Ashes to Ashes

DAD’S WORKING LATE IN THE GARAGE. HE NEEDS to finish up the canoe orders from this past summer. Tourist season basically kicks off in another month and a half. As soon as the snow is gone and the grass starts growing, they’ll be here in droves looking for things to spend money on.

So Pat and I are in the kitchen together making tacos. We’ve got it down to a science. I’m cooking strips of flank steak. Pat’s at the kitchen table filling up bowls of toppings—shredded cheese, sour cream, red onion, black beans, wedges of lime. He’s very particular about the size of the onions. Anyway, the tortillas are getting warm in the oven and the yellow rice is going in the rice cooker.

“Hey,” I say, turning away from the pan. “When you cook the steak, don’t press down on it with the spatula. It dries it out.” I don’t know if Pat’s listening or not, because he doesn’t look up. So I kick his chair with my foot. “Actually, you’re not even cooking it. Not really. You just want to sear it so the middle stays pink. Dad hates well-done meat. If it’s well done, he won’t eat it.”

Pat makes a face. “You made me fuck up my onion dice. And whatever. I don’t ever cook the steak.”

“Well, soon you will, unless you want to go on a taco fast while I’m at college.” It’s crazy to think about. This time next year I won’t be living on Jar Island.

“Don’t bum me out on taco night, please.” And the thing is, Pat actually does sound sad. My eyes fill fast with tears. Pat sees it. “Don’t,” he warns.

“I’m not,” I say, and wipe my eyes. But of course more fall.

“Don’t!”

“I’m not!” I scream. “It’s the damn onions, dick!”

Pat laughs under his breath. “Yeah, okay. Look. I’ll change the subject. Eddie Shofull stopped by the other night and told me some story about how you and Lillia called in a missing-persons thing and made him break into a house.”

I busy myself with the steak. “What was he doing here in the first place?”

Pat gives me the eye. “What do you think?”

I shake my head. “That little pot-smoking pig! You know, he threatened to put me and Lil in jail for insulting an officer.”

“Dummy. But wait. What was going on?”

I sigh and turn down the heat. I don’t even know where to begin. “You remember that girl I brought to Ricky’s basement on Halloween night?”

“The one who helped herself to one of my beers and then didn’t drink a damn sip?”

“Oh, shut up. I gave you money for both of us. Anyway, yes. That girl. She . . . she basically disappeared.”

Pat shrugs. “Not surprised. She was weird.”

“She wasn’t weird.” But even as I say it, I know I’m lying. Mary was weird. I love the girl to death, but she wasn’t exactly normal.

“She was too. Okay, not ‘weird’ as in ‘freaky.’ But . . . she seemed like she’d never been to a party before.”

“She probably hadn’t. She’s very sheltered.”

I pull two pieces of steak out of the pan and put them in Shep’s food bowl. He loves steak. But he barely sniffs them. He doesn’t have much of an appetite these days, poor old dog.

Pat says, “You say ‘sheltered.’ I say ‘freaky.’”

I’m about to slap him upside the head, when my cell phone rings. The name on the screen surprises the shit out of me.

Lind.

I haven’t talked to the boy since Rennie’s New Year’s Eve party. I hope he doesn’t want to ask me anything about the shit Rennie was screaming at him about Reeve and Lillia. If Alex wants that scoop, he ain’t getting it from me.

But I pick up anyway. I’ll always pick up the phone for Alex.

Tentatively I say, “Hello?”

“Kat! Dude! I got in! Well, not exactly in, exactly, but I’m close. I mean, they didn’t reject me!”

I hold the phone a few inches away from my ear. “Fool, what are you talking about?”

“USC! I applied to their songwriting program, and they e-mailed and asked me to send in a demo! They call it a remote audition.”

“Wait. For real? You sent in an application after all?” The last I’d heard, Alex had been too chickenshit to apply to a music school. He was going to either Michigan, because of his dad’s connections there, or maybe Boston College.

“What can I say, Kat? You’re pretty persuasive. So will you help me figure out which songs I should send them? Which ones are good, which ones suck? I want your honest opinions.”

It’s a tempting proposition. I’ve always wanted to hear Alex’s music. I mean, there were those few songs or poems or whatever in that notebook we stole from his car back in September, but I bet there’s more. I could just say yes right now, but I want to draw this out. I’m not above fishing for a compliment or two. I’ve been so down in the dumps lately.

“Why would you care what I think?”

“Because you know music. You’ve seen so many bands play. You know what’s good and what’s not. There’s no way this is happening for me unless I have your help.”

“All right, sure. I’ll try.”

“Awesome. Oh, wait up. I’m a self-absorbed dick. Have you heard anything from Oberlin?”

I would tell Alex the truth, that I got pushed into the general pool, but I can’t. Not with Pat here. He and my dad still think I’m already accepted. “Hey, Al, I got to go. I’ll talk to you at school, okay?”

I end the call as Pat pushes that last perfectly cut red onion into a bowl. Then he holds up his hand. “Taco time?”

