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(c) 2001, Melissa Virus Archive anywhere except pay sites. Disclaimer: there is nothing offensive in this story beyond language, which I can accede some people don't like. If you find anything else you consider offensive, ask yourself: why do I find this offensive? Would this be offensive if it were happening to me? Then, shut the fuck up. Something by Melissa Virus "I know a girl who makes me shine" -Hum, "Dreamboat" Alice is talking about the lighting setup she made for her boyfriend's band, but I'm not listening. It's not that I'm not interested - I am. But when we got out here I started thinking about my field of vision in terms of composition, and now I can't stop. We're on her front porch, and one of the porch-posts is taking up about a third of my view. There are pastel Christmas lights wrapped around it. Alice's face is centered in the middle of my other two thirds. I want to pay attention to her, but all I can think of is this movie synopsis I read in Blockbuster once. The plot was basically that heaven is one moment from your life, stretched into eternity, and the hard part was picking a moment. I was thinking, this is my moment. Scratch. I remember the day I met her. I only really got to know Alice when I was a sophomore in high school. I'd been introduced to her a bunch of times, and we'd been at some of the same parties, and even bumped into each other at shows, but we'd never really gotten to know each other. When I was a sophomore and she was a junior, we both wound up in the same painting and video classes. The day we properly connected, it was spring, at the beginning of the fourth semester. We were in our painting class, listening to whatever New Age music Mr. Voiland had put on, when she hijacked the stereo and put on Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation." I had never heard music like this before: vague, exuberant, and the opposite of ingratiating. Courageously, I asked her what it was. She was wearing this oversized ugly blue men's button-down shirt as a smock. I remember that underneath it she had a long brown-patterned hippie skirt, big chunky boots, and a Nine Inch Nails shirt. She told me about Sonic Youth, and we wound up talking about music and painting for the rest of the period: she was painting the flowers and vase that were the assignment, and I had gotten permission to paint this green underwater seaweed idea I had. Directly after painting class, we had video, but the conversation died. It was my fault. When the bell rang, I'd been telling her about Jackson Pollack, but my friends John and Foul were in our video class, and I sat with them instead of her. I felt guilty right away, but I rationalized it by thinking she could have come and sat with us, if she wanted. She gave me all types of hell about that, after we became friends. That day, I felt like I was in a John Hughes movie: I'd met this girl I'd barely known existed, who knew all types of things I wished I knew, told me about underground music, crazy writers, zines - basically, Alice was connected to the underground, and I wanted to be. I had her Kool-Aid red hair in my head all day. The next day in painting it was really hard for me to pick up our conversation. Maybe I'm insecure, maybe I'm retarded, or maybe I was just infatuated, but I set up my paints at a table across the room from hers, embarrassed about yesterday and intimidated. She caught my eye, waved me over, and I went, heart in my throat. She'd brought in this zine, Crank, for me to look at, since I'd told her I didn't know zines at all. It was really cool, all angry ranting and stuff, but as intelligent as I'd hoped this type of thing would be. I kept having trouble keeping up the conversation with her. I don't know, probably because she was so fly and sophisticated, I kept wanting to say funny, witty things, but every time I came up with one, I nixed it before I could say it. I mean, why would a girl like that find a Gilligan's Island joke funny? Or like, a reference to some dumb band on pop radio - would she be all elitist about it, or would she be beyond elitism, to not caring at all, or ... what? I didn't know what to do with her, but she seemed to like me, and covered for my inability to communicate. Either way, not wanting to be an asshole like yesterday, I asked her to sit with John, Foul and me in video. She did, and John and Foul didn't really embarrass me, even though I kind of expected them to. I fade out, back up again. I remember this time at John's house, playing this game which was basically Dungeons and Dragons, just set in the future instead of the past. My character was a 24-year old girl named Laria who had telekinesis. John was blind drunk. I think we were probably fifteen. Everybody else had been drinking, but I hadn't. I didn't want to be someone who drank. Everybody except John was sober enough to play, and we were trying to, but he kept cracking up, trying to explain why, scribbling a word or a picture of a squirrel in explanation, giving up, throwing something at somebody, then cracking up some more. I remember being pissed at