The Suburban Strange (6 page)

They chatted quietly while the rest of the class finished up. “How do you like school so far?” Mariette asked her.

“It’s good. I was really unhappy at my old high school.”

“Why?”

“You should have seen me last year. I wore sweatshirts and jeans, didn’t know how to do my hair. I didn’t have any friends. I’m not really good at making friends.”

“It’s hard to imagine you like that,” Mariette said. “No one is going to tease you for the way you dress now. And you’re friends with those juniors and seniors, aren’t you? The ones in the black cars.”

“I am.” Celia smiled at the thought.

“But I know what you mean. People will use anything they can to hurt you sometimes.” Mariette glanced around at their classmates.

“It doesn’t seem to bother you, though,” Celia said. “I heard those girls calling you names the other day, and you just shrugged it off.”

“Sideshow Mariette?” She plucked at her unruly golden red hair. “That’s been my nickname since the beginning of last year. There are two kinds of days, you know? There are the days when you manage to stay under the radar, and no one really takes aim at you. And then there are days when you just have a bull’s-eye painted on your back, and every time you turn around someone is doing something cruel.”

“I know
exactly
what you mean,” Celia said.

“But I don’t let it get to me,” Mariette said with clear resolve.

As confident as Mariette sounded, Celia knew from personal experience it was impossible for Mariette to inure herself completely from all the teasing. Celia wondered if she should make overtures to Mariette outside school, but she couldn’t decide how. Perhaps it was selfish, but Celia wanted to keep her time for Regine and the Rosary, and apparently she was supposed to be looking for a job. And after all, Mariette hadn’t asked her for anything.

3. NIGHT TIME

O
N FRIDAY NIGHT CELIA
prepared as best she could for her first visit to Diaboliques. She didn’t have a clear idea what she should do. Her only frame of reference was the couple of school dances she had attended last year. Celia hoped fervently this new experience would be nothing like those extended bouts of anxiety and self-consciousness, when she’d been trapped in a darkened gymnasium, conspicuously alone in a crowd. She put on the black dress Regine had picked out for her, carefully applied her smoky eye shadow, and brushed her hair over and over until it shone. She stood in her front hallway as Regine patiently fielded her mother’s questions. “No alcohol. It’s just a little all-ages club. I’ve never seen a fight there. We’ll be home before one.”

“Well, I’ve never let her do anything like this before,” Mrs. Balaustine said, her smile a little tight as she glanced from Regine to Celia. “But you ask to go out so seldom.” (
Never,
thought Celia.) “I really want to give it a try.” She focused on her daughter. “Have fun, but be safe, okay? Stay with your friends.”

“I will,” Celia promised. She planned to stay as close as a shadow to Regine.

“And don’t think I’m going to start letting you stay out past midnight every night of the week.”

“No, Mom.”

In the car Regine said, “I have seen fights at Diaboliques. But both times it was one person being stupid and getting thrown out by the bouncers. I don’t think your mother needs to know about that.”

“Probably not,” Celia agreed.

“Plus, they do serve alcohol, but they put wristbands on the people who are over twenty-one. The bartenders won’t serve anyone without a wristband, but we don’t drink anyway. There’s plenty of time for that when we’re older. And they’re open until three, but we can cross that bridge later.”

“Oh, okay . . .” Celia was surprised by how deliberately Regine had misled her mother. Before now Regine had seemed so principled—everyone in the Rosary seemed to be. Celia supposed attending Diaboliques must be an opportunity they all treasured, and it must not pose a serious risk, or else they wouldn’t go. But the truth—the parts Regine had concealed from Celia’s mother, which Celia prayed she wouldn’t discover by phoning the club to verify Regine’s account—now made Diaboliques feel a little dangerous, both scarier and more alluring than it already had been.

“This is the brand-new driving-to-Diaboliques mix Brenden made,” Regine said, handing her a CD. “Except he likes to title the Diaboliques mixes in hyperbolic French, so it’s
Voyage aux Diaboliques Neuf
. Yes, there have been eight mixes before this one.” Celia studied the track list and surmised “Nightclubbing” must be the song playing on the car stereo.

