Justin Taylor: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

Kenny lazed in the shallow end, floating on his back. Dawn lit another clove off the butt of the old one and sulked, watching her friend do laps. She didn’t want to be there, but it was a long time before she left.

Over winter break, Angela tore her Nine Inch Nails posters off her walls. Her fishnets, her black boots, her goth makeup — all down the memory hole. When we went back to school, she was in blue jeans with plain tee shirts and looked like she belonged in a public ser vice announcement.

Kenny’s birthday was in February. He was fifteen too, finally. I didn’t know what to get him. He only liked two things, and there was no sense trying to find a better pot connection than the one he already had, so I went to the record store. He had nearly a hundred tapes by this point, but a lot of them were incomplete or fuzzy recordings, and he — a late-comer but a purist — owned almost nothing on CD. There wasn’t a lot of Phish to choose from, except for one double live album I knew he already had, but there was a ton of Grateful Dead stuff. Studio albums, “official bootlegs,” best-of comps. Then I saw it: 2/11/69 at the Fillmore East in New York City. They’d been opening for Janis at the time, and this package had two discs marked EARLY SHOW and LATE SHOW. The eleventh was his birthday. I wasn’t sure if he would already have the show on bootleg, but if nothing else it’d be a sound quality upgrade from the tape version. I bought it, took it home, thought about wrapping it, didn’t, switched it from the clear plastic bag it had come in to a brown paper one, pulled it back out of the brown bag, dug around in the kitchen junk drawer, found a Sharpie. I pulled the shrink wrap off so I could write directly on the case. Fifteen years later & there you were, I wrote, and put the thing back in the brown bag.

On the day itself, Mrs. Beckstein picked him up from school an hour early to go take the test for his restricted license. I waited at the house with Angela. We were on the living room couch, side by side, staring at the TV, unaccustomed to afternoon sobriety. She was flipping channels, paused briefly on MTV, a video for some angry song the old her would have cherished. “Stupid,” she said, to herself I was pretty sure, then went back to flipping — CSPAN, Jesus station, Spanish Jesus station, Home Shopping.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Huh?” she said.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“No, I mean what’s the question?”

“Well, you’ve like, changed.”

“That’s not a question.”

“Yeah, I guess not.”

“I don’t really know how to explain it,” she said. “It feels a lot like traveling. Movement. Some urge like birds get.”

“Whales. They go far, right?”

“I don’t know, maybe, yeah. I like birds better. I want a tattoo of a bird. Something that flies over the ocean.”

“Don’t get a seagull,” I said. “They’re scavengers. They smell.”

“Something else then.”

Her lips were dry and not as soft as I’d imagined. She exhaled through her nose, a tickle skittering across my face. “Don’t do that again,” she said. “They’ll be back any minute.” And they were.

Kenny had passed the test. He had his learner’s permit. I congratulated him, then gave him his CD. “Hey cool,” he said. “Let’s go throw it on.” I knew the songs now, some by their opening riffs and others not until I heard the lyrics, but I got there, usually. Kenny told me the names of the ones I’d never heard.

I was in the cafeteria, sitting by myself because lunchtime was when Kenny did most of his dealing. It was the end of March. I had forgotten my lunch that morning, and was eyeing the line, trying to decide if it was worth getting involved in. Dawn plopped herself down next to me. She smelled like sour sweat and old smoke. She tented her meaty fingers. “We’re losing her,” she said.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The fact that you didn’t ask ‘who’s her’ just proves how right I am.”

“So Angela Beckstein’s too cool for us lately. What do you want from me?”

“I have a ritual—”

“Oh Christ, here we go—”

“But I can’t do it by myself.”

“Aren’t you a little old for playing pretend?”

“It’ll bring her back to us.”

But what was there, really, to bring Angela back from? She was a person who had made a decision, a change, probably for the positive — at least if measured by any standard other than our warped own. I’m sure her parents, for example, were sleeping better than they had in years.

Here’s what Dawn couldn’t stand: Angela was dating Zak Sargent, who had grown into exactly the kind of cartoon character his name suggested. He’d become what we’d all always known he would. And Zak was a whole package. New friends, a suite of attitudes and hangout spots — the new life Angela had told me she was looking for. She was out over the ocean now.

I hated Zak Sargent, too. I hated what he represented, and I hated him for everything he’d ever done to Kenny, so much of which I’d witnessed or turned my face away from, and of course because now he had Angela. Zak Sargent would spend most of his life having and doing and getting whatever he wanted. I knew that. It was a great sick truth. Zak Sargent had led the pogroms of childhood, and since me and Kenny were best friends again, I lived every day with the knowledge that I would have joined those raiding parties if they’d only been willing to include me. But they hadn’t, and with nothing on which to base a claim for some portion of guilt, how could I ever hope to be forgiven?

She got to my house at ten till midnight. I met her in the side yard and led her around back. She was wearing black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt with silver buttons. It was tight on her. She had a small blue backpack slung over her shoulder.

“So where did you learn about this spell?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m past learning other people’s spells,” she said. “This is my own thing.”

The moon was three-quarters full. We walked past the picnic table and out of the bright perimeter established by the outside security lights. We stood near the back fence, in a pool of shadow cast by our lone oak. Bugs buzzed and whizzed. She started taking things out of the bag: a coffee mug with the cast of The Muppet Show on it, a pair of black fishnet stockings, a votive candle in a little glass, a fillet knife, a can of shaving cream. The fillet knife had a wooden handle on which she’d drawn upside-down crosses and devil stars.

She pointed to the knife and mug. “These are our chalice and blade.”

“What about the stockings?”

“Our personal item. They’re a locus of essence. It’s how we target the spell.”

“You mean they’re Angela’s?”

“Yeah, obviously. What would a pair of my stockings do?”

“Where did you get them?”

“She left them over at my house one time.”

“And you never gave them back?”

“Does any of this matter?”

“You’re just sick is all.”

“Eat a dick, Brad.”

She drew a circle of power in the grass with the shaving cream.

“This way when we’re done you can clean it up,” she said. “It was this or spray paint, but we needed something.”

“Good choice,” I said. I had no idea how to be nice to her.

She knelt down in the circle, chanted a while in Latin, then motioned for me to join her. I knelt, too. We were facing each other, close enough to touch but not touching. She took a book of matches from her pocket and chanted — a rushed low garble with lots of edges — while she lit the votive. A fake ripe blueberry smell.

“We’re lucky there’s not much wind tonight,” she said, then checked her watch. “Three minutes till. It’s time.” She unbuttoned her cuffs, rolled them up to her elbows, then instructed me to tie Angela’s stockings around her wrists. I tied her up loosely, one leg to each wrist, so the empty waist swung low between her arms and brushed the grass. She had full freedom of movement, and took the mug-chalice from my hands. “Pick up the knife,” she said. I did. “Okay,” she said, and unbuttoned the top three buttons of her shirt. She pulled the fabric back, and drew a short horizontal line with her finger across the flat space below her clavicles but above the tops of her breasts. “Not too deep,” she said, “but not too shallow either. I only want to have to do this once.”