9
Peace Train
==============DANNY==============
We got in my Mustang, and before we were even backed out of the driveway, Mary asked if she had a name. I had to remind Mary that guys don't do things like nickname their masculine cars. Without my consultation, she dubbed my Mustang "The Stang," and somehow it stuck. I condemned Mary for her unoriginality. She applauded herself for embracing a cliché, which, somehow, in Mary logic, rendered it truly counter-culture.
So, like typical teenagers, we were indecisive as all hell and couldn't figure out where to eat. After what I think was our first disagreement—Mary wanted Thai, I voted pizza—we ended up going to a Shawarma place downtown. Which should not be confused with downtown Carraway Beach. Downtown Gilmore Park was an entirely different beast. To put it bluntly, downtown had seen better days. Nowadays, it lucked out with half a dozen tattoo parlors and bars that had, at most, a two-year lifespan (Yes, we had two bar scenes in town because Gilmore was a population of raging alcoholics).
So believe it or not, acquiring matching tattoos was not what we went to do downtown. There was a record store I wanted to take her to.
Cosmic Records smelled like mold, potential asbestos, and pot. Actually, mostly pot. And I'm also pretty sure the guy who worked there, who wore the same denim shirt every single day (as I've never seen him wear anything else), slept in the back behind the counter. But hey, they probably had every single record ever produced from Jermaine Jackson's solo career, to Irish Folk Songs for Children, and everything in between.
I was looking for a particular Cat Stevens album while Mary flipped through the nineties hip-hop bin and found Biggie Smalls. It slowly began to dawn on me that she was the one stuck in the nineties.
"I wish I could've told him he was beautiful when he was black," Mary said, looking at a wavering holographic poster of Michael Jackson from his BAD era.
She didn't really explain why and I left it at that. Mary then demanded that I had to choose one retro artist (male or female) that I would have sex with. Without even giving me a second to formulate a thought, she told me she would bone Steven Tyler and then quickly returned the question my way. After some good solid pestering, I professed my attraction to Debbie Harry.
"Debba—who?"
"You know, like, Blondie."
Mary got a hoot outta that and wouldn't let it go for the rest of the day. Whenever I asked her a question, she would scrunch up the blonde in her hair and then draw out her answer in a ditzy voice. It didn't matter how much I pleaded that Debbie Harry was a punk-rock chick, she would still do the ditz voice. For a girl who knew so much about pop culture, that surprised me.
Later, after walking around Downtown all afternoon, we hiked our way to the river basking at the bottom of the ravine that broke off from the street. While sitting, talking on the riverbank, listening to the rush of cars on the 306 hidden by the foliage of the trees, Mary asked me, "Why that one?" about my choice in record.
"Some of Cat's lyrics are like my gospel," I said, grabbing the album from the plastic bag and pulling out the lyric sheet. "Like this right here, the first track on the A-Side:
Well you roll on roads / Over fresh green grass.
For your lorryloads / Pumping petrol gas
When you crack the sky / Scrapers fill the air.
Will you keep on building higher /
'Til there's no more room up there?
I know we've come a long way / We're changing day to day
But tell me / Where Do The Children Play?"
A light swell of wind bent the top corner of the page, taking Cat's words away with the following silence. I looked up at Mary; her eyes suggested her mind was elsewhere. I kicked my foot into the dirt.
"Like, tell me——who, WHO, writes like that nowadays? Who actually cares? No one."
Mary just looked at me and started spinning a twig in her hands until it split, and I caught myself getting pissed that she didn't jump on board the ol' Peace Train and instantly agree with me.
"What is your religion?" Mary asked, out of nowhere, and then went scrounging for another twig and started spinning it.
"Cat Stevens and John Lennon. But if you want a technical answer: Catholic by Baptism and agnostic upon education. You?"
"I don't believe in anything," Mary answered. "What's the word for that?"
"Uh, Atheist."
"So, yeah, I'm an Atheist, I guess."
