STARLETS & SPACEBOYS
JOSEPH V. HARTLAUB
THE SKY LOOKED as if it had been splattered with multicolored droplets, a light blue background for the hot-air balloons decorated with all manners and sorts of colors and patterns. It wasn’t even noon on Saturday, yet the wide-open space over Festival Park seemed improbably jammed to capacity, with even more balloons rising majestically upward to the oohs and aahs of the crowd below. Sparkle, too self-consciously hip at age eighteen to make noises of approval like she had when she was five and six (and maybe even twelve or thirteen), nonetheless felt an internal thrill as she watched the spectacle of it all, both in the air and on the ground. She wasn’t ordinarily given to thinking ironic thoughts, not even when asked to do so in her senior English class; Sparkle considered, however, if only for a second, that she was all alone in a crowd of thousands.
The day hadn’t started that way. She had ridden the Sun Tran with her friend Marie to Festival Park early that morning, looking forward to a day of hanging out at the Balloon Fiesta and staying loose. They had done just that for a couple of hours, wandering through the park, taking in the hot-air balloons decorated like people and the crowds of people dressed like balloons, all of it framed against the backdrop of the Sandia Mountains rising so majestically out of the desert to the northeast of Albuquerque.
Their pair-up had abruptly ended, however, when Marie spotted Michael, her all-too-recent ex-boyfriend, strolling through the crowd and not even ten feet away from them. Marie had a hurried conference with Sparkle (who assured her friend that she would be fine, just fine, on her own) and had walked up to him. Michael had smiled, said something, and the last Sparkle had seen of either of them, they were walking hand in hand into the maw of the crowd, which quickly swallowed them up.
Sparkle took stock of things. She was beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed by the crowd and by some hunger pangs that were starting to hit. She had left the house in a hurry that morning, taking a whore’s bath and then quickly applying all over herself the sparkle makeup that had earned her the nickname, and she hadn’t had time to eat breakfast. She was looking for a food vendor who didn’t have a mile-long line when she felt a hand grip her shoulder.
She turned around and there was Rod, all decked out in his gray slacks and Pep Boys shirt with his name emblazoned in an oval patch on the left side.
“Hey, there, Sparkle,” he said, his grin revealing what her friends called summer teeth—summer here, summer there—stained with tobacco. “What are you doing here?”
“Wussup, Rod, no lube jobs stacking up?”
“Funny girl.” He paused and took a drag on a cigarette, reached into his pocket and pulled out a wrinkled pack of Chesterfields, offering her one, his eyebrows going up. She shook her head no. He put the pack back in his pocket and asked, “Your mom around?”
“You know she isn’t,” she said. “She’s at home waiting for you.”
“Yeah, well, I got off early, thought I’d come down here for a little while before I went out to see her.” He took a long drag off the cigarette and blew the smoke out while he smiled at her. “It’s great running into you out here. I’ve been wanting to talk to you anyway. Get to know you a little better.”
Sparkle just shook her head, thinking, so fucking obvious, this guy. “You’re really smooth, Rodney,” she said, using the name he hated. She had turned eighteen in July, three months ago, and she had caught him looking at her more than once since then, always when she was in profile to him and always when her mom wasn’t looking. She would rather be dry-humped by a Walmart greeter than by this grease monkey.
“I gotta go,” she said. She turned to leave and took a step away, her forward progress interrupted when he grabbed her upper arm and turned her back around, not hard but maybe a shade beyond friendly.
“Hold up a minute,” he said. “I just want to talk.” His mouth was smiling, but there was something in his eyes that looked angry. “There’s no reason to get hostile here, pretty lady.”
She looked around, saw everyone moving in different directions, heading here, heading there. She was all alone in a huge crowd of people. People in different parts of the crowd were shrieking happily, one girl squealing, “Heelllp!” with some others laughing. Sparkle tried to pull away, but Rod’s grip just got tighter, like one of those paper Chinese handcuffs. The grin was frozen on his face, but it was more of a weird-pissed look than a happy one. Sparkle had seen the bruises on her mother’s upper arms, the evenly spaced dark marks that looked like fingerprints, and she was pretty sure that they weren’t the result of erotic exuberance. At least, not always.
