the ends of her hair out. Drops of water run down the unadorned side of her chest. She reaches out of the hot tub to grab a hair clip, and it takes all my willpower not to look at her body as she’s looking away. It is dark in here, but my eyes have adjusted, and the water is only water, nothing I can’t see through. But then Meg is facing me again, and it’s enough to look at her breasts rising over her bra as she sighs and clips her hair back.

“What did you mean,” I ask her, “that you’ve had your darker moments?”

“So we’re done talking about Bev now?”

“I’m just wondering,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll tell you. Short version or long version?”

“Whatever you want.” I lean back against the side of
the tub and concentrate on Meg’s face as she decides how to begin. She tilts her head, casts down her eyes.

“I went through this hard time in sixth grade,” she says. “I started having panic attacks.”

“Was something going on?”

She shakes her head, no. “It didn’t really have anything to do with what was happening in my life. I mean, there were things that weren’t helping. This friend of our parents’ was dying. He had always been around and I really loved him, and then he got so sick and weak—he was suddenly old and it scared me to be around him. I started thinking about death all the time. And I had this teacher who I really liked but who kept saying these inappropriate things to me about the way I looked, just like all of these compliments all of the time that I knew were not really okay for him to say even though I kind of liked the attention. Also I was failing math. It didn’t matter how hard I studied or how good of a tutor my dads got me, I failed every math test I took. But really, it wasn’t about any of that. Anything could set me off. Like this one time, I was spending the night at my friend’s house and I wanted to take a shower because we’d been swimming all day and I smelled like chlorine. So I took the shower, and when I got out I couldn’t find a towel. So I started freaking out and crying because all I had was my bathing suit and I was too embarrassed to go back out into her house only wearing that.”

She laughs, but there’s sadness in it. “All I needed to
do was stick my head out and call for her down the hallway and she would have gotten me a towel. But instead I was all shaky and couldn’t breathe and stayed in there until her mom knocked on the door and asked if I was okay. So, as you can see, it wasn’t about the stuff that was happening. It was about me.”

As she tells me all of this, I watch her from across the water: her smooth, pale skin and flushed cheeks, her lips that I’ve rarely before seen unsmiling. Sometimes it seems impossible to really know anyone. Before this moment I had thought of Meg as always confident, always fun, never nervous or sad or anxious about anything.

“So the panic attacks kept coming and they were so fucking scary. I mean, I was, what, eleven years old? I didn’t even know that panic attacks existed. I thought I was dying.”

“What did you do?”

“My parents took me to a therapist, and then the therapist referred me to someone who could prescribe meds, because the attacks kept coming.”

“And the medicine worked?”

She nods.

“That must have been hard,” I say. “To go through all that.”

“It was just that before sixth grade everything in my life was good, and then suddenly I learned all of these things.
That I was going to lose someone I loved forever, and that someone I trusted might not have been that great of a person after all, that there were things that I just couldn’t do right, no matter how hard I tried and worked at them. It was a lot to take in at once. And maybe most of all it was that I had this problem, you know? That I couldn’t handle hard things on my own.”

She looks into the black water; her brow furrows. Then she looks up again and smiles. She presses down the edges of her bandage.

“But from now on it’s all about sunrises and rainbows.”

She says this with such conviction that there is nothing I can say in return. So I lean back and close my eyes, slide farther into the warm water, listen to the sounds of life outside, and try to believe her.

Getting dressed in the shed after Meg has left, I pick up my phone and see that I have a voice mail from Jasper.

“Hey, bro,” he says. “So Spider remembers the guy. Dude was the friend of this lady Spider used to date, who is also the mom of a girl I went to high school with. So I just have to get a hold of this chick Sadie and get her mom’s number, and we should have a name. I’ll get back to you. Oh, and tell Meg that it’s time to take the bandage off if she hasn’t already. Wash it with her hand and that soap I gave
her, and then put on the ointment. And remind her to stay away from Saran Wrap. If I find out she’s been suffocating my art in plastic I will be seriously pissed. Make sure to tell her that. All right. Peace, bro.”

I set the phone back on the wooden bench and pull on my cutoffs. Then I think I hear Bev’s voice.

“Whatever, it’s fine,” I hear her saying. “I just wanted to look at the downtown area before we have to check into the hotel, and we have to set up at the bar and I need to change my clothes. We have a lot to do and we just didn’t have time for you and Colby to hang out in the hot tub for an hour.”

“Thirty minutes,” I hear Meg say. “And the bar is super close and it’s on the same block as the hotel and we have two hours until the show starts.”

I stand still and listen for what will come next.

“Obviously,” Meg continues, “this is not about schedules.”

I push open the door to the shed, and there they stand in the garden. Bev squints through the sun at me, startled.

“Hey,” I say. I drop my keys in my pocket, and in the time it takes for me to pull my T-shirt over my head, Meg has walked away, leaving me and Bev alone together.

“I didn’t mean to be an asshole in the bus,” I tell her.

She nods, looks down at the dust.

“You heard Meg and me, right?”

“Yes.”

“I got jealous,” she says, and when she looks up at me, there is more openness in her face than I’ve seen in weeks.

“Why?” I ask. “Jealous of what?”

My heart pounds hard. Maybe this will be the moment.

“Jealous of Meg,” she says.

I take a step toward her, but she turns, almost imperceptibly, away from me. My heart keeps pounding, but now for other reasons.

