Fear and Laundry (3 page)

***

T
he previous day’s dirt blizzard had passed through town quickly and the wind had reverted to its standard level of blusteriness. I watched the neighborhoods progressively improve as we rode to Lia’s place in the green Dodge Dart she’d gotten for her sixteenth birthday last year, the windows open, Blank Fiction blasting from the speakers at full volume and our hair whipping around our heads.

Lia switched off the music just as we reached her parents’ house, a brick single-story ranch with bright white trim that the Mlinarichs had moved into when Lia was just a baby, right when her dad’s grocery store business had begun to take off. With the later success of Paper or Plastic, they could easily have afforded someplace bigger and nicer, but by then the Mlinarichs liked the neighborhood too much to move.

Lia’s parents normally parked their cars in the driveway, reserving the sound-proofed two-car garage as our rehearsal space. But just then neither John nor Elyse Mlinarich was home. Jake’s blue van, however, sat against the curb, the roughly 400 miles from Austin showing all over its bug-splattered windshield and dirty tires. Lia pulled in nose to nose with it.

When she opened the front door, her cat, Clyde 2, tried to make a run for it. But before he could set a paw across the threshold, Lia scooped him up with a practiced move.

“Where do you think you’re going?” She tucked the cat under her arm like a football and buried her nose against him, nuzzling the black fur at his neck. The bell on his studded collar jingled as he squirmed in her grip, furry legs cycling in vain.

In the entryway just inside the door hung a memorial to every bad haircut and ugly outfit the Mlinarichs had ever donned. Lia called it the “Wall of Shame.” As we passed a Sears portrait featuring a three-year-old Lia dangling, red-faced and bawling, from her mother’s lap, we heard the television squawking from the living room. Lia poked her head in there, turned and yelled Jake’s name. There was no answer.

Lia released the cat and stomped through a doorway behind her, down another corridor to what’d been her brother’s bedroom before he’d moved away. I followed, but stopped just inside the bathroom at the end of the hall, not eager to get caught up in their sibling rivalry crossfire just yet. Peeking out, I saw the door to Jake’s old room standing slightly ajar. Lia pushed it fully open and yelled at him again.

“What?” I heard him call back. Music played in the background but I didn’t recognize it.

“TV’s on,” she informed him.

“Yeah, so?”

“So, turn it off if you’re not gonna watch it.”

He said something I couldn’t make out. The music died away and a minor crash sounded as something toppled over.

“Just go turn it off.” Lia pointed in the direction of the living room, her other hand on her hip.

“You turn it off,” he said. There was more crashing, followed by muffled cursing.

“You’re the one who left it on. I’m not your mother.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” Jake’s voice sounded closer, and in a moment he was in the hall. I took a step back as he swept by but he didn’t notice me, or even look up as he headed for the living room.

I poked my head back out into the hall, where Lia stood waiting, gesturing at me to follow her into Jake’s room. “Come on.”

I hesitated.

“Just come on,” she insisted.

In Jake’s old room, a flowered comforter and sheets had been ripped from the brass bed against the wall. The matching curtains had been pulled down, too, and sunlight streamed in the windows, illuminating an overwhelming mess. Boxes stood piled just about everywhere. A few cartons lay on their sides amid an avalanche of CDs in the middle of the floor, and I guessed these were the sources of the crashes I’d heard.

“Jesus. Will you look at all this crap?” Lia climbed onto the bed, surveying more of the wreckage. I looked around, too, and saw the foot of the bare mattress lying buried beneath a tangle of t-shirts, a television and VCR with the cord wrapped around it sitting on a dresser, two beat-up guitar cases, one electric and one acoustic, leaning in a corner, and a little black dorm fridge covered over with band and bumper stickers squatting beside a bedside table.

In the living room, the television fell silent.

“It’s almost as bad as your room,” Lia clucked at me.

“Get outta there.” I heard Jake’s voice in the hall. “Now,” he said, coming into the room.

He looked thinner than I remembered. His longish hair looked unwashed and he hadn’t shaved in a while. He wore a wrinkled Alice in Chains t-shirt with a hole in it.

“Wow, you look awful,” Lia told him, bouncing up and down on the mattress.

“Get down.” He tried to grab her arm but she whisked it out of the way, bouncing higher and out of his reach.

“Make me,” she mistakenly dared him.

