Homecoming Queen
Malcolm Graham Cooper
My sister Claire was crowned the homecoming queen of Sunnydale High School two weeks after she died of leukemia. Almost everybody I knew was invited to the prom to witness the announcement, and they bent the rules in order to announce the results before the event rather than right there live on stage, as was the custom. To accept in her place, her best friend Emma volunteered; she had recently lost her left eye in a car accident, and she wore an eyepatch that, aside from being ridiculously incongruous to the gross formality of the event, lent a sort of humor to the whole thing that people were forced to hide.
As I walked into the dark and booming opera house — transformed into the epicenter of controlled teenage rebellion for one night only — I could feel the tuxedo my mother made me wear rub against my skin, and I looked around constantly to see who was looking at me. I couldn’t really describe how I felt at that moment — maybe I was scared of being around a young crowd that was still two years ahead of me in school and who knows how far ahead of me in life, but it was most likely showing up with my parents that sent me into a panic.
Parents didn’t belong at prom.
On the walls of the opera house, the lights jerked with bold gels, transforming the room into two mysterious worlds: first, the blue one bathed everybody in sexy darkness, the red world flickering before the color had enough time to imprint itself on the walls, returning to blue again like a cadence of a sound that droned on and on. When the time came for the ceremony, they turned on the lights, and the music stopped. I suddenly felt the air around me push against the sides of my head. Seeing the faces of all those teenagers—some of whom I recognized—bathed in the new light was truly creepy; some were droopy and sad as if the emotional gravity of the situation pulled the skin down; others were drawn and empty but moving fast against the light above heaving chests that breathed in quick staccato-like pulses. And just like that, the invisible motion of breathing in the dark choked out, and then the lights came on, signaling the seriousness of what was to come. The principal of the school took the stage, and everybody averted their gazes from whatever they were doing, stopping like lethargic soldiers.
Mr. Collins was a very fat man; for this event, he wore a black tuxedo that looked more like a garbage bag with a bow tie attached. He negotiated the challenge of the stairs seriously, stopping at each to muster the courage to take the rest as he caught his breath. On stage, he grabbed the microphone and held it at the very bottom with rigid, stubby fingers, using the other hand to lasso the cord behind his back. The bright lights aimed at the stage made the beads of sweat glisten on his forehead, and in my mouth, I could taste their salt.
“Hello, everybody,” he said, jamming the head of the microphone through his lips, nearly pulling it down his throat to choke on. “I want to commend each and every one of you on the success of tonight. I have yet to hear of one incident, so let’s keep it up.” He cleared his throat, and the resulting crackle boomed around the room. “But in order to do that, let me remind you that we will be breathalyzing again after the ceremony. Report to Officer Bates there in the back in an orderly line.” He shielded his eyes with his free hand, his mouth pursed and white.
The assistant principal, Ms. Relke, took her place behind him, her long arms folded in front of her. Her husband died a couple of years ago — he was found hanging naked in their walk-in closet on Christmas Eve.
“Ok, so there’s that,” Mr. Collins continued. He began to look around the stage as if pestered by an invisible mouse. “Now, I will soon announce the homecoming king and queen. But first, let me say a few words about our queen, Ms. Claire Rutherford.” He stopped and stared straight ahead. “Claire was a bright and intelligent girl. She made friends easily. She had a charming sense of humor, and students have told me that she could light up any room. She was known for her beauty but also her humble nature. Even though she isn’t present in body with us here tonight, she is in spirit. Please, accept this honor for her, an honor she was born to accept.”
Ms. Relke had her eyes closed and nodded her head after every sentence as if all of what Mr. Collins said was common sacred knowledge. Around the room, similar faces responded to Ms. Relke’s lead, some of them red and sobbing. If the circumstances were different, it would all seem so pathetic. Mr. Collins hobbled down the stairs to the stage, and Claire’s friend Emma ascended, holding up her salmon-colored dress, and her hidden feet clicked against the steps. Her eyepatch sparkled under the light as if she were some pirate in a disco. Her blond hair fell in thick ringlets and bounced as if on its own. She was crying, but her makeup remained steady and dense, with her bold, defined lips dictating a secret message, a prayer to Claire, although I never knew her to be religious. Then she looked up and began to clap. I felt my father’s hand tighten against my right shoulder, my mother sobbing and heaving while steadying her cell phone to take a picture. When Mr. Collins steadied the tiara on Emma’s head, his shaking hands dropped it on the stage. Ms. Relke and Mr. Collins stooped down in a frantic dash of recovery as if a newborn fell from the arms of a stranger. Some people gasped, but mostly, they just ignored it. I tried not to laugh.
After the ceremony, my parents lingered around to receive condolences and kind words. I hustled through the main entrance; I didn’t tell them where I was going, but they seemed too distracted to care.
On my way out, I saw a girl who picked up her high heels and a bouquet of flowers from one of the banquet tables. The flowers drooped plaintively, pedals scattered as she moved forward. She looked like a lost girl who was older than she was — her face had the downcast scowl of someone already beaten by the dismal qualities of lost faith. Her bare feet smacked on the pavement of the parking lot as she walked quickly in the other direction — she was stripped of all the artifice of the night at that point, her toes bending with each step like some unevolved version of herself. The lump in my throat forced me to turn around and go back to the car, not knowing what to do or say to make things better.
Outside in the parking lot, the early autumn night remained a welcomed silence, the air biting slightly in anticipation of the drop in temperature so characteristic of the next six months of the desert’s excuse for mild weather. The parking lot was mostly empty, with a few cars resting near the entrance and white and black limos idling in the roundabout. I walked into the parking lot to my parents’ white sedan, which looked silver under the bright light of the full moon. As I sat down on the curb by the car, thinking about all the people I hadn’t seen inside, a car alarm went off at the other end of the parking lot, the end that opened out to the empty desert. I jumped at first, thinking maybe it was my parents, but the sound was too distant. And then, as if in response to the car’s sharp wailing, a hollow boom made me jump — up in the sky’s blackness, little specks of silver crackled like so many stars falling to earth.
