Late at night, when there’s nowhere left to go, we go to Alice’s house. Scotty drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in the front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Mutants, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in the back, where you freeze all year long, getting tossed in the actual air when Scotty crests the hills. Still, if it’s Bennie and me I hope for the back, so that I can push against his shoulder in the cold, and hold him for a second when we hit a bump.
The first time we go to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she points up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees and says that her old school is up there: an all-girls school that her little sisters go to now. K through six, you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, “Can we see them?” and Alice goes, “My uniforms?” but Scotty says, “Your alleged sisters.”
Alice leads the way upstairs, Scotty and Bennie right behind her. They’re both fascinated by Alice, but it’s Bennie who entirely loves her. And Alice loves Scotty, of course.
Bennie’s shoes are off, and I watch his brown heels sink into the white cotton-candy carpet, so thick that it muffles every trace of us. Jocelyn and I come last. She leans close to me, and inside her whisper I smell cherry gum covering up the five hundred cigarettes she’s smoked. I can’t smell the gin we drank at the beginning of the night, taking it from my dad’s hidden supply and pouring it into Coke cans so that we could drink it on the street.
Jocelyn goes, “Watch, Rhea. They’ll be blond like her, the sisters.”
I go, “According to?”
“Rich children are always blond,” Jocelyn says. “It has to do with vitamins.”
Believe me, I don’t mistake this for information. I know everyone that Jocelyn knows.
The room is dark except for a pink night-light. I stop in the doorway and Bennie hangs back, too, but the other three go crowding into the space between the beds. Alice’s little sisters are sleeping on their sides, the covers tucked around their shoulders. One looks like Alice, with pale wavy hair; the other is dark, like Jocelyn. I’m afraid that they’ll wake up and be scared of us, in our dog collars and safety pins and shredded T-shirts. I think, We shouldn’t be here. Scotty shouldn’t have asked to come in. Alice shouldn’t have said yes, but she says yes to everything that Scotty asks. I think, I want to lie down in one of those beds and go to sleep.
“Ahem,” I whisper to Jocelyn as we’re leaving the room. “Dark hair.”
She whispers back, “Black sheep.”
1980 is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old. They blew their brains on acid, and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are as thick and gray as shoes. We’re sick of them.
At school, we spend every free minute in the Pit. It’s not a pit, in the strictly speaking sense; it’s a strip of pavement above the playing fields. We inherited it from last year’s Pitters, who graduated, but still we get nervous walking in if other Pitters are already there: Tatum, who wears a different color Danskin every day, or Wayne, who grows sinsemilla in his actual closet, or Boomer, who’s always hugging everyone since his family did est. I’m nervous walking in unless Jocelyn is already there, or (for her) I am. We stand in for each other.
On warm days, Scotty plays his guitar. Not the electric he uses for Flaming Dildos gigs but a lap steel guitar that you hold a different way. Scotty actually built this instrument—bent the wood, glued it, painted on the shellac. Everyone gathers around; there’s no way not to when Scotty plays. One time the entire J.V. soccer team climbed up to listen, all of them looking around in their jerseys and long red socks like they didn’t know how they’d got there. Scotty is magnetic. And I say this as someone who does not love him.
The Flaming Dildos have had a lot of names: the Crabs, the Croks, the Crimps, the Crunch, the Scrunch, the Gawks, the Gobs, the Flaming Spiders, the Black Widows. Every time Scotty and Bennie change the name, Scotty sprays black paint over his guitar case and Bennie’s bass case, and then he makes a stencil of the new name and sprays it on. We don’t know how Bennie and Scotty decide if they’re going to keep a name, because they don’t actually talk. But they agree on everything, maybe through E.S.P. Jocelyn and I write all the lyrics and work out the tunes with Bennie and Scotty. We sing with them in rehearsal, but we don’t like being onstage. Alice doesn’t, either—the only thing we have in common with her.
Bennie transferred here last year from a high school in Daly City. We don’t know where he lives, but some days we visit him after school at Green Apple Records, on Clement, where he works. If Alice comes with us, Bennie will take his break and share a pork bun in the Chinese bakery next door, while the fog gallops past the windows. Bennie has light-brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair into a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin LP. He’s usually looking at Alice, so I can watch him as much as I want.