She stopped herself there and professed that she didn't want to accidentally offend my beliefs. I reminded her I wasn't all that convinced myself on the whole Church thing, so she continued.
"Okay. Well, like. Okay." Mary plucked another twig out from the assortment of fallen pinecones and yellowed-out locust leaves. "If there is a God sitting on his throne in cloud city, why does this world suck? Why do bad things happen to good people? Like, Danny, everything you read out literally says how shitty everything is. You'd think God would send down another Jesus or something by now."
"Well, wasn't that the point the first time around? That God sent His Son down to die for our sins and we were supposed to learn from His sacrifice to go out and spread the Good word?"
My voice drifted while looking out towards the thunderous rapids of the river. The unfortunate thing about this stupid river was that it wasn't a real river. Well, not anymore anyways. They used it to generate power, or something, and installed a bunch of turbines so it was constantly roaring like there's a Biblical storm. Which, at times, was quite a moving force to admire. At the very least, I could pretend that the powerful current was the result of an endlessly raging sea.
"What do you mean?" Mary asked, bringing the conversation back to God's parenting decisions.
I bobbed my head left then right in hesitation. "I don't totally like to bash religion," I answered at last, and then paused.
Something light tickled my forearm. When I looked down, I saw—and admired—the stealth of a ladybug as it crossed over the hurdles of my arm-hair.
"I mean, the story of JC himself is kinda cool. He was the original nineteen-sixties," I said, and then whistled silently onto my arm, sending the ladybug flying. "I only heard the bass line! Well, didn't you pay attention to the piano? The rhythm guitar progression was catchier than the harmony!
"Well, at the end of the day it's all in the key of G. It's all the same sound, you know? Like, it doesn't matter who you worship or what, or even if you don't believe in anything. The core of all religion is really just: Be a good person. I guess that's how I make sense of it all. For a band to sound good, everybody's gotta play along. It shouldn't matter what the lyrics of the song are."
I had noticed that I fluttered my eyes away from hers as I spoke, looking back out towards the rapids of the river. I didn't know how to say what I felt I understood on a deeper level. Half because I was terrified that, while rambling on to discover the right words, I'd sound crazy, and half because, at times, I doubted everything I had ever put spiritual faith in.
"Saint Maria's is a Catholic school, right?" I asked.
A tonally pleasing hum answered my question. Then she said, "Knowing that God disapproved of how I lived was sort of shitty. To be honest. And I guess making out in front of statues of the Virgin Mary was a little weird, now that I think about it."
"You were making out?"
The unfiltered question slipped from my tongue so fast that only by the time I chopped through the last syllable on "out" did I curl my lips, trying to take it back.
Mary frowned. "Yeah? Duh. It was high school. Obviously."
Obviously, right? It was only obvious that Mary and I were not making out right now. Deflecting my angst, I told Mary I was disappointed with the Catholic Youth, and she went on to tell me that the entire student-body was rather apathetic. Including her. The only thing she ever got out of attending Catholic school, and sitting through the bi-annual assemblies of boring Catholic-aimed rhetoric, was the story of Saint Maria Goretti herself.
Long story short: Maria Goretti was an eleven-year-old girl who was almost raped and stabbed to death for refusing to have sex (pleasant, I know), but upon her deathbed, forgave her attacker. Her only dying prayer was for him to see the light and someday join her in Heaven. After being released from prison, the attacker ended up devoting the rest of his life to the church.
"Originally when I first heard that," Mary said, "I was like, super pissed. Like, why is this poor eleven-year-old forgiving a rapist? And because of it, we make her a saint? Like, okay cool. Man rapes a kid but as long as it means getting a guaranteed ticket to Heaven, just forgive the prick? It's seriously so messed up. But I guess it was pretty noble of the bitch. Like, her devotion to God and faith and stuff was noble. And now she's the saint for rape victims, so I like that."
