My Tiki Girl (20 page)

I hear Dahlia get up and blow out the candles.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she scolds when I try to see what she’s doing. Mick Jagger is singing “Memory Motel.” Dahlia gets back into bed next to me.

“We’re at the Memory Motel,” she says. “We’re there, on the beach out front. The neon sign of the motel is flashing behind us, don’t you see it? We’re like mermaids, LaSamba, here in the sand. We’re not wearing any clothes, and our skin, our silvery fish skin, glistens like diamonds.”

Dahlia reaches over and starts to unbutton my black shirt. My eyes fly open.

“Shh. Close your eyes. Go back to the beach.”

She’s right up against me now. Her breath is hot in my ear as she whispers, “What do you want, LaSamba?”

Is this some kind of test? How am I supposed to answer?

My heart feels like the engine of a rocket ship. It’s beating so fast and hard that I’m sure I’ll either die or be launched into space.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

What
do
I want?

Dahlia. I want Dahlia. I want to touch her, to taste her, to lose myself inside her.

But maybe she’s just messing with me. What if her kiss was a joke and she’s just gonna get me to admit what I want, make me act like some lovesick fool, then laugh in my face. Tell me I’m some kind of sicko freak girl and kick me out of the band, out of her life, forever.

“Sure you do,” she whispers. “Come on, chicken. Tell Tiki what you want.”

“I want to go home.”

“Bullshit. Maybe scared little Maggie wants to go home, but that’s not what LaSamba wants.”

Dahlia leans in and kisses me again. It’s a soft kiss, almost tentative, and as soon as it begins, it’s over.

“You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?” she asks. “I know you have. It’s okay. I’ve thought about it, too. It matters, but it doesn’t matter, know what I mean?”

“No,” I manage to say. Jesus, God. This isn’t happening.

“If you feel something, I mean
really feel it
, it can’t be wrong,” she tells me.

“What about if you feel like killing someone?” I ask, trying to make some ridiculous point that has nothing to do with anything. I’m in total panic mode now.

She laughs, all breathy and hot against my face.

“Is that what you want to do, LaSamba, you want to kill me?”

“No, I . . .” I can’t even say what I want to do to her. I want to do things I don’t even know the words for.

She lays a finger over my lips, shushing me.

“LaSamba and Tiki are on the beach and they’ve turned into mermaids. They dive into the ocean, swimming circles around each other. They sing songs underwater.”

Dahlia kisses me again, her mouth open a little. She tastes like cloves. She goes back to unbuttoning my shirt, kisses my neck, puts her lips against my ear.

“Do you hear the waves, LaSamba?”

I’m afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. My eyes are closed so tight I’m thinking they may never open; they’ll be sealed shut forever like entrances to little tombs. The roaring in my head has turned to buzzing and crashing. A rhythmic pounding that I feel with my whole body.

“Yes,” I finally whisper, “I hear the waves.”

She moves her head and kisses my belly while unbuttoning my jeans.

“Are you afraid?” she asks.

“A little.”

“Don’t be,” she tells me. “I promise we won’t drown.”

19

“His name is
Mr. Twister and I’m keeping him,” announces Jonah, who has just bounded through the front door with what looks like an old cardboard box full of hay. Dahlia and I are sprawled out on the living room floor doing homework. I’m helping her with algebra.

It’s Monday, and Dahlia acted normal all day in school—at lunch we sat at Troy’s table and Albert came in and started passing out copies of
The Chatterbox,
which had a huge picture of Dahlia on the front page under the headline ARE YOU READY FOR THE PAPER DOLLS? I scanned the article, which was mostly just the interview with Dahlia, where she went off on how mindless most music was these days and how she considered herself a poet rather than a musician.

“Good work, Finch,” Troy said once he read it, and I had this sickening sense that maybe Troy had put Finch up to doing the article. Maybe it was part of his great plot to win Dahlia over. He had given her food, a guitar, and his silver bullet lighter, and now it was time to move on to the bigger gifts: fame, instant popularity. The things Dahlia wanted most and didn’t even know she wanted.

For the rest of the day, everywhere we went kids were reading copies of
The Chatterbox,
eyeing Dahlia and whispering, “It’s her.”

Thankfully, it seems like Troy’s plan to win Dahlia’s affections might not be paying off. This afternoon, at band practice, Troy said he had an idea for a song, and Dahlia told him he didn’t get to write the songs, his job was just to play his guitar. I was secretly ecstatic. After that, Troy was edgy, eager to please. He kept offering Dahlia different things to drink.

“Wanna beer?”

“No.”

“A Coke?”

“No.”

“Perrier water?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding!” Dahlia snorted.

“How ’bout you, Joey?” Troy asked, realizing there was no pleasing Dahlia.

“Yes,” Joey said.

“Yes to what? What is it you want?” Troy’s voice was full of impatience. I could tell he was half a step away from calling Joey a retard.

Joey just shrugged his shoulders and Troy stomped off to get him a can of Coke, which he practically threw at him when he came back in.