him, because I'd probably wanted to play more than anybody else. We wound up giving up and watching 'A Clockwork Orange' again. About a third of the way through the movie, John looked up in a moment of apparent drunk clarity, at me, but didn't say anything. I couldn't really decipher his look- maybe it was apologetic, though God knew for what, or maybe it was sudden understanding of something, I don't know, but for a couple weeks, I would think about that look and get nervous, until eventually I realized that it was probably just drunk ... something. Then stop. I remember being in eighth grade, wondering whether I was gay. I didn't think so, but I was already insecure enough to be concerned. So I made a test for myself. What I'd do was, I'd block out all sexual thoughts about guys from my head for a full day. If I could do it, it would mean I wasn't gay. If I couldn't do it, that meant I'd have to work on not being gay, which would be fine. I knew I was young, and I probably could change whatever sexual leanings I'd picked up so far. I mean, I was a smart kid. Being a smart kid, I also knew that by not letting myself think gay thoughts, I was kind of forcing myself to think 'em, like when your mom tells you not to think of a red elephant. Once the words registered, you had an image, and so every time I remembered the experiment I was conducting on myself, I saw cock. The experiment wound up being, well, is it difficult to force those thoughts out, do I mind, or do I want them there, on some level? Is it hard to stop thinking about cock? I was relieved to find that it wasn't difficult at all to boot gay thinking out of my head. It was really easy to just look at the legs of any of the girls in my class, or their hair, or anything, and any thoughts of guys seemed pretty inconsequential. That's how I came to be fairly certain that I wasn't into guys. Fade. Then: I remember the first time I went to the prom. I went with Alice. For whatever reason, I didn't understand, we went as friends, not as a date. I don't know whether that was my fault or hers, but I knew that I really wanted for it to be a real date, but it wasn't - we didn't even plan anything afterward. A week or so before the prom, however, was an experience. She wanted to get a dress. She had one that she said she could wear, but she wanted to get a new one - she would rather wear a new one to her prom than one she'd had for a while. Not that we were buying into the whole all-American myth of the prom or anything - we were too fucking rock and roll for that. So she invited me to come with her to the mall - to accompany her, dress shopping. Of course I went. I mean, I was sort of disappointed, because the prom is sort of like a wedding in that the boy's not supposed to see the girl's dress until the actual day of the event. But since it wasn't a real date, and we were both supposed to be going just to experience the prom and all, I could come shopping with her. In a way, it reinforced the fact that we were just fucking friends. On the other hand, though, I was going to go dress shopping with her. And we did: she didn't actually try anything on, so I didn't get to see her in a bunch of different dresses, but up to that point I'd never really been shopping with a girl before, and it was a trip. She looked at a couple, took them off racks and looked at the backs, held them up to herself, asked what I thought, then decided to just go in the dress she had. I hadn't seen that one, the dress she had - so poetically enough, I still wouldn't see her in her dress until the prom. Neat. After she decided not to buy a new prom dress, we headed over to the regular clothes, the sale racks. She was looking at shirts on a round rack, and I was following her around. I spotted this reddish-maroon nylon shirt, and I took it out. I loved it. It had shortish girl-sleeves, that small elastic on the neck that boy shirts don't have, and it was four bucks. I wanted it. Alice looked at me. "You should get it." "Yeah?" "Sure. Why not? It's four bucks - even if you never wear it, y'know, so what? You're out the cost of an issue of maximumrocknroll and a pack of gum. Why not? Also," she patted my stomach, "you should wear something besides t-shirts. You have a cute middle." She was right. Of course I'd buy it. I was nervous though - I mean, of course I didn't have the balls to wear a girl's shirt anywhere, and of course all types of unimaginable bad shit would happen if I even bought it. But Alice was going to get some cheap shirts too, and she could just put mine with hers. I gave it to her with my four bucks. She paid. Later that day, at her house, she played a bunch of songs for me, including a couple she'd written. I wore my new shirt, and I felt awesome. I don't think I've worn it since. Fade. Then I remember a period of time when I was in high school. I was a senior, so Alice had graduated and gone to school. At lunch, I sat with a couple girls I knew and this one other guy, Steve. None of my little inner circle of jerks, John and Foul and all, was in my lunch period, so I didn't worry about them much. They'd gone into their own things anyway, John