(no subject)

[pixiefiction]

Because I write original stuff, too, you know.

And Boo (Original)


It was a dare. “Let’s play Truth or Dare,” Lusmala had shrieked, and so we dropped to the couches with our legs curled under us and played at being fourteen-year-olds at a sleepover while everyone shouted and danced around us. Around the circle, five of us, truth truth truth because maybe we weren’t daring. Tame at first- “Do you still sleep with a blankie, Laura,” and “Red, who do you like better, Lus or Mouse?” “Of all the boys at this party, Mouse, which do you think is the best? Purely physical, I mean!” Then deeper, did Mercedes ever kiss a girl, go past first with one? Who was Lusmala’s first time? Around and around, getting obscene, and then it was my turn again, and I said “Dare,” maybe because by then I was drunk on the pounding techno music and the gross truths we had been shouting, maybe because I was more daring than the rest of them, maybe because the truth was getting scary.
Lusmala catcalled at me, “Oh ho ho, she’s a brave one now, Lion-mouse,” and we all laughed at the ridiculousness of it.
“But what can we make a lion do?” Laura asked dreamily, and the laughter stopped as they considered it.
Back to Lusmala. “Him,” she said, pointing to the boy I had called the best earlier in the game.
Most boys dance stupid, spinning on their backs or sort of flopping around like confused, headless chickens. Not him. Of course, not him. His whole body was in the music, maybe his blood was pianoline and backbeat, sweat was pouring off of him and his hair looked sort of silky like the vocals. That hair. It made me wax poetic when I first saw it- the color of soot, if soot were gleaming. What would you call that? Like when you take a piece of charcoal and break it just right and the flat plane inside shines. Jagged edged like that too.
“What about him,” I asked, coy, regretting ‘dare.’
“You like him best, right? You already told us so.” Lusmala could always be an impetuous child better than the rest of us.
“Yes,” I said, coy turning to caution.
“Kiss him.” She giggled. Red giggled, Laura giggled, Mercedes smirked at me.
“You look like a deer in the headlights, Mouse,” Mercedes told me after a moment.
“Like her name,” Laura said, still dreamy.
“I. Dare you. To kiss him,” Lusmala said very very slowly.
So I did.
One can’t back down on a dare, after all. The fourteen-year-old rules are very strict and we were playing at being children.
A break in the relentless thumping synth music wasn’t coming, and he wasn’t stopping in his dance, and I didn’t want to break his trance but it was a dare. I had to stand on my tip-tip-tip toes to be tall enough, and his eyes were closed and he looked far far away and for that, I was grateful.
He tasted like smoke and roses, burning flowers. When his eyes flashed open, they were blue (of course) and burning like the flowers and he looked mad. I started to hop away, to skitter back to my laughing friends, but he grabbed my wrist and yanked me back. He was walking backwards, somehow not colliding with any of the inattentive dancing drunkards, his expression almost frightening and very determined. I could hear Red shrieking somewhere behind me but I was afraid to stop looking at his eyes in case it made him madder.
The house had a balcony. He twisted the doorknob with his hand behind his back, still staring at me, pulled me out into the chill.
“What the hell?”
“I, uh, I, it was just a game.” I wanted to run away inside but he still had my damn wrist.
“That is not a game.” His voice sounded nothing like I had thought it would, not smokey or sweet like roses, just a normal voice.
“Look, I’m sorry, won’t happen again, promise, could you let go of me?”
“Will you run away?”
“Yes.” I was, perhaps, still feeling daring. Or truthful.
“No.”
“That’s shit. Let me go.”
“This is my domain. I don’t have to. You took something from me. This is the price. And don’t say words like that. You sound like you could be poetic. That’s not a poetic word. You should always try to be poetic if you can.”
“You said hell.”
“You kissed me.”
And just like that we were laughing and grinning at each other like little babies learning to smile, and when Red and Lusmala finally pushed their way through the crowds and appeared to rescue me from this angry beast, we waved them away.