I followed the fireworks in the dark — the parking lot didn’t have any lights on. Whoever was lighting them didn’t care about the display much because I heard three or four shots in the thirty seconds I was walking. At the end of the pavement, Claire’s boyfriend Randy sat slumped over, reaching inside a backpack for the rockets he was propelling in the air from an empty beer bottle.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned around and saluted with a finger to the temple, turning back around while his arm searched inside the backpack. The long chain earring that he always wore glistened in the moonlight, and he had on the blue Adolescents shirt that he wore practically every day. His wavy black hair was greasy against his shoulders. It took me a minute to realize that I hadn’t seen him inside, but looking at him there in his regular clothes signaled to me that he probably never even tried to attend.
“Can I try?” I said, stepping forward.
“Be my guest,” Randy said as he lit a fuse with a butane lighter.
Inside the backpack were a couple of giant rockets.
“How do you fire these?” I pulled one out. I had to use both hands because it was so thick and heavy.
“No, let me do those,” he said, plucking it out of my hands. My arms twitched on reflex. “Take these.” He bent down and produced a small wooden box.
Inside were a few skinny sticks that looked like chopsticks with paper at the end. I held one up against the moonlight to get a better look. “What are these?”
“Sparklers. It’s all that’s left. You should use ‘em up because they’re gonna get dried out.” His voice sounded hoarser than usual, like he had been yelling all day, but it sounded mature and deep, like my dad’s.
Randy lit the fuse for me, reminding me that I had to keep it at arm’s length and out of the brush. I was kind of pissed that he didn’t trust me with the bigger stuff. He talked down to me most of the time. But this time was different — he actually spoke directly at me, looking me in the eye. The sparkles were sort of like shiny vomit streaming down for a second or two, and by the time you noticed what was happening, it went out. With the other one, I tried to make crazy shapes in the air, directing some invisible airplane on a glittering gold runway. After I used them all, an overwhelming sense of disappointment set in.
Randy walked me to the car to see my parents. When she saw him, my mother turned her head away and threw herself in the car, her fingers clutching the front of my father’s blazer she wore. But then my dad surprised me by doing something I’ve never seen him do before — he hugged Randy, embracing him close enough to almost swallow him whole in his arms; Randy made a moaning sound like he was fighting for air. And just like that, my dad turned around and got in the car. I followed. Nobody said anything.
My sister Claire died of leukemia at the age of seventeen. From the moment she was diagnosed — not counting the different procedures and fruitless searches for marrow donors — everyone was free to watch her die and fade away. It was as if she aged fifty years in the span of a couple, and she slowly but surely destroyed every expectation thrust upon her. Her beauty disappeared, and so did all those things that went with it.
I could only remember the memories of my sister that were tragic, as most memories tend to be over time. Claire partied too much. She drank until she blacked out. She was sexually abused by our uncle Frank when we were still in elementary school, and she still told me things that I wish she hadn’t. She often picked on girls and got in fights, wrote mean things on their Facebook walls. Once, she propositioned a teacher for sex in exchange for a passing grade in Geometry. Some of these things I discovered for myself, others I heard from more than one source. Soon, all this became common knowledge. Then she died. She never had a chance to make it right.
I remember when things got really bad, and my parents had me sit in the hospital room with her. What I remember most about those visits was the smell: shit and sweat that clung to the walls and chairs, followed by a finish of burning rubbing alcohol. Her face was always white and frowning. I would walk into the room, and she would look at me with resigned indignation, her eyes looking away, saying nothing. I would sit down in the chair next to the bed, thinking of things to say but falling short. We ended up watching TV, mostly Seinfeld reruns or Jeopardy. Sometimes, when something funny happened, I would make a big ordeal about laughing and would look at Claire to share in the laugh, but she always just lay there silent.
When she died, I spent the following couple of days trying to relive memories of my older sister, perhaps in an attempt to form my own version of her to cling to. But my mind always settled on one thing, falling into its hole of memory no matter how much I tried not to think about it: a little while before she got really sick, she caught me going through her underwear drawer. I mainly did it because I was curious; I had always imagined girls wearing underwear, and I wanted to touch them. I remember my whole body jumping and twisting as the sound of the door opened, startling my nerves. I stuffed the white cotton pair I was holding in my back pocket, and then we met eyes; her red lips sneered upward, and her eyebrows furrowed — a look of empty contempt that surprised me much more than the resulting punch to my ribcage ever could. Sometimes, I would pick up her framed senior picture — her long blond hair lounging against her shoulder, her face white and spotless, lips glossy as they reflected light. I would try to imagine her like this — combing my mind for memories when she was equally happy — but all I could see was that sneer as she discovered me hiding what I found in the drawer.
On the day after the homecoming dance, I stayed home from school to look at porn and eat Cheetos. With my parents at work, I was free to do basically whatever I wanted, free from the always-lingering anxiety that my parents perhaps knew what I was doing when I was alone, listening through the walls to the music I played. After Claire’s death, my parents and teachers basically gave me a free pass to take off whenever I wanted to, unknowingly giving me a free pass to unrelenting carnage.
I got up from bed after taking a nap and looked out the window; Randy’s car was parked across the street, a station wagon with wood paneling. He was smoking a cigarette and looking down at the street. When I went out the front door with the garbage, I made sure to close the plastic bin without making any noise because I didn’t want to have to deal with him.
“Marcus,” he said. He talked fast, like a car horn swerving through traffic.
I was walking back into the house, but I stopped at the foot of the steps, thought about it, and turned around to face him. I tried my best to smile and wave.
“Get in,” he said and jerked his head to the side.
The inside of his car smelled like old crayons. I stared at the crack in the windshield as it sparkled from the sun. Randy just sat there smoking his cigarette, looking forward and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. In the daylight, I realized how long Randy's hair was — dark and wavy against his shoulders, matted and wet with grease. I studied the long chain he wore in his right ear — a golden band that fused with his hair, a crucifix at the end. His nose was long and straight, and unlike most teenagers I knew, his skin was smooth. And then a thought struck me as odd: Randy was pretty, and not in the way guys are handsome or traditionally good-looking, as they say, but he was downright pretty like a girl can be.
