We All Looked Up (16 page)

“Bobo's smarter than people think.”

“I'm sure he is,” Eliza said, backtracking. “But he does seem a little, I don't know, loose-cannon-y.”

“I guess.” Silence as Andy downed the rest of his coffee. He slammed the mug down on the table. “Hey! I just realized, you could probably help
us
out too!”

“With what?”

“This party that me and Anita are planning.”

“Anita Graves? Wait, are you guys a thing?”

“What?” Andy looked almost offended. “Dude, no! We're just collaborating on this party. And also I think we're a band now.”

“She sings?”

Eliza didn't know much about Anita, other than a collection of adjectives: rich, ambitious, smart, aloof. “Musical” was not to be found on that list.

“Like Janelle Monáe and Billie Holiday had a baby. It's crazy.”

“You listen to Billie Holiday?” Eliza asked.

“What? Because I dress like a punk I'm only allowed to listen to the Cramps or something? Don't be a bigot, yo. Anyway, that wasn't my point. My point was that we're planning this party for the night before Ardor comes. I'm talking
massive
. Not just Hamilton. All of Seattle. All of anywhere, maybe. But we weren't sure how to get the word out. And suddenly you've got this big audience, right? It's, like, fate or something.” Andy looked down into his coffee mug. “Hold up. I need a refill here if I'm gonna get my two hundred cups in.”

One thing you could say for Ardor, it was definitely bringing out the weird in everyone. The school's foremost slacker teaming up with a girl who probably couldn't
slack
in a hammock on a Cancún beach while sipping a margarita laced with Valium. And now it came out she was some kind of secret soul singer, and the slacker was probably the next Paul McCartney. Weird and weirder.

Up at the counter, Andy joked with the barista—a pincushion Goth girl who seemed to know him.

I like him
, Eliza thought. Not the way he wanted her to, maybe, but at least as a friend. Since Madeline left for college, Eliza hadn't really let herself get close to anyone. When she needed to be around people, she'd hit up a party or go out on her own. Pretty girls never struggled to find someone to talk to, as long as they didn't need to say anything important. But she did need to say important things. She'd needed that for a while, actually.

When Andy got back to the table with his coffee, he pulled a small silver flask from his backpack and unscrewed the top.

“Wanna make it Irish?”

“Why not?”

He spiked their drinks—once, twice—and at some point in the next hour she just started opening up: about the nightmare her life became after what happened with Peter, about her dad's illness, even about her mom, whose messages continued to build up on her voice mail like plaque on some hard-to-reach molar.

“You should call her,” Andy said.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because at least she gives a shit.”

“She didn't give a shit for the last two years.”

“Maybe. But she does now. Trust me, that's worth something. Besides, it's the apocalypse, right? It's your last chance. Get on the tearful reunion train already.”

Eliza, buzzed on the Baileys and having a surprisingly good time, thought how crazy it was that just a month ago, she wouldn't even have
spoken
to Andy unless some teacher had forced her to. And now she was actually thinking of listening to him.

That Friday, Eliza got the tap on her shoulder she'd been expecting ever since
Apocalypse Already
took off. Ms. Cahill, the office receptionist, stood above Eliza's desk, casting a dour administrative pall over the whole AP Chem classroom.

“Ms. Olivi,” she whispered, though the room had already gone quiet. “The principal would like to see you.”

Walking upstairs with Ms. Cahill, Eliza couldn't help but imagine herself a convict, traipsing the long corridor toward the electric chair. Each classroom she passed was a prison cell; from inside came the desperate screams of chalk on chalkboard and the sighs of tortured teenagers spending what might be their last hours on Earth learning about the causes of the Peloponnesian War and the best way to ask for directions in German.

“Am I in trouble or something?”

“You'll have to ask Mr. Jester.”

When they reached the main office, Ms. Cahill pointed out the principal's door and then disappeared into her cubicle, as if she were just an appliance, like a vacuum cleaner, that would sit patiently in a corner until it was needed again.

Mr. Jester didn't even notice her come in. He was staring out the window, past the dusty stripes of the blinds, toward the Hamilton parking lot. His outfit was decidedly non-principal-esque: wrinkled cargo pants and a ratty T-shirt with a picture of Jim Morrison on the front.

“Hey,” she said.

He jumped. “Jesus, you scared me.” His eyes were sunken and sleepless, and even the ring of hair atop the naked atoll of his head was wild and greasy. She watched him attempt the Herculean task of hauling up the heavy corners of his mouth. “How are you, Eliza?”