Down the path from the Pit is where the Cholos hang out, with their black leather coats and clicky shoes and dark hair in almost invisible nets. Sometimes they talk to Bennie in Spanish, and he smiles at them but never answers. “Why do they keep speaking Spanish to him?” I go to Jocelyn, and she looks at me and goes, “Rhea, Bennie’s a Cholo. Isn’t that obvious?”
“That’s factually crazy,” I go, and my face gets hot. “He has a Mohawk. And he’s not even friends with them.”
Jocelyn goes, “Not all Cholos are friends.” Then she says, “The good part is: rich girls won’t go with Cholos. So he’ll never get Alice, period-the-end.”
Jocelyn knows that I’m waiting for Bennie. But Bennie is waiting for Alice, who’s waiting for Scotty, who’s waiting for Jocelyn, who’s known Scotty the longest and makes him feel safe, I think, because even though Scotty is magnetic, with bleached hair and a studly chest that he likes to uncover when it’s sunny out, his mother killed herself three years ago with sleeping pills. Scotty’s been quieter since then, and in cold weather he shivers like someone is shaking him.
Jocelyn loves Scotty back, but she isn’t in love with him. Jocelyn is waiting for Lou, an adult man who picked her up hitchhiking. Lou lives in L.A., but he said he would call her the next time he comes to San Francisco. That was weeks ago.
No one is waiting for me. Usually the girl in a story that no one is waiting for is fat, but my problem is more rare: I have freckles. I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face. When I was little, my mom told me that my freckles were special. Thank God I’ll be able to remove them, when I’m old enough and can pay for it myself. Until that time I have my dog collar and my green rinse, because how can anyone call me “the girl with freckles” when my hair is green?
Jocelyn has chopped black hair that looks permanently wet, and twelve ear piercings that I gave her with a needle, not using ice. She has a beautiful half-Chinese face. It makes a difference.
Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes. She’s seen my dad puking into the hedge outside our building, and I was with her on Polk Street the night she recognized one of the leather boys hugging outside the White Swallow—it was her dad, who was on a “business trip,” back before he moved away. So I still can’t believe that I missed the day she met Lou. She was hitchhiking home from downtown and he pulled up in a red Mercedes and drove her to an apartment that he uses on his trips to San Francisco. He unscrewed the bottom of a can of Right Guard, and a baggie of cocaine dropped out. Lou did some lines off Jocelyn’s bare butt and they went all the way twice, not including when she went down on him. I made Jocelyn repeat every detail of this story until I knew everything she knew, so that we could be equal again.
Lou is a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally. There were gold and silver record albums on his walls and a thousand electric guitars.
The Flaming Dildos rehearsal is on Saturday, in Scotty’s garage. When Jocelyn and I get there, Alice is setting up the new tape recorder that her stepfather bought her, with a real microphone. She’s one of those girls who like machines—another reason for Bennie to love her. Joel, the Dildos’ steady drummer, arrives next, driven by his dad, who waits outside in his station wagon through the whole practice, reading books about the Second World War. Joel is A.P. everything, and he’s applied to Harvard, so I guess his dad isn’t taking any chances.
Where we live, in the Sunset, the ocean is always just over your shoulder and the houses have Easter-egg colors. But the second Scotty lets the garage door slam down we’re suddenly enraged, all of us. Pretty soon we’re screaming out the songs, which have titles like “Pet Rock” and “Do the Math” and “Pass Me the Kool-Aid,” but when we holler them in Scotty’s garage the lyrics might as well be fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Every once in a while a kid from band or orchestra pounds on the garage door to try out with us (invited by Bennie). Today we audition a sax, a tuba, and a banjo, but sax and banjo keep hogging the stage and tuba covers her ears as soon as we start to play. Practice is almost over when there’s another bang on the garage door and Scotty ropes it up. An enormous pimpled kid in an AC/DC T-shirt is standing there, holding a violin case. He goes, “I’m looking for Bennie Salazar?”
Jocelyn and Alice and I stare at one another in shock, and it feels for a second like we’re all three friends, like Alice is part of “us.”