Telling Mary she was a weird-smart didn't go over as well as I had hoped. No matter how many times I backtracked, telling her it was a compliment, Mary tousled her hair, put on her "Blondie" voice, and kept reciting how deep and wise Danny was. So that was the end of the religion topic. We went on to talk about something else that I quickly forgot about while I traced the roots traveling up to the tree tops that had just let go of a new series of fluttering locust leaves.
==============MARY==============
Squeegee Boy distracted me from getting my laundry done. So, as expected, I smelled like shit. Just kidding. I sweat Chanel no. 5. But he did waste my time. He pretty much forced me to go downtown with him to this record store, then pretty much forced me to go to his house after to listen to that record. Whatta smooth criminal. Chastity belt on lock doe.
I had never been in a house as big, or as nice, as Danny's before. Most of the people I knew, figuratively speaking, lived in cardboard boxes. But Danny's house had a basement and an upstairs and, like, rooms that just had chairs and books in them. It was huge. Danny gave me the lowdown on the mess, blaming his mom, and took two steps up the stairs. Over in a room to my left, past two fanned open, windowed doors, sat a black grand piano. Danny told me that it was his mom who played when I asked him, and nudged me again to go up the stairs. For whatever reason, seeing that piano in someone's house amazed me. Tightening my chastity belt, I followed Danny.
The stairway was pretty much a gallery of family photos. I couldn't figure out who Danny lived with. In some pictures on the wall, I saw two very similar, but different looking young boys. The pudgy baby, I instantly recognized as Danny. He still looked, like, exactly the same. But the older looking boy in the pictures I just assumed was his brother. Maybe? There weren't any new looking pictures on the wall either, which might be normal. Who really wants a framed portrait of some gawky fifteen-year-old on the family photo wall?
Danny twisted the handle and opened the door to his bedroom.
"Danny," I said, and he turned around to blink at me. "What the hell?" Two guitars, a wooden one and another plugged into a speaker, sat on stands in the corner of his room. "You totally play music."
Not much fazes me. A perk of being a Bitch from Venus is that you're born without a heart. So just like the time Tanner began selling weed and religiously lied to me that he was an Uber driver, Danny lied to me about playing music. Don't get me wrong, I honestly don't care that he lied. I just don't like being lied to.
"Why'd you lie about not being able to play music?" I asked.
Danny's verbal reflex game was on point, cuz he dodged every question with some sort of stupid sarcastic answer. Gotta hand it to him, the kid had wit.
"I'm not entirely sure," Danny finally broke, after my interrogation. "I didn't feel like it. Come on, let's just listen to our records."
I told him that, since he lied, he had to play Biggie first. So while Liar Liar Pants On Fire went to do that, my eyes swept over the rows of albums stuffed in the long rectangular shelf beneath his record player, and spotted the spine of a notebook popping out.
"Is this where I can find all your Christian Rap verses?" I asked, bending over and pulling the notebook out. My thumb swept through the pages just as Danny dropped the needle on Biggie and lost his mind.
"NO. No! Don't look through it!"
Danny took a giant lunge towards me, and all I saw was ten outstretched fingers flying at my face. I swooped out of the way, and as Biggie began rapping over the speakers, I flipped to a random page and read:
"She rocks her head to an out of tune lullaby.
Waiting for a knight in—shimming—shining—armor
To stop the tears from her lonely eyes—"
"Hey!" Danny grabbed for his book, but again I stepped out of the way, running in circles around his dirty laundry while holding (let's face it) his diary, open above my head. Then I tripped on this random plastic garbage bag. I caught my landing just in time and jumped up on his bed, flopping onto my tummy as I flipped to another page.
"Oh forget what you think you understand!
Live tonight and let that pretty stranger take your hand!"
"Danny! These are some straight up ghetto rhymes yo!"
"Those are all from, like, the seventh grade," he said (very defensively, I may add). "I write much better now."
The room seemed to ripple with his jitters. Boy oh boy was I grinding Squeegee Boy's gears.
