for Sheena

 

Melanie filled a rocks glass with ice cubes, splashed a jigger of chilled vodka over the ice, then filled the glass to the rim with ruby red grapefruit juice from an open forty-six-ounce can she’d pulled from the refrigerator. She stirred the drink with a lime green plastic swizzle stick (there was a box of them in the cupboard above the glass rack), then carried the drink into the bathroom and set it down on the vanity. She’d done a good job—her mom would be pleased.

“Thanks,” Melanie’s mother said. She stopped what she was doing and took a sip. “Mm. Perfect.”

Melanie lowered the toilet seat lid and sat on top of it—she raised her feet up onto the seat in front of her and wrapped her arms around her legs, pulling them tight against her chest. She rested her chin on top of her knees and watched her mother get ready to go out for the night. The Bee Gees and the Doobie Brothers and KC and the Sunshine Band floated in from the radio in the other room.

Melanie’s mother was named Barbara, but she preferred Babs. Even to Mom. Melanie watched as Babs lined her upper and lower eyelids with a dark kohl pencil to make her eyes look big and round. Then Babs applied several coats of mascara to her eyelashes, pressing them with a metal eyelash curler in between coats, until her lashes were long and thick. Melanie watched the transformation with awe.

As she worked, Babs paused occasionally to take sips from the cocktail Melanie had mixed for her. A greyhound. Light on calories, she’d told Melanie, plus clear, top shelf liquor meant no alcohol breath and less chance of a hangover the next morning. She lined her lips just outside the vermillion border with a dark red pencil to make them appear fuller, accentuating the cupid’s bow at the top of her upper lip. Then she filled her lips in with her favorite color—Revlon’s Wine with Everything. Babs placed a doubled-over square of toilet paper in between her lips and smacked softly, dabbing off the excess, then bared her teeth in the mirror to check for stray streaks of lipstick. “Cover your eyes,” she said. Melanie put her hands over her eyes and listened until she no longer heard the hiss of hairspray against bleached blonde hair. “There,” Babs said. She left the bathroom, and Melanie followed in a cloud made up of Aqua Net and her mother’s Tabu perfume.

“Where is Dave taking you?” Melanie asked.

“We’re going dancing at the Wagon Wheel,” Babs said. Melanie’s mother had a boyfriend, but he was in Soledad Prison, convicted of assaulting a woman in his apartment building. Babs dressed up and went to visit him on Sunday mornings, as if it were church.

“Why do you stay with him, Babs?” Melanie had asked her mother a couple of weeks before. “You could get a better boyfriend. One with a job who could take you out to dinner and buy you flowers.”

Her mother’s response was seared into Melanie’s brain and would unfortunately govern all of her future decisions regarding boys who hurt her: “Anybody will stand by you when you’re right,” Melanie’s mother had said. “Only someone who loves you will stand by you when you’re wrong.” Babs wore her loyalty to her convicted-rapist boyfriend as a badge of honor. In the meantime, she couldn’t be expected to sit at home. “Besides,” Melanie’s mother had said, “he didn’t do it. That bitch is a lying slut. She was just pissed off because he wouldn’t go out with her.”

Melanie wasn’t so sure that’s how it had gone down, but Babs’s mind was made up.

“What are you girls going to do tonight?” Babs asked now.

“We’re going to the carnival,” Melanie said. “Maybe downtown to cruise Main.” They didn’t have a car, but they’d find some boys to ride with. “Sherri and Alice are going to stay over, okay?”

“Sure,” Babs said.

The honk of a Chevy Chevelle announced Dave’s arrival at the curb in front of the pink Los Coches Avenue house where Babs and Melanie lived.

“Here,” Babs said. She opened her pocketbook and pulled out a wad of bills. She handed the money to Melanie. “Happy birthday,” she said.

“Thanks, Babs.” Melanie hugged her mom tight.

“Don’t get into any trouble tonight.”

“We won’t,” Melanie said.