“Don’t pull away, now, there’s no reason for that, and no reason to tell your mom. This is just between you and—”
Rod stopped talking suddenly. His mouth was open, but no words were coming out of it. His head was turning to the left, looking at a set of fingers that had curled over his shoulder, a set of fingers attached to a hand, which in turn was attached to an arm, which itself was attached to one of the most beautiful guys Sparkle had ever seen. He was an inch or two shorter than Rod’s six feet but somehow seemed to tower over him. All sharp angles, like he had been carved out of stone, he had deep-set blue eyes that peered out from under the shelf of a shaven head, eyes that looked directly into Rod. Rod let go of Sparkle’s arm, his fingers not so much releasing her as falling off her, as if some strings in his arm had been cut.
“Leave,” the guy said to Rod, his face about an inch away from his. “Now.” Rod stumbled, as if he couldn’t get his feet and legs moving properly, and the guy righted him and turned him, almost gently, in a direction opposite of Sparkle and gave him a soft shove. Rod took a couple of steps away and the crowd enveloped him, as if he were a beaten dog accepted as a nonthreatening presence by a larger pack.
The guy turned back around and looked directly at Sparkle for the first time. His eyes were like pools; they had lost the laser-beam intensity they had possessed when he was looking at Rod. Looking at her, they were just … warm. She wanted to dive in and lose herself in them forever. He smiled at her, a genuine smile that didn’t overdo it, yet lit up the day and everything in it.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. He’s just a creep.”
“Do you know him?”
“He’s a friend of my mom’s.”
“Ugh.” The guy’s smile went up another hundred watts. “I hope you have better taste.”
They shared a laugh.
“I’m Nick,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Sparkle,” she answered.
“And so you are, indeed,” he said. They both laughed and shook hands. Nick’s hand was warm and strong, but didn’t grip hers so much as gently encompass it.
“My pleasure,” he said. “This”—he gestured to the balloons, the costumes, the people all around them—“is amazing, it’s overwhelming. This is my first year here. Have you been here before?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I live in Albuquerque. I come every year.”
“Well …” He hesitated a minute, then dialed up the wattage of his smile yet again.
“Look,” he said, “I’m starving. I’d love to hear more about all of this, and about you.”
He looked around at the food vendors, at the impossible lines in front of all of them. “Would you care to have lunch with me, and talk?” Nick had wanted to go someplace quiet, away from the noise. He was staying in Old Town and had seen a restaurant there he had wanted to try, so they caught a southbound bus and then walked over to the Church Street Café. Taking her hand as if it were something they did every day. The two of them sat down at an outside table underneath a hanging basket of flowers, sharing chips and a hot bandito pie and drinking frosted glasses of San Felipo Lemon Tea while they talked.
Nick told her that he was an advance man for a rock band called Starlets & Spaceboys. Sparkle had never heard of them. He told her they were trying out a new marketing model: get on a bus, go to a big open space where there were a lot of people, and put the word out that they were going to have a rock concert. No tickets, just contributions. He had been in town for about a week, putting the word out, waiting for the band to catch up with him. They were going to play a midnight show out under the Sandia Mountains the following Saturday. Maybe, Nick said, looking into her eyes, you’d like to come. She said she’d love to, both of them knowing without saying it that they weren’t just talking about a rock concert.
Nick never asked her how old she was, or if she was in school, or anything like that. He never asked her about the Balloon Fiesta or about her life or anything else. And Sparkle never asked him about his accent—British, maybe, or Australian—or about how he happened to enter her life at exactly the right time. They simply finished lunch, and she reached for his hand, but he put his arm around her. She melted into him and they walked out of the restaurant and down the sidewalk to his room at the Hotel Albuquerque.
Sparkle loved hotel rooms. She had only been in one a couple of times, both of them on so-called vacations with her mom, one of them at a Comfort Inn on the outskirts of North Phoenix, with a real pool bizarrely located in the parking lot, the other one in a Days Inn outside Oklahoma City. Sparkle liked the sheets and the wrapped soaps and the plastic cups wrapped in cellophane, and the way a maid would come in and clean up after you.
This was different, however; it was even better. Nick’s room was on the top floor of the hotel, the bedsheets crisp and starched and smelling fresh and clean, the air conditioning just high enough to be comfortable, the room bright and airy. And Nick was different. She knew what roofies were, and Nick hadn’t touched her drink, spending the whole meal just paying attention to her and answering her questions, looking into her eyes and not at her tits, though she could tell he wanted to.