"Yo. These are actually pretty good," I said, flipping through a few more blue-lined pages, and then looked up at him and added: "For seventh grade."
He didn't say anything. When I turned around, I saw that Danny's face, highlighted with the shaft of light coming in through the window to my left, was bright red. "I'm being serious, Danny! Like, you one sens'tive seventh grade nigguh. Were you like the Drake of middle-school?"
"No comment."
I guess if there's one way to really invade a man's privacy, you skim his diary. See, I never kept diaries and shit like that around, because that's just leaving behind cold-hard evidence of all the weird shit you don't want people ever knowing. Which is exactly what happened.
My fingers rapidly shifted through the book, scanning the unfettered bursts of blue ink along the pages. The markings of his relentless imagination. The indelible scribbles in the top margins when the pen must have dried out. Words and entire sentences scratched out completely in thick, repeated dashes, eliminating certain confessions from existence. Danny's humiliation grew hotter with the building momentum of my fingers flipping the pages, my giddy snickering each time I read something dorky. With my face burning from the inherited embarrassment radiating hot off of Squeegee Boy, I looked up at him, rolling his eyes, and then fluttered my gaze to the next page and went stone cold. The corners of my mouth throbbed. Consciously, I flexed the muscles in my face to keep smiling, pretending to still laugh.
Written without any regard to the boundaries of the blue lines, in hacked and staggered ink, was the beginning of a sentence I should've never seen. My heart felt frail, guilty, for unknowingly communicating with a dark thought that he must have only written down to leave its burden behind. The gravity of the room condensed to the size of a pinprick on my forehead.
I quickly struck through a hundred or so pages, hiding away the sentence, and instead read aloud the first thing I saw that was written coherently on another blue line:
"Well now you've got me and won my heart,
What more could you want?!"
Oh boy! That was hilarious.
Danny snatched the notebook out of my hands and threw it across the room. "Okay, that's enough out of you."
Biggie fired up a new verse and killed it.
Posters tacked up in a multicolored checkered pattern hugged the corner between the two walls behind him. Trying to name all the posters became a game of trivia, like naming all the celebrities on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, which was the first poster that caught my eye.
"What are you thinking about?" Danny asked.
"Oh, nothin'." Which wasn't true. As I mentally probed about every last square inch of his room, I wondered if Squeegee Boy was embarrassed about bringing me (or anyone, really) into his bedroom, because half of it was still like a little kid's.
"Is there something wrong?" he asked.
"No, Danny."
Taped unevenly up on the wall across from his posters, were shitty little kid drawings done in marker with like Pokémon and Dragonball Z shit on them. And next to the night table, he had stickers of the GameCube logo and like, Animal Crossing, peeling at the corners off the wall.
"Ooh!" I jumped to my feet. "Danny likes dem titties!" I said, walking towards his closet door that crept slightly open.
"What?"
Hung up on the inside of the door was a poster of some, like, seventies pin-up babe. "So these are the kinda girls you like! She's hot as hell." Checking out the poster of the gloriously divine goddess with a mass of curled hair hanging over her tits, I was secretly pleased to see that photoshop couldn't do nuthin' to those 1970s stretch marks. "She looks like Lana Del Rey."
"I think it's more accurate to say Lana Del Rey looks like Raquel Welch."
"Aren't you defensive of your—what? What would she be now? Like, ninety-year-old crush?"
"She was a good singer."
"Does she help you sleep at night? You know?" I said, wrapping my hand around and shaking an invisible banana.
"Screw off."
Seventies sex-kittens and Pokémon. Danny was a strange kid.
After making a mental note to find out if Raquel Welch aged like shit (which, no, unfortunately not), I gazed back to his array of instruments. "Play me your guitar," I ordered.
"No."
"Oh, come on. Please? Pretty please?"
"No way. Not after that bullshit."
"Just picture me in my underwear."
"WHAT."
