Crime Plus Music (12 page)

“That sleepover you and Bret had. The summer between junior and senior year.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you two stop talking after that?”

Funny. I must have imagined her asking me this question a hundred times when I was a kid. But in my mind back then, she'd always sounded so angry. Now, she sounds sad, defeated.
Bret is gone. What's the point in lying anymore?
For several seconds, I teeter on the brink of telling her the truth.

“Bret told me you fought over a boy that night.”

My jaw tightens. “Right,” I say, giving in to the lie. “Now I remember.”

She places a hand on mine. It's cool and dry as a dead leaf. “You were a very good friend to her. I wish you two hadn't fought. Sometimes I think her life would have been happier if you'd stayed close through the rest of high school.”

I close my eyes for a few moments, listen to the song still playing, to John Doe singing about the last Paulene, the one who wouldn't cooperate. When I open them again Mrs. Raines is looking up at me, thin lips trembling. I put my arms around her and hug her. I want to start sobbing, but instead, I tell her the only truth I can. “Mrs. Raines,” I say. “I wish that sleepover had never happened.”

“Y
OU
KNOW
WHAT
THIS
SONG
is about?” Bret said.

I didn't answer right away because my heart was in my throat. We were in the Karmann Ghia on the Pasadena Freeway, all treacherous bends and Bret behind the wheel, X's
Los Angeles
pounding on the tape deck. She'd just dived head first into a sharp curve at full speed and I saw now for the first time how drunk she was to be driving. “Jesus, Bret,” I breathed. “Be careful.”

“Don't be such an old lady.” At least she slowed down a little.

The music blasted. I tried listening to the song, but everything sounded like it was under water. It was hard to make out the words.

“It's called ‘Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,'” she said. “It's about a drug that makes guys need to have sex every hour.”

“Need?”

“Uh huh, so the guy in the song takes it. He shoots it up with a needle and for twenty-four hours, he is like attacking every girl he can find. He's pulling them off of busses. He's not taking no for an answer. . . .”

“Why would a guy take a drug like that?”

Bret shrugged. “He calls all girls Paulene, too,” she said. “And he spells it weird. . . . Hey, there's the off-ramp.” She cut across three lanes fast and swung onto the ramp that took us to the Hollywood Freeway.

I gasped. “You're going to get us arrested.”

She ignored me, driving faster. She shifted into the fast lane, nearly cutting off a Porsche. Its horn blared.

“Arrested or beat up or dead.”

“I vote for dead,” she said. Trying to be punk rock.

“Shut up, Bret. We're from Pasadena. We wear uniforms to school.” I took another swig of the schnapps and closed my eyes.
Best not to even look at the road
, I thought. So I didn't.

“W
E
'
RE
HERE
,” B
RET
SAID
.

I'd fallen asleep for a few minutes. I had to blink a bunch of times just to get my eyes focused. Bret was checking herself out in the rearview mirror, re-applying her dark lipstick. Out the window, I saw the Whisky, the legendary Whisky, X's name on the white marquee, a long line in front. I wanted to squeal over it, but I was too drunk to get excited, too queasy. Bret handed me the lipstick and tilted the mirror my way. Again, I was startled at my own image and the schnapps buzz made it hard to put the lipstick on straight. “I can't believe we're in Hollywood,” I tried.

“I need to tell you something,” Bret said.

“Yeah?”

“I need to tell you why Trina killed herself.”

I turned to her. “Now?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because it happened here.”

“What?”

“At the Whisky. At an X show.”

“She killed herself here?”

“No,” she said. “No, listen. That boy I told you about. The boy who . . .”

“Hurt her terribly.”

“Look at me, Lara.”

I had been watching the crowd out the driver's side window. I shifted to Bret. Her face was perfectly still. She stared into my eyes with all her death makeup, and I felt as though I was dreaming and would never wake up. “He did it to her here,” she said. “Took her out to a show and did it to her in his van. In front of other guys. With other guys.”