“So,” I began, hoping to break the silent tension. “Got any more of those fireworks?”
He exhaled a puff of smoke through his nose, and it twisted and curled against the light. Then he dropped the cigarette into a half-empty water bottle in the cup holder; it hissed as the fire went out.
“Can you do something for me?” Randy said. He folded his arms and continued to stare through the windshield.
I shifted in my seat. “Um, I dunno. Like what?”
He turned his head. His eyes were wide like he suddenly grew surprised, and he pursed his lips as he thought. “No. Tell me you’ll do it first.” He took a hold of my shoulders.
I jerked my torso. “What’s in it for me? And besides, if my parents come home and find me gone, they’re going to freak.”
“Who said you’re leaving? Just listen for a second, Marcus,” Randy said. His voice began to shake like the night before.
“Fine. Doesn’t mean I’ll do it.”
He raised his dark eyebrows and scratched the stubble on his cheek as he considered. “Fair enough. I guess. Besides, it’s not a big deal,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “I just need you to get something. Something of Claire’s. In her room.”
“Get it yourself.”
“No. I can’t.” He bit at his thumbnail.
“What’s stopping you? My parents are at work.”
“I just can’t.”
I found a BB gun under the seat, one of those airsoft handguns. I took aim at the nearest mailbox, my right eye squinting. “Whatever. What is it?” I said, throwing down the gun after discovering it was empty.
“A box. Like, a chest. You know. A wooden chest thing,” he said, obviously annoyed.
“What’s in it?”
“Just fucking do it, man. C’mon. Stop being a brat.”
“Fine,” I said, sighing heavily for effect. I couldn’t really care less about doing it.
Of course, I knew exactly where it was — behind the headboard of her bed, inside a small hole in the drywall where my dad lost control of a dolly while moving a dresser. I slid under the bed, crawled against the carpet, stuck my arm inside the hole, and felt around. My hand hit wood almost immediately. I took it to the kitchen and examined it on the counter: it was only about the size of one of my hands, but it felt heavy. It was a deep brown oak with Claire embossed on a silver plate in the center. When I tried to open it, I discovered that it was locked, but I never remembered seeing a key to it.
Inside the car, Randy said nothing and only nodded when I showed him the box. He didn’t take it out of my lap but just looked at it, studying it silently with a blank face and eyes drooping at the lids, and then he reached into his shirt like he was scratching something and pulled out a necklace he was wearing. As he tugged it off his neck and out of the web of his hair, I could see the sun blinking off the key’s silver at the end of the chain. He leaned over to my lap where the box sat and without taking it, unlocked it with a key. His face didn’t change as his hands stirred up the things inside — the sound of paper rustling and hollow thumps against the hollow wood. I craned my neck over the lid and was disappointed at what I saw: just some notes on lined paper bound with a purple hair tie, a couple of condoms, some fake eyelashes, and a tiny vial with what was most likely cocaine residue plastered on the sides. Randy’s mouth tensed up at the side. He was probably disappointed at what he saw, too. And then, as if an afterthought, he plunged his fingers inside a small pocket in the lid’s velvet lining. His face relaxed a little, his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth as he blindly searched the inner pocket.
“Fuck yes,” he said, sounding like a little kid finding a lost toy. He opened his palm and sprinkled two purple pills in its center, turning them over again and again as if he had just found some gold at the end of a lake.
“What are those?” I leaned in closer.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said and lifted up off the seat to stick the pills in his back pocket.
I stuck the box in between the windshield and the dashboard. “Where are my smokes?”
At first, he looked at me, puzzled. But then he seemed to remember, and after making a big deal about opening up and showing me his own empty pack, he said, “All gone. Gonna have to go buy some.”
“No problem. Let’s go,” I said.
He shook his head. I expected little balls of grease to come flying from his hair. “Nope. I can’t have you in the car with me.”
I just sat there, not saying anything. The sun was in the middle of the sky, and the street was deserted. I could tell that Randy was thinking because he was chewing his thumbnail and moaning from his stomach. And just like that, he started the car and drove up the street without looking up.
At the 7-11, a few blocks from the house, he had me go into the backseat and lie down. I started to tell him they didn’t care, that I was in there all the time, but he slammed the door, and a cloud of dust flowed weightless in the air, caught by the sunlight. I looked up from my place on the floorboard and saw him pointing to the rack of cigarettes with his ID. Back in the car, he threw the pack of Winstons on my lap and smacked his own against his palm.
“Thanks,” I said, struggling with the plastic band.
But he just started the car and drove off, away from my house and onto the highway.
I was glad Randy put on some music because I had run out of things to say. I stopped talking after the third attempt at asking where we were going. Out of the original speakers of the station wagon — I could only assume they were original, given their ability to make everything sound tinny and distant — came the sounds of Husker Du’s album Zen Arcade. Even though I always thought Randy was a jerk and mostly dumb, I had to admit that he introduced me to all my favorite music. He used to make me CDs or iPod playlists, giving me a sample of punk rock that I couldn’t have heard anywhere else. If we ever bonded over anything, I guess that was it. Sometimes, I would just sit in my room with my headphones on, the lights turned off, and listen to those frantic and sorrowful songs and imagine Randy listening to the same thing, nodding his head slightly in acceptance of everything going on through his ears.
As the singer chanted about something he learned that day, I lit my second cigarette and turned my head out the window, trying not to cough. That was my goal: to prevent the embarrassment of inexperience no matter how much my throat tingled at the foreign smoke. We followed the highway west out of the city limits, and with each passing minute, the buildings became fewer and fewer until there was only the faded brown of the high desert brush. It didn’t take me long to realize where we were going — the dry wash that runs wide and long around the border of the city. Usually, it was a hotspot for teenagers and couples who stopped there at twilight to watch and listen to the bats that lived underneath the bridge of an abandoned road. I remember once when my dad took me down there before the sun began to set; I held on to the belt loop of his jeans and cowered at the shrieks that came from the cracks, imagining the glowing eyes of the bats fixing their gaze on me as they prepared to take flight.
