hidden (25 page)

I guess Pony plans to live on Ming’s burgers, fries, chocolate milkshakes and oatmeal.

M
outh. Ache. I’ve had it. The throbbing tooth must go. I sit on the edge of the tub and massage my gums with ice cubes and oral anesthetic. I poke the soft tissue. Numb. Nothing. I feel—

Quick, before the numbness goes away, I wrap floss around the tooth, hook the end around the knob and kick the door. I hear something rip and scream—

“AAAHHHHH!”

The pain’s incredible. Blood,
real
blood, pours out my mouth and runs down my shirt. I should ask Hammer to set up the camera. Surely, someone would pay to see, “The Boy with the Bloody Mouth.”

The rotten tooth hangs off the floss. It dangles from the knob, horror movie style. A dark, red droplet hangs and shudders, one last sigh, and drops. Lands on the white tile and explodes and I—

I wake up. I’m in bed. Someone tucked me in. It’s night.

I remember—I passed out.

I grab the plastic bottle, take a swig and taste. Cold, bubbly liquid. Good.

The mind-numbing pain’s gone. The 7UP feels good in my mouth. I feel woozy. I bet someone gave me a pill. That’s why I can’t remember my dreams.

I collapse, back, and pass out. I need to dream a dream, or two.

“P
eople!” Marci shouts.

I sit up and look around, ostrich style. Fist to eyes, I rub and try to get the sleep out. My mouth’s packed with stuffing. I reach in and pull at it. The giant tampon’s soaked with blood.

“Girrrl.” Kidd cackles. “You a woman.
Don’t flush it!
”

“Fabric!” Marci dumps a pile of bright scraps on the floor. Everyone swarms. Arts & Crafts Day must be big in the safe house. “And
this
is Pony.”

I’m the only one who looks. A scrawny kid stands behind Marci.

“Hi,” I say. He ignores me. I climb down and hover, watching the fabric feeding frenzy. “What’s that about?”

“Halloween costumes,” Marci says. “Our High Holy Holiday.”

“Holy? Hardly.” Alice / Nadya rolls her eyes, holding a piece of blue chiffon up to her face, Mata Hari style. “All we do is go out and walk around.”

“Hey,” I say to Pony. Maybe he didn’t hear me. Close up, Pony’s beautiful. I guess anyone named Pony would be pretty. His little body is perfectly shaped. His face is cut like a statue’s. Pony’s a white marble angel covered in black soot. A hard journey’s etched on his sweet face and aqua eyes.

I lean into his left ear and whisper, “Isn’t Halloween for little girls in princess outfits?”

He ignores me. Traumatized, I guess. He reminds me of me. But I’m pretty sure I’ve lost that glazed-eyed, freaked-out look. His nervous energy shows me how much anxiety I’ve shed.

“Do you feel like taking a shower?” Marci asks.

“Hell, yeah.” Pony’s voice is deep, with a twang. He looks like an angel, but he sounds like a pit bull. He feels my stare. “What the
fuck
you lookin’ at?”

I shrug; he grunts and follows Marci to the bathroom. I want to pull her aside and warn her, “He’s a mistake. Send him away. This won’t work out. He’s crazy. All he wants is attention. And he doesn’t sound gay.”

In Serenity Ridge, I met lots of Ponys. Their eyes burned bright furnace bright. The Pony type has just-don’t-know-what-to-do-with energy. Between the Halloween fabric crisis and Pony’s arrival, I feel ignored. I slip out the front door and run upstairs, to the roof.

I walk toward the solar panels. The panels’ catch light—from the street, cone-shaped aircraft red warning lights perched atop of skyscrapers and a moon the color of tea-stained teeth.

I stand on the roof’s edge and stare. The city. I want to see—
really
see—what lays beyond the safe house. Far away (or nearby, I can’t tell), there’s an odd-shaped building covered with a blue-green glass skin. The shape and cartoon colors make me think of a stranded whale. Or, a dyslexic’s idea of the Great Pyramids. On the green side, colored lights travel up a column, morphing red to purple to green to blue.

“C’est romantique, c’est magnifique,” a deep voice says. The song kicks in, “
This is what it sounds like when doves cry
.” The D.J.’s hidden but close. Over my shoulder? Or, in my head? Maybe this is my “he-crazy” moment, the first sign being, hearing ′80s music 24 / 7.

The elevator motor groans. I peer through a small window covered with metal mesh. Inside, it’s dark except for one reading light hung over turntables. The D.J. sits in the shadows on a milk crate. Hunched over the gear, he wears a thick parka,
hoodie and wool cap. I can’t see his face. He leans forward. Light catches his eyes, nose, mouth.

