Alexander Chee - Edinburgh

I am watching Elizabeth. She has been drinking, talking all night to a cute skinhead boy about four inches shorter than she is. I find myself wondering if he will grow those four inches this year. He looks almost our age.

My sister is such a slut, Peter says, as if he can see what I am watching. He sits down. She’s had every skin between here and Portsmouth between her legs, he says, and he lights a cigarette. He just moved here from Boston and he’s heard of her, I bet. He spits on the floor behind us.

According to my mother. I’m over at Peter’s. According to Peter’s mom, Elizabeth has taken us to a late movie. Somehow after the show we go to an apartment building up off Congress Street, where loud music sprays the sidewalk and seventy-odd skinheads and punk kids drink beer and try to have sex. Peter and I are hiding outside the house, in a shadow now, trying to avoid the mean skins, our coats wrapped around us. They are threatening to shave our heads. Make you a proper skin, they say. Crew-cuts are for hippies. We went outside when one of them asked me what I was.

What do you mean, I said.

Are you a gook or what? Eh, Charlie? Eh?

She’s passed out for sure, Peter says, looking down the dark street. Street lamps post bleary light in rows away to either side. Lucky for us all those skins want a piece of her more than they want to shave our heads. I’m sure they’re upstairs on her. His breath clouds on the winter air, a personal weather.

Peter takes my Zippo out of his pocket, twists and pours lighter fluid onto his thumb. He closes it and running it along his jeans, lights the lighter and then his thumb. A blue candle of his hand in the dark. He holds the thumb against the trash in the can next to us and the cartons and paper in there catch. If a cop comes, he says, we can pretend we re vagrants. He walks over to the side of the house. Wait here, he says. I need to go get my sister.

The fire gets larger. A peaceful warmth, some light for this dark corner, a bit of bitter smoke. I take a cigarette out and light it. For no reason I can account for, I am calm, searching myself for panic and not finding it. The cold is like a hand at my back, pushing me forward toward this burning can. I see Elizabeth’s car, and go over to sit on the hood, where I wait until Peter comes out, his sister and another girl with him. They are helping Elizabeth walk but it looks actually like she’s floating, carrying them with her as she flies. Wait, she says, and turns her head to the side, and dull amber vomit chokes out of her in a spurt. Steam rises where it hits the ground. Her head looks like it’s bleeding, but closer I see it’s actually an A for anarchy, painted there, shiny. Like it was done in lipstick. Fuck, she says. Oh, fuck me. She drops, cross-legged, onto the ground beside her vomit.

Peter fishes through his coat and comes up with his pack. He holds a cigarette out to his sister. Here, he says.

Thanks, she says. He lights it for her.

She looks into the trash fire and starts laughing.

Oh, fucking A, she says. A camp-out.

Peter taps on the shoulder of the other girl, a broad-shouldered swimmer I recognize now from meets. She swims for Falmouth, Butterfly. Her hair is cut short, almost like mine and Peter’s. She leans in and says, Yeah. I’ll drive. Peter hoists his sister up and loads her into the backseat, and I climb into the shot-gun seat.

Hang on, he says, as the girl settles behind the wheel. He runs back to the trash fire and for a second, I think he’s going to put it out, but instead he kicks it against the side of the building, where it falls over the snowy ground. He picks up a stone and chucks it through the window. FIRE, he yells after the broken glass, and he hoofs it to the car, tossing himself into my lap. The door shuts with a bang, the flames splash the other trash cans, which start to roar, and the girl beside us is cursing, quietly, flooring the pedal as the wheels grind and then catch. Soon we are on the road out to Cape Elizabeth.

Peter says, Fee. Look back. Is she passed out’

I peek back to see her staring, wide-eyed, her hands crossed in front of her, laid across the seat. One hand cradles nothing, and then on the floor, I see the cigarette, which I pluck and hand to Peter. She dropped this, I say. He raises his eyebrow and then pushes down the car-lighter. As he relights her cigarette, the orange ring lights his face. He inhales hugely and smoke pours out of his nostrils.

Why’d you do that, the girl driving us asks.

It’s one way to make sure she can’t go back, he says, and he laughs. I fucking hate those pricks, he says, and finally leans into me, and I do not move for the rest of the ride.

*

I get home late. My mother waits, a single light in the kitchen, reading a book she puts down the moment I walk through the door.

Is it rebellion, my mother asks, my hand between her hands as she rubs off the polish with a cloth, the acetone on it making me dizzy. I sit on the shut toilet seat. I want to scratch my neck.

Just tell me you aren’t sniffing it, she says, and I say, Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.

Oh great. Honey, listen. Please remember that people at school are worried about you and that this reflects on me. It’ll be hard for you to be friendly with the boys on the swim team if you do stuff like this.

Good, I say. They’re ridiculous and I hate them.

She lets my hands go and pats my hair. That word. Will this shampoo out, she asks.

I don’t know, I say, hoping that it doesn’t.

A regular little iconoclast, aren’t you. I guess I’ll stop while I ’m ahead. Is this blood? She looks me over, as if I were someone else’s child, and I try to stay calm. Don’t say I didn’t try, she says.

I don’t want her to wash the blood off. It’s not like I got a mohawk, I say.

The next day, when Peter and I walk into rehearsal together, identical hair, identical Goodwill clothes, Big Eric asks, Are you cadets or sopranos?

Soprano cadets, I say.

We’ll learn Britten’s War Requiem someday then, he says. We’ll all get crew cuts. He taps the music stand. Tck tck tck. His promise to remove me, if I showed bizarre behavior, broken.

20

Did you see his arms, Zach asks me.

We are in his beige room, naked. The afternoon on Sunday. His parents are out, his brothers are out, and in an odd way, it feels as if this is our house. I get up to get a glass of water, and look at myself naked, with my short hair. I have a premonition then, of my future. That this is the start of what it looks like. I go back, and settle next to Zach. He has been asking me questions about Peter.

I didn’t, I say. What did they look like?

Like cigarette burns. Round, red scabs, blistered. James Dean used to do it, apparently.

I think of James Dean. Peter has the same look, at certain angles. The raised eyebrows, the beautiful eyes, the way the whole face seems to lean forward to get your confidence, and, having it, whispers something just for you. I say, He’s going to pierce his ear.

Big deal. Does he burn himself? Zach rubs my head. I like it, he said the first day. Soft.

I haven’t seen anything of it. But I’ll look for it, I say. And I have a memory of pale arms in the dark, hands burning.

I look down to see my hand on Zach’s penis, the silver nail. Soon we will get dressed, leave, we will speak as if none of this is happening. I’ll find out, I say, and unspoken in the air is, to tell you next time.

Zach turns over my forearm. Plain skin, he says.

21

Freddy Moran’s house takes up most of the plot it sits on, a narrow stripe of yard barely surrounds it. He lives in Cape Elizabeth not far from me, in one of the town’s newer houses, on Old Ocean House Road. This house is newly made, the carpeting new, and Freddy has an enormous upstairs room, a sunroof he can climb through to the roof deck, furnished by his telescope, on a steel tripod mounted by bolts into the wood.