doing his shop thing and Foul barely ever coming into school. So I sat with some second tier friend kids, who I kinda liked better anyway. This new kid came to our school. His name was Keith. He was gay. I pretty much fell all over myself, making sure that he knew that I was cool with his sexuality, and he wound up sitting with us. I mean, even if I hadn't been a factor, he probably would have sat with us - we were the type of freakies that the gay kid would sit with. The girls at our table, Nadie and Lisa, were our school's flagship Goths, at this point I was the school's token raver, and Steve was most likely gay and closeted - I never got to ask him. There was definitely something going on with him. When Keith came in, I wanted very badly to be friends with him. I had some kind of need to show everyone that I was cool with gay people, something like that, I don't know. Maybe it was like jonesin' to be underground, I was jonesin' to know gay people. Something new, something different. The problem was that Keith was fucking obnoxious. He had the worst affected lisp I've ever heard, he talked nonstop constantly about his boyfriend and their bondage games, he talked shit about breeders, he made fun of people's clothes - I didn't even make fun of people's clothes. He was the only gay kid I knew, and he was the most boring, one-dimensional bastard I'd ever met. I was so disappointed. I got real sick of Keith real fast. I learned a lesson though: being a minority, or being persecuted, or being, y'know, weird, didn't necessarily make you cool. This is an important lesson for any alt-kid to learn, and I probably learned it later than I should have. End. Then I see myself on the floor, green lasers shooting overhead, bass everywhere. I'm at my first rave on my first pill. Wow. People keep asking me whether I'm okay, because I'm sitting against a wall, on the floor, with my eyes closed. They don't realize that I'm more okay than I've ever been in my life. People will tap me on the shoulder and ask if I'm good - I'll look up, smile, tell them I'm so good, they'll laugh, then ask me if I'll watch their coat. Sure. Sure I'll watch your coat. I've never met you before, but I'd love to do anything you could ever ask me to do Anything. I want to be inside you. I want to be you, girl with the Aphex Twin shirt, I want to be inside your chest, inside that grey shirt, I want to be inside every head here. I want to be everyone. Forever. Alice is here. She brought me. She's dancing. I know we came with some other people, but I can't remember who. I know that she's here. She's done this before, my heart is pounding my chest convex, my head is full like a red blood water balloon without a skull, and I'm holding myself tight and warm. Alice sits down next to me. She gives me a piece of gum. I un-clench my jaw. I stand up, try to dance some, wiggle a little, and determine that it feels better to sit and hug myself. Dancing is hardly intense. This is the feeling I've looked for in music, in masturbation (no sex yet, loser), in everything, everywhere. This is the greatest thing that's ever happened to anyone. And Alice is here. Ahhhh. She's dancing, and she's really good at it. She's so graceful. Later I get really cold, they open the doors, and it's sunny outside. I've been awake for a lot of hours. I'm worn out but clean. I mean, I'm filthy, but I feel purified, spent. I'll have to do this again. I will. Fade. Then: It's a year or so later. I've taken a lot more E, and it's never been as good as the first time, though I guess nothing ever is. It's ten AM and I haven't slept - something about pills cut with speed; I've had my stereo on very quiet hiding out under my blankets, gently hallucinating, since about three. My mom thinks she wakes me up. She wants me to pick up my sister at a sleepover. Ok, ok, I'm getting up. Leaving the blankets I am freezing. I go get my sister at some house in some small mountains. I tell her that I was partying last night, she asks if I got high, I say yes. She says I am talking very quickly. I tell her I think I took speed. She looks, nods. Drugs and raves are getting boring. I have not become a burnout, and I do not want to. We get breakfast at McDonald's and I can't eat. I don't want to think about that any more. I think about Alice: I think about the time we saw Beck. I am eighteen and will be a senior in high school a month from now, in September, and I have not seen Alice in weeks: she's getting ready to leave for school. I invited her to go to this show. She is not familiar with Beck's work: something about not listening to the radio, and doing a much better job than I do of not watching MTV. Beck is playing with some other bands, and we go in an hour after the doors open. But before we go in, we are in my car, in a parking lot in Asbury Park, and Alice is fixing her makeup. This is a part of why she always looks so good. "Yo, Alice," I say to her, "this is a rock show, right?" "Yeah. Um, Beck is a rock and roll star. A rock show, yes," she confirms. We are talking like we are in Devo. "Well uh, do you think I should wear eyeliner to a rock show? I mean, isn't