As the orange dots of the Mansfield Pumpkin Farm came into view on the right, I knew we would be there soon. Randy coughed as he flicked on the blinker and took the exit. The road was cracked and faded, showing the signs of the elements after years of neglect. The gravel popping out of the brush hit against the metal parts underneath the car like popcorn. As the brown rust of the bridge’s railings ahead filled the windshield, Randy pulled the car off to a patch of dirt that was packed tight from other people who did the same.
Outside, the cool air surprised me, given the blinding power of the sun along the drive. Randy stretched, and as he arched his back, his shirt pulled up to reveal his ribcage against thin, white skin. He reached inside his pocket and took out the two purple pills and set them on the hood of his car. With his ID, he crushed them into powder against the metallic hood, using his weight to grind.
“Don’t ever do this,” Randy said, looking up. “I wish someone told me not to even try drugs. Not even once. Because after that, life just isn’t the same without them.”
I shielded my eyes with my hand. “What do they do to you?”
“What?” He had scooped the powder into two lines, and after inspecting them, he ran his tongue along the card.
“Those pills,” I said.
“Painkillers. They kill pain, I guess.” He pulled a green straw out of his back pocket and snorted the first line. After leaning his head back and swallowing, he did the second.
After getting Claire’s box from the car, we started to walk down the trail to the bottom of the wash. We only got about halfway when Randy stopped and ran back, emerging minutes later with a can of lighter fluid. I knew right away he wanted to burn the box and everything in it, but I decided against bringing up the fact because I didn’t see the point in talking about it.
The empty wash was a long stretch of white gravel and shrub, some scattered cacti jutting up as if emerging from a grave. We sat down under the shade of a palo verde tree; cicadas hidden deep in the branches split the air with their metallic shrieks. A few yards away, a shopping cart overflowing with garbage and black bags sparkled against the sun — some abandoned safe deposit of a homeless person, most likely. I wondered where he had gone and if he would like us sitting there so near his stuff, probably the result of months of picking and searching, building an empire of nothing. Randy walked over to it, his combat boots crunching rock and dirt, and after a few seconds of digging and examination, produced what I thought he was looking for: a mostly empty bottle of vodka. He smiled at me, walking forward, and I resisted the urge to tell him to stop. He took a quick sip before sitting down, moaning low on reflex, and gave the bottle to me. I filled my mouth with the warm vodka before I could stop myself. I could feel the top of my stomach tighten and clench as it passed through.
Randy sat down, and I looked at my hands. I could feel him looking at me, cutting my brain in two. I could hear the smack of his spit as he opened his mouth to talk, but he didn’t say anything. I thought about the homeless person and drank another mouthful of vodka.
“I’m sorry,” Randy said. He shifted his weight; the gravel beneath him crackled.
“For what?” I looked away. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to face him.
“Your sister,” he said. “I didn’t love her.”
A crow perched up on a torn pillow beside the shopping cart. It looked around, its black head darting left and right. I handed Randy the bottle. “Who cares?”
He shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s just weird, you know? Like, thinking about her in the ground right now.”
I had thought about it, too, probably even before her funeral.
Randy stood up and picked at the bark of the tree. “It creeps me out to think of how she was just here. Pretty soon, her skin will come off, and then she will be just bones.” He looked up. “She had this scar, you know? On her inner thigh. I used to kiss it all the time. My lips were there, and now that exact part of skin is already fading away.”
“Christ,” I said, putting my face in my hands.
And then we sat like that for a while, saying nothing, talking to each other, perhaps telepathically. The sun was white and blinding on top of the mountains; soon, it would cover everything in a shimmering aura, painting the sky purple and orange against the clouds like a bruise bulging and sweltering and ready to pop.
Randy stood up suddenly. He picked up the box and set it down on the gravel a few feet away. He took the lighter fluid and squeezed it and shook it up and down, the thin spirals of liquid making arcs as they fell. He was pushing down so hard that a lot had gotten on his arm. He probably noticed this because he held out a book of matches to me and beckoned.
“You do it,” he said.
I walked over and bent the book over, striking the head of the match between the strip and the flap. It went out instantly, but there was no wind. It took a third time of the same to feel the satisfying explosion of sulfur spark up with flame. Randy reached out, steadying his fingers and taking the match with both hands as if it held some godly power. With the lit match, he walked over to the chest, kneeled down, and carefully threw it. At first, I didn’t think it would take, the fire only sputtering at a lone corner, but pretty soon, the whole thing was alight.
And then we just stood there, looking at the burning box; it was kind of awkward because I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what, if anything, I was supposed to be looking for. The sky began to grow into a rusted purple, and the cicadas had stopped crying.
I was looking toward the mountains and must have missed him reaching his hand into the flame. I looked up for a moment, and there he was: his hand totally engulfed by a pale orange fire. He just stood there, his face blank and relaxed, staring endlessly into the fire that had crawled up his fingers. It must have been about thirty seconds before I did anything. I headed to the shopping cart, and it didn’t take me long to find the blanket; it looked like moths had fed on it for months, and it smelled like milk and cheese. I tackled Randy with the blanket, making sure to cover his burning arm. It felt like hitting a brick wall, and I cracked my forehead against his knee and lost my breath. He let out a low grunt against the gravel.
On our way back to the car, Randy didn’t even look at his burned hand. The homeless man was squatting in some brush, regarding us, turning his head as we passed.
“Get these crows out of here! I’m calling the cops!” he said, his voice shallow and torn.
As we took to the highway, I stared at Randy’s burned arm; it was a smooth purple color, the skin on top thin and transparent. I imagined peeling away the skin there, revealing more scarred flesh, fluid oozing, and pus not far behind it until I went down layer by layer to the bone. I burrowed down in the seat, looking up at the mountains against the sky; the sun was entirely hidden by the mountains now, but there was just enough light left to see everything in its true colors. Terror twilight—that’s what people called it. It’s the only time in the desert when the sun doesn’t get in the way of seeing everything as it should be.
It wasn’t until we took the exit for the city limits that I realized we missed the bats. Instead, I imagined them—the giant swarm looking like a giant black balloon against the empty sky, expanding until you could see each bat by itself until they spread out so far that they disappeared completely.
