So when they start to play, I try to only listen to Bev’s voice, and I watch them all as they move to create sound—Alexa’s arms crashing down to the drums and rising again; Meg swaying back and forth as she plucks her bass, confidence restored, in the care of her familiar drug.
And as I watch them I realize that for the first time they sound okay. What Alexa pounds is actually a beat. Bev’s fingers move quickly across the frets from one clear chord to the next. Meg’s low notes resonate; they pound through my feet and up to my chest. When Bev starts to sing it all crashes down on me—the reasons that they want to play music, the reasons that I wanted to come along.
We all want to feel something, we want to be someone to one another.
After the show Bev spends a few minutes talking to a guy who is clearly interested in her. He looks young and nice, almost like someone we could all be friends with, and I try to talk myself into feeling okay about this.
I tell Meg that I have an errand to run, and to tell the others not to wait up, and then I head to the bus and call Abbie. She shows up in front of the Kennedy School and I climb into the backseat of her friend’s car. I shut the door and we’re off, some great, old hip-hop song playing, the small space of the car alive with what we’re about to do.
“Sienna, this is Colby,” Abbie says. And then, to me, “Sienna found us a great spot. You’re going to freak out.”
We only drive a few blocks, and then we turn down a small street and then to an alley with a huge brick wall, not unlike the one I found in Arcata when I first had the idea.
“It’s so cool that you’re doing this,” I say as we stand admiring it.
“My pleasure,” Sienna says.
“It’s her life,” Abbie says. “She’s always threatening to go into retirement but she never will. In a few years you’ll be this like soccer mom, pulling over in your station wagon in the middle of the night to lay down some tags.”
Sienna shrugs. “You are who you are, you know? I don’t feel right if I go too long without a can of spray paint in my hand. Listen to this sound,” she says.
She hops onto the trunk of her car, climbs to the top.
“Abbie showed me the sketch. Should we start with the right eye?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say, and I can’t help it—I’m smiling like it’s my birthday or something. Standing in the dark on the top of a car, she looks like a superhero, about to get started saving the world. Even when I was imagining doing this, first in Arcata and then today in the bus, the imagining wasn’t nearly as great as this moment.
She shakes the can and pops off the top, and soon there is the most fantastic steady hiss, a perfect black arc that will soon be the face’s right eye.
She gives me a look that says, So, what do you think?
“That’s one beautiful sound,” I say.
She nods. “That’s right. Now, tell us how to proceed.”
We decide that Sienna will rough out the image—I’ve never done anything on this scale, and every line she sprays seems impossibly long—and then I’ll come in after her and add the detail. Abbie keeps watch at the end of the block.
With Sienna moving so quickly, it doesn’t take us too long. I spray white paint for the light reflected in the irises and the tear. Black eyelashes as long as my arm. I make the eyeliner like Diana Ross’s on the album cover in Sophie’s record store, so now the whole thing looks kind of stylized and retro. I keep thinking of René’s tattoo—those luminous raindrops, the way Jasper’s brother played with light—so we keep going back over our work, darkening sections, adding more highlights.
And then, starting on the far left and ending at the right, I spray “The Disenchantments.”
I step back.
It’s fucking beautiful.
“We aren’t finished,” Sienna says. “We’re missing the most important part.”
“Oh, right,” I say.
I’m not gonna lie: when I was doing that report I thought about what it would be like to be one of the guys I was researching. When I got sick of writing and doing Internet searches I practiced tags on pieces of graded homework and college brochures that hadn’t hit the recycling yet. But I never actually got good at it. I never thought I’d be in this situation, with the entire side of a building covered with my painting and two experienced graffiti artists waiting to see me tag it.
“You can do it,” Abbie says, joining us. “Everyone has a first time.”
So I take a can of silver paint and crouch in the bottom right corner. I decide not to try for fast and elaborate, and instead go for slow and even. I spray the Art first and then the School right below it and skewed a little to the left, so that the last letters in both words, the t and the l, are one long vertical line with the shorter horizontal cross close to the top. Then I decide to extend the vertical line, so that it bends to the left and underlines the word School. As I spray I think about the name and what it means, and what it might convey out here, as a part of street art, far away from any actual school with walls and windows and units and semesters. René would probably laugh at me thinking about it like this.
But actually maybe not.
Maybe that was the point. Because as I step back and look at this piece that I designed two years ago that’s changed in all of these ways because of what’s happened and how we’ve been living, the name takes on a different meaning. Right now, out in the world, away from my tiny room and my family, for the moment even away from my friends and with these new people I only met hours ago, on a street that was unfamiliar as of this morning, with a new name written in paint drying right in front of me, having just made the best work of art of my life, I realize that this—living—means so much more than art school. That feeling that Bev described by the side of the road last night sweeps over me, and I understand how it can matter to her as much as it does.
Here it is, all at once: rightness.
Not the graffiti itself, even though it’s undeniably spectacular, but this feeling of making plans and carrying them through, of meeting people and getting to know them, of being asked to do something and saying Yes, of wanting something, asking for it, making it happen.