I step back. Of course. All those nights I lay in bed and listened to the deep, marble voice and house music, J.D. was the D.J., podcasting to the world, the galaxy, the universe and beyond.

The song crests. I turn and face the city. The column’s lights fade to black. The sequence ends and starts over, colors brightening and fading. Add music. Mix. Drink Hypnotic.

Time to go.

I slip inside. The “safe” house is scandalously easy to enter. So easy, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find Blue-Eyed Bob in the closet getting a lap dance from Hammer. I lock up and climb up the ladder, eager to rest.

Pony’s in my spot, curled up, dead, or asleep. Drool dribbles out his pink, bow-tie-shaped mouth. A tin sits next to his head. I pick it up, unscrew the top and sniff. Tobacco. Gross. That explains the dribbling drool. I climb off the bed. Tonight, I’ll sleep on the floor.

H
alloween.

Sixty minutes to freedom. Everyone runs around the safe house, laughing and screaming. We spent the day getting dressed. A few hours ago, we started putting on makeup.

J.D.’s costume is simple: sky blue midi (tiny tee cut off right below his breastbone), plastic vampire fangs and white face. His lips are dark red with temple-to-temple black slashes across his face. His mohawk’s dyed magenta. Spiked, his ’do looks like an underworld security fence tipped with purple razor blades. A cross between Dracula and Futuristic
The Last of the Mohicans.
I’m running a Best Costume Contest in my head: J.D. wins First Place.

The closet door opens. Hammer steps out. Boberella bends over and zips up knee-high boots. Hammer’s costume isn’t much more than a tiny, rhinestone-covered thong and iridescent paint smeared over his body-by-Michelangelo.

The closet door’s open. I peek through the crack. Peanuts. Topless, she turns and sees me.
Whomp!
The door slams shut.

Hammer slips a CD into the old boom box, jacks the volume on a generic house track (“Alice / Nadya / Sell me …”) and dances, turning the safe house into a strip club. I’d guess he’s going as a go-go boy (or, working as one?). He grabs a sparkly cowboy hat and white gloves lined with fringe, Madonna (circa,
a while ago). Moving, grooving, his body shimmers and shines, a human rainbow. The glam body makeup catching the light.

I wear tight pants, identical to J.D.’s, except mine are white. Anita wanted me to go shirtless but (a) I’ve got a dork chest, and (b) I get cold easily. Anita made a sheer (see-through) shirt thing. It’s not really warm, modest (or, my style), but it’s better than naked.

Earlier, she nudged my shoulder and motioned to the bathroom. “Time to dye.” She calls my new hair color “dead movie star blond.” My hair was barely dry when she switched on the clippers and buzzed my scalp. Chop-chop, five minutes later, I was mohawked.

“What the hell are you?” Kidd cracked.

“Angel-A,” I said. “My costume’s more of a look.”

“Yeah, if you’re in seventh grade and that’s your idea of sexy.”

“If you’re gonna mop my look,” J.D. said. “You need product.” He whipped out a giant tub of green gel and styled my ’do into a proper homo’hawk.

“Close your eyes,” he said, setting it all in place with a rainfall of toxic hairspray. “Look at us, bro’. We’re ebony and ivory.”

“Or, alterniverse twins,” I said, referring to the Xena Warrior Princess Twins, Crazy Sandy and Elena, those crazy-beautiful dykes who rescued me.

“Done?”

“Almost. Makeup.” Careful, he drew lines across my face.

“Accessories.” Alice / Nadya drapes a fake pearl necklace around my head, a minicrown. Marci slips wings over my shoulders. Kidd tried to wear the wings, but they didn’t fit. Watching him struggle to pull them on over his broad shoulders, I think, “Evil Stepsister.”

When everyone’s done tarting me up, I look in the mirror. I’m more like Angel-A than Punk Rock Jailbait.

Done and dressed, I sit back and watch. Alice / Nadya works on her costume: layers of blue, chiffon material, matching veil and crown. She sticks twelve candles in the crown. Using Anita’s
fish bowl makeup mirrors, Alice / Nadya fills in her pursed lips with bright red lipstick.

“What’s that thing on your head?”

“A minora.”

“A wha’nora?”

“You’ll see,” she says, tracing her lids with kohl and blue eyeliner.

“What are
you?
” Kidd jokes. “The angel with a birth defect?”

“Remember Joey?” Alice / Nadya says, daintily adding three tiny lines just outside her left lid. Marilyn Monroe did that, too.

“I do,” J.D. says. He sits, perched on the kitchen’s windowsill, smoking a joint. He’s getting high. Preparing to take flight. He holds out the roach. I shake my head.