that more rock and roll?" "Yeah, it is rock n roll," she tells me, "ok. Open your eye real wide and look up." And then I am wearing eyeliner. It's awesome. When she put it on it was cold and wet, but now it is warm and simply present. I almost ask for some barrettes or something, because my hair is pretty long, but I decide not to press my luck. We go into the show, and Beck is amazing. She's been taking me to punk shows every now and again, and this is the first time I've taken her to see somebody I like who she doesn't know. And Beck is amazing. He rocks the crowd with a combination of irony and non-irony that confuses and exhilarates me. And "Beercan" is the fattest live groove I've ever heard. I think Alice enjoyed it too, though later she will tell me that it was too professional, too polished: not punk enough for her. Still, she danced. I love to see her dance. Afterward, we go back to her place, because it's closer. I assume that we will not be having sex, since we never have, and get so stoned that I fall asleep, feeling sick, during the second song of this amazing trip-hop record she puts on. I wish I could have heard more, but for some reason I am bad with weed, and wind up with stomach cramps which can only be alleviated by sleep. And so I give up. I remember another makeup experience. It's spring, and getting toward the end of the school year, so we are all a lot more cavalier about cutting classes and fucking around inside the school building, and we are able to get away with much more than ever before, thanks to seniority. It's yearbook picture day - not the day that individual pictures are taken, but the day that they take group pictures of clubs and things. I am with Nadie and Lisa, and we are smoking cigarettes in a secluded stairway. Nadie is cute and very small; Lisa is short and not petite. They both have black hair and Marilyn Manson shirts. Nadie wears a black slip over a slightly longer white slip, with fishnets; Lisa has black JNCOs and the Manson shirt with the green logo and the lipstick face. We all wear Doc Martens. Lisa mentions that there's a photographer taking pictures on the other side of the school, and I determine that once we've finished these butts, we should go try to weasel our way into some club pictures, make like we're members of them, as if that were so ridiculous a concept. I actually am in the Science Fiction club, which is a euphemism for 'kids who still play dungeons and dragons.' However, I didn't realize pictures were today until now, which means I missed my club picture. I know it makes me a loser, but I would have been in the picture. I like the idea of being in a yearbook for something. I have fucked Nadie. I don't think Lisa knows this. I don't remember exactly when it happened, in relation to this particular memory, though it was probably pretty close, because I remember that day feeling a little skittish and a little giddy about it. It was a weird thing - I assume it always is a weird thing, fucking a friend. I mean, friends have mutual friends. Do you tell them? If you don't tell them right away, then it's awkward, because by the time you do tell them, you've been keeping it a secret. And if you do tell them right away, then it's fucked up, because you're bragging about fucking someone to whom you're both pretty close. And so, at this point, Nadie and I are not telling Lisa that we have had sex. Actually, I don't remember whether we did tell Lisa at all. We decide to be involved in the pictures, squeezle our way in. Before we do it, "since it's forever," Nadie suggests that she make me up like Alex from 'A Clockwork Orange.' I figure this means a fake eyelash, which is cool, but all she means is a quarter kindergarten sun poking from the bottom of my eye. She draws, with pencil eyeliner, the rays, an inch or an inch and a half, coming out of my eye. Then we try to squeeze into every picture, but the photographer's a dick, and keeps shooing us away. It's fun, though. Eventually we go spend time in the photo room, where the teacher suffers vagrants with kindness. I never want to wash Nadie's makeup from my face. Fade. Shuffle. It's a month or so before photo day. I am wearing a black suit - I am at a funeral. Nadie and Lisa are here, looking less Goth than ever in their black dresses. My parents did not know Steve, and so they haven't come. Neither have Lisa or Nadie's parents. I am crying. I'd been afraid that I wouldn't be able to cry. For some reason, whenever I feel like I should be crying, as soon as the urge fights its way up my throat, I accept it, do my best to cry, and then it will not come. I want so badly to be someone who cries. I don't want to be a boy, a man - I want to be in touch with myself. Maybe the fact that I want to cry makes me feel happy that I am going to cry, whenever I feel it coming on, and that happiness kills the sadness which brings the tears. I don't fucking know. All I know is that Steve, whom nobody really knew, has hanged himself. The casket is closed. There was no note. My theory is that Steve was gay and couldn't live that way, but fuck if you think I'm going to tell his parents