When we’ve finished, Sienna and Abbie climb into their car.
“I wish we could wait to see your friends,” Abbie says. “But Sienna needs her beauty rest.”
“It’s true,” Sienna says.
They have all of the spray paint in the trunk.
“Wouldn’t want to leave you with a stockpile of evidence,” Abbie says. “Take care now, Colby. Thanks again for the ride.”
I watch them drive away, and then I pull out my phone and call Bev.
“What happened to you?” she asks.
“Come see,” I tell her, and give her directions.
Minutes later, they’re here. Climbing out of Melinda, tired, still in their makeup from the show but now in more comfortable clothes, walking toward me.
“Where are we?” Meg asks, but I don’t say anything. I just lead them around the corner. I step back, lean against the wall across from the painting. They join me. Gasp. Stare. I don’t even want to look at the wall anymore; I just want to look at their faces.
“You did it,” Alexa says. “How did you do this?”
“I had some help.”
“It’s incredible,” Bev says.
Meg says, “I’m going to come here every day and guard it so that it doesn’t get painted over.”
“It’ll get covered up,” I tell her. “But that’s okay. It’s here for now, right?”
They nod. Yes.
Bev and I are hungry, but Meg and Alexa want to sleep, so we drop them off at the hotel and drive a few blocks through the dark. We park on the street by a diner with a pink fluorescent sign, stand in the dark, and look through its windows.
“Look good?” I ask Bev.
“Yeah,” she says.
We walk toward it, past a couple of bikes leaning against a street lamp.
“Someone needs to
lock their bikes,” I say.
Bev sees them and nods.
Inside, a few tables are taken but overall it’s pretty empty, and the hostess leads us to a vinyl booth and hands us our menus. A radio station plays rock ballads from the eighties.
Soon our waitress appears with two plastic cups of water and her notepad out and ready.
“What can I get you kids this evening,” she says.
She’s wearing the diner’s uniform: short black dress with a white apron, and she doesn’t look too much older than we are, and I wonder if calling us “kids” takes effort, if she’s trying to prove something.
I order a grilled cheese; Bev orders pie.
“Coffee?” the waitress asks.
We both say yes.
“I’ve been thinking,” I say, when the waitress leaves our table, “about your mom.”
Bev stays quiet, but she looks at me, so I take that as an indication that I can continue.
“It’s just, I don’t know. Maybe your dad already knows about it. Or maybe it’s the biggest regret of her life.”
The waitress brings us cups of coffee and a bowl of tiny half-and-half containers. I rip the top off one of them and pour it into my coffee.
“Anyway, I know what she did was wrong, but she might be able to explain it, or at least talk to you about what happened. That science fair was four years ago.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying I think you should tell her that you know.”
“When?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
And then it hits me, again, that we’re leaving in the morning.
So I say, “Now, maybe.”
“Here?”
I shrug. “You could play her your song.”
She looks around the restaurant, at all the other people.
“Out in the bus?” I suggest.
“Or the bathroom,” she says. “It might be hard for her to hear me, and the bathroom probably has good acoustics.”
“Sure,” I say. “In the bathroom, then.”
Bev looks a little pale, but she reaches across the table for my keys and slides out of the booth. I watch her walk fast across the diner floor and outside, and I wonder if this is really going to happen. And then Bev is back with her guitar case and amp, explaining something to the waitress who looks skeptical but nods and says okay.
Bev doesn’t even come back to the table. She just motions for me to come with her so I do. We flip on the light of the little room that smells like bleach and urine, and Bev crouches on the blue-tiled floor to snap open the locks of her guitar case. She uncoils the cord and we find a socket on the wall by the door.
“I’m gonna need you to hold the phone,” she says. She’s trying to act calm but the fear in her voice is impossible to miss and her hands turn the pages of her notebook so fiercely that I’m afraid she’s going to rip them.
“Okay,” she says.
I scroll through her numbers for the one that says HOME.
“Ready?”
She nods, her face pale but determined, and I press Call.
I hear Mary’s worried “hello” and say, “Hi-Mary-it’s-Colby-everything’s-fine,” and as I move the phone away from my ear I think I can hear Mary’s voice, but Bev has already started strumming. Chords bounce off the bathroom walls.
I hold the phone close to her mouth and, at the same time, reach toward the amp to turn the volume down so the music doesn’t drown out the words. Bev sings her first lines, Sunny afternoon/Empty living room, and her voice, clear and strong, fills the space.
I don’t know if any of this would have happened if we had been at home. Would she have told me about her parents? Would we have crammed ourselves into the bathroom of a San Francisco restaurant to play her song? I doubt it. There’s something about distance, being removed from what’s familiar, that lets things happen.
So here I am. Gray-white walls, a bare lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling, a toilet with bright blue water. It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m leaning against the yellowed sink of a diner bathroom, guitar chords echoing around me, this girl, my best friend, crouched on the floor, singing her heart out to her mother.