“Hey, Marty,” Bennie says. “Perfect timing. Everybody, this is Marty.”
Marty plugs in his violin and we launch into our best song, “What the Fuck?”:
Bora-Bora was Alice’s idea—we’d never heard of it. While everyone roars the chorus (“What the fuck? / What the fuck? / What the fuck?”), I watch Bennie listen, his eyes closed, his Mohawk like a million antennas pricking up from his head. When the song ends, he opens his eyes and grins. “I hope you got that, Al,” he goes, and Alice rewinds the tape to make sure.
Alice takes all our tapes and turns them into one top tape, and Bennie and Scotty drive from club to club, trying to get people to book the Flaming Dildos for a gig. Our big hope is the Mab, of course: the Mabuhay Gardens, on Broadway, where all the punk bands play. We go there every Saturday night, after practice. We’ve heard the Dead Kennedys there, and Eye Protection, the Germs, and a trillion other bands. The bar is expensive, so we drink from my dad’s supply ahead of time. Jocelyn needs to drink more than me to get buzzed, and when she feels the booze hit she takes a long breath, like she’s finally herself again.
In the Mab’s graffiti-splattered bathroom we eavesdrop and find out how Ricky Sleeper fell off the stage at a gig, how Joe Rees, of Target Video, is making an entire movie of punk rock, how two sisters we always see at the club have started turning tricks to pay for heroin. Knowing all this takes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?
During the shows we slam-dance in front of the stage. We tussle and push and get knocked down and pulled back up until our sweat is mixed up with real punks’ sweat and our skin has touched their skin. Bennie does less of this than the rest of us. I think he actually listens to the music.
One thing I’ve noticed: there are no real punk rockers with freckles. They don’t exist.
One night, Jocelyn answers her phone and it’s Lou, going, “Hello, Beautiful.” He says he’s been calling for days and days, but the phone just rings. “Why not try calling at night?” I ask, when Jocelyn repeats this.
That Saturday, after rehearsal, she goes out with Lou. The rest of us go to the Mab, then back to Alice’s house. By now we treat the place like we own it: we eat the yogurt her mom makes in glass cups on a warming machine, we lie on the living-room couch with our sock feet on the armrests. One night, her mom made us hot chocolate and brought it into the living room on a gold tray. She had big tired eyes and tendons moving in her neck. Jocelyn whispered in my ear, “Rich people like to hostess, so they can show off their nice stuff.”
Tonight, maybe because Jocelyn isn’t here, I ask Alice if she still has those school uniforms she mentioned the first time we came over. She looks surprised. “Yeah,” she goes. “I do.”
I follow her up the fluffy stairs to her actual room, which I’ve never seen. It’s smaller than her sisters’ room, with blue shag carpeting and crisscross wallpaper in blue and white. Her bed is under a mountain of stuffed animals, which all turn out to be frogs: bright green, light green, Day-Glo green, some with stuffed flies attached to their tongues. Her bedside lamp is shaped like a frog, plus her pillow.
I go, “I didn’t know you were so into frogs,” and Alice goes, “How would you?”
I haven’t really been alone with Alice before. She seems not as nice as she is when Jocelyn is around.
She opens her closet, stands on a chair, and pulls down a box with some uniforms inside: one of the green plaid one-pieces she wore when she was little, a sailor-suit two-piece from later on. I go, “Which did you like better?”
“Neither,” she says. “Who wants to wear a uniform?”
I go, “I would.”
“Is that a joke?”
“What kind of joke would it be?”
“The kind where you and Jocelyn laugh about how you made a joke and I didn’t get it.”
My throat turns very dry. I go, “I won’t. Laugh with Jocelyn.”
Alice shrugs. “Ask me if I care,” she says.
We sit on her rug, the uniforms across our knees. Alice wears ripped jeans and drippy black eye makeup, but her hair is long and gold. She isn’t a real punk, either.
After a while I go, “Why do your parents let us come here?”
“They’re not my parents. They’re my mother and stepfather.”
“O.K.”
“They want to keep an eye on you, I guess.”
The foghorns are extra loud in Sea Cliff, like we’re alone on a ship sailing through the thickest fog. I hug my knees, wishing so much that Jocelyn was with us.