I slap it back. “You know it.” And for a second I think, if I don’t get into Oberlin, it will suck, but it won’t be the worst thing in the world.

Later that night I’m in my bedroom, working my way through a box of old CDs that I haven’t listened to in years. I’m pulling aside ones I think will be up Alex’s alley, mostly stuff I was into freshman year.

Listening to this old music is like being in a time machine. I remember each CD I bought from Kim at Paul’s Boutique. I concentrate on finding songs I think he’d do well to emulate—kind of folksy guitar stuff but with an edge.

I’m leaning back, eyes closed, listening to a song, when there’s a knock at my door. I say come in, expecting to see Pat, but it’s not him. It’s Lillia. And she looks upset.

“Lil. What happened? What’s wrong?”

She starts pacing around my room, literally wringing her hands like a lady in a Victorian novel. “Paige just caught me and Reeve hugging. And she basically told me off.”

“What?”

Lillia flops down onto my bed and curls into a ball. “I promise you, we’ve barely said two words to each other since Rennie died. We were both over there today by accident, and then, when Paige left the room, he told me that he got into a prep school for his postgrad year, so he can have another shot with college recruiters, and then the next second we’re hugging each other.”

I roll my eyes. “So what? You guys hugged. Big deal.” Trust Lil to turn a piddly hug into some soap-opera drama.

“It wasn’t just a hug, okay? It’s never just a hug with us. Like on New Year’s Eve, when we were in his truck.” Lil shivers. “We get near each other and we lose our heads.”

I lean forward in my chair. Now she’s getting to the good stuff. “Did you two have sex that night?”

“No! No, nothing like that. But it was probably the most intense make-out session of my life.”

A wistfulness crosses her face for just a second, and then it disappears, and my heart drops. Damn. I’m happy that Lillia’s gotten past what happened to her last summer with those college fucko rapists, enough to have a fun night letting loose with a guy. But it sucks that it happened with someone she can’t actually be with.

“If Paige hadn’t walked in . . . I’m scared of what could have happened.” Lil closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I mean, we were in Rennie’s kitchen! How could I do something like that?”

I hold up my hand. “Say no more. I know exactly what this is.”

“What?”

“My sophomore year I was hooking up with this dude from the motocross circuit. I’d only ever see him on Pat’s race days. He was a lot older than me. Like, I think he may have been twenty.”

“Eww!”

“Don’t eww me! He was hot. But he was also bad news. He definitely had a girlfriend. He might’ve even been married, I don’t know. I knew that if my brother found out, he’d kill me. But, like, I still couldn’t stop, you know? We’d run into each other near the bike trailers, and I’d tell myself not to look at him, and the next thing I’d know, we’d be up against a chain-link fence, going at it. It was like a gravitational pull.”

Lillia nods her head vigorously. “That’s exactly how it feels.”

“You can’t go near Reeve, Lillia. Especially not when it’s just the two of you, alone. The force, it’s too strong. You’ve got to shut it down.”

“Shut it down,” Lillia repeats. “Yes.”

“Shut it the fuck down, because if you don’t, it’s only going to bring you trouble. Think about Mary, what she’d say if she knew.”

“It would kill her.” Lil shudders. “So you were able to stop seeing that guy?” she asks hopefully.

“Uh, well. I mean, yeah. After he moved to Italy to join this pro racing club.” I wonder what ever happened to that guy. Fuzz? Fez? I can’t remember. Lillia groans. “Lil, we only have, like, four months left of school. And then you’re gone, baby, gone. You can do this.”

“I have to do this,” she corrects. Staring up at my ceiling, she says, “I just hate that Paige thinks badly of me now.”

“Don’t take it personally. Paige loves to stir up shit, you know that. She’s a drama queen. That’s where Rennie got it from. She’s just pissed right now that Ren’s gone, and she wants to take it out on somebody.”

Lillia nods, but I can tell she’s still bummed out. I get it. I’d probably be bummed out too.

She hangs around for a while longer. I fill her in on what’s going on with Alex and play her a few of the songs that I’m putting on his mix. “Lindy must really trust you,” she says, putting her jacket back on. “He doesn’t play his songs for anyone else. I hope they’re good enough for him to get in.”

“Me too. He was so excited on the phone, like a kid on Christmas.”

Before Lil leaves, she says, “I almost forgot—I have something for you.” She unzips her purse and holds out a strip of black-and-white photos. They are of me and Rennie, as little girls, from the photo booth in the ice cream parlor. Rennie has her hair in two pigtails, and I’ve got mine long and straight, with bangs cut blunt across my forehead.

“Rennie’s old nose,” I say, laughing. “It wasn’t even bad.”

Lillia looks over my shoulder. “I told her that a hundred times, but she’d never listen.”

In the first shot we’re both smiling at the camera. In the second we’re smiling at each other. In the third we’re both back to looking at the camera, but this time Rennie’s giving me bunny ears. The fourth one is blurry, because there are tears in my eyes.