Pink Smog (7 page)

In the room next door there were piles of skateboard magazines and unwashed clothes. A stereo stood in what appeared to be a place of honor and there were Doors, Beatles, Dylan, and Hendrix posters on the walls. The room smelled like dirty socks but there was something comforting about being there in contrast to the rest of the place and part of me wanted to stay, to snuggle into the unmade bed and sniff the sheets.

Instead, I went into the master bedroom. There was a waterbed with a red velvet bedspread. I jumped onto the bed and looked up at the mirrored ceiling. I saw myself floating on a bloodred ocean, thin and pale and seasick with dis-ease.

I flipped over on my stomach. There was a framed photo on the bedside table.

And I saw it.

It was a picture of Hypatia Wiggins wearing a red dress, her long dark hair piled on her head. She was leaning into the arms of a tall, thin man with a five o'clock shadow and dramatically high cheekbones.

I hadn't inherited those cheekbones but I knew them very well, sharp when I kissed them.

The man was my father. It was possible that he had been cheating on my mother with Hypatia Wiggins all this time.

That was when I heard the sound of keys in the lock and the dogs barking and scrambling at the door.

But this is what I knew: I knew the layout of the condo because it was just like mine. Here would be the main bathroom off the master bedroom. Here would be the small bathroom window. It was not painted shut. I stood on the toilet seat and opened it. My body was just small enough to slither through and jump onto a bench on the walkway before the three bears got home. Here would be safety, momentarily at least.

My father was gone and his photograph was on our new neighbor's bedside table. What did it mean? Had my dad been cheating on my mom? Is that why she drank so much, had changed so much? And what did that say about my relationship with Charlie? If he had been lying to my mom the whole time, what other lies did he tell us? I must be less important to him than he said I was if he could betray our family like that. If it was all true, he had also betrayed the woman he was cheating on us with, leaving her and running off to New York. I had been deluding myself the last couple of days. Charlie didn't have a crystal ball. He didn't care if I was good or bad, what I did or didn't do, how I dressed, if I left dirty dishes in the sink or even broke into strangers' homes. I didn't matter to my dad as much as I had thought. I didn't even really know who he was anymore.

That night I snooped through my dad's stuff looking for a picture of Ms. Wiggins or some sign of her. There were black notebooks filled with sketches and notes for the films my dad had worked on and boxes of dusty sci-fi screenplays. There was a collection of glass paperweights, including one of the Empire State Building. The snow inside had turned yellowish. I wondered if my dad was looking at the real Empire State Building right then.

I found an enamel pillbox with my dried-blood-spotted baby teeth and a lock of pale hair.

There was a black shoe box with a few black-and-white photographs of my dad and his sister, Goldy, with their parents in Brooklyn. In one he was standing in a bucket of water wearing a diaper and grinning. In another Goldy was holding him in her arms like he was a doll. Aunt Goldy had visited us in the cottage when I was born but my mom said she was judgmental and turned up her nose at the food my mom made so she was never invited back.

I saw more photos, too. There were some of me as a baby looking very bald and surprisingly fat with chub bracelets around my ankles and wrists. There was a wedding picture of my parents like dolls on a cake. It was shocking how young and beautiful and in love they looked. There was a photo of my dad's grandmother. Her children had to leave her behind when the Nazis came. She was too frail to travel and she made them go. Charlie always said that he hoped she'd died before she was taken but no one knew for sure. My great-grandma's eyes were hauntedly sad as if they knew what was coming.

I didn't want to see her eyes. What was I looking for? A copy of the picture I'd seen? Had I really seen it at all? Did missing my father so much and being so angry at him at the same time make me see it? Or was the affair with the purple-eyed woman real and my father had just covered his tracks, maybe taken any evidence of her away with him, tucked in his coat pocket, nearer to his heart than I might ever be again.

