We All Looked Up

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

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

  “What website?”

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

  “Huh.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “What was it?” Eliza asked.

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

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

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

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

  “Sure.”

  “Cool.”

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

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

  “Afternoon, Mr. Ray Charles.”

  “What’s up, Aretha?”

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

  Andy stopped playing. “Eliza? When?”

  “She sat down next to me in assembly.”

  “You talk me up?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “On it.”

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

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

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

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

  “Then tone it down, porn star.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re back,” she said simply.

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

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

  “Go figure.” Anita laughed experimentally.

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

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

  “With Andy. He’s a friend.”

  Andy raised a hand. “Yo.”

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

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

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

  “I used to sing in that closet over there,” she said.

  “Good acoustics?”

  “Thick walls.” She walked to the closet and shut herself inside. “Fuck you, Mom!” she shouted.

  Andy said something in response, but Anita couldn’t make out the words. She looked around the little room, pinched the hem of a red velvet dress she’d grown out of years before. “Good-bye, closet,” she whispered.

  Back in the bedroom, Andy was looking over her music collection. She threw a last pair of shoes in the duffel bag and zipped it up. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Her mother was still mopping when they came back down.

  “I’ll meet you outside,” she said to Andy, passing him the bag.

  “All right. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Graves.”

  Anita’s mother didn’t say anything until Andy had shut the front door behind him. “What are you and that disgusting boy getting up to?” she asked, fire in her voice.

  Anita wanted to shout back, but she checked herself. Who knew when she and her mother would see each other again? Maybe never. She didn’t want to leave on bad terms.

  “We’re just friends,” she said.

  Her mother scoffed. “Friends?”

  “Yeah. But it’s none of your business anyway.”

  Her mother threw the mop onto the floor. “The Bible says to respect your elders, Anita! Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but it meant something to me and your father when we were kids. We had respect then. Not like this. Running away from home. Shacking up with some boy who looks like a drug addict.”

  “Doesn’t the Bible say something about supporting your children? About loving them unconditionally?”

  “The commandment is honor thy mother and father. Not the other way around.”

  “Then the Bible is fucked!” Anita said.

  A terrible shroud of detachment seemed to fall across her ­mother’s face—a cloud passing over the sun. Her voice went flat as a gravestone. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on out there, young lady. This is the final reckoning. They may not discuss it that way at that school of yours, but those of us who are right with God know what’s going on. It’s the separation of the saved and the damned. So you go, if that’s what you want to do. You go and damn yourself.”

  Anita felt the tears coming again, and it seemed one and the same with holding them back to march deeper into the house, into her father’s office. He rose from behind his desk, silent as a monument, as Anita went straight to the polished metal palace in which he kept Bernoulli, the world’s saddest hyacinth macaw, and opened the hatch. She expected a fluttering flush of blue to erupt into the room, but the bird didn’t move. Bernoulli had no idea what to do with freedom; even the desire for flight had been bred or beaten out of him.

  “Get out of there!” she screamed. “Are you stupid?”

  Bernoulli tilted his head, squawked once.

  “Where would he go?” Anita’s father asked.

  It was true, Anita realized, and her mind reeled with the weight of that truth. Even if the bird escaped his cage, he’d just be stuck in the office. And if he got out of the office, he’d just be stuck in the house. And if he got out of the house, then where could he go to be safe? He’d be every bit as trapped outside the cage as he’d been trapped inside it. And Anita was afraid it would be the same for her. All the world was a cage.

  “Fine,” she said, and stormed back out of the office. Somewhere along the line, the dam had burst again; tears streamed down her face. One drop fell onto the polished marble floor of the foyer, a salt stain Anita knew her mother would mop away before it even had time to dry.

  Eliza

  “WAIT, WHAT’S THIS GUY’S NAME?” Anita asked.

  Eliza checked the printout again. “He calls himself ‘Chad Eye.’”

  “Eye? Like an eyeball?”

  “Yep.”

  “Sounds like hippie nonsense.”

  “I think it’s badass,” Andy said. “Like Sid Vicious or something.”

  “Well, he can call himself the reincarnation of Tupac, as long as he’s got something for us,” Anita said.

  They’d posted requests everywhere—from actual flyers on the Hamilton bulletin board to Craigslist’s “community activity” forum—but when the offer finally came, it came through Apocalypse Already. Eliza put out the word that they were seeking a venue for the Party at the End of the World, and within a few hours, she got the e-mail from Chad. He said he had a proposition for them but wanted to meet in person to discuss it. They were told to come by his house at five thirty on Thursday morning, and also “to abstain from heavy foods or sexual activity for the previous twelve to twenty-four hours.” In other words, the guy was certifiably crazypants. But a Zillow search of his address—just on the other side of the 520 bridge—turned up a house valued at four million dollars. So here they all were.

  The ride turned out to be oddly uncomfortable. Eliza was getting a distinct passive-aggressive vibe off Anita, and she had no idea why. It wasn’t as if they were competing or something. Neither of them were interested in Andy, and Eliza was as bad at singing as Anita probably was at taking photos. Maybe it was inevitable—one of those rivalries that so often sprout up between girls, like mushrooms in the crevices of a forest, craning up toward whatever attention filters down through the canopy.

  “The pictures you put up on the blog yesterday were wicked,” Andy said. “How long did it take for that place to burn down?”

  “Well, the fire department got there after an hour, so it didn’t really burn down. But I doubt anybody’s going to be living there anytime soon.”

  “Couldn’t you have helped out somehow?” Anita asked. “Instead of standing around taking pi
ctures?”

  “What was I supposed to do, run inside and start carrying people out?”

  “You’re listening to KUBE 93,” said the radio DJ. “Let’s keep this best of the eighties countdown rolling with ‘Lucky Star’ by Madonna!”

  Anita turned down the volume. “Gross. At least the end of the world means no more eighties music.”

  “You don’t like Madonna?” Eliza asked, then immediately regretted it. Of course Anita didn’t like Madonna; that would be way too mainstream and predictable.

  “Girl, Madonna is nothing but an old shoe.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “She’s got no soul,” Andy said, and both he and Anita cracked up.

  Eliza snorted. “That’s stupid.”

  “Madonna is what’s stupid,” Anita said.

  Eliza was preparing a less civil rejoinder when she was interrupted by the voice of the unflappable GPS lady.

  “You have reached your destination.”

  They parked on the shoulder of a wide suburban street, surrounded by vaguely Germanic mini-mansions and mailboxes shaped like vaguely Germanic mini-mansions. It was all pretty cookie-cutter, except for the house directly across the street, which just happened to be where they were going.

  Chad’s house had been built in the style of a Japanese temple, all terraced spires and bloodred wood inlaid with bronze. The yard wasn’t dirt or lawn, but raked gravel and smooth rocks, littered with trees that looked like giant bonsai. At the far end of the garden, a couple sat cross-legged in a small pagoda, facing each other. The path from the street led across a short, steeply curved bridge, arcing over a pond in which the moonlight caught an occasional flicker of a fin or glittering plane of scales. There was no doorbell or knocker at the front door, only a small gong with a mallet attached to its base by a length of leather cord.