is shouting all sorts of things. Mostly she’s painting a picture for me of what Hell looks like and how unfortunate it would be for me, for someone so gifted as me, for someone who’ll always be that brown-eyed kid on J.C.’s lap, to wind up stoking the flames with the rest of the sinners. Mom says this, but then, after a pause, she backs down. She tells me that she didn’t really mean it. She tells me that she loves me and appreciates me. She says, her voice muffled by the door and by her ravaged from screaming throat, “All can be forgiven. Let’s talk.”
I don’t open the door.
I lie back on my bed with my arms folded up under my head and I try and sort everything out in my mind. I try and pull the threads together. Try and figure out how there can suddenly be two futures. How I can see myself healthy and happy in one and crippled and tormented in the other. I close my eyes tight and beg my dad to visit. I want to see his young self, his masked self, standing in the corner of my room. I want him to explain it all to me again. Which way is which? Does killing Jimi lead to the happy life? Does not killing him? My head hurts. I massage my eyes, pressing down hard on the giving spheres of them.
After a long time of silence, I hear Mom in her room sobbing. I can hear her praying and I know she’s on her knees with her eyes closed and her head bowed.
I’m sure she’s speaking in tongues.
I’m sure she’s biting the insides of her cheeks until they’re bruised and swollen.
The two of us, we’re both confused in different ways.
The two of us, we’re both hypnotized by something neither of us understands.
FOUR
When the sun is highlighting the horizon, I climb out my window and drive over to Vauxhall’s place.
Just like in all the teen movies, I throw pebbles at her window in the backyard and duck down into a bush when the light in her mother’s room comes on. I’m throwing rocks for fifteen minutes before I toss a real big one that I worry is going to shatter the window, but only makes a super-loud thud. Vauxhall, in a tank top and Umbros, comes to the window and looks out at me and shakes her head. She opens up and says, “You’re a very bad boy. It’s way too early for breakfast.”
“I know,” I say. “I can’t sleep.”
Learning out her window, her cleavage as pale as the moon, she says, “Watch TV like a normal insomniac or something.”
“I don’t like TV.”
“Play on the computer. Download a movie.”
“I want to see you.”
Vauxhall says, “Naughty.”
She invites me in and her room smells like sandalwood and vanilla. She curls up on her bed on a mound of beaded and tasseled pillows and I sit on the floor, legs crossed, just staring at her. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, she blows me a kiss and, head on her hands, says, “You were like a superstar tonight.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I felt really alive.”
“So, superstar, you ever dream about flying?”
“I used to,” I say. “But now it’s mostly swimming.”
Vauxhall thinks about that for a beat and then reaches into her nightstand and pulls out her video camera. I can hear it whir to life and then a green light comes on and suddenly the room is bright with neon lime.
I say, “I was wondering when that would reappear.”
Vaux’s like, “Tell me about the swimming dreams.”
The camera hums. It is soothing.
I say, “It’s swim practice. I just feel alive in the water. Must be because they keep it at like eighty-two degrees at Celebrity’s and it’s like swimming in a womb or something. These dreams, they’re mostly about me swimming in this shallow sea, like the Great Barrier Reef. You know, really super-clear blue water. Lots of fish too. Colorful fish. Some so big that when they swim beneath me it’s like the whole bottom of the sea is moving.”
As I talk my eyes adjust to the light from the camera. And soon I can see Vauxhall’s legs and chest and her feet and the top of her head, a beautiful green ghost.
Vaux asks, “In the dream, are you alone?”
“Yeah. Almost always. But in a very peaceful way.”
She asks, “Are you naked?”
“I don’t know.”
She says, “In all the dream books it talks about swimming meaning sex. Particularly if it’s in warm water. Supposed to be like your subconscious yearnings. Your desires. Do you feel like that means anything?”
“No.”
The voice behind the green light asks, “Why?”
“I don’t buy all that dream interpretation bullshit. Dreams are just what happens when I turn my mind off and let the screen saver play. Mine, it’s one of those tropical screen savers. Helps that I’m relaxed.”
“Want to know what I dream about?”
I nod and can only imagine that my eyes are reflecting in the green glow the way dogs’ or tigers’ do in those nature shows. The feral me sitting on the floor, ready to pounce.
Vaux says, “Lights.”
She says, “I keep dreaming about stars that are really high above me that drop lower and lower and then become the lights around the edge of a stage. I’m in the middle, standing there in all sorts of outfits, and the lights are creating the space I’m in. Outside of it, I know there’s an audience and I know I’m supposed to act, but I’m purposely not doing it. I’m purposely restraining myself from giving them the show they want. There’s this tension.”
I say, “You could read a lot into that.”
I can’t see her, but I imagine she raises her eyebrows.
Uncrossing my legs and leaning back on my hands, I say, “It’s like the universe has just come into focus. Like all the pieces are snapped together and everything’s quiet.”
Vauxhall turns the camera off.
She whispers, “Come here. I want to feel beautiful with you.”
I climb up onto her bed, the weight of me making it groan, and then I put my mouth on hers and my hands on hers and we just sink into each other and let our bodies do what they want.
Afterward, Vauxhall’s body shivers while she plays with the sparse hair on my chest and says, “It was really strange. Well, I didn’t see into the present like last time. Did you?”
“No,” I say, my voice crackling. “That’s odd, right?”
“I saw your past,” Vauxhall says. “But still no high.”
“Good,” I say, smiling, “Sorry.”
“Ade, your past. Your childhood. Everything before meeting me was like static.”
I take a deep breath and just let it sit inside me. I can make out the edges of the furniture in the room and the slope of her shoulders and the dune of blankets that her hips make. I realize I wasn’t really hearing what she was saying.
“What about my past?” I ask.
Vauxhall says, “It’s gone.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