that. Part of me says that I should: It was his identity, and he should be remembered for who he was. I mean, the only reason I have to believe that Steve was not into guys is that he never explicitly said it. I mean, he listened to Keith's ridiculous stories, followed him around like a puppy - it seemed pretty apparent to me. I know closets pretty well, y'know? There was no note. Maybe Steve accidentally put his head through a chance noose and randomly slipped off a chair in his basement. I guess it's possible. Maybe one day we will make that joke, but not today. Today I am easily able to cry, and I am disgustingly pleased at this. The poor kid. The poor, poor fucking kid. We pay our respects to his parents and leave, go to this restaurant, Cleo's, which is a shithole, but which is open all night. We are there often: it's dark, and they have one of those old ugly backlit Coca-Cola signs with the plastic numbers and letters telling us the prices of things. We go there in our black, our suit and dresses, and we drink coke and don't eat, we cry sometimes and I find my hand on Nadie's leg, on her black nylon dress. It's under the table, and Lisa probably doesn't see. I pull it away as soon as I realize it's there. We are not at our usual table. Steve didn't come out with us much, but when he did, we sat at a table, second from the back, on the left. We do not sit there. I always sit next to Nadie, and Lisa sat next to Steve. If we were to sit there today, Lisa would have a whole side of the table to herself, and it would be too fucking weird and obvious. We sit at the opposite table, second from the front, on the right. It is early afternoon, on a Thursday. We have been excused from school to go to the funeral. Later, I will take Lisa home. Lisa is a sophomore, Nadie is a junior and I am a senior. Steve was a junior, and Nadie has known him since first grade. This is the night that Nadie and I fucked. Post-funeral sex, it turns out, is intense. Not really good or bad, just particularly visceral. I have Nadie leave her dress on while we do it, and I remember to use a condom. This is how I join the teenagers-having-sex club. I am starting to feel it in my chest, the glowing, that feeling like there's something growing, getting ready to explode your rib cage. I don't want to be sad. I can't help it, though - sadness seems to be my defining emotion. All of this, everything makes me want, so badly, just to cry. I remember going to the prom with Alice. She looked absolutely stunning - my dad even said that he was impressed. But the problem was her dress. Alice looked better than any girl I'd ever seen in person, ever. But I'd been hoping for something more princess-y, with poofy skirts, long, flowing things that she'd be lost in, and thin straps on her shoulders. Instead, it was more of a black Jessica Rabbit type thing, very tight, slit up her left leg. Her ass looked so good. I couldn't even take joy from it, though, because this was my big night to live vicariously, to be with a girl in a dress I could really love, remember for the rest of my life. I wanted to enjoy the prom, I wanted it to be good, but I'd been thinking so much about her dress, ever since we'd gone shopping, that I wanted for it to be perfect. And it wasn't. Still, we had fun. I couldn't shake the feeling I was missing out - I mean, all those girls, looking so fucking beautiful, so many of them, and they knew it. It's like, for once, these girls realize their femininity. I can't handle it. In comparison to some of the other girls' dresses, Alice's is, like, boring. Even though she's got a better figure than pretty much all of them. After the prom - I haven't thought about this in a long time - Steve came over. (Alice knew him way before anybody else did.) He came over, while we were killing time at A's house, and he brought a bottle of vodka. We all got drunk. Actually, I didn't really get drunk at all. I'd been really hoping I could lose my virginity to Alice, that night, and Steve showing up kind of killed that. He would facilitate the loss of my virginity, but in a very, very different way. It's ok though - sex probably wouldn't have happened anyway, what with the explicitness of the fact that A and I were just friends. Even though, before Steve got there, at one point, in her basement, there was a very awkward moment when we didn't know what to do, just sitting in our formal clothes on an old orange couch. I think there was a psychic moment where we both kind of admitted that we wanted to get naked with each other and do something meaningful, but the moment passed, and I am too much of a pussy to have followed up on it. Steve wound up driving me home in my car, since I am also too much of a pussy to drive with alcohol on my breath, at age seventeen. Stop. Fade. Then: I remember the reason that we were so explicitly just friends, at the prom. We'd been talking on the phone every night, for hours. I'd expressed, to a lot of people, my interest in her, specifically that I thought she was the coolest girl ever. People had asked me whether she was my girlfriend. This is an important distinction in high school. I hadn't