He swiped at her again, this time catching her shirt in his fist, but she twisted free and hopped over the pile of shirts, scampering down the opposite side of the bed to safety. It wasn’t until he lunged after her he caught sight of me standing against the wall. Our eyes met just before he lost his balance and fell across the mattress.

“Smooth,” Lia laughed, skirting around the bed while he recovered.

“Shut up.” He rolled onto his back and looked up at me. His hair was lighter brown than Lia’s, and while she had a small, pert nose, his was a little too big for his face. They had the same gray eyes. Though right then, his looked tired and bloodshot. “Hey, Nic,” he said. He was the only person who’d ever called me that. I introduced and thought of myself as Veronica. Aside from Lia’s use of “Vee,” when people tried a nickname out on me, they usually went with “Ronnie,” which I didn’t like.

“Hi.”

“Nice shirt,” he said.

I tugged reflexively at my
Night of the Living Dead
t-shirt. “Thanks.”

“What’ve you been doing all day?” Lia pulled back the flaps of a cardboard box nearest her and began rifling through the contents. “Obviously not unpacking.” She held up a raggedy teddy bear she’d found, waving its paw at me.

He sprang up to pluck the bear from her hands and stuff it back into the box. Turning her around by her shoulders, he gave his sister a light shove.

“Aren’t you embarrassed for Vee to see what a pig you are?” she scolded, moving back to the bed and sitting cross-legged on it.

He looked at me. “Most of this isn’t even mine,” he said.

“I know,” I said. After Jake moved out, Lia’s mom had redecorated his room, intending to convert it into a guest area. But his parents had ended up using it as an extra storage space instead, nearly filling it with their own junk. Easily two thirds of the boxes were theirs. “Don’t feel bad, my room’s worse,” I admitted.

He smiled a little, one corner of his mouth just lifting higher than the other. He rested his elbow on a stack of boxes, rubbing absently at a scrape on his forearm. “Lia tells me that’s your drum kit out in the garage,” he said. “Finally get bitten by the rock star bug?”

Lia and Jake had always made music. They hopped continually from one band to another, sometimes playing with more than one at a time. Despite Lia’s periodic offers to teach me to play something – and assurances it’d be “so fun” if we were in a band together – I’d remained content to sit on the sidelines and write about shows for her zine. I didn’t exactly love the idea of being on stage, the center of attention.

“It’s Sierra’s kit,” I demurred. “Our guitarist.”

When he looked confused, I explained I’d been playing it, but only because Lia’d talked me into it. She’d been between bands when the news about Lynch’s broke (Lia chimed in here, explaining Roy’s situation and what she was doing about it) and had had to scramble to pull a group together to headline the benefit. She and Sierra, who knew how to play just about every instrument, had taught me some drum basics but I hadn’t really taken to it yet.

“She’s getting really good, though,” Lia declared of me.

“I’m not,” I assured him.

“You guys playing anytime before this benefit thing?”  He asked. He’d like to come see us.

Probably not, I told him, explaining about Sierra. The way things were going, we’d be lucky to find someone to replace her and be halfway ready to play by the benefit.

“Chill out, Vee. It’s rock n’ roll. Doesn’t have to be perfect,” Lia tried to console me.

“So you need someone to play with you,” Jake said impassively. I couldn’t tell if he was interested in helping us or just making an observation.

“Well, actually...” I began as Jake moved over to the window and kicked at the hideous curtains pooled on the floor. While he was looking down, Lia shook her head furiously at me and pulled her hand across her throat, but I ignored her. “We were thinking of asking you if you’d be interested.”

“Yeah?” He looked up at me.

Lia dropped her face into her hand.

“Yeah. I mean, if you’re going to stick around for a while.” I watched his face for any hint about why he’d have suddenly come back like this, or what it might mean. But he gave nothing away.

“I’ll be home for a while,” he shrugged. “I can do it. I mean, I can play with you guys if you want.” He’d always liked Roy, he said. It’d be a shame if Lynch’s folded. He paused, and then murmured something about having plenty of time on his hands now, too.

“Heaven forbid your lazy ass look for a job,” said Lia.

“I will if you will,” he said, unruffled. “But I’m guessing you’ll just let Mom and Dad go on coddling you.”

“Me?” She barked a laugh. “That’s rich!”

“Guys,” I said.