They followed the same route as in the mornings before school to assemble the chain of black cars, and the procession felt even more glamorous to Celia in the nighttime than during the day. She had a momentary desire for sunglasses, which made her smile. From Ivo and Liz’s house the Rosary drove downtown to a warehouse neighborhood that was unfamiliar to Celia. But the street where they parked was clean, and she saw an all-night diner on the next block down.

Everyone wore a dressier version of their daytime style, and Celia thought they were a remarkable sight. As they got out of their cars, she looked around at this group of people who barely had stopped being strangers to her and in whose presence she still felt like a guest.

Ivo had on a morning-length suit coat over a shirt collar that spread out on either side of his polka-dotted black tie. It was clear to Celia he was the leader of this tribe, though she hadn’t learned why. Perhaps no one wanted to challenge him for the position. He was confident but quiet. She still hadn’t seen him look directly at her, but she was sure he had passed judgment on her somehow. Among the Rosary, Ivo remained the biggest mystery.

Liz wore a charcoal strapless dress over a fitted white blouse, a combination that never would have occurred to Celia. Liz had shown flickers of interest in her, and she had smiled at her on a few occasions, so Celia felt a little more comfortable with her. At school Liz carried a notebook in which she scribbled constantly, and even if the scribbles were words instead of drawings, Celia felt a kinship with her because of it.

Brenden wore a velvet suit of such dark midnight blue, it might as well have been black. With his hair swept up to its usual height he reminded Celia of a matinee idol, but the henna patterns on his palms made it harder to pigeonhole him. Brenden’s encyclopedic knowledge of the music Celia was just discovering made him the most impressive to her, and she longed to see his music collection. In the meantime she hung on his words whenever he told her the name of an artist or a song. She didn’t feel as though she was imposing because Brenden always was so pleased to share what he knew.

Marco sported a mandarin-collared jacket buttoned up to his neck and a piece of embroidered fabric wrapped like a long skirt over his dark pants. Celia thought he was adorable, but to her he also was fearless. She was amazed by his ability to push the boundaries of men’s fashion the way he did and somehow walk through high school unscathed. She knew it helped that he was so handsome. Nearly every day at school she heard girls talk about him with regretful longing.

Regine wore a corset over her black blouse and long skirt. The corset had a pocket on the side seam that held a watch with a silver chain that draped across her waist and clipped on the other side. Marco seemed to be correct that one of the reasons Regine had embraced Celia was in order to rise slightly in the hierarchy of the Rosary, if only by bringing in someone younger. Celia didn’t care. She was grateful to be there.

On a strange dark street, assembled with these alluring people, Celia felt a little plain in her comparatively simple black dress and black heels, but Marco whispered to her, “You look great. Regine wouldn’t have let you out of the house if you didn’t.” Still, Celia was nervous. This was a different kind of unease than she had felt on Monday at Suburban. That first day she had been scared of asking for attention she didn’t really want. Tonight she was scared of not being interesting enough. They walked down the block, a series of uninviting buildings that might have housed heavy manufacturing in earlier decades. The muted bass thud of dance music signaled that the club must be close, but from the outside Diaboliques offered few clues about its contents. A single red light bulb glowed in a bare socket above an unmarked door in a brick wall, guarded by a brutish-looking guy dressed in black jeans, boots, and a black leather jacket, smoking a clove cigarette. The spicy smoke was foreign, making Celia nervous and reminding her she had allowed herself to be taken someplace about which she knew practically nothing. When they approached, the bouncer broke character and greeted them familiarly.

“Hello, folks! Good to see you all! Who’s this?”

“Hey, Rufus. This is Celia,” Liz introduced her, and Celia’s hand felt tiny in Rufus’s broad grip. He grinned at her, and she wondered what it was like to stand outside a club all night while everything went on inside.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Paperwhite. Have a good time.” Grasping the door handle, he cleared his throat and said in a dramatic voice, “Twinkle, twinkle . . .” Celia was surprised to hear the Rosary chime in, adding “Release the bats!” in unison.

“What does that mean?” she whispered to Marco.