said yes, but to two people I'd responded that she was 'just about' or 'as good as' my girlfriend. Word got to Alice that apparently I'd been telling people she was my girlfriend. She asked me straight up, which is about the best thing I think she could have done. She is an honest person. I straight up told her no. I didn't lie, exactly, but, y'know, I wasn't exactly open about it. She'd just broken up with her boyfriend of a long time, and didn't want to be involved with anybody. Not even somebody as cool as me. I'd known this, but I wished to God she could have been my girlfriend. Fade. That's a short scene, just her confronting me in the photo room one afternoon. Next, I'm in eighth grade again. It's the day after I conducted my "am I gay" test, and have determined that I am not gay. I decide to perform an "am I a transvestite" test. Same rules. The problem is, or at least, part of the problem is, you can't look at girls too keep your mind off their clothes. I tried and tried not to think about girls' clothes, about poofy prom dresses, their shoes, about their underwear - tried not to think of the trannies I'd seen on Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake - but I couldn't. Forcing those thoughts out fucking hurt. And so, a day after I determined I wasn't gay, I determined that I was a transvestite. That was probably worse. Fade. I'm older again, a junior. It's spring, and she's about to graduate. She's been accepted to an art school upstate, far enough to be a pain in the ass, but visitable. It's a Wednesday. We're in the photo room. She decides that tonight we should go to New York and see art films at the Angelika. I'm down. I'm willing to break curfew for this girl, fuck yeah. I mean, what's the worst that'll happen? Detention? And so, we bust out of school early, using some mission: impossible parking lot sneaking and dodging, and drive into the city. I feel like Liza and Louise. I park in Jersey City and we take the PATH in - it's cheaper, and I don't have to drive in the city. Remember: I'm a pussy. We get off at Christopher Street, and I try to act like I've been to New York before. Of course, I give myself away as soon as I give a dollar to a homeless guy, and Alice makes fun of me. Not viciously, of course - for some reason, when she makes fun of me, there's absolutely no edge. She honestly does not want to hurt my feelings, which feels weird. Comfortable and wonderful, yes, but those are weird feelings. We walk to the Angelika, which I had expected to be some kind of dingy art-house thing but is instead some kind of huge 50s-looking lush movie place, with these nice tables and food and drinks for sale. There is really expensive, probably good food, which we can't afford. We buy tickets to see some movie, I don't even remember what, and we see it. I am disappointed because it sucks. Afterwards, we buy forties in a convenience store. Apparently, in New York, not only do they sell forties in convenience stores, but they'll sell them to anybody who wants 'em, even kids who can't grow goatees, even though they're trying. And so we walk around New York, have two forties apiece, take the PATH back, and fall asleep in the back seat of my car, parked in this lot at the PATH station, too drunk to drive home. It's fucking cold, but I keep a blanket in my car, and we keep each other warm. I still have dreams about that, and am angry when I wake up. I think of another time. Alice and I are laying on the hood of my car. Her school is in a pretty non-urban region, and we can see all the stars above us, and we are completely exhausted. Tonight she played Magenta in a production of 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' at her college. She invited Nadie, Lisa and I up to dress weird and yell and all. And we did: directly after school, Nadie and I had gone to Lisa's house and gotten ourselves dressed up. I wore Lisa's fishnets, my own Docs, a tight sparkly black sweater, barrettes, and a black fake leather skirt that only came about three quarters of the way to my knees. I also wore lipstick, eyeliner, eyeshadow, and mascara. Lisa and Nadie dressed similarly to me. Since I was the old one, and the one with the car, I drove the whole hour and a half ride up to Alice's school. I can't come up with any reason that we didn't cause a twenty-five car pile-up. My brain all but shorted out and shut off, and I must have been visibly trembling. Apparently, when transvestites dress up like this, after an hour or so it loses its novelty, but for me it never did, and I couldn't draw a proper breath. I never really smoked, but I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights at a gas station because, when I smoked them, I left a lipstick trace on the filter. When we got to Alice's school, we only got to see her for a couple minutes before the play, because she had to be backstage and all. She did flirt with me, though, and make the appropriate "ooh baby" coos and ass-grabs. I had no idea at all how to handle it - if I laughed, I'd probably tremble audibly, and if I didn't, I'd be a weirdo. So instead, I opted for the smooth-operator style smirk and