“Look,” said Jake, “It doesn’t matter to me one way or another. Just figured I’d offer.” He gave the curtains another kick. Then he crouched on one knee to gather spilled CDs.

“Well, thanks.” Lia stood up. “But no thanks. C’mon, Vee.”

I looked hard at her.

“C’mon.” She came over, steering me toward the door. “We’ve got stuff to do.” When we reached the hall, she marched ahead to her room, but I hung back, glancing at Jake again. Still hunkered by the mess on the floor, he looked up at me and held his hand to his forehead in mock salute. I wanted to stay behind and ask him what he was doing back, if it was true he’d dropped out of school. But Lia called my name.

***

C
lyde Kameron, his eyes ringed heavily with kohl, confronted us from Lia’s open bedroom door. Lia kissed her thumb and pressed it briefly against Clyde’s pout as we passed the black and white poster on our way into the room.

There were more photos of Clyde taped above the headboard of Lia’s neatly made bed, surrounding another, even larger, poster. In that blurry color shot taken live onstage at Castle Donington, a tousle of long, blonde hair obscured Clyde’s face from view as he swung his guitar at the stage like a hammer.

“Clyde, get off there,” Lia reproved the cat lounging on the bedspread beneath the shrine to his namesake. She said it too gently to mean it and the cat didn’t budge, only started to purr.

“Hello there, Mr. Clyde.” I massaged the cat’s shoulders. “Hello, Mr. Fuzzypants.”

Lia crossed to her desk. It’d been her mother’s in college and was old, but perfectly tidy. “I wanna show you something,” she said, yanking open a drawer grown reluctant with age.

“Wait a second. What was that back there?” I sank onto the bed. Beside me, Clyde 2 stood and arched his back.

“Hm?” Lia daintily extracted a single sheet of copy paper from the drawer.

“You know what I mean. Jake offered to play with us.” It was the perfect opportunity, I said; the solution to our guitarist problem. “Why’d you turn him down?”

“I told you I didn’t want him. We’ll find someone else. Or, if we don’t, I’ll play the guitar myself.” I knew she’d done it before, played and sang at the same time. I also knew she didn’t like it much, preferring not to be “constrained” from moving around onstage by an instrument. I was about to remind her of this when she carried the piece of paper over to me and held it out. I took it from her, saw there was writing on it but it was all upside down. I flipped it around and saw it was a flier mock-up.

“Who’s Impressionable Youth?” I asked, looking at the messily drawn logo.

“We are.” She spread her hands. “It’s the name I came up with for the band.” Inspiration had struck her late last night, she said, and she’d sketched the flier first thing this morning.

I studied the sheet of paper again. “Oh.”

“You like it?”

“Yeah,” I said, truthfully. “It’s good. It works. But this says we’re playing at Lynch’s on the twenty-seventh.” A week before the benefit. “You didn’t already book this, did you?” I asked, horrified.

No, she said, but she planned to talk to Roy about it as soon as possible.  As much as she hated to admit it, she shared her brother’s opinion on this. “It’ll be good for us to play at least once before the big show.”

“But,” I groaned as Clyde 2 jumped in my lap, bumping his head affectionately against my chin, “We only have three quarters of a band and four songs,” I reminded her.

“We’ve got four weeks to fix all that.” She made it sound like we had four months. She reclaimed the flier and looked it over. “I know this doesn’t look so hot, by the way. But I figure you can fix it later...Right?”

When I didn’t reply, she looked at me. “Look, don’t be pissed about the Jake thing, okay? Everything’ll work out; you’ll see.”

When I still didn’t answer, she flopped down beside me, sighing dramatically. “Jake’s only been back a day and already everyone’s reverted to acting like the world revolves around him. Jake this, Jake that. Honestly, it makes me sick. Not that I expect you to get it. You’re so lucky to be an only child.” She tried to catch my eye but I wouldn’t look at her, just went on stroking Clyde 2’s back.

“So let me get this straight,” I said evenly, “Because you’re jealous of your brother, you get to just ignore my opinion?”

“What?” It hadn’t been what she’d expected me to say and she half laughed with surprise. But I finally looked up, and she saw I was serious.

Was I part of this band or wasn’t I? I asked.

“Course you are. And I am
not
jealous of him,” she objected, scowling. “Wow, you are really hung up on this idea. Did I miss something?” Her voice took on a teasing tone and she tried to tickle my side. When had I become one of her brother’s groupies?