Chapter 1: Entering
We’re talking about nothing again when someone asks if I know what terror feels like. A familiar voice, an echo, reaches through the smoke. Behind the guitar assault grinding and growling though a blown speaker, I know someone is talking to me. I summon the effort to focus my attention on the voice’s face.
“So, do you?” One of the twins, the one who parts his hair to the left, passes me the joint. He looks like one of those guys from A-ha. His twin brother, who parts his hair to the right, looks like the other A-ha. Holding the joint out to me, he tosses his head back, shaking hair out of his eyes. “I don’t mean a little bit startled. I mean stark terror. Unable to scream. Shit your pants scared.”
I take the joint from him without answering.
“I know what that feels like,” Dom says, twisting the cap off a bottle of beer. “When they brought my grandpa home after his stroke, I was still real little. When he tried to speak, it totally freaked me out. I ran away. Almost pissed myself. It took days before I’d go around him at all.”
The sides of Dominic’s head are the color of uncooked dough, making a stark contrast with his tanned face. His Mohawk is less than two days old. When he dyed it black, some of the black dye dripped and oozed onto his scalp and forehead. If you stand close to him, you can see the scabs on his scalp where he tried to clean the dye off his skin with Clorox bleach. It cleaned so well that he ended up speckled with the evidence of his most recent transformation. That’s Dominic for you: working hard to be badass, but ending up with something hilarious and absurd.
Dom’s like a lot of people, I guess.
Next to me on the worn, itchy sofa, Bronwyn shakes her head. “Your poor grandpa. Jesus.”
Dominic’s shoulders droop, and the wave of shame that washes over his face resonates through everyone in the room. “Yeah, poor old dude. But, I think all grandpas know how dumb little kids are. I bet he doesn’t even remember it, as far gone as he is now.”
We’re on joint number three. In between hits and spacing out, I’m rubbing my ankles because my feet are killing me. “What is this we’re listening to?”
“Soundgarden. They’re new. You can take your shoes off if you want to,” Left-parted hair says.
“More new shit? What were we listening to the last time I was here?”
He shrugs. “I don’t remember. Maybe it was Alice in Chains. Luke was playing that one nonstop a few weeks ago.”
Then I get things straight in my mind again and remember that left side is Roman. Right side is Luke and I know confusing the two as often as I do makes me some kind of an asshole because I’ve been fucking Luke since graduation a few weeks ago. None of us have a plan for what the hell we’ll do with ourselves for the rest of our lives, and nobody here except Bronwyn even has a job. We need the distractions. Even if we can’t remember which distraction is which.
“Man, I don’t like all this new shit.” Bronwyn picks up a plastic cassette case, opens it, and pulls out the lyric sheet. “All this Seattle stuff. Everything’s changing and it’s weird.”
Luke laughs and gives her a nudge. “You’re just sad because nobody wants to listen to Winger and Poison anymore. Is that what your terror feels like? No more hair metal?”
Smirking, she holds up the lyric sheet from the twins’ Soundgarden cassette. “Yeah. This terrifies me.”
“So, Ivy.” Roman prods me with his elbow. “What about you?”
I pull my shoes off. My cheap black suede — okay, imitation suede — ankle-high boots. I take a drink, trying to think of what terrified feels like, what shit-your-pants scared does to a person, besides covering themselves with their own shit.
“This one time,” I say, “when I was maybe three or four, my sister Indra’s hamsters got loose. She kept them in one of those big plastic Habitrails they run around in, with all the tubes and shit. Well, some of those tubes, they didn’t go anywhere. They had all these dead-ends with plastic orange caps to keep the hamsters inside. Those caps, they popped right off. One day, or maybe it was night, my mom was in the bathroom, fixing herself up, putting makeup on in front of the mirror when she hears this scratching. Claws digging at the wall just in front of her, but she can’t see anything, so she starts screaming bloody murder. She ran out of the bathroom like she was being chased by a fucking axe murderer. We all started screaming because she freaked everybody out with her running and screaming and arms flailing everywhere.” I take a sip of my beer. “A few minutes later, we all laughed because my dad figured out that it wasn’t a murderer, it was just Indra’s hamster. It was funny because it was just this stupid little hamster and the fear was harmless.”
Bronwyn reaches across me and punches Roman in the arm. “Nice going, dickhead.”
“Sorry,” he says, handing me another beer without looking at me. “I forgot.”
I take the beer and I know why Roman doesn’t want to look at me. I’m grateful for that because I know if he does tilt his head up, I’ll see the pity stare. The same expression that drove my sister away. It’s the way people look at you when they know you’re damaged, but don’t know how to react to knowing a thing like that.
Dominic walks over to the guitar that one of the twins has sitting on a guitar stand. He picks it up and plucks at a few of the strings.
Bronwyn laughs when she sees what Dominic is doing with the guitar. “Dude.” She shakes her head. “You can’t play that thing.”
Bronwyn, her real name is Theresa, but she’s been making everybody call her Bronwyn for a couple years, now. “Theresa sounds like a fat chick,” she told me when she first came up with the idea to be a Bronwyn. “A Theresa is unremarkable. Mundane. Adequate. Invisible. Bronwyn is a strong woman. A warrior goddess. A myth.”
Bronwyn is too much woman to be invisible by any name. She looks like a Theresa, but she reads a lot of books and just got braces to make her teeth look less Theresa-like.
So, I sit next to Bronwyn — new and improved Theresa — and wait for Dominic to wow us with his musical skills. He takes a deep breath, and then attacks the guitar with an epileptic fury. The erupting cacophony has nothing to do with music, it’s only squeals and screeches of pain from the helpless instrument being tortured.
The chaotic sounds pull both twins up and out of their seats. One of them — it doesn’t matter which one — grabs the neck of the guitar and rescues it from any further abuse.
Bronwyn’s arms wrap around her body, which quakes and jiggles as she laughs so hard that her face turns bright red. “Man, I tried to tell you that you couldn’t play that thing, you idiot.”
Dom shrugs and takes a pack of smokes out of his pocket. “I was just curious to see if it would work.”
“If what would work?” I say.
“My hidden talent.” He packs the box of cigarettes a few times against the palm of his hand. “I don’t know what it is yet. I thought that might be it.”
“Better keep looking,” says one of the twins.
“I think your hidden talent might be comedy.” Bronwyn wipes the tears from under her eyes.
Dominic ignores their comments. “Too bad that wasn’t it,” he says. “That would have been so fucking punk rock.”
This sends Bronwyn into another fit. Roman shakes his head and rolls his eyes. Luke takes a hit off the joint.
I feel a little sad for Dominic. Life might be easier if a person accepts that they can’t do anything exceptional or interesting. Maybe a person like that would be exceptional, probably more exceptional and interesting than anyone I’d met so far. I begin to wonder if I should start picking up random instruments to see if I can play them, too. It doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Then the door flies open and the screaming begins.
Read the rest of Tied Within October 2020! For more updates, sign up for the Rasmenian Detritus mailing list here.