grabbed her ass back. We went inside, armed with toast and toilet paper, and took seats. I'd wanted to bring a purse, but nobody had one for me, so my wallet and ticket and stuff were in my backpack with all the patches on it. In my chair, I looked at Nadie and Lisa to my left, with their legs crossed, and crossed mine too. Why not? Noticing, Lisa said something about it being a comfortable position, and I agreed. The show was good. They did a smutty de-virginizing thing for people who had never been to Rocky before, but I was terrified of being involved in that kissing-somebody-you-don't-know shit when I was already in pervasive danger of having my cock stand up and yell "Tranny!" to anybody who looked. So I just sat there, the whole play, and yelled whatever lines I could remember. There were about three. I knew the songs well enough though - I'd bought the soundtrack a while ago. Afterward, we caught up with Alice, in her maid's uniform, and I hugged her. Ostensibly it was a 'good job' hug, but in reality, it was an 'I'm dressed like a girl and you're dressed like a sex fantasy, and I would kill my own mother for a photograph of this feeling' hug. We decided to go to a diner down the road from the theater. We all got in my car - Alice got shotgun, of course. She saw that I had a tape copy of 'Daydream Nation,' and put it on. I felt - strongly - that this was some kind of meaningful parallelism thing, but didn't say anything. This is the betrayal: As soon as we got to the diner, I went to the bathroom and changed into jeans and T-shirt. Nadie told me not to. Lisa told me not to. Alice was down with whatever I wanted to do. Even the fucking waitress said that it was cool, if I wanted to be dressed like a girl then I didn't have to change. But I was too scared. I'd been dressed up for about four hours, and it felt like this was already asking too much, like I was already owed some kind of evil negative death karma. There was some kind of sword of Damacles shit happening. Also, even though the diner didn't seem to have any kind of aggressive vibe at all, I was terrified of being beaten up. So I changed out of those amazing clothes in the bathroom, and haven't worn a skirt since. I put them into my backpack and went back to our table. We ate cheese fries and then I asked Alice if she wanted to talk outside, private like. Nadie and Lisa understood that we were the mature elder leader types, and they stayed inside, smoking butts and drinking coffee. Alice and I went out and laid on my car's hood and looked at the sky, and smoked cigarettes. I'd intentionally left my lipstick on, and could still taste it. "You were rad tonight," I told her. "Thanks," she said. "You were cute." "Heh," I said. I thought for a minute. "How's college? Is it cool?" "Oh, it's so great," she said, a smile turning her face into the one I saw when I thought of her. "I've met all these great people. All we do is smoke and drink, play music, and have the type of conversations that are, like, the ones you had in high school that were so good you remember them, you know?" "Yeah." I knew. The type of phone conversations we used to have. "That's so rad." I dragged from my cigarette, tried to start talking, exhaled, paused, dragged again, deep, then said, "You know, school's just boring without you around. Nadie and Lisa are cool, but it's like ... I don't know, it's not the same at all. There's no soul, like. They just want to run around and talk about KMFDM and the Lords of Acid. And whenever I say anything even remotely insightful, about anything, they're just like - they can't handle it. It's like they never had any kind of interesting thoughts at all, and they just keep me around to have thoughts for them." She looked at me. She knew something was up. "Really? Do you mean that?" I looked up, over at her, still looking at me. "No. Nah, not really. I feel that way sometimes, though - like, I don't know, like I can't talk to anybody like we used to talk, you know?" "Yeah." I thought I might have made her uncomfortable, so I added, "Ahh, fuck it. It's cool. I mean, there's this kid Keith who's kind of funny, but like ... I don't know. I'm really looking forward to going to college, too, you know?" "Yeah. You'll really like it. I mean, just talking to the art students at this lame school, it's a totally different thing," she said. She seemed glad not to have me trying to hide the fact that, years later, she still amazed me, and I missed her like, every morning, at 7:30 AM, I missed being asleep. I mean, just being out here with her, having this girl I thought about so much, having her actually in the flesh, next to me, had me high. Well, that and the skirt I'd been wearing earlier, though I liked her better than the skirt. "Alice." This was it. I was going to tell her who I was, and she was going to accept me, and she'd probably let me wear her clothes if I wanted, and ... and as I thought, the moment passed, and I said, "I really miss you." "I miss you too, man," she said. She paused. Then, "I mean, it's not really as cool here as I want it to be, you know? It's better than high school, and these people are all