“Are they right now?” I ask, softly. “Keeping an eye?”
Alice takes a huge breath and lets it back out. “No,” she goes. “They’re asleep.”
Marty the violinist isn’t even in high school—he’s a sophomore at S.F. State, where Jocelyn and I and Scotty (if he passes Algebra II) are headed next year. Jocelyn tells Bennie, “The shit will hit the fan if you put that dork onstage.”
“We’ll find out,” Bennie says, and he looks at his watch like he’s thinking. “In two weeks and four days and six hours and I’m not sure how many minutes.”
We stare at him, not comprehending. Then he tells us: Dirk Dirksen, from the Mab, gave him a call. Jocelyn and I shriek and hug onto Bennie, which for me is like touching something electric, his actual body in my arms. I can remember every hug I’ve given him. I learn something each time: how warm his skin is, how he has muscles like Scotty even though he never takes his shirt off. This time I feel his heartbeat on my palm when I hold his back. Jocelyn goes, “Who else knows?”
Scotty, of course. Alice, too, but it’s only later that this bothers us.
I have cousins in Los Angeles, so Jocelyn calls Lou from our apartment, where the charge won’t stand out on the phone bill. I’m two inches away from her on my parents’ flowered bedspread as she dials the phone with a long black fingernail. I hear a man’s voice answer and it shocks me that he’s real, that Jocelyn didn’t make him up, even though I never supposed that she had. He doesn’t say, “Hey, Beautiful,” though. He says, “I told you to let me call you.”
Jocelyn goes, “Sorry,” in an empty little voice. I grab the phone and go, “What kind of hello is that?” Lou goes, “Who the Christ am I talking to?” and I tell him, “Rhea.” Then he goes, in a calmer voice, “Nice to meet you, Rhea. Now, would you hand the phone back to Jocelyn?”
This time she pulls the cord away. Lou seems to be doing most of the talking. After a minute or two, Jocelyn hisses at me, “You have to leave. Go!”
I walk out of my parents’ bedroom into our kitchen. There’s a fern hanging from the ceiling by a chain, dropping little brown leaves in the sink. The curtains have a pineapple pattern. My two brothers are on the balcony, grafting bean plants for a science project. After a while, Jocelyn comes out. Happiness is floating up from her hair and skin. Ask me if I care, I think.
Later she tells me that Lou said yes: he’ll come to the Dildos gig at the Mab, and maybe he’ll give us a record contract. “It’s not a promise,” he warned her. “But we’ll have a good time anyway, right, Beautiful? Don’t we always?”
The night of the concert, I go with Jocelyn to meet Lou for dinner at Vanessi’s, a restaurant just down Broadway from the Mab, where tourists and rich people sit outside drinking Irish coffees and gawking at us when we walk by. We could have invited Alice, but Jocelyn goes, “Her parents probably take her to Vanessi’s all the time.” I go, “You mean her mother and stepfather.”
A man is sitting in a round corner booth, smiling teeth at us, and that man is Lou. He looks as old as my dad, meaning forty-three. He has shaggy blond hair and he’s handsome, I guess, the way dads can sometimes be.
Lou actually does say, “C’mere, Beautiful,” and he lifts an arm to Jocelyn. He’s wearing a light-blue denim shirt and some kind of copper bracelet. She slides around the table and fits right under his arm. “Rhea,” Lou goes, and lifts up his other arm for me, so instead of sliding in next to Jocelyn, like I was just about to do, I end up on Lou’s other side. His arm comes down around my shoulder. And, like that, we’re Lou’s girls.