“What did he do?”

She gave me flat eyes.

“But . . . but he took that picture of her. She was smiling.”

“So?”

“So . . . I thought they were in love.” I cringed at the sound of my voice, the words I'd chosen, but still I couldn't stop myself. “I thought he just broke up with her. I thought that's what you meant by hurting her.”

“He gave her a bunch of pills and then he wrecked her,” she said. “He
shared
her, Lara. She told me.” Bret stared out the window at the line outside the club. Her eyes burned through the glass. “It took hours.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh my God.”

“She never told our parents. But she told me. Three days later, she locked herself in her room. Put
Los Angeles
on the tape deck. Took the pills. . . . That song, ‘Johnny Hit and Run Paulene.' It was the last song she listened to.”

“How do you know?”

“She stopped it, right after the line about the Paulene who wouldn't cooperate.” Bret leaned over me and snapped open the glove compartment. Her words weren't slurring anymore, and I noticed how smooth and calm her movements were, the drunkenness gone, as though she'd pushed it off. “Lara,” she said. “He's the bouncer at The Whisky. He does all the X shows. He's there.” I turned. She was watching my face.

“We can get revenge,” she said.

I swallowed.
Revenge
. The word pulsed through me.

Bret removed something from the glove compartment and placed it in my hand—a pocket knife. She held up another one of her own.

Are you serious?
I wanted to say. But I knew she was.

“We can hurt him,” she said. “We can scare him, at least.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. I wasn't sure if it was all the schnapps or the story itself or that picture of Trina, the trust in her smile. But I liked the idea. I liked the feel of the knife in my hand, solid and real as a drumbeat. “We could get caught,” I said.

“Are you kidding me? Look in the mirror, Lara. No one will recognize us.”

I looked at her. “You planned this.”

She put her hand on mine and smiled at me with blood-red lips. “I've been planning it for four years.”

H
E
WORE
A
TIGHT
BLACK
T-shirt with The Whisky's logo on the front and he leaned against the club's door as though he owned it. I had the strangest feeling when Bret pointed him out—a mixture of anticipation and dread, as though he were a dangerous animal we were hunting. As we approached the door, Bret told me his name was Johnny. “For real,” she said. “Like the song.” Then she waved at him. Winked.

“What have we here?” he said.

Johnny was thicker than I'd imagined he'd be, with beady green eyes, dumb, pouty lips, and a fat head. I couldn't imagine Trina wanting to be with someone like that, but Bret insisted it was him, so who was I to doubt her? I hung back while she sidled up to him, the crowd streaming past, jostling for a place inside. “Do you have black beauties?” she said in a shy voice. “I heard you did.”

He grinned. “I can get some for you.”

“Yeah?”

“They're in my van.”

My van
. My heart pounded. I pressed my purse to my side and thought about the knife.

“Can my friend come along?”

He glanced at me. “Why not?” he said. I looked at the kids in line, laughing and shoving each other, shouting to be heard. Inside the club, I could hear an electric guitar being tuned, someone banging on a cymbal. For a few moments, I was filled with a longing I couldn't quite name. . . . A longing to be a kid, I suppose, going to an all-ages X show. A longing to be thinking about nothing but the music like all those kids were, like I would have been if I hadn't swallowed so much schnapps and if Bret hadn't told me what had happened to Trina.

Johnny led us away from the door, both of us. “My lucky night,” he said through his thick lips, his fingers at my waist, my skin shrinking from them. “What's your name, baby?”

“Paulene,” Bret answered.

“What about—”

“Her name's Paulene, too.”

“Wow,” he said as we rounded the corner, “What are the odds?”

T
HE
NEXT
PART
IS
FUZZY
in my mind and keeps changing each time I remember it. Sometimes he's pushing Bret up against the side of a black van, other times, she's pulling him to her. Sometimes, she's slapping him across the face or calling him a murderer and he's pulling out clumps of her hair, just like Johnny does to the last Paulene in the lyrics of the song. She's screaming, he's clamping his hand over her mouth. There are so many variations. Keep in mind, this all happened in a matter of seconds and I was very drunk. And drunk or not, all memories fog over with time.