Sparkle was not a virgin, but she was used to furtive groping and quick thrusting by guys her own age, thirty-second encounters that were over before she even got wet. Nick was different there, as well. He took his time with her, exploring her slowly but with a confidence that was an aphrodisiac all by itself. He kissed her gently on the mouth while he unbuttoned her blouse, ran his tongue over her rosebud nipples as he unbuckled her jeans, slowly tickled and tongued her pussy as his hands tweaked her breasts. When he entered her, his cock felt like a fire inside her that she never wanted to put out. There was a part of her that was terrified, that was screaming that this was too pitch-perfect, being in bed with a guy who looked exactly like the guy she had always wanted, someone who made her feel safe, and desirable, turning her inside out with pleasure. It was like that amusement park ride, the Demon Drop. Nick took her higher than she had ever been in her life and then dropped her down into a hole that was so deep she passed out.
* * *
When she woke up, the room wasn’t quite as bright. Nick was lying next to her, his arm around her, watching television. He looked down at her and smiled as she moved up against him. “What year is it?” she asked.
He smiled down at her. “This one,” he answered. She laughed and smacked his arm.
“It’s actually five-twenty p.m.” he said.
“Ghod, what did you do to me? I’ll never fuck again.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve ruined you,” he said with mock dismay.
“I’m afraid so,” she responded. She looked at the television. Nick was watching some sort of science channel. There was a commercial on for a video, one of those wonders-of-nature things with footage of bears catching fish in their mouths in midair. Sparkle and Nick watched as a large fish swam by a rock, which turned out to be a fish itself. A large mouth suddenly materialized, swallowed the fish whole, and settled down into rock shape again.
“That,” Nick said, “is what I am going to do to you.”
Sparkle laughed. “I think you already have,” she smiled.
“No,” he said, “not yet. Not quite yet.”
They both laughed and he kissed her and then helped her out of bed. He led her into the shower—where, under an endless stream of needles of water, they began swallowing and soaping body parts and entering orifices until Sparkle thought her bones had turned to rubber. Nick carried her out of the shower and laid her on the bed, draping a towel over her. He called room service and ordered a light supper for the both of them, which got to the room just as they finished dressing. They ate quietly: steak and steamed potatoes and vegetables and bottled water. They sat on the bed and fed each other, watching the sun set.
Sparkle was halfway through dessert—a large piece of banana cream pie—when she turned to Nick and said, “I don’t know how to say this, but I’m going to have to go home at some point.”
“I know,” he said, “and I have to earn my keep as well.” He walked over to a suitcase and opened it, taking out a plastic bag. There were seven capsules inside.
“The band is working on something, a new type of music delivery system, if you will.”
If you will, she thought. She loved his accent, his eyes, his body, the way he treated her, everything about him. She could almost feel tendrils, ley lines, snaking their way across the space between them, connecting them invisibly.
He held the bag up to her. “These are not drugs. I swear to you. But take one each day and you will hear a different Starlets and Spaceboys track in your head. It may take two or three days, but it will be like nothing you have ever experienced.”
Nick took her hand and placed the bag, the capsules inside, on her palm. Then he gently closed her hand around the bag and kissed her. “Endings,” he said, “and beginnings.”
The words were out of her mouth before she even knew it. “Will I see you again?”
Nick looked her directly in the eye. “Oh yes,” he said. “And before the concert. We’ll hook up before Saturday.
“But now”—he stood up, offering her his hand to raise her gently off the bed—“we both have to go.”
They caught a bus back to Balloon Festival Park, and they held each other and kissed under a sky full of balloons and stars.
“I’ll see you out there,” Nick said, pointing to the Sandia Mountains. He squeezed her hand one more time, looked into her eyes, turned, and became one with the horde. Sparkle, for her part, felt like she could have died right there.
* * *
By Monday, Sparkle couldn’t get the music out of her head.
It wasn’t so intrusive at first. She took her first capsule late Sunday morning. When she had come in on Saturday night, her mother had been passed out in the living room of their shotgun double-wide, an empty liquor bottle on the floor next to her. There had been no evidence of the Rodster in sight; apparently, he hadn’t had the nerve to show up after trying to pick up his girlfriend’s daughter. Sparkle wasn’t sure whether she would tell her mom or not, thinking, wait and see, keep it in reserve for an argument. There was no point in waking her mom up in any event. She was snoring to beat the band; she always did after a bout of heavy drinking, and Mom liked that Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. Tonight, Sparkle had thought, she’d been the one with the Captain in her, oh dear ghod yes. Sparkle had gone to bed and enjoyed the sleep of the well-fucked and satiated.