A week ago, I looked at the menu outside Vanessi’s and saw linguine with clams. All week long I’ve been planning to order that dish. Jocelyn picks the same, and, after we order, Lou hands her something under the table. We both slide out of the booth and go to the ladies’ room. It’s a tiny brown bottle full of cocaine. There’s a miniature spoon attached to a chain, and Jocelyn heaps up the spoon two times for each nostril. She sniffs and makes a little sound and closes her eyes. Then she fills the spoon again and holds it for me. By the time I walk back to the table I’ve got eyes blinking all over my head, seeing everything in the restaurant at once. Maybe the coke we’ve done before this wasn’t really coke. We sit down and tell Lou about a new band we’ve heard of called Flipper, and Lou tells us about being on a train in Africa that didn’t completely stop at the stations—it just slowed down so that people could jump off or on. I go, “I want to see Africa!” and Lou goes, “Maybe we’ll go together, the three of us,” and it seems like this really might happen. He tells us, “The soil in the hills is so fertile it’s red,” and I go, “My brothers are grafting bean plants, but the soil is just regular brown soil,” and Jocelyn goes, “What about the mosquitoes?” and Lou goes, “I’ve never seen a blacker sky or a brighter moon,” and I realize that I’m beginning my adult life right now, on this night.
When the waiter brings my linguine I can’t take one bite. Only Lou eats: an almost raw steak, a Caesar salad, red wine. He’s one of those people who never stop moving. Three times people come to our table to say hello to him, but he doesn’t introduce us.
Back on Broadway he keeps an arm around each of us. We pass the usual things: the scuzzy guy in a fez trying to lure people into the Casbah, the strippers lounging in the doorways of the Condor and Big Al’s. Traffic pushes along Broadway, people honking and waving from their cars like we’re all at one gigantic party. With my thousand eyes it looks different, like I’m a different person seeing it. I think, After my freckles are gone, my whole life will be like this.
The door guy at the Mab recognizes Lou and whisks us past the snaking line of people waiting for the Cramps and the Nuns, who are playing later on. Inside, Bennie and Scotty and Joel are onstage, setting up with Alice. Jocelyn and I put on our dog collars and safety pins in the bathroom. When we come back out, Lou’s already introducing himself to the band. Bennie shakes Lou’s hand and goes, “It’s an honor, sir.”
The Flaming Dildos open with “Snake in the Grass.” No one is dancing or even really listening; people are still coming into the club or killing time until the bands they’re here for start playing. Normally Jocelyn and I would be directly in front of the stage, but tonight we stand back, leaning against a wall with Lou. He’s bought us both gin-and-tonics. I can’t tell if the Dildos sound good or not. I can barely hear them, my heart is beating too hard and my thousand eyes are peering all over the room. According to the muscles on the side of Lou’s face, he’s grinding his teeth.
Marty comes on for the next number, but he spazzes out and drops his violin. The barely interested crowd gets just interested enough to yell some insults when he crouches to replug it, with his plumber’s crack showing. I can’t even look at Bennie, it matters so much.
When they start playing “Do the Math,” Lou yells in my ear, “Whose idea was the violin?”
I go, “Bennie’s.”
“Kid on bass?”
I nod, and Lou watches Bennie for a minute and I watch him, too. Lou goes, “Not much of a player.”
“But he’s—” I try to explain. “The whole thing is his—”
Something gets tossed at the stage that looks like glass, but, when it hits Scotty’s face, thank God it’s only ice from a drink. Scotty flinches but keeps on playing, and then a Budweiser can flies up and clips Marty right in the forehead. Jocelyn and I look at each other, panicked, but when we try to move Lou anchors us. The Dildos start playing “What the Fuck?” but now garbage is spewing at the stage, chucked by four guys with safety-pin chains connecting their nostrils to their earlobes. Every few seconds another drink strikes Scotty’s face. Finally he just plays with his eyes shut. Alice is trying to tackle the garbage throwers now and they shove her back and suddenly people are slam-dancing hard, the kind of dancing that’s basically fighting. Joel clobbers his drums as Scotty tears off his dripping T-shirt and snaps it at one of the garbage throwers, hitting him right in the face with a twangy crack—snrack—like my brothers snapping bath towels, but sharper. The Scotty magnet is starting to work—people are watching his bare muscles shining with sweat and beer. Then one of the garbage throwers tries to storm the stage, but Scotty kicks him in the chest with the flat of his boot—there’s a kind of gasp from the crowd as the guy flies back. Scotty’s smiling now, grinning like I almost never see him grin, wolf teeth flashing, and I realize that, of all of us, Scotty is the truly angry one.