He told me all the words he was writing down and how he could never find the right music for them, how his brother had called him scary-intense and named him Boo when he was seven, about dark bedrooms and his father leaving and how angry angry angry he got sometimes, Berserker rage. How he thought Asleep by the Smiths was the best song, but also the sickest, “Like telling someone to kill you tonight.” It scared me to do it but I told him all I knew, too, dropping out and neon color palettes and my picture being in magazines when I was little and hardly knowing my own voice, sometimes, being afraid of everything. We held hands in movie theatres and wore berets when we went downtown to see foreign films and put eyeliner on each other. When I got sick that winter he bought Campbells chicken and stars even though he hated the packaged taste, because he knew I loved it, made it for me in a little white pot in my tiny kitchen and then left me with it only to return with an armful of daisies and a bag of mangos, pineapples, bananas and limes, all impossible to find in the winter city. He took all my paper cups, put a daisy in each one and made me a smoothie with the fruits to go in one of them with the flower. He named the smoothie Love. The winter of my Love, hot tropical fruit and daisies.
When the lease on his apartment ran out, I said there was a sign saying rental in the building across from me and bribed the landlady with cookies and stories about being young and wanting everything until she let him be the one to rent it. Our windows faced each other. We strung the paper cups that had held the daisies on a piece of yellow yarn and hung them across the stretch between the windows, sung fragments of 80s synth songs into one cup while the other pressed their ear into it’s partner across the string. We made paper flowers to hang off of the yarn, two stories above the heads of anyone walking in the alley below. For the cup phone to work we had to keep our windows cracked open all the time, to let the yarn in, but we packed the cracks with old blankets and shivered for the luxury of playing a child’s game and being able to talk across empty air.
We went to the parties with Lusmala and Mercedes. I photographed him when he danced but would never join in. Black and white stills of a raving boy were my wallpaper after a while. We drank, but never enough for a hangover and I wouldn’t let him touch it when Lus or one of the boys at the parties offered E or coke. “You look like you could be poetic. Those aren’t poetic chemicals. You should always be poetic if you can.” He laughed, remembering that first night.
I cut my hair with a razor, the same dark length as his, just falling in my eyes.
“You look exactly the same,” Red told me, “If you ever walk in wearing his shirt I’m going to yell ‘Yo, Boo,’ and not even know that I’m wrong.”
I started writing it all over everything, teenybopper style- “You are cordially invited to the wedding of Mr. Gabriel Tamlin and Ms. Janet Faire. Mr. Boo Tamlin and Ms. Mouse Faire. Boo and Mouse. Mouse Tamlin. Janet Tamlin. Janet Mouse Faire Boo Tamlin. Mouse. And Boo.”

We went to Le Pompadour one night because there were no parties and he wanted to rave. It was barely twenty degrees outside and the streets were full of slush, but I left my coat in the apartment and we ran all the way there. Inside it was dark and neon red, sweaty, pounding, like a big heart. He left me curled into myself in a corner- I never danced- and disappeared into the mass of grinding, jaded kids. Thump thump went the heart, a blacklight somewhere flashing on and off. I had forgotten my camera in my coat so I just watched.
She was dressed in this silk micro mini dress, the only red neon thing I’ve ever seen outside of a light bulb. It strained across all of her, practically screaming about silicone and plastic. Her hair was absolutely white, like paper, like a bucket of paint, pure. The blacklight turned it bright blue when it flashed. Diamonds at her throat. I saw her watching him, gyrating closer to him. His eyes were closed like they always were when he danced.
I will not be jealous, I thought. He is my Boo, my beautiful boy, and she is only plastic.
She was good, dancing like he did, moved by the music rather than moving to it. Her whole body in it, graceful, the reason I never danced- I couldn’t move like that. Couldn’t abandon myself to it.
She was dancing with him, then, without touching, just weaving this circle between them. Electric sparks in space. He must have felt it but his eyes didn’t open. Somehow they were perfect partners, dancing. People stopped to watch. Her eyes never shut.
I will not be jealous, I thought. He would be dancing with me if I wanted to.
When he came back to find me, eyes glowing with energy and sweat dripping from his hair, she followed him. I wasn’t surprised.
“Who are you,” he asked her, slipping his arms around my waist.
She laughed. “You’re cute.”
“No. I’m Boo.” He laughed too, let go of me with one arm to extend his hand to her.
She took it with a red smile, pumped the hand up and down. Stupid firm grip, I thought, stupid capable handshake.
“Boo?” she asked, “That’s certainly eclectic.”
“Boo,” he said, dropping her hand. I curled back into him.
“I’m Faye,” she said finally, voice like bells, and smiled again.