She reaches into her bag for her pack of cigarettes. I watch her light one and try to sound as calm as I can when I say, “What is this about?”

She sucks in smoke, waits for me to explain.

“This,” I say, pointing to her cigarettes. “And the not answering the question, and the lying about college, and lying about Stewart, too.”

She looks a little lost, a little scared, so unlike herself.

“What’s going on?” I ask her.

She shrugs, but not like she doesn’t care, like she really doesn’t know the answer, or maybe just doesn’t know how to tell me.

“I thought we could talk about anything.”

I’m trying to stay calm and steady, like I’m coaxing an animal from a hiding place, but I watch as her face hardens. Soon, here it is again: the distance between us.

“I already told you about the application,” she says.

“Yeah, but it didn’t take twenty minutes. You need recommendation
letters. You need to write essays. You need a portfolio. It takes planning.”

“I meant the form, the online part.”

“You were trying to make it sound like it was this casual, simple thing, but I know that it wasn’t.”

I watch her face as she searches for some way to defend herself.

I search, too, for new words to ask her to explain.

The light is fading; a breeze picks up. She finishes her cigarette. The cat from inside appears and brushes against my leg. I lean over to pet her for a while. When I stand again, Bev looks at me. I look at her.

We both give up.

We park on the outskirts of the square, in front of an abandoned building. Meg applies her bright red lipstick, Alexa combs her hair. I get out of the bus and lock the driver’s door, lean against it and study the brick wall in front of me. Last year I did a research project on graffiti artists and it’s cool, now, to look at the tags spread out on the wall and know something about them. Some of them are familiar, from groups of people who tag the same name, and some are new to me.

I follow a few tags across the wall, up to an expanse of whitewashed brick.

“Hey, you know what would be so cool?” I say. They’ve all gotten out of the bus now and come around to
my side, looking where I’m looking. “If we graffitied The Disenchantments picture up here.”

“Oh my God,” Meg says. “That would be awesome.”

We envision it, where each eye would go, how the tear would settle into an area of the wall where a few bricks are missing in a shape that’s already almost tearlike, how we would paint the letters of the band name across the top.

“We should do it,” Bev says.

Alexa nods.

“All we need is spray paint,” I say. “I could stand on top of Melinda and you guys could stand on both sides of the block to let me know if anyone’s coming. It would probably take around an hour,” I say.

“Let’s do it after the show,” Meg says, and we all agree.

The square is pretty cool—grass and park benches, a few trees, old-fashioned streetlamps—and the buildings that surround it look like they’re out of a Western. An American flag flaps above us.

Meg points out a record store. “Let’s go in,” she says.

“Sure,” I say, but Bev wants to sit in the grass and carve, and Alexa sees a shop that sells hemp clothing and incense and tells us she’ll meet up with us in a minute.

A bell on the door chimes as we walk in. I start at some Bob Dylan records, and recognize a few of them from my parents’ collection.

“Colby, look at this.” Meg holds up a Supremes record. “
Look
at Diana Ross’s eyeliner.”

I nod. “Cool.”

She widens her eyes as if I’m crazy and pushes the record closer to my face, so I peer at it and say, “Oh my God, you’re right. The way it starts all thin and then gets thicker. And,
whoa
,” I grab at my heart. “That slight curve up in the corner . . . How will I ever draw again after seeing a line like this!”

“That’s more like it.” Meg puts the record back in the rack and flips to the next.

“You like The Supremes?” The girl who works there leans over the counter, closer to us. She’s dressed similarly to Meg in a short strawberry-printed dress. She has long bangs swept to the side of her face and bright pink lipstick, and looks just a few years older than we are.

“They’re my favorite,” Meg says. “I just made ten playlists and every one starts with a Supremes song.”

“
Every
one?” I ask.

The record store girl laughs. “That’s so cool,” she says. “Have you heard The Chiffons?”

Meg shakes her head, no.

The girl strides over to the
C
section and flips through a few records.

“I like your dress,” Meg says.

“Yours, too,” says the girl. “Oh, too bad. I guess someone bought them out since my last shift. They were recording at the same time as The Supremes, but they were on V-tone instead of—”

“Motown,” Meg says, grinning. “How about The Marvelettes?”

“Love them,” the girl says. She leads us to the
M
s and selects an album:
Please Mr. Postman
.

“I know that song,” I say.

“It’s sooo good,” Meg says.

The girl nods. “Yeah, this whole album is fantastic. They came first, you know. Even before The Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas. I love Gladys Horton’s voice.”

Meg is so excited that her head moves like a bobble-head doll’s. “I know, me too! It’s like a little smokier than Diana Ross’s, right?”

“Yeah. It’s
so
sexy. So are you guys just passing through?”

“We’re in a band,” Meg says. “Well, I am, not Colby. It’s a girl band. We’re playing a show at The Alibi tonight.”

“You should come,” I say.

“Yeah!” Meg says. “You should
so
come.”

“I wish I could,” the girl says. “But my baby is with the sitter and I have to go straight home when my shift is over.”

“That sucks.” Meg looks away from the girl, crestfallen, but then her eyes focus on the record in her hand and she gets a little brighter. “I’m going to buy this,” she says, and sets The Marvelettes record on to the counter.

“You’ll love it. I have all of their albums. The Supremes’, too. I even have all the EPs.”

“Wow, really?”

She nods. “And some other groups.”

“So you’re a collector?” I ask, flipping through a stack of postcards as the girl rings Meg up.