Malcolm Graham Cooper
My sister Claire was crowned the homecoming queen of Sunnydale High School two weeks after she died of leukemia. Almost everybody I knew was invited to the prom to witness the announcement, and they bent the rules in order to announce the results before the event rather than right there live on stage, as was the custom. To accept in her place, her best friend Emma volunteered; she had recently lost her left eye in a car accident, and she wore an eyepatch that, aside from being ridiculously incongruous to the gross formality of the event, lent a sort of humor to the whole thing that people were forced to hide.
As I walked into the dark and booming opera house — transformed into the epicenter of controlled teenage rebellion for one night only — I could feel the tuxedo my mother made me wear rub against my skin, and I looked around constantly to see who was looking at me. I couldn’t really describe how I felt at that moment — maybe I was scared of being around a young crowd that was still two years ahead of me in school and who knows how far ahead of me in life, but it was most likely showing up with my parents that sent me into a panic.
Parents didn’t belong at prom.
On the walls of the opera house, the lights jerked with bold gels, transforming the room into two mysterious worlds: first, the blue one bathed everybody in sexy darkness, the red world flickering before the color had enough time to imprint itself on the walls, returning to blue again like a cadence of a sound that droned on and on. When the time came for the ceremony, they turned on the lights, and the music stopped. I suddenly felt the air around me push against the sides of my head. Seeing the faces of all those teenagers—some of whom I recognized—bathed in the new light was truly creepy; some were droopy and sad as if the emotional gravity of the situation pulled the skin down; others were drawn and empty but moving fast against the light above heaving chests that breathed in quick staccato-like pulses. And just like that, the invisible motion of breathing in the dark choked out, and then the lights came on, signaling the seriousness of what was to come. The principal of the school took the stage, and everybody averted their gazes from whatever they were doing, stopping like lethargic soldiers.
Mr. Collins was a very fat man; for this event, he wore a black tuxedo that looked more like a garbage bag with a bow tie attached. He negotiated the challenge of the stairs seriously, stopping at each to muster the courage to take the rest as he caught his breath. On stage, he grabbed the microphone and held it at the very bottom with rigid, stubby fingers, using the other hand to lasso the cord behind his back. The bright lights aimed at the stage made the beads of sweat glisten on his forehead, and in my mouth, I could taste their salt.
“Hello, everybody,” he said, jamming the head of the microphone through his lips, nearly pulling it down his throat to choke on. “I want to commend each and every one of you on the success of tonight. I have yet to hear of one incident, so let’s keep it up.” He cleared his throat, and the resulting crackle boomed around the room. “But in order to do that, let me remind you that we will be breathalyzing again after the ceremony. Report to Officer Bates there in the back in an orderly line.” He shielded his eyes with his free hand, his mouth pursed and white.
The assistant principal, Ms. Relke, took her place behind him, her long arms folded in front of her. Her husband died a couple of years ago — he was found hanging naked in their walk-in closet on Christmas Eve.
“Ok, so there’s that,” Mr. Collins continued. He began to look around the stage as if pestered by an invisible mouse. “Now, I will soon announce the homecoming king and queen. But first, let me say a few words about our queen, Ms. Claire Rutherford.” He stopped and stared straight ahead. “Claire was a bright and intelligent girl. She made friends easily. She had a charming sense of humor, and students have told me that she could light up any room. She was known for her beauty but also her humble nature. Even though she isn’t present in body with us here tonight, she is in spirit. Please, accept this honor for her, an honor she was born to accept.”
Ms. Relke had her eyes closed and nodded her head after every sentence as if all of what Mr. Collins said was common sacred knowledge. Around the room, similar faces responded to Ms. Relke’s lead, some of them red and sobbing. If the circumstances were different, it would all seem so pathetic. Mr. Collins hobbled down the stairs to the stage, and Claire’s friend Emma ascended, holding up her salmon-colored dress, and her hidden feet clicked against the steps. Her eyepatch sparkled under the light as if she were some pirate in a disco. Her blond hair fell in thick ringlets and bounced as if on its own. She was crying, but her makeup remained steady and dense, with her bold, defined lips dictating a secret message, a prayer to Claire, although I never knew her to be religious. Then she looked up and began to clap. I felt my father’s hand tighten against my right shoulder, my mother sobbing and heaving while steadying her cell phone to take a picture. When Mr. Collins steadied the tiara on Emma’s head, his shaking hands dropped it on the stage. Ms. Relke and Mr. Collins stooped down in a frantic dash of recovery as if a newborn fell from the arms of a stranger. Some people gasped, but mostly, they just ignored it. I tried not to laugh.
After the ceremony, my parents lingered around to receive condolences and kind words. I hustled through the main entrance; I didn’t tell them where I was going, but they seemed too distracted to care.
On my way out, I saw a girl who picked up her high heels and a bouquet of flowers from one of the banquet tables. The flowers drooped plaintively, pedals scattered as she moved forward. She looked like a lost girl who was older than she was — her face had the downcast scowl of someone already beaten by the dismal qualities of lost faith. Her bare feet smacked on the pavement of the parking lot as she walked quickly in the other direction — she was stripped of all the artifice of the night at that point, her toes bending with each step like some unevolved version of herself. The lump in my throat forced me to turn around and go back to the car, not knowing what to do or say to make things better.
Outside in the parking lot, the early autumn night remained a welcomed silence, the air biting slightly in anticipation of the drop in temperature so characteristic of the next six months of the desert’s excuse for mild weather. The parking lot was mostly empty, with a few cars resting near the entrance and white and black limos idling in the roundabout. I walked into the parking lot to my parents’ white sedan, which looked silver under the bright light of the full moon. As I sat down on the curb by the car, thinking about all the people I hadn’t seen inside, a car alarm went off at the other end of the parking lot, the end that opened out to the empty desert. I jumped at first, thinking maybe it was my parents, but the sound was too distant. And then, as if in response to the car’s sharp wailing, a hollow boom made me jump — up in the sky’s blackness, little specks of silver crackled like so many stars falling to earth.