“Okay, I guess, considering.”

“Where are you hoping to head in the fall? New York, right?”

“If there's a New York to go to. How'd you know?”

“I read the blog, of course! New York's pretty crazy, though. I couldn't take all that noise and traffic, but a young thing like you, you'll do fine.”

A long silence. “You want me to take down the site, don't you?” she asked.

The whole Botoxed cheer of Mr. Jester's face went slack. “It's not about what
I
want, Eliza. I believe in the arts. Free speech and all that.” He pointed to Jim Morrison on his T-shirt, and Eliza wondered if he'd put it on just for her sake. “But those pictures you're taking have already caused a lot of trouble for this school. And I promise you that if you keep going like you're going, it'll turn out badly.”

“Is that a threat?”

The principal put his hands down flat on the desk. His voice was desperate, almost manic. “No! It's a plea! Look . . .” He scrabbled through the mess on his desk, coming up with a week-old copy of the
Seattle Times
, whose presses had stopped rolling a few days back due to employee attrition. The headline read
VIOLENCE INCREASINGLY TARGETS KIDS AND TEENS
. “It's not safe out there, Eliza.”

“But it's safe in here? At Hamilton?”

Mr. Jester waved the question away. “Listen, my superintendent says he got a call yesterday from the DOE. That's the Department of Education, Eliza. That's federal-level stuff! They think there's some kind of corporal punishment going on here because they saw the picture you took, with that slacker kid all covered in blood.”

“His name's Andy,” Eliza said.

“I know his fucking name!” The obscenity reverberated around the room like a gunshot. When Mr. Jester spoke again, it was with controlled fury. “I could get in real trouble, Eliza. Please. This is my life we're talking about.”

For years now, Eliza had felt a captive to the whims of adults, whether they were acting voluntarily (her mom, leaving), or involuntarily (her dad, dying), or just ordering you around (pretty much all of them, all the time). She thought she'd always feel that powerless. Then she met Madeline, who taught her one way to exercise some modicum of control over the world: by making a weapon of her body. It took Eliza a year to realize that, while that kind of power was real enough, the exercise of it sapped some internal resource, one that took a long time to recover, if it ever did. Today, for the first time, she felt like her power was based on something other than sex. The fear in Mr. Jester's eyes was the fear of a small man come face-to-face with something bigger than himself. And maybe it was cruel, but Eliza told him the truth—that she wouldn't take the website down just because of what might happen if she didn't, because she felt that what she was doing was good, and so only good could come of it, even if it wasn't immediately clear how. And when the principal began to sputter and threaten and shout, she calmly reached into her bag and pulled out the Exakta. It was the only thing about that whole meeting that truly surprised her: As she fit the viewfinder to her eye, Mr. Jester froze. She pressed the shutter button, replaced the camera in her bag, and left the office. All the while, the principal stayed perfectly still—resigned to his final pose.

He was fired the following week.

A
nita

FOR THE FEW HUNDRED STUDENTS
who still came to school every day, the morning now began with a mandatory twenty-minute assembly, presided over by Officer Foede, their government-appointed interim principal. He'd pass along the newest information about Ardor (as if they weren't all compulsively checking it online a hundred times a day), then hand the proceedings over to student council, who'd been tasked with organizing a five-to-ten-minute daily “pep rally.” The remaining members of the Hamilton improv team, Sudden Infant Monkey Death Syndrome, claimed Wednesdays, while a group of boys who sang a cappella versions of female pop songs—Miley Cyborg—­performed every Friday. The other three days featured a rotating cast of the talented and talentless, proving that ten minutes could feel like two or two hundred. Today, however, Anita had claimed the slot for herself; she and Andy were going to officially unveil the Party at the End of the World.

“Good morning, Hamilton,” Officer Foede said, stepping up to the podium. He was the quintessential cop—stalwart and ruddy-skinned and self-important.

“Good morning, Mr. Foede.”

“Today I have something very important to talk to you about. It's come to my attention that a political gathering is planned for this upcoming Saturday at Cal Anderson Park. I am here to tell you that it is expressly forbidden that any student attend this event.”