“She smells like plastic,” I said.
“Chill out, Mouseybabey,” he muttered, shifting to lie on his back. “She’s just a friend to go clubbing with. You’ve never liked doing that; now I don’t have to make you.”
“She smells like plastic and I don’t like her.” The sheets were trapping me. It was too hot. I sat up, leaned out of the bed, patted around the floor for my sweater.
He grabbed my hand. “You are jealous, but you are my Mouse, we are right and left and we couldn’t be without the other, and you know it, and I know it.” He kissed my palm. Opium.
“As long as she knows it,” I whispered, lying down again.

She came to the parties too, all that spring. “After all,” he said, “Lusmala and Laura and Mercedes are always there. My friends can come too.” He sounded angry. I hid in a room where they were playing séance, with Laura. We sat on the couches and watched the strangers light candles and try to call up spirits with a Parker Brothers board. He was in another room, dancing.
“I just don’t like her,” I told Laura.
“You should hold on to him,” she said softly.
“I’m not going to cling. Not if he likes her better. I hate being jealous.” It was the most I had said at one time in a while. I closed my mouth again.

He stopped sleeping in my bed and so I stopped sleeping. I curled at the bottom of it, my bed, and stared at the window that faced his. It was summer and they were open, our windows. The cup phone that we had made still hung between them, limp. I reached for the cup. Too far away. I slid off the bed and grabbed it, put it to my mouth. “Boo, Boo, wake up.”
But he couldn’t hear it or he didn’t care. I leaned out the window instead. “Boo. Boo! Please?”
His face in his window. His eyes were shadowy circles. “Go to sleep, Mouse.” He shut the window.

Where did he go with her? I don’t know. He came in sometimes wild-eyed and grey, talking about the neon flowers in his head before he fell down on my floor. I said, I don’t know what you’re taking, but stop it, I can’t watch this, please stop it. I’ll paint you neon flowers if you need them this badly. Whatever you want.
Stop it stop it Mouse, he laughed, I’m fine, they’re so pretty, you’re so pretty, stop complaining.
Whatever you want, I whispered.
I want you to go-he went unconscious staring at my ceiling.

Fall and he stopped coming in at all. His apartment window was always dark. I thought, I’ll let him go, then. That’s what he wants. No more me.
“Where is he?” I asked Lusmala because I couldn’t help it. She gave me the pitying look.
“Shouldn’t have tried to keep him straight-edge,” she told me, her eyes saying, You bored him.
Stories about perfect Faery Queenes stealing beautiful boys. Sleeping Beauty reversed, the prince in the stupor. Maybe I am obsessed, I thought. Or maybe I just want to save him. I don’t know.
I didn’t want to go to the parties any more because I’d see them, dancing in the black rooms. Her hair with a white light of its own. They tried to make me go, Red and Mercedes and Laura.
“Show him you don’t care,” Red told me.
“Forget about him,” Mercedes said. “Plenty of guys.”
Laura looked me in the eyes. “You can still hold on. You just have to hold on when it hurts. If you hold on even when it hurts, it’ll come right in the end.”
I didn’t answer any of them.

“You’re coming to Sam’s Halloween party, I don’t give a shit whether you want to or not,” Lusmala said over the phone. “You’ve got to stop moping. He was just a boyfriend.”
I didn’t say, but he knew what my voice sounds like. He is right and I am left and he knows me in a way that I don’t know myself. He is spiraling down and I want to make him okay. If he is okay then I will be okay even if he is gone. But he isn’t.
They came to my apartment, my four friends, dressed me up for the party. Child crushing boots and a miniskirt, a bright pink wig. No no no, said Laura, that’s wrong. She put daisies in my hair and let me wear my tattered tutu from the museum store. Better, Laura said, more like Mouse.
Lusmala and Red and Mercedes went down to the car while Laura and I cleaned up. I was shutting the window when I saw it. Him. His window open, him framed in it. Where did he find a chainmail shirt? He looked like a faery knight. Of course he was going to the party; Sam’s house was where I met him.
My eyes felt like bruises as I watched him pull the shirt on.
He glanced up, saw me, smiled. Boo-smile, not cruel, not I’ve Forgotten You.
He pushed his window open. “You going tonight?”
I nodded. My mouth was a bruise too.
“Save me a dance?” he asked. He must have gone crazy. I don’t dance. I didn’t answer.
“See you,” he called, and shut the window.
I looked at the cup that still hung off my window sill. He is gone. Left. I am left.