After her mother left, Melanie snuck into her mother’s makeup and attempted to replicate her mother’s eyes and lips. It was harder than it looked. When Alice and Sherri arrived, they helped Melanie fix her makeup and then embellished their own. The girls changed into crop tops that showed off their midriffs and platform sandals that weren’t even visible beneath the long, bell-bottomed hems of their tight-at-the-ass, high-at-the-waist, saddleback jeans. They heated the curling iron and took turns curling each other’s long, straight hair back into wings that only slightly resembled the Farrah Fawcett locks they were going for, then sprayed everything into place with Babs’s Aqua Net. Melanie mixed Bacardi and Coke in tall glasses. The girls drank them in childish gulps and smoked cigarettes. They turned the radio up loud, and when Van McCoy came on, they stopped what they were doing, ran to the living room, pushed the coffee table up against the couch, and did the Hustle, like they were told.

Before they left the house, they shut themselves in Melanie’s bedroom and smoked some grass Alice had brought along with her. Alice expertly rolled the mix of dried leaves, stems, and flowers into a single Zig-Zag rolling paper, thin and tight, then lightly licked the edge to seal it. She put the joint between her lips and lit it with a blue disposable cigarette lighter. Once it was smoldering, she passed it to Melanie. “Happy birthday, chick.”

“Thanks,” Melanie said. “Hey, Alice?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I flick your Bic?”

The girls laughed so hard they got short of breath. It wasn’t the pot or even the joke—everything was funny and charged when they were together. They sat cross-legged on Melanie’s bedroom floor, got high, and talked about boys and music and the cars they would drive someday. Then they lay back on the carpet—for how long Melanie couldn’t say—watching the ceiling spin.

Getting ready to go out for the evening was a ritual. This was a thing Melanie had learned from her mother. The girls were quiet for a while, each in her own thoughts. Melanie hoped she would see the boy she had a crush on at the carnival, a tall boy named Ben with long, brown hair and pretty green eyes who played guitar in a local garage band.

Friday’s child is loving and giving, and this was Melanie. Melanie wasn’t one to complain. It was Melanie’s sixteenth birthday, and the California Rodeo and carnival was in town as it was every summer during Melanie’s birthday week. The girls had gone together every year since they were children. It was their improvised version of a family tradition. Melanie’s mother spent most Friday nights at the bar, and tonight was no exception. That morning, Babs had made her knockoff version of homemade donuts for Melanie. A birthday breakfast. Canned biscuit dough she whacked against the counter to pop it open. Holes punched into the center with the lid off the vanilla extract bottle. Bubbled in vegetable oil in a large saucepan on the stove until the dough puffed up and turned a light golden brown, then rolled in cinnamon sugar.

There would be no cake with candles, no wrapped presents, no singing “Happy Birthday.” That wasn’t Babs’s thing. Melanie didn’t take it personally. This year, Babs had given Melanie the new Frampton double live album, still in the Sam Goody bag. Last year, she’d given Melanie a carton of Marlboro reds (hard pack) and a leather-bound Bible. The cigarettes had lasted Melanie and her friends a week and a half. The Bible would last Melanie a lifetime—one day, it would be all she had left of Babs.

Once the room stopped spinning, the girls began the two-and-a-half-mile walk down Natividad Road to the carnival. Melanie could see the rising bright lights of the Ferris wheel in the distance, hard set against the black night sky. They stuck out their thumbs, but no one stopped. Between the slow pace of intermittently walking backward to try and hitch a ride, and then stopping because they were laughing too hard to walk, it took them nearly an hour to get where they were going.

After they passed through the carnival gate and bought their wristbands, Alice wanted to go straight to her favorite ride, the cages, but Melanie begged off.

“Let’s go to the midway first,” Melanie said. “I want to try to win something.” Melanie didn’t like the cages. The ride looked deceptively mild, like a Ferris wheel, but the seats were enclosed in metal prisons. The large outer wheel to which the cages were attached spun around on a big center axle, and the individual cages spun around too, each on its own axle, suspended above the earth, rocking gently or violently, depending on the actions of the riders. Alice always rocked the cage too hard.

“Okay,” Sherri said, taking Melanie’s side. “Let’s play games first, then the rides.”

“Oh, come on, you babies,” Alice said. Alice already seemed agitated, the way she always got around people and noise and activity. It was something Melanie recognized. It was as if the lights and the noise seeped into Alice’s body and then immediately struggled to get out again. Alice snapped her chewing gum loudly. “We can play games after. Let’s go on the rides before the lines get too long.”

“It’s Melanie’s birthday,” Sherri said. “She gets to decide.”