Anita heard a clicking sound from somewhere nearby. Two seats over, Eliza Olivi was taking photos of the proceedings. Her dark-brown hair hung loose and a little curly, reaching just to the top of a silver ankh that drew the eye down into the vortex of her prodigious chest. So this was what Andy had himself all worked up about. It wasn't as if Anita didn't get it; the pretty airheads like Stacy Prince you could always write off as so much plastic, but Eliza was different. You could tell she'd actually be a beautiful woman, not just a beautiful girl. Still, Anita wondered if Andy recognized the insecurity balanced perfectly between the push-pull of Eliza's two protective shells: the bitchy attitude and the skimpy clothes. Or maybe only other girls could see it, like those frequencies only dogs could hear.

Eliza noticed Anita watching her. She stood up and displaced the junior boy sitting between them with a word: “Move.”

“This might sound crazy,” she said, after she was seated next to Anita, “but I think I'm the reason this douche bag is our principal. Mr. Jester asked me to take my website down, because it was going to get him in trouble, and I said no.”

“What website?”

Actually, Anita knew all about
Apocalypse Already
, but for some reason, she didn't want Eliza to know that she knew. “It's this blog I started. And it's gotten a lot of attention, I guess, and so has Hamilton. Like, not
good
attention.”

“Huh.”

Foede was still going strong on the subject of dangerous political activity, glaring around the room as if he wished he could interrogate the whole place at once. Eliza snapped another photograph.

Anita looked over her shoulder. Andy and Bobo, seated in the otherwise empty back row of the auditorium, were laughing quietly at Foede's impassioned prohibition. If anything, the dumb cop had only made it
more
likely that students would go to Cal Anderson on Saturday. Anita didn't know much about the event—some kind of demonstration involving that creepy Golden guy (and what kind of second-rate hip-hop name was Golden, anyway?)—but she hoped it wouldn't dilute the impact of her own announcement vis-à-vis the Party at the End of the World.

“I want to be very clear about this,” Foede continued. “The ­Seattle Police Department and various other law enforcement agencies have reason to believe that this rally represents an incitement to violence against the state. For your own safety, and for the good of the community, do not attend. That is all. Please proceed to your first-period classes.” He released the lectern as if he'd just finished waterboarding it.

Anita stood up. “Hey! I have an announcement to make!”

“You can make it tomorrow!” Foede shouted, over the murmur and shuffle of liberated teenagers.

“What was it?” Eliza asked.

“The Party at the End of the World. I had a whole speech prepared.”

“Oh, don't worry about that. Andy asked me to start writing about it on my blog. You'll reach a lot more people that way than in here.”

Anita had an uncharitable thought—
I didn't ask for your help
—then swallowed it and smiled. “Thanks, Eliza.”

“No problem. Hey, we should hang out sometime. Maybe with Andy?”

“Sure.”

“Cool.”

Eliza wafted off in a bubble of floral shampoo smell, drawing stares as she went, along with a few more uncharitable thoughts.

The music room was located on the ground floor of the arts building, separated from the main hallway by two sets of swinging doors. You entered on the topmost level, and as you moved toward the center of the room, the floor stepped down like an inverted ziggurat—wide enough on each step for one stratum of orchestra players. The great black heart of the room was an old Steinway grand, lid lifted to reveal the crisscrossed coils and struts that were its innards. Andy had replaced the wooden bench with a leopard-print drum throne. He was already sitting there when Anita came in, picking out the melody to a song they were working on and sampling harmonies in the left hand. They met here every day now, one fifteen-minute snack break after the Consolations of Philosophy.

“Afternoon, Mr. Ray Charles.”

“What's up, Aretha?”

Anita leaned into the curve of the piano—her favorite spot. “I spoke to your girl today.”

Andy stopped playing. “Eliza? When?”

“She sat down next to me in assembly.”

“You talk me up?”

“I didn't get the chance.” Anita chose her words carefully. “You ever feel like she's a little . . . full of herself or something?”

“Maybe, but that's only because she's so awesome.”

Anita laughed through her annoyance. So what if boys always went in for the ones with the big boobs and the reputation for putting out? Didn't matter to her.

“What are we working on today, Ms. Winehouse?” Andy asked.

“Let's do ‘Seduce Me.' I thought we were getting pretty close yesterday.”

“On it.”

Anita more or less ran their rehearsals, but Andy wasn't afraid to speak up when he thought she was wrong about something. They already had a couple of songs in good shape—“Bloodless Love” and a retooled version of “Save It”—and a few more that were coming together. “Seduce Me” was probably Anita's favorite, because it was a collaboration. Andy had written the melody months ago, but he hadn't been able to sort out the lyrics. “You should take a run at it,” he'd said. Anita had never considered herself a writer, but as soon as she set pen to paper, she realized how desperate she was to express herself somehow. She could spend hours working on a single line, poring over a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus, even going back to some of her favorite songs to see what made them tick. She'd already developed two fundamental rules of songwriting: (1) Every word that rhymed with “love” was a cliché (and anyone who wasn't Prince who used the word “dove” in a song deserved to be shot), and (2) ­Clichés were sometimes okay. Otherwise, how could you have songs like “Stand by Me” and “I Can't Stop Loving You” and even “Love Is a Losing Game”?

