The House of Tomorrow (17 page)

“Why are you in a tree?” I said.

“I asked you first.”

“I was looking up at your room,” I said. “Not hers. Why are you in a tree?”

Jared sighed. “I like to climb this tree, okay? And Janice doesn’t let me do it anymore because she happens to be a Nazi. So when she’s gone, I climb it.”

I nodded. Jared exhaled a puff of smoke.

“What’s the story with the shoes?” I asked.

“These stupid things?” he said, kicking again at one of them. “Meredith keeps them up here on this branch. For good luck, she says, but I think they’re a signal for guys to come over and feel her boobs.”

“But they’re up there all the time,” I said.

“Exactly.”

I walked over just below the tree and looked straight up at him. His undersized legs hung over the branch like a small child’s. He tapped his cigarette and the gray ashes floated past me to the ground. I still had the guitar on my back and it was getting heavy. “I thought we were having band practice,” I said.

“We are,” he said, “in a minute. I’ve been inside all day. Just let me get a breath of air for once.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette.

I took down the bass and sat on the frigid ground beneath the tree. I rested the instrument on my lap and ran my fingers thoughtlessly over the strings.

“Needs to be tuned,” said Jared.

Another flick of ashes fluttered down around me like dirty snow. Some of it landed on my shoulders. “Let me ask you something?” Jared said.

“What?”

“Do you think girls will want to get it on with me when we’re famous?”

I paused for a moment to let him know I was really giving it some thought.

“I think so,” I said. “I’ve done some research about this.”

Jared kicked at the shoes. “Yeah,” he said, “famous people have to have bodyguards to punch out crazy fans and screaming girls. It doesn’t matter if you’re small or whatever. People just want your booty if you’re an artist.”

“It appears that way,” I said.

“Fame’s not going to change me, though,” he said. “I’m not going to sell out or act like some powerful douche bag. I’m going to be the same Jared. I’m going to just rock and get it on with my groupies. That’s it. And maybe make a horror movie later in my career about brain-eating werewolves. Something cool like that.”

“Good idea,” I said.

I looked up and saw he was watching me. It was hard to see his eyes; his glasses were reflecting the porch light from the house. But his jaw was tense.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He took one last drag on his cigarette.

“Janice wants me to start school again by the end of the month.”

He was quiet a moment. Then he dropped his cigarette butt from the tree like a guided missile. It landed in a splash of orange sparks on a patch of dirt.

“I’ve never been to real school before,” I said.

“I know,” said Jared. “I used to think you were a homeschooled moron. Now I think you might be the luckiest person I know.”

He started moving toward the base of the tree, shifting his thighs over and holding tight to the branch. “High school is worse than you can even believe,” he said. “The guys are all a bunch of chuckling assholes. The girls are all versions of my sister. Everybody likes sports. And the classrooms smell like armpit.”

Jared began sliding down the trunk of the tree, dirtying his black pants.

“It’s hell on earth, Sebastian. Plain and simple,” he said, grunting.

He let go of the tree and fell to the ground, landing hard on his sneakers.

“Ow,” he said. “Shit.”

He walked around his yard a minute, shaking his ankles. His leather jacket hung down like a cape, and in the dark he could have been mistaken for a broken-winged vampire. Finally he loped back around and stood above me. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “What the hell am I going to do?”

“Are you scared?” I asked.

Jared didn’t say anything. He pressed his glasses back on his nose.

“We should probably go inside,” he said. “My free days are numbered and we have some serious goddamn work to do.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

We walked over the yard and up the steps. We wiped our feet on the mat and I couldn’t help looking down.
God Bless This House.
I looked back up quickly, making sure not to hit the bass on the door frame.