“Fine,” Alice said. She turned to Melanie and looked at her in a way that felt like a challenge. “What do you want to do? Rides or baby games?”

Wednesday’s child is full of woe, and this was Alice. Alice wasn’t one for being told what to do. Alice’s father had left Alice’s mother when Alice was thirteen. He owned a liquor store in north Salinas and lived with whatever girlfriend he was with at the time. Last year, he’d killed a young Mexican boy, only seventeen. He shot the boy, then drove his body out to the deserted dirt fields near the intersection of Crazy Horse Canyon and Old Stage Road and buried him. When the body was discovered (the grave had been far too shallow), Alice’s dad came forward and said the boy had tried to steal a six-pack of beer from the liquor store cooler after two o’clock in the morning, so he’d chased after the boy and shot him in the back as he ran away down the dark sidewalk. To get his beer back. Alice had confided to Melanie that she didn’t believe her father’s story—she helped him with inventory four times a year, and no beer was missing that quarter.

Alice’s father was never charged with a crime—he was protecting his property, the district attorney said. Alice wasn’t proud of having a father who would kill a kid, whether it was over a six-pack of beer or the color of his skin or anything else. Her father took everything personally, Alice said. Everything was an insult. He doled out punishment with abandon and in an extreme manner, disproportionate to the imagined crimes against him. Anyone might be considered an offender, including Alice, who couldn’t learn to keep her mouth shut and was forever getting a split lip for talking back. But the punishments hadn’t affected her the way her father intended, as far as Melanie could tell. Alice wasn’t afraid of him. She hated him. And she did everything she could to show him he couldn’t control her. No one could control her, not even Melanie. Not even if she asked nicely.

Melanie felt a knot forming in her stomach. She didn’t like it when Alice was aggressive, especially when it was aimed at her. But she defied Alice this time—it was her birthday, and she was sixteen, and it was time to grow up. “I’d rather play games first.” Her voice was small and timid, but she said it, and that’s what mattered.

Alice rolled her eyes but didn’t argue. She fell into line behind Melanie and Sherri when they started walking toward the midway.

At the midway, they stopped to throw baseballs into milk cans, and Sherri swore she saw Lolly Vegas hanging out by the ring toss. “He must be visiting his mom,” Sherri said.

“That’s not Lolly Vegas,” Alice said. “Redbone’s on tour in Europe. I just read it in Creem.” Alice was the rock and roll authority, and her word was final—Sherri had not seen Lolly Vegas.

“Did I tell you my mom saw Elvin Bishop at the Wagon Wheel last summer?” Melanie asked.

Alice rolled her eyes again. “Only five times,” she said. “And that’s bullshit. Elvin Bishop wouldn’t be caught dead at that dive.” But Babs would—Melanie didn’t miss Alice’s point. Alice wanted to hurt her because she wouldn’t ride the cages. Typical Alice.

 Sherri had played on the girls’ softball team in junior high, and after a couple dozen tries at the milk cans, she worked her way up to the third smallest prize, a little stuffed dog, light blue cotton with cockeyed black felt eyes and a red felt tongue lolling awkwardly out the side of a black, running-stitched mouth. “Here,” she said. She handed the prize to Melanie. “Happy birthday.”

“Thanks,” Melanie said. “I’m naming him Al Pacino. Because he’s a dog.” The girls had had crushes on Al Pacino ever since Jack Kirk had let them into the movies to see Dog Day Afternoon the year before. It was rated R, but like just about every boy at school, Jack had a crush on Sherri, so he snuck them in through the side door of the theater for free.

“Attica! Attica! Attica!” Sherri chanted now, pumping her fist in the air. The girls laughed harder than was warranted, but they were sixteen and high on pot and freedom, so it didn’t take much.

Melanie was still laughing when she spotted her real-life crush at the end of the midway, by the fishbowls. Ben was with his older brother, Travis, leaning against a pole and smoking a cigarette. So cool. She didn’t recognize him at first because his long hair was gone. His and his brother’s hair had been shaved close to their heads, maybe half an inch long. But Melanie would have recognized his green eyes and sidelong smile anywhere. His lashes were so long. So long for a boy. He was beautiful, and his face was even more striking now that his hair wasn’t misdirecting attention away from it. He was looking right at her. He smiled. Melanie felt her face grow warm. She looked down, and Sherri whispered in her ear, “I bet you’d like to flick his Bic.” Melanie turned red, and Sherri laughed. “Hey Ben,” she said, not loud enough for the boy to hear. “Come and get your love.”