When she woke up on Sunday morning, the sun was high in the sky and the air was warm. There was a message on her cell phone; Sparkle hoped that it was from Nick, even though she hadn’t given him her number. It was not from him at all, of course; it was from Marie, asking if Sparkle wanted to go to the Fiesta today. Fat fucking chance of that, Sparkle thought, though she couldn’t really be mad at getting left high and dry. Well, high anyway, she laughed to herself.
Sparkle had wandered into the kitchen looking for something to eat. There was no cereal, no Pop-Tarts, only some toast that looked like it had been found during an Anasazi dig. She remembered the capsules in the plastic bag in her pocket and got a glass of water from the faucet, thought for a moment about taking all of them, then remembered what Nick had said. Jesus, she thought, hugging herself for a second at the memory. What a great fuck he had been. She unclenched herself and swallowed a capsule. And a nice guy, too.
Sparkle had believed Nick, but she was still surprised when the music started in her head. It began not so much as a melody but as a discordant series of notes heard from afar, like a car radio heard from the distance of a couple of blocks that never gets any closer or farther away. The sound didn’t interfere with her thoughts; it was more like background music that almost wasn’t there. She spent her Sunday afternoon hanging out at a Starbucks and then surfing the net in her bedroom, all of it with the music, some sort of ambient rhythm with deep thumping bass and drums, faintly playing in the background of her mind.
Nick hadn’t told her about the video. Sparkle didn’t see it until she closed her eyes, but then, all of a sudden, there it was, synced to the music that she could barely hear. A bunch of guys who looked like Vikings—long beards, homed helmets, swinging axes and swords—were in a pitched battle with these things that looked like women, except that they were … off, in a way that Sparkle couldn’t quite put her finger on. The Vikings were getting their asses kicked royally, literally being eaten whole, the almost-women screaming and laughing with blood smeared around their mouths, biting the heads off the Viking guys in one chomp. It was vivid, yet repetitive after a fashion: a Viking would lose his head and his body would jump around for a few seconds, blood spurting out of his neck, and then fall over.
The music in the dream video got louder and Sparkle suddenly recognized the song. It was a cover of a song her mom had played for her once, had told her that she played in the birthing room when Sparkle was born, something called “Thursday” by Morphine. Nick was in the video as well, standing off to the side, laughing at the carnage, urging the women-things on at the top of his lungs.
Sparkle sat straight up in bed, wide awake. The Vikings, the carnage, the women bitches … were all gone. The music still echoed in her ears, and for just a second she saw Nick standing in the comer, smiling at her. He disappeared, but the music played on, loud and proud, inside her head.
Sparkle lay in bed for a moment before she realized it was Monday, a school day. She looked at the clock and reluctantly rolled out of bed. She stripped, applied her sparkle glitter, then quickly rooted through a pile of clothes on the floor of her closet until she found something reasonably clean and got dressed. She stopped in the kitchen, but there was still nothing there for breakfast; she hesitated a second, then filled a glass from the faucet and took a second capsule.
By Monday afternoon chemistry class, the music was drowning everything else out. Marie had come up to her in the cafeteria at lunch, wanting to talk, but hearing Marie talk was like listening to some garbled radio station from a foreign country: it made no sense to her at all. What she wanted to hear was the music. It was like she had an iPod in her head set on Repeat, and it wasn’t playing the quietly creepy Morphine song anymore. It was a track she’d never heard, faintly like “The Four of Us Are Dying” by Nine Inch Nails but more sinister. She loved every note; she found herself bopping along to it. Her lab partner, a Native kid named Cristos, kept looking at her, and he raised his eyebrows at her once in question, as if asking her if she was okay. She just nodded her head yes. She had never felt better in her life. She couldn’t wait until Tuesday morning so she could take another capsule.
* * *
Sparkle was dream-free Monday night, but taking another capsule on Tuesday seemed to open a part of her brain that she hadn’t known existed. It was like she was split into three parts. The song in her head could have been an unreleased Puscifer track, while off to the side—there was no other way to describe it—the battle scenes from 300 seemed to be playing in silhouette. And in front of her was this world.