"Or what? You'd rather me drape my hair over my tits?" I crossed my hands back behind my head, mocking the poster. "But isn't that what you're supposed to do? Picture your audience in their underwear if you're nervous?"
And even after prostituting myself to his imagination, Danny still stayed all stiff.
"Come on, Ringo," I said. "Just one Beatles song."
"Really? You gave me Ringo?"
"Yeah. I'd screw Ringo."
Danny started dying of laughter. With the way Danny's hair fell, he could've been a Beatle.
"What's wrong with saying I'd bone Ringo?" I continued. "George kicked the can, and I mean he's a Beatle after all. So, c'mon, final offer for the underwear deal."
"You'd actually strip down to your underwear?"
"Promise you'll play?"
"Yup."
Someone then started knocking on the door. And I felt that my slutty bargain had been heard by the entire world. Yay for bringing home sluts!
"Danny?" A woman's voice questioned as the door nudged open. "Is that Biggie Smalls?"
Obviously, the woman was his mother. So, due to my lousy upbringing (absent of manners and respect for my elders––and all that), I answered, "Hell yeah it is!" Then wrapped my hands over my mouth.
What else would a random older woman be doing in Danny's house? You know, unless he was into that sorta thing. But their resemblance was crazy. It was made most obvious by the high, shapely cheekbones that protruded above their defined jaws. A.K.A Danny was a momma's boy, if that wasn't already obvious.
His mom just gave an approving murmur about Biggie and nodded. "Danny, I thought you might've had a friend over."
"Oh yeah, Mom, this is my uh friend..."
"Hi. I'm Mary," I chimed in. I thought I would be generous and help the kid out, because I am a nice person.
"It's nice to meet you, Mary."
"Okay! Cool!" Danny exclaimed. "We're all acquainted! Bye, Mom—"
"Why does your mother have to leave, Danny?"
"Yeah, Danny?" his mom joined in. "I like Mary. She has cool taste in music. Maybe we both want to rock out to Biggie?"
"Hell yeah, Danny's mom." It just slipped out accidentally again.
"Hell yeah, Danny's friend, Mary," she said, tossing me a wink. "See? I don't get why you're so embarrassed of me. You should be nicer to me in front of your friends. Don't you agree, Mary?"
"I totally agree. But you see, Mrs. Danny's mom, that's the problem. Danny doesn't know if we're—" I quoted my fingers "—friends or not. He's having a difficult time with his feelings."
"Bye, Mom."
She closed the door halfway. "Love you too, Danny." And then looking over at me while still speaking to him, "I hope you figure your feelings out. Oh. Danny, you didn't eat the quesadillas?"
Danny told her that his stomach was sore. His mom shrugged and closed the door. Some gunshots clicked off before The Notorious spat his next verse.
"Your mom is so cool."
Danny just grumbled and went to pick his notebook up off the floor. I harassed him about playing guitar again, but all I could think of was that notebook. What I had read, or started to have read, wasn't okay. I honestly didn't know how to feel about it. All I knew was, that for whatever sadistic reasons of mine, that I burned to find out what exaggeration of suffering could make this spoiled rich-kid driving his own car, and living with his cooking and cleaning mom, want (I quote): "To die."
=========Author's Note===========
Thank you for reading this chapter of "Some Place Better Than Here"!
Writing this book certainly wasn't easy by any means. It was an honest-to-God from the bottom of my heart labour of love. And so, if the writing has touched you in anyway, please share your thoughts in the comments or vote on a chapter that you particularly liked!
Sharing a little bit of love back really helps me grow my platform as a writer so I can continue to publish great works for you and I both to enjoy !
Also, if you enjoyed SPBTH please check out my latest project "The Roar of Andora," a explorative fantasy that will be told over a three-part anthology.
https://www.wattpad.com/611263651-the-roar-of-andora-book-one-prologue-the-boy-king
Thank you for reading "Some Place Better Than Here"!
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