I put everything away and went to check on my mom who was sleeping in front of the TV in the same yellow negligee. It made me so sad to see her like that, in that shabby nightgown. I remembered the way she would only wear natural fabrics like silk or real cotton, the way she would paint her toenails like the tiny, shiny, pale-pink shell fragments we found on the beach. I remembered the dresses she made for me and the doll dresses she made from the scraps. Petal Bug still had one of them on.

I went into my room and found Petal Bug under the bed. The dress she wore had pink and purple flowers all over it. I could remember the skirt my mom made for me out of that fabric. It had burned in the fire.

Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming desire to make something pretty. But just as quickly I changed my mind. What was the point? The most beautiful thing of all—love—could change into two people screaming at each other and one of them driving away forever.

I climbed into bed and jammed Petal Bug under one arm and Mink under the other and thought about being in Winter's room without him knowing, being able to smell him when he wasn't there. I imagined him coming into my room in the dark and sitting at my bedside, stroking my forehead with his hand, whispering fairy tales the way my father used to, his blue eyes like night-lights.

After I'd fallen asleep I thought I heard the phone ring, a muffled sound, far away across the land of Nod. That's what my mom used to call it. By the time I reached it the caller had hung up.

T
he next day proved that I was right about not spending time on making something pretty to wear as a way to distract me from the realization that my dad had probably been cheating on my mom for years. When I got to school my scruffy jeans and sweatshirt didn't matter. No one was looking at my outfit but they were looking at me.

A low, ominous hum met me as I went up to the front gate. It was hundreds of voices whispering in unison at me.

“Blow blow blow blow blow.”

On the walls of the building around the quad where we ate our lunch someone had scrawled graffiti—huge black letters, about twelve feet high.

The graffiti said:

BOBBY C. SUCKS DICK

LILY CHIN BLOWS CHUNKS

And last but not least (you guessed it):

LOUISE B. JUST BLOWS

I stepped backward and felt someone steady me with warm, delicate hands. It was Bobby.

“You okay?” he asked. The dark curls bounced merrily around his face but he wasn't smiling his usual mischievous grin.

“Are you?”

He nodded. “I'm thinking of mine as free advertising.”

I socked him lightly in the shoulder. The janitors were already setting up their ladders to paint over the graffiti. But not before Lily had seen.

She was sitting by herself and we went over to her. She was crying.

Bobby threw himself down on the cement bench and put his head in her lap. She looked startled, then pleased, then confused. The tears kept streaming down behind her glasses and she dabbed them with her sweatshirt sleeve.

“Once they heard me. In the bathroom. And the next day they made this, this mess. It was all this disgusting cafeteria food mixed together.” She shuddered. “They would leave globs of it around where I was. Once they put some on my notebook.”

I had planned on telling Bobby and Lily about what had happened to me the day before, about the picture of my dad in Winter's apartment, but I decided I had to give all my attention to helping Lily then. I put my arm around her.

“I'd like to shove some of that stuff down Staci's throat,” Bobby said.

I watched the janitors working on the graffiti. “How'd those girls get up there?” I said. “It would wreck their nails.”

We looked across the yard at where Staci, Marci, and Kelli were holding court before three tall ninth-grade boys with broad biceps. Jeff Heller, Rick Rankin, and Staci's superhot stoner boyfriend, Casey Cassidy. They were all laughing hysterically. Oh.

“They won't mess with you again,” I told Lily, although I had no idea how I was going to stop them. I wasn't thinking about impressing Charlie's nonexistent crystal ball or the fact that he wasn't who I'd thought he was—I just needed to find some way to help my friends.

I looked at Bobby. He pulled a square of Bubble Yum out of his Levi's pocket and handed it to me.

I had been practicing ever since the gum-in-hair incident, planning to someday challenge Staci Nettles to a duel. I unwrapped the gum. It had a thick, chalky texture and smelled of pink and sugar. I stuck it in my mouth and blew and blew—the biggest bubble I had ever made. It got bigger even than my face.

“I blow,” I said.

After school I went to find Winter. I knew I had to talk to him about it all. I thought of being alone in his room, breathing his air. I thought of his eyes like blue mood-ring stones. Happiness. I thought of how he knew my father and now Charlie's picture was in his apartment. I thought about the mysterious notes I had received. Fee Fi Fo Fum.