Then, of course, there was Nick, always Nick, who seemed to be whispering to her. She didn’t even think about how she looked to the other kids at school—Marie tried to talk with her a couple of times, but Sparkle blew her off without even knowing it—until Cristos blocked her way in the hall after chem class on Tuesday and got in her face. She could barely hear him over the music, sensing rather than understanding what he saying.
“Hey Sparkle, wassup?”
“Hey, Cristos.” She tried to walk around him, but he wasn’t having it. The Native kids always kept to themselves, unless they played sports or something. Sparkle hadn’t said two words to any of them in her entire three years of high school, and she saw no reason to break the record in her senior year. She didn’t like Cristos blocking her way; it was like she didn’t have enough brains to handle it. But he wouldn’t give way.
“Listen to me … you been swallowin’ music, haven’t you?”
“It’s none of your fuckin’ business!” She tried to pull away, but he quickly nudged her into a corner and began speaking low and quickly. The music abruptly faded away, though it was still there. She wanted it back, loud and now. Cristos was somehow interfering with the transmission.
“Listen, it’s bad shit.” He looked around, to see if anyone was listening. “I’ve got a cousin, Miguel, he worked at the Dancing Eagle out in Casa Blanca, at the restaurant?”
Sparkle didn’t say anything to him, not even a nod, so he kept talking. “He kept talking to his boss about some woman he met who was playing the slots, some Anglo who looked like she stepped out of his dreams. She was with some rock band or something, looking for a place to have a concert, and she had these fucking pills she gave him so that he could hear the band’s music. It’s some band no one ever heard of, Stardust and Spacedreams, or something—”
“That’s enough—”
“—and after just a day or two he’s bouncing around, dancing, not paying any attention to anything but this music he’s hearing in his head. So he starts wandering off into the desert, looking for this bitch, this Nikki—”
Sparkle grabbed him. “Wait a minute. Who?”
“Nikki. Miguel kept talking about this woman named Nikki. And then he just wandered off, looking for the band, and they haven’t seen him for two weeks and now you’re acting—”
“Shut up!” Sparkle pushed him away, crying, and ran up the hall and out the door. She had walked halfway home before she realized it.
The music had come back, full volume and then some, as soon as she had cleared the school doors, and now there was just the road, the music, and the video playing behind her eyes. She found that with some practice she could control the volume of the music just by thinking about it, almost like the sensor-touch volume on the Bose MP3 player she and Marie had seen at Target a couple of weeks before. She wondered how loud she could make it, and kept pumping it up, not stopping even when the blood started to drip out of her left ear. By the time she had walked to the gravel road that led to the double-wide, her T-shirt, the one that said “Your Mother Is a Bitch,” was ruined. It made it look even better. She stuck some toilet tissue in her ear to dam up the blood and went to bed.
When Sparkle woke up hours later, it was dark outside, just a faint hint of daylight peeking out from the east. She went into the bathroom and got a glass of water and swallowed all of the remaining capsules at once. The music stopped suddenly, and for just a second she felt as if she could unzip her skin and crawl out of it. She didn’t know what to do about it, not at first.
Then she walked over to the window and looked out across the city toward the horizon, where the Sandia Mountains rose from the desert and met the sky. She knew it was impossible, but she thought she could see Nick out there, standing at the base of the range, his arms crossed against his chest and smiling at her as if he was waiting for her. An electrical storm was starting up off to the west; she thought it might get to Albuquerque in an hour or two. Maybe, she thought, I can get to the desert before then.
She slipped back into her room and put on a dirty pair of jeans and a Coke Dares shirt. She felt small and helpless, but there was a comfort to it as well; she was so insignificant that the universe would never notice her, never stoop so low as to hurt her. And, she thought, who would hurt me, with Nick to protect me?
She opened her bedroom door quietly and slid out and down the hall, trying to be quiet, though her mom was snoring so loudly that Sparkle could probably have stomped out and she never would have known. Still, Sparkle padded quietly down the hallway, past her mother’s room—peeking in, she saw no sign of the Rodster—and walked into and through the living room.
It never failed to surprise her how quiet everything was at this time of night, just before dawn. And it was even more so now that the music had stopped. Or maybe it hadn’t. Sparkle seemed to hear some sort of low “thrum” interspersed between the rush of blood into her ears, and wondered if this was what snakes felt, the pulses that attracted them toward the highway where they would get run over.