I followed the fireworks in the dark — the parking lot didn’t have any lights on. Whoever was lighting them didn’t care about the display much because I heard three or four shots in the thirty seconds I was walking. At the end of the pavement, Claire’s boyfriend Randy sat slumped over, reaching inside a backpack for the rockets he was propelling in the air from an empty beer bottle.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned around and saluted with a finger to the temple, turning back around while his arm searched inside the backpack. The long chain earring that he always wore glistened in the moonlight, and he had on the blue Adolescents shirt that he wore practically every day. His wavy black hair was greasy against his shoulders. It took me a minute to realize that I hadn’t seen him inside, but looking at him there in his regular clothes signaled to me that he probably never even tried to attend.
“Can I try?” I said, stepping forward.
“Be my guest,” Randy said as he lit a fuse with a butane lighter.
Inside the backpack were a couple of giant rockets.
“How do you fire these?” I pulled one out. I had to use both hands because it was so thick and heavy.
“No, let me do those,” he said, plucking it out of my hands. My arms twitched on reflex. “Take these.” He bent down and produced a small wooden box.
Inside were a few skinny sticks that looked like chopsticks with paper at the end. I held one up against the moonlight to get a better look. “What are these?”
“Sparklers. It’s all that’s left. You should use ‘em up because they’re gonna get dried out.” His voice sounded hoarser than usual, like he had been yelling all day, but it sounded mature and deep, like my dad’s.
Randy lit the fuse for me, reminding me that I had to keep it at arm’s length and out of the brush. I was kind of pissed that he didn’t trust me with the bigger stuff. He talked down to me most of the time. But this time was different — he actually spoke directly at me, looking me in the eye. The sparkles were sort of like shiny vomit streaming down for a second or two, and by the time you noticed what was happening, it went out. With the other one, I tried to make crazy shapes in the air, directing some invisible airplane on a glittering gold runway. After I used them all, an overwhelming sense of disappointment set in.
Randy walked me to the car to see my parents. When she saw him, my mother turned her head away and threw herself in the car, her fingers clutching the front of my father’s blazer she wore. But then my dad surprised me by doing something I’ve never seen him do before — he hugged Randy, embracing him close enough to almost swallow him whole in his arms; Randy made a moaning sound like he was fighting for air. And just like that, my dad turned around and got in the car. I followed. Nobody said anything.
My sister Claire died of leukemia at the age of seventeen. From the moment she was diagnosed — not counting the different procedures and fruitless searches for marrow donors — everyone was free to watch her die and fade away. It was as if she aged fifty years in the span of a couple, and she slowly but surely destroyed every expectation thrust upon her. Her beauty disappeared, and so did all those things that went with it.
I could only remember the memories of my sister that were tragic, as most memories tend to be over time. Claire partied too much. She drank until she blacked out. She was sexually abused by our uncle Frank when we were still in elementary school, and she still told me things that I wish she hadn’t. She often picked on girls and got in fights, wrote mean things on their Facebook walls. Once, she propositioned a teacher for sex in exchange for a passing grade in Geometry. Some of these things I discovered for myself, others I heard from more than one source. Soon, all this became common knowledge. Then she died. She never had a chance to make it right.
I remember when things got really bad, and my parents had me sit in the hospital room with her. What I remember most about those visits was the smell: shit and sweat that clung to the walls and chairs, followed by a finish of burning rubbing alcohol. Her face was always white and frowning. I would walk into the room, and she would look at me with resigned indignation, her eyes looking away, saying nothing. I would sit down in the chair next to the bed, thinking of things to say but falling short. We ended up watching TV, mostly Seinfeld reruns or Jeopardy. Sometimes, when something funny happened, I would make a big ordeal about laughing and would look at Claire to share in the laugh, but she always just lay there silent.
When she died, I spent the following couple of days trying to relive memories of my older sister, perhaps in an attempt to form my own version of her to cling to. But my mind always settled on one thing, falling into its hole of memory no matter how much I tried not to think about it: a little while before she got really sick, she caught me going through her underwear drawer. I mainly did it because I was curious; I had always imagined girls wearing underwear, and I wanted to touch them. I remember my whole body jumping and twisting as the sound of the door opened, startling my nerves. I stuffed the white cotton pair I was holding in my back pocket, and then we met eyes; her red lips sneered upward, and her eyebrows furrowed — a look of empty contempt that surprised me much more than the resulting punch to my ribcage ever could. Sometimes, I would pick up her framed senior picture — her long blond hair lounging against her shoulder, her face white and spotless, lips glossy as they reflected light. I would try to imagine her like this — combing my mind for memories when she was equally happy — but all I could see was that sneer as she discovered me hiding what I found in the drawer.
On the day after the homecoming dance, I stayed home from school to look at porn and eat Cheetos. With my parents at work, I was free to do basically whatever I wanted, free from the always-lingering anxiety that my parents perhaps knew what I was doing when I was alone, listening through the walls to the music I played. After Claire’s death, my parents and teachers basically gave me a free pass to take off whenever I wanted to, unknowingly giving me a free pass to unrelenting carnage.
I got up from bed after taking a nap and looked out the window; Randy’s car was parked across the street, a station wagon with wood paneling. He was smoking a cigarette and looking down at the street. When I went out the front door with the garbage, I made sure to close the plastic bin without making any noise because I didn’t want to have to deal with him.
“Marcus,” he said. He talked fast, like a car horn swerving through traffic.
I was walking back into the house, but I stopped at the foot of the steps, thought about it, and turned around to face him. I tried my best to smile and wave.
“Get in,” he said and jerked his head to the side.
The inside of his car smelled like old crayons. I stared at the crack in the windshield as it sparkled from the sun. Randy just sat there smoking his cigarette, looking forward and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. In the daylight, I realized how long Randy's hair was — dark and wavy against his shoulders, matted and wet with grease. I studied the long chain he wore in his right ear — a golden band that fused with his hair, a crucifix at the end. His nose was long and straight, and unlike most teenagers I knew, his skin was smooth. And then a thought struck me as odd: Randy was pretty, and not in the way guys are handsome or traditionally good-looking, as they say, but he was downright pretty like a girl can be.