I turn to Jocelyn, but she’s gone. Maybe my thousand eyes are what tell me to look down. I see Lou’s fingers spread out over her black hair. She’s kneeling in front of him, giving him head, like the music is a disguise and no one can see them. Maybe no one does. Lou’s other arm is still around me, which I guess is why I don’t run, although I could. I stand there while Lou mashes Jocelyn’s head against himself again and again until I don’t know how she can breathe, until it starts to seem like she’s not even Jocelyn but some kind of animal or machine that can’t be broken. I force myself to look at the band, Scotty snapping the wet shirt and knocking people with his boot. Lou is grasping my shoulder, squeezing it harder, turning his head into my neck, and letting out a hot, stuttering groan that I can hear even through the music. He’s that close. A sob cracks open in me. Tears leak out from my eyes, but only from the two in my face. The other thousand eyes are closed.
The walls of Lou’s apartment are covered with electric guitars and gold and silver LPs, just like Jocelyn said. But she never mentioned that it was on the thirty-fifth floor, six blocks away from the Mab. She didn’t even tell about the green marble slabs in the elevator. I think that was a lot to leave out.
In the kitchen, Jocelyn pours Fritos into a dish and takes a glass bowl of green apples out of the refrigerator. She’s already passed around quaaludes, offering one to every person except me. I think she’s afraid to look at me. Who’s the hostess now? I want to ask.
In the living room, Alice sits with Scotty, who is wearing a Pendleton shirt from Lou’s closet and looks pale and shaky, maybe from having stuff thrown at him, maybe because he now understands for real that Jocelyn has a boyfriend and that it isn’t him and never will be. Marty is there, too; he’s got a cut on his cheek and an almost black eye and he keeps saying, “That was intense,” to no one in particular. Joel got driven straight home, of course. Everyone agrees that the gig went well.
When Lou leads Bennie up a spiral staircase to his recording studio, I tag along. He calls Bennie “Kiddo” and explains each machine in the room, which is small and warm, with black foam points all over the walls. Lou’s legs move restlessly and he eats a green apple with loud cracking noises, like he’s gnawing rock. Bennie glances out the door toward the rail overlooking the living room, trying to get a glimpse of Alice. I keep being about to cry. I’m worried that what happened in the club counts as having sex with Lou—that I was part of it.
Finally I go back downstairs. Off the living room I notice a door partly open, a big bed just beyond. I go in and lie face down on a velvet bedspread. A peppery incense smell trickles around me. The room is cool and dim, with photographs in frames on both sides of the bed. My whole body hurts. After a few minutes someone else comes in and lies down next to me, and I know it’s Jocelyn. We don’t say anything—we just lie there side by side in the dark. Finally I go, “You should’ve told me.” “Told you what?” she goes, but I don’t even know. Then she goes, “There’s too much,” and I feel like something is ending, right at that minute.
After a while Jocelyn turns on a lamp by the bed. “Look,” she goes. She’s holding a framed picture of Lou in a swimming pool surrounded by kids, the two littlest ones almost babies. I count six. Jocelyn goes, “They’re his children. That blond girl, she’s almost twenty.”
I lean close to the picture. Lou looks so happy, surrounded by his kids like any normal dad, that I can’t believe the Lou with us is the same man. He comes into the bedroom a minute later, rock-crunching another apple. I realize that the bowl of green apples is completely for Lou—he eats them non-stop. I slide off the bed without looking at him, and he shuts the door behind me.
It takes me a second to get what’s going on in the living room. Scotty is sitting cross-legged, picking at a gold guitar in the shape of a flame. Alice is behind him with her arms around his neck, her face next to his, her hair falling into his lap. Her eyes are closed with joy. I forget who I actually am for a second—all I can think is how Bennie will feel when he sees this. I look around for him, but there’s just Marty peering at the albums on the wall, trying to be inconspicuous. And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once—the couch, the walls, even the floor—and I know Bennie’s alone in Lou’s studio, pouring music around us. A minute ago it was “Don’t Let Me Down.” Then it was Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Now it’s Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”:
Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.