The one part that's consistent, though, is Bret's head slamming into the side of the vehicle—the sound of it, a loud crack. And the next part too. The next part, I have never been able to forget.

“Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop hurting her.”

He didn't turn. He threw his weight into the side of the van and she squirmed against him and told him to stop and his hands went where I couldn't see them, making some kind of awful adjustment. I heard Bret whimper and I thought about how this wasn't the way we'd planned it and I thought about history repeating itself and about how he was supposed to be scared and sorry, how he was supposed to apologize and why wasn't he apologizing and somehow, the knife was out of my purse, clutched in my sweaty hand. I flicked it open and rushed at him and jammed the blade into the small of his back and yanked it out again, feeling nothing beyond adrenaline and anger. Blood dripped from the knife's blade. I stared at it and for a few moments, everything seemed to move in slow motion—Bret heaving on the pavement, Johnny whirling around like an animal, blood spraying out of him, blood on my hands, a timed streetlight humming to black. . . .

He lunged at me. I couldn't see his features, just the outline of him on the dark street, a shadow coming at me, grabbing me by one wrist. My eyes started to adjust, just enough to see him, the funhouse-mirror face, the gritted teeth.
A bad dream. Trina's bad dream
.

“Bitch,” he said. With my free hand, I slashed him across the throat.

I
REMEMBER
THE
GURGLING
SOUND
now as I hug Mrs. Raines, the sound of a man dying. I remember how he fell to the sidewalk and Bret and I had stared at him until he went still and quiet, without helping, without thinking to help. I remember how we'd looked down the row of quiet houses, how none of their lights had gone on and how in my dim, shocked mind, I'd rationalized that into some kind of tacit approval.
They saw what he was doing to her,
I had told myself.
They wanted me to kill him
. I remember how calmly Bret had taken the Kleenex out of her purse and wiped my prints off the knife and dropped it on him. How she'd plucked his wallet out of his pocket and tossed it into the bushes and called him scum, a piece-of-shit drug dealer, how she'd held her ripped blouse to her chest and told me I'd done the whole world a favor.

We'd walked back to our car in utter silence. I remember how slowly and carefully she'd driven home, using her blinker for every turn. How we'd taken turns in the shower, washing off the hair dye and make-up and blood before stuffing our bloody thrift store clothes into three sets of garbage bags and throwing them in the dumpster at the gas station down the street, how we'd jumped into our sleeping bags just as Bret's parents pulled into the driveway. “I'll never tell anyone,” Bret had whispered.

“Thank you,” I had said, thinking of that dying noise he made and, for a few moments, trying to feel bad about it.

The next day, she'd given me a ride back to my house, and returned home telling her parents we'd had a fight about a boy and that we were never speaking again. It was for the best, we had decided, talking it over in the car. If we cut ties and stayed apart, we'd be less likely to give each other away. Really, though, I think there was another reason. We were different, now. Everything had changed. But so long as we stayed apart, it was easier to pretend it hadn't.

As I pull away from Mrs. Raines, I remember my last conversation with Bret—a phone call, two weeks after the X show, when her parents weren't around. “It wasn't him,” she had said. “It wasn't Johnny.”

“I'm so sorry,” I say it again, again too loudly.

Mrs. Raines gives me a weak smile. “That song is horrible, isn't it? Bret specified they play it at her wake.”

“When?”

“Funeral home said she spoke with them about it years ago,” she says, a sigh in her voice. “My daughter always did love to plan things in advance.”

N
EITHER
ONE
OF
US
WAS
contacted by the police. Bret's parents never even asked if we'd left the house that night. My parents didn't notice a change in my behavior because my behavior didn't change. It was part of a survival plan and we both stuck to it. It scared me a little, how easy that was to do.