“What’s so funny?” Alice asked. Sherri turned and whispered the Bic joke into Alice’s ear. It hadn’t been particularly funny the first time, and a second time was pushing it, but it didn’t matter. All three girls were laughing now—the deep, rolling laughter of sixteen-year-old girls who were so high and free to do as they pleased.

When Melanie looked back up and at the boy, he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He wasn’t smiling either. He elbowed his brother in the side and then leaned in and said something to him. The two boys walked away together. He didn’t look back at Melanie. He never looked at her again.

“Hey,” Melanie said to her friends. “We can ride the cages now, if you want.” Melanie didn’t care anymore. She’d gone from being thrilled at the boy’s green eyes looking into hers to being crushed.

Sherri put her arm around Melanie’s shoulder and whispered into her ear. “Hey,” Sherri said, “forget him. His family is nothing but trouble anyway. His dad cheated my uncle out of fifty bucks. They’re trash.”

“It’s cool,” Melanie said. She didn’t want to stay at the midway anymore. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go ride the cages now.” It was inevitable. Might as well get it over with.

“Right on!” Alice was thrilled.

The girls left the midway and made their way to the cages. The ride was operating and there was a long line of people waiting for the next ride. Melanie looked up at the spinning cages and then looked back down. She fixed her eyes on the ground and tried not to hear the shrieks coming from above her head.

Monday’s child is fair of face. In every trio of best friends, one is the most beautiful, and this was Sherri. Sherri wasn’t one for waiting. She walked up to the boy operating the ride and got up close to him, like Melanie had seen her mother do when she wanted something from a man. Sherri pressed forward, just shy of pushing her body into his. Melanie saw him light up, heard his bold laugh waft toward the back of the line, saw him smile and show his teeth. Sherri turned toward her friends and tipped her head quickly to the side, toward the front of the line, gesturing for them to come up. Melanie averted her eyes as she and Alice walked to the front of the line. A woman with two kids yelled at them for taking cuts.

The three girls did everything together, and so they squeezed into one cage, although Melanie knew this would mean more weight, more rocking. There was a bolt inside the cage that riders could slide into place and lock to keep the cage from spinning, but Alice would have none of that. Alice would do everything she could, Melanie knew, to get the cage to spin completely around, to turn upside down, to flip end over end. Alice seemed to constantly be trying to drown something out by any means possible—booze, grass, loud music, and now a violent spinning sensation. It was no use talking to her when she got like this. All anyone could do was stay out of her way. But here Melanie was—in Alice’s way. This wasn’t the first time Melanie had felt the panic of being caught up in Alice’s slipstream.

Five minutes. The ride will be over in five minutes. She would keep her eyes closed and hold on tight and count to sixty. Five times. By then it would be over.

Melanie squeezed her eyes tightly closed, tensed her jaw so hard she thought her teeth might crack, and held her breath. She started counting, but as the ride spun and rocked, jerked and jolted, she lost count and let her mind go blank. Eventually, the ride slowed, then stopped. The boy started letting the riders off, one cage at a time. When the girls’ cage came to the bottom, instead of opening the door to let them out, he winked at Sherri and smiled. “This one’s on me,” he said. He didn’t stop their cage at the bottom. He didn’t let them off. He started the ride again. Their cage slowly rose back up into the air. Melanie started to cry.

Sherri began to scream. “Let us off, you asshole!” From the top of the wheel, she yelled down at the boy, who was on the ground helping new riders into a cage and fastening their safety bar into place. Melanie felt a brief hope, but the boy’s face clouded. His offer of a free ride hadn’t been accepted with the gratitude he’d expected. He was probably embarrassed. And he was definitely pissed off. The boy ignored Sherri’s demands to be let off the ride. He pushed the start button and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket.