“It’s one part Alice in Wonderland, one part of the song by the Birthday Party,” Marco whispered back. “It just amuses us.”

Meanwhile, Rufus had opened the door for them. Instead of a room full of people, though, a dark flight of stairs awaited them. Celia followed the Rosary inside and up, then along a hall with no doors and plain black walls. The corridor turned left and right and then they arrived at a vestibule with a podium. A plump girl in a Victorian gown put down her nursing textbook. She took their money and marked their hands with a hint of contempt. After they passed, Marco whispered to Celia, “She’s always sour. I gave up trying to win her over a long time ago. Plus, I’ve only ever seen her in three different dresses all the time we’ve been coming here, so how interesting can she be?”

After another stretch of hallway, at which point Celia thought they surely must have reached the back side of the building, they emerged through a doorway onto a mezzanine that was dark except for a few candles on low tables and the occasional sweep and flash of lights from the dance floor below. In those flashes Celia could make out couches on which a few darkly clad people practically disappeared into the shadows; all she could glimpse were some pale faces and a plume of fiery red hair.

“Come take a look. We never go down there,” Regine said, and Celia walked with her to the mezzanine railing next to the stairs leading down. Below her lay a dance floor the size of a basketball court, filled with people dancing like frenetic circus performers.

She looked over the railing for another moment, but she sensed the others were waiting for her, so she turned back to them and they moved to the far side of the room. The perimeter of the mezzanine was so dark Celia hadn’t noticed another flight of stairs, but there it was, and the Rosary climbed higher. At the next landing there was an awkward little antechamber with several doors and people passing through in all directions. A man with metal spikes protruding from his ears and his chin walked by them. Celia wasn’t sure whether the others had surrounded her intentionally, but she was glad to have them as a buffer. They went through the door on the left and Celia saw another bar tended by a man and a woman clad head to toe in vinyl. Beyond the bar lay an even larger dance floor with a crowd that heaved and spun, this time to music that sounded more like rock. She saw people who looked like characters from Tim Burton films and was as entranced as she might have been at the theater. She would have been happy to stand there and watch for quite some time; she wished she had her sketchbook with her.

“It’s a little of everything out here,” Marco said. “We check it out every once in a while, but the music is all over the place. Patrick plays a more consistent set.”

“Who is Patrick?”

“You’ll meet him. He’s the main reason we’re here.”

Celia gathered that there was even more to come, and sure enough, the Rosary moved again, back through the crowded landing and across to a door on the opposite side. As they passed into another hallway the energy seemed to focus a little. Not as many people came in this direction.

The next room they entered was closer in size to a living room, with crushed velvet upholstered banquettes around the perimeter and a smaller bar on one side, where a beautiful, slender but strong-looking man with black hair down to his waist held court.

“I know this song,” Celia said excitedly to Marco. “ ‘Alice’ by the Sisters of Mercy.”

Marco looked impressed. “Regine really is taking your musical education seriously, isn’t she? This is where we spend all our time. The music is a little older, more obscure, and the people are a little more mature. It’s more sophisticated than the other two rooms.”

She could see the difference as she looked around. The people in this room wore beautiful dresses and sharp suits, as well as items of clothing Celia would have been hard-pressed to name. Marco rattled off the names of fashion designers Celia barely recognized: Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Thierry Mugler. Some ensembles looked custom-made. There were people whose gender was difficult to discern. Celia felt plain again, even in her black dress, which was by far the most formal thing she had ever worn—the same black dress that an hour ago had made her wonder where she could go and not feel overdressed. The elegant clothes her friends wore made complete sense to her, now that she saw them in this context.

“Come with me. Let me introduce you to Patrick,” Brenden said, taking Celia’s hand. The contact made her flash back to when she was younger, holding hands with her father. But Brenden’s hand around hers also quickened her heartbeat. She understood the act for exactly what it was—a protective older friend trying to make her feel comfortable—but she couldn’t remember ever holding hands with a guy before for any reason, and Celia thought she must be smiling idiotically. Brenden led her over to the DJ booth, where a wiry man with carefully messy hair turned away from his music to greet them.