I notice Marty looking over at me kind of hesitantly, and I see how this is supposed to work: I’m the dog, so I get Marty. I slide open a glass door and step out onto Lou’s balcony. I’ve never seen San Francisco from so high up: it’s a soft blue-black, with colored lights and fog like gray smoke. Long piers reach out into the flat, dark bay. There’s a mean wind, so I go in for my jacket then come back out and curl up tight on a white plastic chair. I stare at the view until I start to feel calmer. I think, The world is actually huge. That’s the part no one can really explain.
After a while the door slides open. I don’t look up, thinking it’s Marty, but it turns out to be Lou. He’s barefoot, wearing shorts. His legs are tanned, even in the dark. I go, “Where’s Jocelyn?”
“Asleep,” he says. He’s standing at the railing, looking out. It’s the first time I’ve seen him be still.
I go, “Do you even remember being our age?”
Lou grins at me in my chair, but it’s a copy of the grin he had at dinner. “I am your age,” he goes.
“Ahem,” I go. “You have six kids.”
“So I do,” he goes. He turns his back, waiting for me to disappear. I think, I didn’t have sex with this man. I don’t even know him. Then he says, “I’ll never get old.”
“You’re already old,” I tell him.
He swivels around and peers at me huddled in my chair. “You’re scary,” he goes. “You know that?”
“It’s the freckles,” I go.
“It’s not the freckles, it’s you.” He keeps looking at me, and then something shifts in his face and he goes, “I like it.”
“Do not.”
“I do. You’re gonna keep me honest, Rhea.”
I’m surprised he remembers my name. I go, “It’s too late for that, Lou.”
Now he laughs, really laughs, and I understand that we’re friends, Lou and I. Even if I hate him, which I do. I get out of my chair and walk to the railing, where he is.
“People will try to change you, Rhea,” Lou goes. “Don’t let ’em.”
“But I want to change.”
“Don’t,” he goes, serious. “You’re beautiful. Stay like this.”
“But the freckles,” I go, and my throat gets that ache.
“The freckles are the best part,” Lou says. “Some guy is going to go apeshit for those freckles. He’s going to kiss them one by one.”
I start to cry. I don’t even hide it.
“Hey,” Lou goes. He leans down so our faces are together and stares straight into my eyes. He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints. He goes, “The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me.”
And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.
Two weeks later, Jocelyn runs away. I find out at the same time as everyone else.
Her mother comes straight to our apartment. She and my parents sit me down: What do I know? Who is this new boyfriend? I tell them, “Lou. He lives in L.A. and has six children. He knows Bill Graham personally.” I think that Bennie might know who Lou actually is, so Jocelyn’s mom comes to our school to talk to Bennie Salazar. But he’s hard to find. Now that Alice and Scotty are together, Bennie has stopped coming to the Pit. Before, he and Scotty didn’t talk because they were like one person. Now it’s like they’ve never met.
I can’t stop wondering: if I’d pulled away from Lou and fought the garbage throwers, would Bennie have settled for me the way Scotty settled for Alice? Could that one thing have made all the difference?
They track down Lou in a matter of days. He tells Jocelyn’s mom that she hitchhiked all the way to his house without even warning him. He says that she’s safe, he’s taking care of her, it’s better than having her on the street. He promises to bring her home when he comes to the city the next week. Why not this week? I wonder.
While I’m waiting for Jocelyn, Alice invites me over. We take the bus from school, a long ride to Sea Cliff. Her house looks smaller in daylight. In the kitchen, we mix honey with her mother’s homemade yogurts and eat two each. We go up to her room, where all the frogs are, and sit on her built-in window seat. Alice tells me that she’s planning to get real frogs and keep them in a terrarium. She’s calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I can’t tell if she’s real, or if she’s just stopped caring whether she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?
I wonder if Lou’s house is near the ocean. Does Jocelyn look at the waves? Do they ever leave Lou’s bedroom? Are his children there? I keep getting lost in these questions. Then I hear giggling, pounding from somewhere. I go, “Who’s that?”
“My sisters,” Alice goes. “They’re playing tetherball.”
We head downstairs and outside, into Alice’s back yard, where I’ve been only in the dark. It’s sunny now, with flowers in patterns and a tree with lemons on it. At the edge of the yard, two little girls are slapping a bright-yellow ball around a silver pole. They turn to us, laughing in their green uniforms. ♦