“Hell, ya, gimme some’a that,” Pony says, and takes the Mary J. He’s a cross-dressed Daisy Mae: blue-and-white gingham print dress, ruffled cocktail waitress top and wig—blond pigtails. Anita painted red circles on his cheeks and dotted his face with mascara. It looks like he has really bad combination skin: blackheads and chicken pox. His fire engine red lips shine, hard and beautiful, dipped in shellac.

“Was Joey the crazy guy who let you spit in his mouth at parties?” J.D. exhales. I don’t partake, but I like the scent: incense with an edge.

“Joey’s the one who let you spit in his mouth?”

“Help.” Peanuts steps out the closet, pointing to s / his head. “They won’t stay on.”

“He’s the one,” Alice / Nadya says, mid-eyelid, reaching over and adjusting Peanuts’s headpiece, a dozen green, rubber snakes. “You could put anything in his mouth.”

Peanuts nods. The snakes shimmy. “The boy who swallowed the spider the size of a cellie?”

“Yeah,” Alice / Nadya says, returning to lining her eyes. Costume plus makeup, I’m guessing Scheherazade. Or, Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra (the real Egyptian monarchess being many, many shades darker than these two). “And remember how he had that extra nipple?”

“—
really
good at crank phone calls.”

“—triple back flips.”

“And could suck his own cock.”

“Ready?” J.D. says, stands and looks at me.

“Boys,” Marci says. “We’re not ready.”

J.D. grabs my hand and walks us to the front door.

“Hey! Guys!” Marci calls out. “I told you,
wait up!
”

“Shouldn’t we—”

“Hell, no,” J.D. says, opens the front door and steps out. I follow. He pauses and lights a cigarette. “We ‘wait’ for them, we’ll be there all night.”

I don’t tell him, but I’m a little worried about going outside-outside. Everybody’s nervous. We were ready to leave hours ago. He propels down stairs, taking two, three, four steps at a time.

“Dude, you ever seen Marci wait for us to
eat?
”

W
e step down off the stairs into the lobby. I look at the floor-to-ceiling mirror. It takes me a second before I realize the two boys in the reflection are … us. The two cutest bois in
all
of San Francisco. We’re destined to get more looks than Louisiana food stamps.

“Fuck prom,” I say, parting the front door’s dirty lace curtains and peering out at the street. It’s packed. (Surfing the Web, I read Burning Man started here, at Land’s End.) People shout, laugh, dance. Bare flesh flashes under barely there costumes. I reach for the doorknob. I want to dive into this beautiful, moving tide of humanity.

“Hey,” J.D. says. “Let’s wait a few.”

It’s been a while. Anxious, I look at the stairs.

“Does everyone think Halloween lasts three nights?”

“People!” Marci marches downstairs. The kids follow. She installs herself, guard style, at the front door. “We leave the building in pairs, one pair every five minutes.” We surge toward the front door. Marci blocks it. “Wait! Where’s Anita?”

“Fuck that,” Peanuts grumbles. “We’re not livin’ on
drag
time!”

But s / he doesn’t move, and I know why. We want to see Anita’s getup. Sewing it was a top secret project, the Area 51 of Halloween costume manufacture.

Kidd glares at me. No mystery why
he’s
mad: His costume’s lame, a brown papoose (really, a stuffed backpack), corn husks and feathers sticking up, out his head. He’s shirtless—and hot (yawn, Hammer’s way hotter)—and wears moccasins with his loincloth. He’s a post-op, she-to-he Pocahontas.

A stethoscope’s draped over Marci’s Doctor Marvelous white overcoat. A tiny digital camera hangs on the cord. She holds it up. “Before you leave, disclose your psychosis.”

“Punk Rock Jailbait,” I say. A flash pops and bathes me in white light. I feel famous for a second.

“Next.”

“Dwaculaaaaa!” J.D. hisses, bares his fangs, lifts his arms and turns his black cape into giant wings.

“Pocahantas!” Kidd steps out, twirls, left hand in the air, right foot out, bouncing down into a lap dancer squat.

“Or,” I think, “the Skanky Squaw.”

“Squirtle,” Peanuts says. “The stuff
dreams
are made of!”

“Or nightmares?” Kidd says. “Anyway, who gives a fuck about Squirtle? Star-Belly Sneetches’d be all over him, beating—”

“Girrrlll!” Marci says, staring at the stairs. I look at J.D. and mouth, “Let’s go?” He doesn’t see me. He and everyone else are transfixed.

A shadow darkens the wall. A foot wrapped in a green high heel steps down.

Pauses.

“Work it, girl!” Hammer shouts. “
Woooorrrrkkk!
”