Since we got to the apartment, Dahlia and I have been doing homework and I’m going a little crazy, wondering if I imagined everything that happened Saturday night. Was it even real? Does Dahlia remember? Is it really possible that what she said Saturday night was true?
Tiki loves LaSamba,
she whispered. But she’s not acting like a girl in love now. Dahlia isn’t even all that focused on her homework: she’s taken the tiny scissors out of her bag and is making paper dolls from a page of thick blue paper she got from the art room at school. She finally puts the scissors away in her bag and opens up the folded sheet of paper, revealing two identical blue mermaids holding hands, tiny little holes in their tails letting the light through, making their scales shimmer.

“For you,” she says, smiling, and I think that maybe she does remember, maybe she is a girl in love after all.

Dahlia and I get up and peer into the tattered box Jonah cradles in his arms. TOMATOES, it says on the side in big green letters. There, in the center of a nest of hay, is not a bunch of red tomatoes fresh from the vine but a fat white rabbit.

“Where did he come from?” asks Dahlia as she stares into the box and strokes the rabbit on the head. I expect some mystical explanation—like that he’s the incarnation of Jonah’s invisible spirit guide, or he was pulled from a hat like a real magician’s rabbit—but I am mistaken.

“School,” Jonah answers. “He was living in our homeroom, but some kids were feeding him Alka-Seltzer to see if his stomach would explode. Miss Evans said he couldn’t stay anymore and someone would have to take him home. I was the only one who offered.”

Mr. Twister is a stout white bunny with black eyes and a twitchy nose. He’s chewing hay nervously while Dahlia strokes his head and ears. Jonah sets down the box and lifts the rabbit out gently, setting him on the living room carpet. Mr. Twister is frozen at first, overwhelmed by his freedom. He hops over to the couch, then to the dead brown fern in a clay pot below the window. He munches at the dry leaves.

“I think he’s hungry, kiddo,” says Dahlia.

Jonah picks him up, puts him back in the box.

“He’s always hungry,” Jonah explains. “That’s the way it is with rabbits.”

“I thought it was sex rabbits always wanted,” Dahlia says, eyebrows raised.

Jonah’s face reddens a little and he keeps his eye on the bunny in the box. His look shows he’s hurt, offended even, that she would imply such a thing about this rabbit, his rabbit. He doesn’t say a word to his sister, just picks up the box and clutches it to his chest.

“Come on, Mr. Twister,” he mumbles softly, then turns and carries the rabbit to his room; each step he takes seems to echo his disappointment. Dahlia looks disappointed, too, sorry even. But she stays where she is instead of going after him to apologize. We hear him shut the door to his room and start talking softly to the rabbit.

Dahlia shrugs, turns to me. “And what about
you
, LaSamba?”

“What about me what?”

“What is it
you
want?” she asks in a strange voice, half teasing. “Tiki wants to know.”

Her smile makes me want to melt into a hot waxy puddle right here on the carpet. I’d just be a stain people walked around.
That was LaSamba,
they’d all say.

“Do you want to stay out here and do homework?” she asks. “Keep finding the value of
x
and
y
and all that happy horseshit?”

She gets down on the floor, begins to work on a problem from the textbook. She’s got it all wrong; she’s multiplying when she should be dividing.

“No,” I tell her. “That’s not what I want.”

She looks up, smiling. “Let’s go to my room.”

I follow her down the hallway into her bedroom. She locks the door, draws the shades, turns up the radio.

“Sometimes,” she says as she walks toward me, “Tiki wonders what goes on in LaSamba’s head. She wonders if you really love her or if the whole thing was just some crazy dream.” Her voice is soft, calm, and familiar. It’s the voice Tiki used on the beach, full of gentle wind and luring waves.

We’re standing by the window and she puts her hand in mine, starts pulling me toward the bed.

“So tell me, LaSamba, what is it you want?”

Now, of course, there’s an obvious answer to that question, but there’s something else I want, too.

“I want to know what’s going to happen,” I tell her.

“You mean right now?” She smiles, leans in to press her mouth against my neck. “I’ll show you,” she whispers.

“I mean to us. To me and you. What are we going to do?”

We’re at her bed now and she’s laying me down gently, like I’m wounded.

“Tiki and LaSamba are going to travel around the world in their gypsy wagon. We’ll be famous rock stars. We’re going to find the Memory Motel for real.” She’s using her best storytelling voice; it’s the voice that told of Dead Aunt Mary, of the crazy nurse in the woods. It’s a voice so sure of itself that it could make you believe just about anything. But the thing is, I don’t believe her. Call me a realist, but I’m not a happily ever after kind of person.

“We’re going to sleep in the sand each night, listening to the waves. Do you hear them, LaSamba? Close your eyes and listen.”

I close my eyes and Dahlia slithers on top of me, presses her body into mine. I am listening and what I hear is the sound of Dahlia’s breath quickening in my ear, the DJ on the radio saying there’s snow coming, could be quite a storm. If I listen carefully, through these other sounds, I can hear Jonah in the next room talking away to Mr. Twister. I don’t know what he’s saying, but his voice is serious. It sounds like he’s talking to a person, not a rabbit, and like what he’s saying is urgent, so urgent that he keeps talking faster and faster until it sounds more like a hum than words.