My nerves had been jangled by that message. Now they were worse from the graffiti and seeing the picture of my dad. Something needed to start making sense.

I knocked on Winter's door and held my breath. What if the girl, Annabelle, or her mother, Hypatia, answered? If the mother did, I'd be face-to-face with the truth about my dad and I wasn't ready for that yet. What if the dogs answered? But there was no barking and all I saw when the door opened was Winter wearing khaki green army pants, which were a little too big so they hung low on his narrow hips, and a white T-shirt. The dogs growled behind him in the dim room. The incense smell hit me with its sensory memory of naked ladies on fabric bins.

“Hey,” he said, smiling. When I saw that slow smile showing the white chewing-gum teeth I had to remind myself to be mad.

“You still mad?” he asked, reading my mind.

“I don't know who you are or why you are following me or how you know my dad,” I said. “And why your crazy sister is attacking me and…”

I almost said something about the photo on his mother's bedside table but my heart banged a surge of blood to my head in warning and I stopped.

“How do you know she's my sister?” He squinted at me from under the lock of hair. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. He could have been suspicious or just curious. I could have been paranoid from all my snooping.

“Isn't she?”

“Pretty much.” He reached behind his back for his skateboard and stepped outside. “Want to go somewhere? I got to get out of here.”

I nodded a little reluctantly, trying to see into the condo before he closed the door (was there really that photograph of my father on his mother's bedside table?), and followed him like a helpless puppy down the stairs and out the front gate.

I put my skates back on and then he zipped off, so I went after him. (Remember: he was the cutest boy who had ever paid any attention to me in my entire life.) We went east a ways, then north toward the hills, sloping gray under the afternoon haze. The apartment buildings and houses were older there, many in Spanish styles with red-tiled roofs and thick adobe walls. We turned onto a small side street. There was a little deserted park with a swing set and climbing equipment. The patch of sand and green was surrounded by a wall of bamboo overgrown with morning glories, bougainvillea, and oleander, all intertwined to create a new plant of purple bells, red leafy blossoms, and hot-pink-and-white flowers. A white angel's trumpet with its poisonous, upside-down lily cups grew nearby. Winter jumped onto one of the swings and gestured for me to join him. His long legs looked like they could touch the sky.

I scowled at him for a while but it didn't seem to be working so I went over and sat on the swing, dragging my skates in circles in the sand.

“It's better if you actually swing,” Winter said, smiling at me sideways. “That's why they call it a swing?”

“I don't feel like it.”

He slowed down and twisted the chain swing so that he was facing me.

“Are you sending me those notes?” I asked.

“What notes?” He blinked innocently, fluttering his eyelashes the way an actor would do in a movie, but it felt genuine.

“Fairest of them all? Fee Fi Fo Fum?”

“Nursery rhymes?”

“Yes. Did you send them?”

He shook his head. “It's been a long time since I heard any nursery rhymes. Why?”

I decided to let that one go. I had a more important question. “How do you know Charlie?”

“He was my mom's director. I guess they were friends.”

“Friends? Yeah right.”

“Believe me, Weetzie, whatever the situation is, you're the one he cares about the most.”

“Cares? He left me! He hasn't even called.”

“He thinks about you all the time.”

“How do you know?” I got up and moved away from him. My heart was doing its slamming thing. I saw red. You know how they say you see red when you're angry? That was really what it was like. The world looked red for a second like when you press your hands over your eyelids and tilt your face up toward the sun.

Winter looked down at his hands and bit nervously at one cuticle. “He's tried to call you,” he said. “But she always answers. Or the machine.”

I slumped on the bench and put my head down. “Why is this happening?”

Winter untwisted the chain of his swing and spun away from me, rubbing his eyes with a fist. “My dad left, too,” he said.

When he stopped spinning I saw that his eyes were red. “I never really got to know him at all. He was always doing his own thing and working so hard. All I got from him is this fucked-up last name.”