Andy composed on piano, but once they had something solid, he'd switch over to guitar. His playing reminded her of Amy Winehouse's, actually—nothing showy, but always clean and tasteful. And his sense of rhythm was, for lack of a better term, exceptionally not-white.

“Don't try to sound sexy,” Andy told her after the first run-through. “The song already does that.”

“I wasn't trying. That's my natural sexiness.”

“Then tone it down, porn star.”

They worked “Seduce Me” for an hour or so, then finished up the basic melody of a new one, “Countdown.” That night, back at Andy's apartment, he'd finalize the chords while Anita sat on the couch, cleaning up his lyrics. They were together practically 24-7 these days, like sudden siblings. She knew his wardrobe, his breakfast cereal preferences, even his smell—a musk of sweat and deodorant and cigarettes and old cotton.

It was hard to believe she'd been staying with him for almost three weeks now, ever since that Perineum concert on Valentine's Day. Her parents weren't happy about it, of course, but there wasn't much they could do. Her father had come to Hamilton just once, a couple of days after she ran away, and they'd argued each other to a draw in the hallway outside U.S. history. Anita hadn't been kidnapped. She was still going to school. And the police were way too understaffed and overworked to bother getting involved. It was fun, seeing her father utterly powerless to command her, walking away in a childish huff.

She quickly replaced her family with Andy's. Well, not his
actual
family, who'd long since abandoned ship, but his friends. And while Bobo still hadn't grown on her (or vice versa), she got along well enough with the rest of them—the exploited rich kid Kevin, Jess-who-used-to-be-a-girl, and Misery, who seemed way too messed up to be Peter's sister, but not quite messed up enough to be dating a sociopath like Bobo.

Anita didn't have any friends for Andy to bond with; she'd always kept way too busy for that. And though she had no particular desire for him to meet her parents, she did have to pick a couple of things up from the house, and she really didn't want to go alone. After rehearsal, she ran the idea by him and got pretty much the response she'd expected.

“Andy, how would you like to meet some parents even worse than yours?”

“About as much as I'd like a kick in the balls.”

Anita slapped him on the back. “Then you better strap on a cup, kid, 'cause this is happening.”

It was strange—after only a few weeks away, the house no longer felt like home. Anita had never noticed how pointlessly big the place was. Why in the world did three people need so much space, except to escape from one another, to be more alone? Andy hummed the chorus to “Hotel California” as they drove up the long driveway.

Just on the other side of the front door, Anita's mother stood mopping the marble floor. She looked up when they entered, nervous and suspicious at once, like a wildebeest trying to ascertain whether the approaching lion was hungry.

“You're back,” she said simply.

“Just for a few minutes.” It struck Anita that she'd never actually seen her mother clean before. “What are you doing? Where's Luisa?”

“She quit. We offered to double her salary, but she said she wanted to spend time with her family.”

“Go figure.” Anita laughed experimentally.

Her mother replaced the mop in its red bucket and leaned the handle up against the stairs. There was hesitance in her eyes, a softening toward the thought of softening. Then a decision was made and everything went hard again. “Do you have any idea what you've put us through, Anita? Where are you even staying?”

Judgment. Disapproval. How could she have hoped for anything else?

“With Andy. He's a friend.”

Andy raised a hand. “Yo.”

Anita's mother swept her eyes over him like a grocery clerk scanning a bag of potato chips, ascertaining his worth, then brushing him aside. “You should talk to your father. He'll have some choice words about this.”

“No, thanks. I just came back to get some things.”

She walked past her mother and up the stairs. Her room had been dusted and polished and arranged.
Nothing wrong here!
it said.
No daughter on the run or anything!
Anita took a duffel bag out from under the bed and hurriedly filled it: clothes, jewelry, a stuffed cat worn down to a matrix of gray thread from all the times she'd tried to squeeze some human warmth out of it. And then she was crying—hot, angry tears—and Andy was there, supporting her as she slumped against him, letting the weakness pour out of her. It felt so good to be held; even after she was strong enough to stand on her own again, she didn't immediately step away.