Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

HILLARY AND ALI AND I were inseparable as the petals of a rose. Ali had been my best friend since the first day of kindergarten. We had stood in the playground weeping as our parents left us, and then fallen into each other’s arms, wailing—a story which we heard repeated, say, a thousand times over the years. Ali was slight and fey, as I was big-boned and (much against my will) commonsensical. As a girl she wore white fishnet stockings and plastic go-go boots to parties, her long black hair so thick that when you ran your fingers through it they stuck, as though it were taffy. My own hair was a mess, thin and lank. My mother finally gave up on it and brought me to her hairdresser in the city.

“Chop it off,” she ordered, snatching up her copy of Women’s Wear Daily and sinking into a pink lounge chair. And chop it off he did, leaving me with a horrible pixie cut. I was tall for my age, skinny as a rail. With my cropped head I looked like a very young ex-con and was constantly mistaken for a boy. It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I rebelled and insisted on growing my hair out. It took two years, but by the time I reached high school I was a reasonable facsimile of a girl, with shoulder-length hair and narrow hips, though still too quick-tempered and clumsy as a young St. Bernard.

Hillary, on the other hand, remained blithe as ever. He was one of those kids whose popularity transcends the rigid class barriers of high school. The jocks liked him, the freaks who smoked pot between classes, the kids in the Honor Society, teachers: everyone. Once a guy from Mahopac called Hillary’s father a fag, and even though Ali pointed out that, technically, this was true, Hillary sat down and patiently explained the word’s etymological origins until the guy finally shrugged.

“Well, shit, if you don’t care that your old man’s a fag, neither do I,” he announced, and bought Hillary a beer.

In 1974, nobody cared; at least not in Kamensic. David Bowie had appeared on Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert wearing eye makeup. Duncan had seen the New York Dolls perform in drag at Club 82, and even Hillary sometimes wore electric blue mascara to parties. I made my own bid for bisexual chic by dressing à la Joel Grey in Cabaret , in a moth-eaten tuxedo and battered top hat. I still have a Polaroid photo that Ali took of me then: strange lunar eyes so pale they seemed to have no irises, upturned nose and dark eyebrows, a slight overbite that had failed to yield after three years of braces.

“God, look at me,” I wailed, when the offending image dropped from Ali’s camera onto my living room floor. We were going to a cast party, Ali resplendent in a red leotard and Danskin skirt, me in my tatty Marc Bolan finery. “I look like—I don’t know what I look like.”

“You look fine,” said Ali, shoving the camera in her leather satchel. “‘Divine decadence.’ Right, Unk?”

My father nodded, giving me one of his mock-solemn looks. “Charlotte is jolie-laide. Interesting-looking. Like her mother.”

At this my mother frowned over her script, her face larded with Christian Dior unguents. “Charlotte is far more jolie than laide. And I am not interesting-looking.”

“You’re beautiful, Audrey,” Ali said soothingly and with the assurance of someone who truly was. Even at seventeen she was petite, just five feet tall, with a round smooth body, small round breasts and milk-white skin, freckled all over. She still had that wild mane of black hair framing a wide, expressive face—freckled cheeks, sweetly pursed mouth, honey-colored eyes, a small gap between her two front teeth. Hillary teased her and called her Colette, which for a little while made Ali hope that perhaps he was in love with her. They slept together a few times, but then Hillary started going with a Swedish exchange student with even more fabulous hair, and that was the end of that.

Ali’s parents did indeed get divorced. Ali lived with her father in Kamensic, and spent alternate weekends in the city with her mother, a one-time principal dancer with the New York City Ballet and former Balanchine muse. Ali’s father, Constantine, was a set designer. Ali had inherited his gifts—she would have made a wonderful illustrator, with her eye for the grotesque combined with her skills as a draftsman—but Ali wanted to be a dancer. She had studied since childhood at Madame Laslansky’s famed Manhattan studio, but despite the years of training she moved with an oddly stilted grace. Not like a dancer at all; more like a fox stalking, stopping to listen, and then flowing forward, always on the balls of her feet so she looked slightly tippy-toed, as though she were about to pounce. In our freshman year she auditioned for both the Joffrey and the School of American Ballet, but was turned down for both.

She was different after that. Wilder—she’d always been wild, but now there was a hysterical edge to everything she did, from dancing at parties to streaking during away football games at Carmel and Goldens Bridge. When I think of Ali I think of her naked: she shed her clothes like a toddler, unthinkingly, stripping to slide into the lake or to join some boy in the mossy woods behind school. Or else she wore leotards, black Danskins and black Capezios on her tiny feet; a ragged flannel shirt tied around her waist so the sleeves flopped against her thighs, her glossy black hair slick against her skull.

That was how she was dressed the day we met Jamie Casson. It was a damp afternoon in our senior year, the week before Halloween. The end of high school seemed like a formality to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. We’d both recently applied to the college of our choice—Hampshire College for Ali, NYU for me. Half the time we’d hardly bother showing up for class at all, save to find our friends in the parking lot and check out whose parents were out of town scoping locations for a new film or rehearsing. That was how we knew where the parties were, and that’s how we spent most of our time.

It was a strange autumn; not just that one October night, but all the weeks leading up to it. Though I never spoke of it, I felt a real foreboding at the idea of leaving. Not leaving school, but leaving Kamensic—and leaving Hillary, who had aced us all and already been accepted by the Yale School of Drama. Yet in some weird way the thought of going away from the village disturbed me more than anything else. I wondered if Ali felt it, too. Sometimes she would grow silent and oddly alert, as though focused on a faint sound, thunder or the rustle of footsteps in dead leaves. But she never told me what she was thinking.

That rainy Thursday afternoon I felt fiercely restless. By the end of the day I thought I’d start screaming if I couldn’t escape: from school, from the rain, from my own too-tight skin. I met Ali in the parking lot by Hillary’s old Dodge Dart. Behind us the dismissal bell shrieked. The rain had slacked off, though a cold breeze shook the trees and sent water arcing onto our heads. Ali lit the butt-end of a joint; as usual, the pot made me feel worse, paranoid and fuzzy-headed. But Ali grew loopy, laughing and walking backward through the woods.

“Something’s gonna happen now. Don’t you feel it, Lit?” Her golden eyes narrowed as she took out a cigarette. “Don’t you feel it?”

We cut through the trees, heading out along the railroad tracks. I shrugged and kicked at the gravel underfoot. “I guess.”

The truth was I felt a vague foreboding, a sense of malevolent purpose in the way the tree-limbs moved and the pattern of raindrops beaded on the railway ties. But Ali walked alongside me happily, smoking and singing.