At least, she thought, my ear has stopped bleeding. She felt a slick wetness between her legs, however, just as she reached the front door. Shit, she thought, pretty soon there’ll be no point to leaving. She hurried to the bathroom for a quick cleanup and a tampon insertion, and after changing her underwear she slipped quietly out the front door.
The sky was jet-black with a swirl of stars through it, kind of like the cake mix Marie’s mother had used for birthdays, Funfetti or something, where you mixed colored sprinkles in with the chocolate cake mix. Sparkle thought for a moment about Marie, who seemed more like someone out of dream than a friend she had shared things with, and then the moon went behind the cloud bank that was the source of the electrical storm that was approaching. Sparkle could still see the desert gleaming across the road, a solid black with scraggly patches of sagebrush.
She was deep into the desert within a few minutes, far enough from the highway to feel enveloped in the dark and solitude. She maneuvered around the slightly elevated mounds that bespoke of ant or spider nests and began walking toward the mountains.
What would happen, she thought, if I just kept walking and never came back? She imagined that if she did that, she would eventually die out here. Not a bad way to go, she thought. A sophomore girl at school last year had gotten into her mother’s tranks and deliberately overdosed; Sparkle also remembered a senior boy who had hung himself in the closet a couple of years ago. There were rumors, though, that the hanging had been an accident, that he had slipped while whacking off. A couple of the football players said his body had been found with gay porn, but in the end, it didn’t make any difference. Dead was dead. There was an appeal, though, to dying under the sky, falling asleep and never waking up, the last thing you felt being the sun and the heat.
Sparkle kept walking toward the mountain range off to the north. In the distance she could see Indian School Road winding off toward it, vanishing behind the mountains, which interrupted the horizon. She thought she saw a twin smudge of headlights back on Interstate 40, someone leaving this place. Land of Enchantment, my ass, she thought. She didn’t feel like going to school today.
Maybe, she thought, I’ll just stay out here until around ten o’clock, then start walking back home. Her mom would be at work by then. It was kind of a sweet deal. Her mom got up around 8:00 and left for work a little after 8:30, and would figure that Sparkle had gotten up and left for school. School wouldn’t call the house and report her missing until around 9:15 or so. She could erase the message from voice mail and then write a note or something. She’d figure it out later, like she always did. If I figure it out at all.
The music suddenly started up in her head again at the same time Sparkle saw Nick, smiling, standing on a pile of rocks practically next to her as if he had been waiting for her. It wouldn’t be cool to run to him, but she did smile back at him.
“I missed you,” she said—so uncool, but so true—and hugged him against herself.
He seemed to melt into her and asked her as if from a long way away, “You took all of the capsules, didn’t you?”
He wasn’t mad about it, not at all, his voice rumbling gently through his chest and into her ear. He was wearing cargo pants and a tan T-shirt that said “Starlets & Spaceboys—Millennium Tour” across it, the lettering curved over a tour bus whose front grille resembled a gaping, leering mouth.
Sparkle nodded yes into Nick’s chest, and he laughed, saying, “It’s okay, everybody does.”
A part of her brain, the little corner that was still, somehow, working properly, wondered at that, even got briefly angry over it—like this is something he does all the time, she thought—but the emotion was quickly shouted down by a hundred different voices, and she just pulled him tighter to her.
“C’mon,” Nick said, still sounding happy. “It’s time to meet the band!” He gently disengaged from Sparkle and, turning her toward the Sandias, took her by the hand and began walking with her.
The bus seemed to materialize out of the rock at the base of the mountains. One minute there was thin air; the next a sleek black bus was moving toward them. There was a flash of lightning off to their left, and a few seconds later she heard a clap of thunder that coincided with the roar of the bus engine. The bus came right at them, the blinding shine of the headlights in her face looking like a set of glaring yellow eyes, the grille looking just like it did on Nick’s shirt.
It was one of those large passenger vehicles like Greyhound used, except the front and side windows were not just tinted but blacked out. Music was blasting out of some hidden speakers, so loud it was almost distorted, yet the beat of it coincided with what she was hearing in her head. A random thought, so faint and distant that it seemed to come from a well inside her that was a mile deep, said that something was off about the whole thing, but she didn’t have time to wonder about it. The bus headed straight for her, and she jumped back just as it pulled up in front of her and the side door folded open.