 

 

 

BEFORE WE COULD PRACTICE, WE NEEDED SUPPLIES. So we stopped in the kitchen and filled two large tumblers full of grape drink and big blocky ice cubes. Then we stopped at the pantry for some kind of bright orange crackers with peanut butter in the middle. It looked like food from another planet, but it tasted incredible. Salty. Sweet. Orange. I washed it down with a long drink of the grape stuff and closed my eyes to fully enjoy the taste. It was so cold and sweet. This drink certainly did not come from a co-op. It was certainly not organic. It was delicious poison.

Loaded down with our provisions, we headed down the hall toward the stairwell. Jared paused for a second in front of Meredith’s door, and I wondered momentarily if he was somehow aware of the phone calls I’d been making. The door was shut tight, and a strain of despairing music was barely muffled by the door.

“Lucky for us, she’s been acting like a suicide case all day,” said Jared. “Usually when Janice is gone she goes into ultrabitch mode. But I knocked on her door earlier and she was just lying on her bed looking out the window like some abused puppy. It was pathetic.”

“Maybe she’s in love,” I said, and instantly regretted it.

“Yeah,” said Jared, “and maybe I have a fifteen-inch wiener.”

We both looked at her door. Then we walked up the stairs and into Jared’s room. Once we were settled, Jared made multiple trips to the closet for tangled cords and little boxes he called “Effects Pedals.” He produced his amplifier and then another small one for me. The humidifier puffed and burbled in the corner, but the room smelled better this time. He worked quietly, plugging things in, flipping switches, tuning his guitar, and then tuning my bass. When he was finished, we both sat on his unmade bed, our instruments buzzing like enormous cicadas.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Give me a minute to think,” said Jared. “Why do you always have to ask things?”

Jared coughed. We were close enough to touch elbows.

“How did you begin practices with your other bands?” I asked.

“What other bands?”

“I thought you had performed in other bands.”

“When the hell did I ever say that?”

“I assumed,” I said.

“Don’t ever assume things,” he said. “You don’t know anything.”

Jared looked at his guitar. I looked at my bass. We met eyes again.

“I can play an A minor chord,” I said.

Jared seemed to think about this a minute.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear your A minor chord.”

I took some time to carefully adjust my fingers into the correct positions. D string. A string. E string. I strummed with my thumb, and there it was again, that perfect deep dulcet tone. It poured from the baby amplifier. I felt it in my toes. And as if answering an alarm, Jared immediately stomped on one of his pedals and put his fingers in position. Before the sound of my chord disappeared, he answered it with a growling riff from his guitar. The two sounds met and clapped together like waves. Then they blended and left the air of the room altogether. Synergy.

“Do that again,” said Jared.

I slammed my hand onto the strings and the sound blasted back at me. Jared played his chord again, breaking it up into three choppy down strums. He looked at me again and nodded his head. I hit the strings. He strummed three times.

“Do it twice,” he barked. “Play that twice in a row before I play.”

I complied the best I could. My fingers were slipping a little from position but the note was almost right. I pounded.
Boom. Boom.
Jared came back.
Duh, duh, duhhhhh.

“Keep doing it!” he yelled.

I looked closely at my fingers. I held the strings down as tight as I could.

We stopped at the same time and listened as the sound died out. Jared looked at me. “That was almost cool,” he said. “Kind of like Gang of Four or something.”

“What’s Gang of Four?” I asked.

“Just do it again,” he said. “I’ll educate you later.”

We spent the next half hour or so playing those two chords. Over and over. We tried to get the timing right. My part remained the same, but Jared added some flourishes to his until it nearly sounded like the beginning of a song. We were both sweating from the humidity of the room. And by the time we could play it how Jared wanted it, his face was pale and dripping. He tossed his guitar down on the bed and sat down against the wall on the other side of the room. He ran his hands through his knotty black hair.

“I’m actually supposed to do a warm-up before any physical activity,” he said. “That was probably too fast.”

I listened to him breathe. He put his hand over his chest.

“That’s the only chord you know,” he said, panting, “isn’t it?”

“It is.”

He took a deep breath. “That’s okay,” he said. “We gotta start somewhere.”