Melanie’s sobs and her terror were choking her now. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. After a few minutes, the ride slowed again, and the boy started letting riders off. When the girls’ cage came to the bottom, the boy didn’t let them off this time either. He looked right past them as their cage came to the bottom and then slowly began another ascent, ignoring Melanie’s tears and Sherri’s screams. Alice was in her element, surrounded by chaos. She left it to Sherri to try to comfort Melanie and enjoyed the ride. The boy left the girls on the ride three more times, until Sherri and Melanie were broken, quiet, and huddled together in the cage. Then he lowered their cage to the ground and opened its door. Sherri was already disengaging the safety bar, and they stepped off the ride before the boy could change his mind. Alice was satisfied. Melanie was sick to her stomach. Sherri was furious. “Fuck you, you sonofabitch,” Sherri said to the boy as they disembarked.

The boy laughed. “Sluts,” he said. “Fucking ugly bitches. Get lost.”

Sherri put her arm around Melanie and helped her to a patch of grass between the cages and the bobsleds. Melanie lay down on her back, pulled her knees up, and closed her eyes. She felt like she was still spinning. She felt like she might throw up. As though through a fog, she heard Sherri chewing Alice out. “Why did you do that?” she asked. “You know Melanie hates that ride. Why would you insist on making her ride it on her birthday?”

“Fuck you, Sherri,” Alice said. “Don’t try to blame me. You’re the one who flirted with that guy and then pissed him off.” The voices stopped, and when Melanie finally opened her eyes, Sherri was sitting cross-legged in the grass beside her, smoking a cigarette, and Alice was gone.

“You okay now?” Sherri asked.

“Yeah,” Melanie said. She sat up, and Sherri offered her a drag off her cigarette. They finished the cigarette, then without a word stood up and did what they always ended up having to do—they went to find Alice.

Melanie and Sherri searched the carnival grounds, going from ride to ride and back down the midway. They checked the back fence behind the carnival, where some of the kids hung out, but she wasn’t there either. They saw a few people they knew from school, but no one had seen Alice. They thought about calling Alice’s house from a pay phone, to see if she’d gone home, but they didn’t want to get her into trouble. They were no longer having fun. After looking for Alice for over an hour, they started the long walk back to Melanie’s house. They were about a half mile from the carnival when Melanie realized she’d left Al Pacino on the ride.

The walk home was not as fun as the walk there had been. It was late, the road was deserted of cars, and the sky was black and moonless. Their buzzes had worn off and they were tired. It was cold, too. Although it was summer, the crisp Monterey County nights were always cold, even inland. There was no laughter and little talk. Melanie thought about the person she always thought about when they were out walking this late at night. Cindy Collins. The older sister of their friend Susan. Cindy, who was nineteen when she’d hitchhiked up to Oakland for a concert two summers ago and never came home. And then Melanie thought about Alice, who’d walked away from the carnival alone. She hoped she was okay. She had to be okay. But whenever a rare car passed by, the girls stuck their thumbs out anyway, youthful confidence in their invincibility winning out over fear. The odds were in their favor. But no one stopped to offer them a ride.

When Melanie and Sherri got to Melanie’s house, Alice was there, sitting on Melanie’s couch, watching a rerun of The Midnight Special. Melanie and Sherri took their places on either side of Alice. Sherri lit a cigarette and took a drag, then handed it to Alice. Alice took a drag and passed the cigarette to Melanie.

“Alice,” Melanie said. “You can’t do that anymore.” Her voice no longer quavered. It was clear and firm. “You can’t leave us like that. No matter how mad you get. You scared us.”

Alice didn’t answer.

“We’re sixteen now, Alice. We’re all grown up, and we’ve only got each other. You can’t do that anymore. Not to us. You’ve got to promise.”

“Okay,” Alice said.

The girls watched the television show in silence then. Paul Anka sat at a white piano wearing aviator sunglasses even though he was indoors. So cool. He leaned sideways into the piano and forward into the camera and spoke, and then the lights came up on Peter Frampton. The boy with the long, wavy, golden hair played the guitar and sang “Show Me the Way.” His shirt was unbuttoned and open to his waist, revealing his slender form and hairless chest, a gold cross hanging around his neck. His mouth worked his talk box on the musical breaks. He was sexy in a sweet and androgynous way that didn’t scare the girls. So cool. So cool. So harmless. The girls huddled together on the couch and watched, waiting for Babs to get home and tell them about her night. Waiting for something to happen.