Sparkle immediately became enveloped in a burning cloud of scent not unlike dope—the good stuff, not the Mexican crap the beaners and the niggers at school were selling for a quarter a joint, but the quality Jamaican stuff she had been able to score once or twice from the guys who hung around the college when she was able to hitch a ride down there: the type of shit that gave Bob Marley brain cancer. She took a deep breath of it, letting it settle into her lungs, feeling the ganglia open, the synapses sparking.
Nick got up on the first step of the bus, made a mock bow, and held his hand out to assist her up—courtly like a gentleman, grinning at her all the while. Sparkle noticed for the first time how pointed his teeth looked, how sharp, and wondered why they hadn’t cut her while he had been sucking on her nipples, on her clit. For just a second, her feet almost seemed to jump off her, running away of their own volition, but she overrode the impulse and stood there, wondering what was causing her to freak on some level.
She suddenly remembered a dream she had had a couple of months before, about a magic bus coming out of the desert and taking her away from everything: her mom, her school, the boys who were always looking at her tits and never at her eyes. And here it was, right in front of her. There was dope—and it was good shit, heavy and sweet and totally, absolutely intoxicating—and now there was Nick, who looked like he had stepped right out of her wish book, standing at the top of the stairs leading up to the bus, one hand holding hers, the other on the old-folks rail, standing there, all of the answers to all of her problems.
Sparkle stepped past Nick into the bus. The door folded shut and Nick was suddenly gone, swallowed up by the dark interior. She could barely see the driver, who smiled at her over a white shirt and dark tie and jacket, giving a jaunty wave and a “Welcome aboard!” even as she felt the bus begin to move beneath her.
The odor of the ganja was overpowering and caused her to stumble as she made her way down the bus aisle. She turned around and Nick was gone, not just out of sight but gone, and she was standing alone in the aisle. She could make out dim shapes on either side of her, fuzzy and indistinct, and there was another smell now, one she was trying not to think about.
Somehow, Nick was in front of her again, and he had her gently but firmly by the arm—almost as tight as Rod, she thought—and was walking her down the aisle, slowly. The aisle seemed to go on for a mile or two, and Sparkle thought that it must be the effect of the secondhand smoke from the dope; she wondered what it must be like to actually smoke the stuff. Nick seemed to know what she was thinking and winked at her, holding his finger up to his lips and smiling, playfully raising his eyebrows and wiggling them. It reminded her of that comedian, the one with the bushy eyebrows and mustache and cigar who was in the old black-and-white movies.
The music was even louder now, dark and moody, like Bauhaus or Marilyn Manson, thumping so loud that it felt as if it was coming from within her instead of from the floor- and ceiling-mounted speakers she could barely make out in the corners of the bus. Sparkle wasn’t focused on the music, however.
The other smell she had been trying to ignore was almost scrubbed out of the air by the odor of the marijuana, but it was something that bespoke of things dark and foul, and for just a second the odor got down into her stomach and flipped it over, almost making her want to throw up. It seemed to be coming from the seats on either side of the aisle, or rather, from the shapes in the seats. To Sparkle, the shapes looked like people sleeping, but there was something off about the whole thing. The seats looked as if they were stained with something dark in big splotches, and the people weren’t sitting in them, not exactly. It was more like they had been … stuck on them.
Sparkle’s eyes suddenly focused in on the seats that were not seats; they looked more like teeth, with bodies in various states of rot and decay on them. They suddenly jumped into focus, as if a veil had lifted, and the shapes began to look familiar: one looked like Rod, and those two, across the aisle, looked like Cristos and another Native. All of them didn’t sit upright so much as … jiggled, as if they didn’t have any bones holding them together. Sparkle’s stomach lurched, and a scream rose up in her throat, but it died as Nick put his hand on her shoulder and turned her slowly to him.
The light in his eyes caught her, impaled her, and from far away she heard him say softly, but somehow over the roar of the music, “You’re my starlet, and I’m your spaceboy.”
Something soft broke inside of Sparkle, and then there was nothing, nothing but Nick and the music, the beautiful, loud, roaring music. Sparkle smiled at him and closed her eyes. She loved him so much. But she did not want to watch as Nick’s jaws closed over her head.