Everything was bumping throbbing hot. I couldn’t stand it. Girls in Egypt cat eye makeup, false-eyelashed Cleopatras. Boys wearing caps on their teeth like vampires. They will bleed me dry, I thought.
I went outside under the balcony. Cars were still pulling up; the house was huge. It was freezing out, even colder than it was in the city. Better than the fever inside. Could I walk home from here? I’d freeze to death before morning, another little match girl. Escaping.
The car was white, even in the blackness of the night, pure white like a bucket of paint. Oh god, I thought.
She stepped out of the car like I knew she would, Faye Faery Queen. White Marilyn hair, red celluloid lips. Green dress like skin. Diamond tiara. It looked like she was dancing just getting out of a damn car. I thought, At least I know that it is humanly impossible to be more attractive than that. At least it is not only my own fault. How could I fight that? I couldn’t.
I held my breath, thinking he’d come next, but he didn’t. It was some other man dressed in fake army camouflage, brown and green like leaves. Why am I watching this? Am I obsessed, some creepy stalker? I just miss him. My heart. My right. I am left.
He stepped out of the car in that chainmail and a white cloak. He didn’t see me, staring straight ahead, but I could see his eyes. They looked grey.
I thought, I just have to know.
And so I ran out of the shadows to grab his wrist, like he had grabbed mine that night when I kissed him.
“Boo,” I said, “Boo. Can I talk to you?”
He didn’t quite look at me. Faye was turning around, glaring.
“Stupid,” she said to me, “Hasn’t he made it clear enough that he wants you to leave him alone?”
Every story about perfect Faery Queens stealing beautiful boys.
I kept hold of his wrist. “Please, Boo. Just look at me. Just once. I’ll let you be. Just look at me please.”
“Let go of him,” she said, hissed it like a snake.
I couldn’t. I wanted to; his skin felt like ice. But my fingers were locked into place.
She shrugged. “Fine. Embarrass yourself.” She started to walk away, inside, to the pounding music. I could feel the blood surging in his wrist to the beat of her hips as she walked.
He tried to follow her. I couldn’t let go.
His eyes were like fire when he glared at me. He wrenched his arm toward himself, snarling like an animal, his throat beating with blood. I thought of wolves.
“Let go of me,” he growled.
“Will you run away?” The whisper almost choked me coming out.
“I told you to let go of me,” his voice like a roar. He tossed his black hair back, a lion’s mane, and I shivered. He could bite me, I wouldn’t stop him if it killed me. But I couldn’t let go.
His left hand came up before I saw it. His nails hitting my cheek felt like all the flames, all the charcoal embers burning burning burning. I felt water in my eyes but no I will not cry I will not. He was molten. Laura had said, hold on when it hurts.
“I just want you to look at me,” I whispered. “Like you did. That first night when I kissed you. You made me brave enough to do it. I’m being brave this one last time and then I promise I’ll stop and let you go dance. Just please, Boo, look at me. For real. I just want to see your eyes and know that you’re all right.” I could have bitten my tongue, I could have let all the blood in my body fade out through my mouth into him, I could have lived in him that way, my blood could have purged the chemicals out of him and purified us both.
He tasted like smoke and roses, like acid, burning flowers dipped in the synthetic. I thought I would bite his lips off and hold them in my mouth like soft fruit. I thought, you have left but I am right, you are not okay.
When I pulled away and dropped his wrist his eyes were blue again.
“Lion-mouse,” he whispered. He took my hand. Every story about kisses waking up the sleeper. Every story about holding on.
We are we are we are. We are holding on.