And even though I know how important this is, and that I should be thinking only of what Bev has gone through and what will result from this moment, I can’t help watching her and thinking about us, too. I have so many questions about what happened at the Starlight, what it meant to her, what will happen to us now.
She sings, Maybe we were never/Who I thought we were, and I think, maybe we always were the people we imagined ourselves to be. Able and brave. Maybe we still are. As a chord reverberates through the tiny room, I decide that it can’t be that hard to be the person you want to be. What’s difficult is finding a place in a world with other people, who want different things for themselves. And then the bathroom is quiet.
Bev’s eyes are wide and she hisses, “Hanguphanguphangup,” and I fumble with the phone and finally press the button and we look at one another, take a breath in unison, exhale. The phone rings.
I hand it to Bev. She looks at the screen.
“It’s her,” she says.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “Of course.”
“Do I have to pick up?”
“I think so, yeah.”
She watches the screen.
“Definitely,” I say.
So she does.
“Hi.”
It takes all my willpower not to ask her what Mary is saying, so I try to distract myself by unplugging the amp from the wall, pulling the cord out of Bev’s guitar.
Bev doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, but when I stand up again, I see her face. She looks suddenly young again. Fragile.
Her mom is doing most of the talking. Bev nods and gives one-word answers. At one point she closes her eyes, and when she opens them again tears run down her face. She’s breathing calmly; her voice sounds steady when she speaks. But the tears keep coming.
“Yes,” she says.
“I guess so,” she says.
A knock comes at the door as I’m placing Bev’s guitar into the velvet inside of her guitar case. I click the locks shut. Open the door to a middle-aged woman with dyed black hair.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her, “but we’re gonna need a couple more minutes.”
I smile my nicest smile, and the woman looks confused but not angry, and I shut the door again. I sit down on the ocean-blue tiles and lean against the door. Bev is still silent and listening. I look at her, and then away.
The last time I saw Bev cry was when we were eleven, and my parents and I got home from my soccer game to find her family waiting for us. Her parents were dropping her off on their way to the vet because they had to put Fitzgerald, their cat, to sleep. Fitzgerald was big-pawed and orange and affectionate, and he was older than we were and would follow us from room to room. And though by this point he was feeble and no longer able to eat by himself, to Bev this was murder. She sat between my mom and me on the couch and trembled for an hour, until the call came that it was over and Bev leaned into me and cried until my soccer jersey was soaked through.
I was sad—I loved him, too—but I was also proud to be needed. I’m sure I could have used a shower, I must have had that little kid sweaty smell, but she still chose me. She could have been sobbing on my mom’s shoulder but she was sobbing on mine. I remember that I sat very still, overcome by the responsibility of her.
If I had to choose the one moment that I fell in love with Bev, that would probably be it.
Or maybe it would be when she held auditions for Melancholy Play, watching the actors intently with her clipboard, making notes. I fell in love with her then, too.
Or every time I drew her, whether she knew I was drawing her or not.
Or when we sat on my living room floor with maps of Europe laid out all around us, and she said, “We have to go everywhere. I don’t want to miss anything.”
Now, from her side
of the bathroom, Bev hangs up, wipes her eyes with her hand.
I wait.
“What did she say?” I ask after a little time has passed.
“She said a lot of things. She asked if that’s why she lost me.”
“Does your dad know?”
Bev nods yes, and her face clouds over.
“Oh my God,” she says. “All these years, I thought I was keeping this horrible secret, but it wasn’t even a secret. We could have been a normal family. We could have . . .”
Her voice breaks. I stand up; she steps toward me. I hold still, and she cries until my shirt is wet.
Then we go back to our table.
“I want to show you something,” Bev says.
I chew my grilled cheese, sip my lukewarm coffee. Bev leans down and resurfaces with her messenger bag. She takes out the box that holds her carvings, and as I eat, she sets them up on the table. I’ve been catching glimpses of them throughout the trip, but here they all are, more of them than I realized.
She’s lining up the people we met: Walt, Jasper, the lemonade kids, the girl from the Bianchi Motel, Sophie, the redhead from Arcata, Melvin, and other people, too, who I don’t recognize but who must have stood out to her for one reason or another. And then I look more closely at one of them. The drunk guy from the River Bar and Grill.
Next comes Melinda, and I notice a dent, right in the front of the fender, from when Pete once hit a pole in a parking garage. She arranges the instruments to the side of the bus, set up as though waiting for the show to begin, and on the other side of the bus come the versions of us. Just glancing at the figures I would think they were more of her usual depictions of people identified by their props: their favorite shoes, their paintbrush, their script. But I look closer, knowing that they’ll be different this time.
And they are. Alexa holds the deceptive Magic 8 Ball. Meg’s chest is bandaged. In her hand is a tiny bottle of pills. Bev has her headphones on, a barrier against the outside world. I don’t have a prop. Instead, I stand, palms empty, facing the sky. There are close to two dozen miniature people here, all flawed and small and gathered together.