“So,” I began, hoping to break the silent tension. “Got any more of those fireworks?”
He exhaled a puff of smoke through his nose, and it twisted and curled against the light. Then he dropped the cigarette into a half-empty water bottle in the cup holder; it hissed as the fire went out.
“Can you do something for me?” Randy said. He folded his arms and continued to stare through the windshield.
I shifted in my seat. “Um, I dunno. Like what?”
He turned his head. His eyes were wide like he suddenly grew surprised, and he pursed his lips as he thought. “No. Tell me you’ll do it first.” He took a hold of my shoulders.
I jerked my torso. “What’s in it for me? And besides, if my parents come home and find me gone, they’re going to freak.”
“Who said you’re leaving? Just listen for a second, Marcus,” Randy said. His voice began to shake like the night before.
“Fine. Doesn’t mean I’ll do it.”
He raised his dark eyebrows and scratched the stubble on his cheek as he considered. “Fair enough. I guess. Besides, it’s not a big deal,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “I just need you to get something. Something of Claire’s. In her room.”
“Get it yourself.”
“No. I can’t.” He bit at his thumbnail.
“What’s stopping you? My parents are at work.”
“I just can’t.”
I found a BB gun under the seat, one of those airsoft handguns. I took aim at the nearest mailbox, my right eye squinting. “Whatever. What is it?” I said, throwing down the gun after discovering it was empty.
“A box. Like, a chest. You know. A wooden chest thing,” he said, obviously annoyed.
“What’s in it?”
“Just fucking do it, man. C’mon. Stop being a brat.”
“Fine,” I said, sighing heavily for effect. I couldn’t really care less about doing it.
Of course, I knew exactly where it was — behind the headboard of her bed, inside a small hole in the drywall where my dad lost control of a dolly while moving a dresser. I slid under the bed, crawled against the carpet, stuck my arm inside the hole, and felt around. My hand hit wood almost immediately. I took it to the kitchen and examined it on the counter: it was only about the size of one of my hands, but it felt heavy. It was a deep brown oak with Claire embossed on a silver plate in the center. When I tried to open it, I discovered that it was locked, but I never remembered seeing a key to it.
Inside the car, Randy said nothing and only nodded when I showed him the box. He didn’t take it out of my lap but just looked at it, studying it silently with a blank face and eyes drooping at the lids, and then he reached into his shirt like he was scratching something and pulled out a necklace he was wearing. As he tugged it off his neck and out of the web of his hair, I could see the sun blinking off the key’s silver at the end of the chain. He leaned over to my lap where the box sat and without taking it, unlocked it with a key. His face didn’t change as his hands stirred up the things inside — the sound of paper rustling and hollow thumps against the hollow wood. I craned my neck over the lid and was disappointed at what I saw: just some notes on lined paper bound with a purple hair tie, a couple of condoms, some fake eyelashes, and a tiny vial with what was most likely cocaine residue plastered on the sides. Randy’s mouth tensed up at the side. He was probably disappointed at what he saw, too. And then, as if an afterthought, he plunged his fingers inside a small pocket in the lid’s velvet lining. His face relaxed a little, his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth as he blindly searched the inner pocket.
“Fuck yes,” he said, sounding like a little kid finding a lost toy. He opened his palm and sprinkled two purple pills in its center, turning them over again and again as if he had just found some gold at the end of a lake.
“What are those?” I leaned in closer.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said and lifted up off the seat to stick the pills in his back pocket.
I stuck the box in between the windshield and the dashboard. “Where are my smokes?”
At first, he looked at me, puzzled. But then he seemed to remember, and after making a big deal about opening up and showing me his own empty pack, he said, “All gone. Gonna have to go buy some.”
“No problem. Let’s go,” I said.
He shook his head. I expected little balls of grease to come flying from his hair. “Nope. I can’t have you in the car with me.”
I just sat there, not saying anything. The sun was in the middle of the sky, and the street was deserted. I could tell that Randy was thinking because he was chewing his thumbnail and moaning from his stomach. And just like that, he started the car and drove up the street without looking up.
At the 7-11, a few blocks from the house, he had me go into the backseat and lie down. I started to tell him they didn’t care, that I was in there all the time, but he slammed the door, and a cloud of dust flowed weightless in the air, caught by the sunlight. I looked up from my place on the floorboard and saw him pointing to the rack of cigarettes with his ID. Back in the car, he threw the pack of Winstons on my lap and smacked his own against his palm.
“Thanks,” I said, struggling with the plastic band.
But he just started the car and drove off, away from my house and onto the highway.
I was glad Randy put on some music because I had run out of things to say. I stopped talking after the third attempt at asking where we were going. Out of the original speakers of the station wagon — I could only assume they were original, given their ability to make everything sound tinny and distant — came the sounds of Husker Du’s album Zen Arcade. Even though I always thought Randy was a jerk and mostly dumb, I had to admit that he introduced me to all my favorite music. He used to make me CDs or iPod playlists, giving me a sample of punk rock that I couldn’t have heard anywhere else. If we ever bonded over anything, I guess that was it. Sometimes, I would just sit in my room with my headphones on, the lights turned off, and listen to those frantic and sorrowful songs and imagine Randy listening to the same thing, nodding his head slightly in acceptance of everything going on through his ears.
As the singer chanted about something he learned that day, I lit my second cigarette and turned my head out the window, trying not to cough. That was my goal: to prevent the embarrassment of inexperience no matter how much my throat tingled at the foreign smoke. We followed the highway west out of the city limits, and with each passing minute, the buildings became fewer and fewer until there was only the faded brown of the high desert brush. It didn’t take me long to realize where we were going — the dry wash that runs wide and long around the border of the city. Usually, it was a hotspot for teenagers and couples who stopped there at twilight to watch and listen to the bats that lived underneath the bridge of an abandoned road. I remember once when my dad took me down there before the sun began to set; I held on to the belt loop of his jeans and cowered at the shrieks that came from the cracks, imagining the glowing eyes of the bats fixing their gaze on me as they prepared to take flight.