cool to hang out with, but they don't really listen, you know? They're not interested in pushing things further, to finding out what's supposed to be next - all of them seem to just want to impress each other with what they've done. Really," she started to raise her voice, "it's exactly like high school again, except that everybody here is a painter, instead of having all the different types of kids, you know?" "Yeah. Man, that sucks," I said, feeling almost happy: I missed her honesty. I also kind of missed the way I became monosyllabic and stupid when she was on a roll. "I wish you could come up here more," she told me. "You really should. I mean, I really miss your perspective on things." "Yeah! Exactly," I said, "I miss your perspective, too. That's what I'm talking about: Nobody around me now seems to be interested in coming up with their own thing, you know?" She did. We quieted down. What more was there to say? Gee, it sucks that we live far apart from each other now? How lame. There was one thing I needed to tell her, but I'd missed my chance. Fuck. She turned on her side, and we hugged. For a long time. And man, when a hug means something, it means more than just about anything else. Eventually we went inside and smoked some butts with Nadie and Lisa. Then we dropped Alice off and went home. The defining incident in my estimation of Alice happened the first winter I knew her. I'd been to her house a couple of times, but still didn't consider myself close to her - especially since she had that boyfriend. I didn't know what that meant for our relationship. But one afternoon in November (the 26th, if you're curious), she called me over. Her boy wasn't there, and as the sun was first starting to disappear, she asked me to come for a walk with her, to go looking for beauty. That was a blunt, naked way to put it, but fuck it, that was all I ever did anyway, and it would be great to have somebody to do it with. She put on a jacket with a fur hood and picked up an acoustic guitar in a case. We left out her garage for these woods that started at the end of her parents' property and went back for God knows how long. We walked down the border of the woods for a bit until we found a path that looked like it went pretty deep, and went into the woods. There was snow on the ground, about four inches, so everything was all white, with fragile black sticks coming up out of it, and the occasional dead black tree. The trail was tall enough that we only had to crouch a little, and it was actually pretty clear - not a lot of fallen branches or anything. We walked for a long time, I remember, and I followed her. Later she'd tell me she knew exactly where we were going, but at the time, I thought we were just exploring. It took forever for the sun to set, because when we got where we were going, the sky was still orange. It was fading, but it was orange. We stopped at this tiny little bridge over this tiny little stream. I remember thinking, well, we've found beauty, we can go home now. But saying it would have wrecked everything, and I didn't mean it anyway. I knew why she'd brought me here as soon as I saw it: I wanted to stay here forever. It was just a tiny little wooden bridge, maybe three feet long, with snow on the handrails, over a little river that was probably six inches deep: just deep enough not to freeze. The water was running, too: it had carved its way under snow that overlapped its edges, so that you couldn't see the edges of the river under the snow, and it looked like the river was infinitely wider than it could ever possibly be in reality. It looked endless. A smiled at me. She knew I'd like this. I started to take out a camera, but she stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. "Don't take a picture," she told me. She wasn't smiling, but she wasn't humorless. "Really?" "Yeah. Trust me - it's better to have a memory of it than a picture. No matter how good a picture is, it tells you what to remember, and you don't want to be told. It'll be better in your memory." I didn't say anything, but zipped my backpack back up. I wasn't about to contradict her, at all. She sat on the packed snow on the bridge and opened up the guitar case. I realized that I hadn't heard her play before. I don't know what she played: I think she just improvised, caught the moment in music. I do know that at first I was nervous, because I knew she'd be good but I didn't know whether I should stand or sit or clap along or what, but once she'd started I knew I should sit next to her on the bridge and listen. And I remember it was beautiful. She'd found her beauty, and she was sharing it with me. She didn't sing. She may even simply have been fucking around with the guitar, making it all up as she played. I know she didn't play anything that I knew, and I know that she didn't play anything punky or abrasive, just beautiful. Her sound filled the woods for me. I look up. It's now again. "So when he steps on the pedal this green spotlight actually turns on with it ... it's really cool. You should see it," she says. Her face, Christmas lights. "Yo A., I've got to tell you something," I say back.