It took about ten minutes of rest before Jared looked normal again. I was worried for a while that he may have overtaxed himself. I had a series of quick visions of myself in the back of an ambulance again looking at a respirator. But when he opened his eyes again, he seemed somewhat refreshed. Like all he required was a brief recharge.

“You ever catch a buzz?” he asked, still leaning against the wall.

I looked back at him, expressionless.

“You ever drink a beer or some schnapps or something?”

“I inebriated myself once on some Canadian ice wine,” I said.

“Right on,” said Jared.

He got to his feet and pulled a small box off the shelf above his stereo. He opened it up, and inside were stacks of guitar magazines. He tossed them aside and revealed a small collection of miniature alcohol bottles. “My dad steals these from hotels,” he said. “He has a whole briefcase full in his closet.”

He carefully selected two clear ones and then he lined up our grape drinks on his window ledge. Poised over our tumblers, his hair hung over his glasses and his lips were curled in a grimace. He unscrewed the caps of the bottles and dumped one in each of our drinks. Then he stuck a finger in both glasses and swirled them around.

“What did you put in there?” I asked.

Jared picked up one of the bottles and squinted.

“Bombay Sapphire,” he said.

He held out my tumbler. I set the bass guitar on the bed and joined him at the window. When I took the glass, he clinked his against mine.

“Drink it fast and you won’t even taste it,” he said.

He tipped his up and started guzzling. I watched him for a few gulps, then did the same with mine. I angled the glass skyward and felt the drink flowing down my throat in long swigs. Jared was right; I could barely taste a thing. Just cold. Until I stopped and belched at the end. Then there was a piney taste in my mouth.

“Gone,” I said.

Jared looked at me and laughed. His lips were bright purple.

“Gone,” he said back.

He pressed play on his stereo and the Ramones burst through the speakers. “
I don’t wanna go down to the basement
.” Jared started doing a little dance where he shook his fist in the air. I laughed and sat down on the floor. I was already getting a touch light-headed.

“How do you feel?” he yelled in my face.

He put his hands on my shoulders.

“I have to urinate!” I yelled over the song.

“Downstairs!” he said. “Unless you just want to go in your pants.”

“I’ll go downstairs,” I said.

“Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” he said.

He let go of me and kept singing with his eyes closed. I got up, walked out of the room, and wandered through the hallway and down the stairs. I was feeling warm from my chest up to my cheeks. My head felt light, too. I hummed the tune Jared and I had just played as I walked by Meredith’s room. The door was still shut tight. I kept moving and found the bathroom just off the kitchen by the back door.

“Wha, wha, wha,” I mouthed while I urinated in the cinnamon-smelling room. “We are in . . . a punk rock baaand!”

The toilet water was blue for some reason, and it swirled around and around when I flushed. Above the bowl, on the tank, was a row of tiny soaps shaped like seashells. I picked one up and sniffed it. Strawberry. I examined the shower, too, before I left. It seemed to pour out infinite amounts of water, as if there was a never-ending supply. And inside the curtain was a wealth of bathing accessories. All of them foreign to me.

On my way back, I got all the way to the third step before I noticed the crack of light coming from Meredith’s door. It was open. I turned around and stepped up to the door. I was nearly face-to-face with the soaking wet muscleman on the poster. I could see the individual sprouts of his chest hairs. I peeked inside the bedroom. Just as Jared had described, Meredith was lying on the bed with her eyes open, looking at nothing in particular. Her feet were hanging off the end of the bed and I could see her toenails were freshly painted pink. The music had been shut off.

“Get the hell out of here, Jared,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“It’s not Jared,” I said.

I made sure to speak as much like myself as possible. Meredith craned her neck up from the pillow and looked into the doorway.

“Here on Earth,” she said, “people knock on doors.”

She laid her head back down and looked up at the ceiling. She did not tell me to enter. She did not tell me to go away.