As the orange dots of the Mansfield Pumpkin Farm came into view on the right, I knew we would be there soon. Randy coughed as he flicked on the blinker and took the exit. The road was cracked and faded, showing the signs of the elements after years of neglect. The gravel popping out of the brush hit against the metal parts underneath the car like popcorn. As the brown rust of the bridge’s railings ahead filled the windshield, Randy pulled the car off to a patch of dirt that was packed tight from other people who did the same.
Outside, the cool air surprised me, given the blinding power of the sun along the drive. Randy stretched, and as he arched his back, his shirt pulled up to reveal his ribcage against thin, white skin. He reached inside his pocket and took out the two purple pills and set them on the hood of his car. With his ID, he crushed them into powder against the metallic hood, using his weight to grind.
“Don’t ever do this,” Randy said, looking up. “I wish someone told me not to even try drugs. Not even once. Because after that, life just isn’t the same without them.”
I shielded my eyes with my hand. “What do they do to you?”
“What?” He had scooped the powder into two lines, and after inspecting them, he ran his tongue along the card.
“Those pills,” I said.
“Painkillers. They kill pain, I guess.” He pulled a green straw out of his back pocket and snorted the first line. After leaning his head back and swallowing, he did the second.
After getting Claire’s box from the car, we started to walk down the trail to the bottom of the wash. We only got about halfway when Randy stopped and ran back, emerging minutes later with a can of lighter fluid. I knew right away he wanted to burn the box and everything in it, but I decided against bringing up the fact because I didn’t see the point in talking about it.
The empty wash was a long stretch of white gravel and shrub, some scattered cacti jutting up as if emerging from a grave. We sat down under the shade of a palo verde tree; cicadas hidden deep in the branches split the air with their metallic shrieks. A few yards away, a shopping cart overflowing with garbage and black bags sparkled against the sun — some abandoned safe deposit of a homeless person, most likely. I wondered where he had gone and if he would like us sitting there so near his stuff, probably the result of months of picking and searching, building an empire of nothing. Randy walked over to it, his combat boots crunching rock and dirt, and after a few seconds of digging and examination, produced what I thought he was looking for: a mostly empty bottle of vodka. He smiled at me, walking forward, and I resisted the urge to tell him to stop. He took a quick sip before sitting down, moaning low on reflex, and gave the bottle to me. I filled my mouth with the warm vodka before I could stop myself. I could feel the top of my stomach tighten and clench as it passed through.
Randy sat down, and I looked at my hands. I could feel him looking at me, cutting my brain in two. I could hear the smack of his spit as he opened his mouth to talk, but he didn’t say anything. I thought about the homeless person and drank another mouthful of vodka.
“I’m sorry,” Randy said. He shifted his weight; the gravel beneath him crackled.
“For what?” I looked away. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to face him.
“Your sister,” he said. “I didn’t love her.”
A crow perched up on a torn pillow beside the shopping cart. It looked around, its black head darting left and right. I handed Randy the bottle. “Who cares?”
He shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s just weird, you know? Like, thinking about her in the ground right now.”
I had thought about it, too, probably even before her funeral.
Randy stood up and picked at the bark of the tree. “It creeps me out to think of how she was just here. Pretty soon, her skin will come off, and then she will be just bones.” He looked up. “She had this scar, you know? On her inner thigh. I used to kiss it all the time. My lips were there, and now that exact part of skin is already fading away.”
“Christ,” I said, putting my face in my hands.
And then we sat like that for a while, saying nothing, talking to each other, perhaps telepathically. The sun was white and blinding on top of the mountains; soon, it would cover everything in a shimmering aura, painting the sky purple and orange against the clouds like a bruise bulging and sweltering and ready to pop.
Randy stood up suddenly. He picked up the box and set it down on the gravel a few feet away. He took the lighter fluid and squeezed it and shook it up and down, the thin spirals of liquid making arcs as they fell. He was pushing down so hard that a lot had gotten on his arm. He probably noticed this because he held out a book of matches to me and beckoned.
“You do it,” he said.
I walked over and bent the book over, striking the head of the match between the strip and the flap. It went out instantly, but there was no wind. It took a third time of the same to feel the satisfying explosion of sulfur spark up with flame. Randy reached out, steadying his fingers and taking the match with both hands as if it held some godly power. With the lit match, he walked over to the chest, kneeled down, and carefully threw it. At first, I didn’t think it would take, the fire only sputtering at a lone corner, but pretty soon, the whole thing was alight.
And then we just stood there, looking at the burning box; it was kind of awkward because I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what, if anything, I was supposed to be looking for. The sky began to grow into a rusted purple, and the cicadas had stopped crying.
I was looking toward the mountains and must have missed him reaching his hand into the flame. I looked up for a moment, and there he was: his hand totally engulfed by a pale orange fire. He just stood there, his face blank and relaxed, staring endlessly into the fire that had crawled up his fingers. It must have been about thirty seconds before I did anything. I headed to the shopping cart, and it didn’t take me long to find the blanket; it looked like moths had fed on it for months, and it smelled like milk and cheese. I tackled Randy with the blanket, making sure to cover his burning arm. It felt like hitting a brick wall, and I cracked my forehead against his knee and lost my breath. He let out a low grunt against the gravel.
On our way back to the car, Randy didn’t even look at his burned hand. The homeless man was squatting in some brush, regarding us, turning his head as we passed.
“Get these crows out of here! I’m calling the cops!” he said, his voice shallow and torn.
As we took to the highway, I stared at Randy’s burned arm; it was a smooth purple color, the skin on top thin and transparent. I imagined peeling away the skin there, revealing more scarred flesh, fluid oozing, and pus not far behind it until I went down layer by layer to the bone. I burrowed down in the seat, looking up at the mountains against the sky; the sun was entirely hidden by the mountains now, but there was just enough light left to see everything in its true colors. Terror twilight—that’s what people called it. It’s the only time in the desert when the sun doesn’t get in the way of seeing everything as it should be.
It wasn’t until we took the exit for the city limits that I realized we missed the bats. Instead, I imagined them—the giant swarm looking like a giant black balloon against the empty sky, expanding until you could see each bat by itself until they spread out so far that they disappeared completely.
