Late at night, strobe lights flash inside of a re-purposed warehouse building. Speakers stolen from radioshack blare music from burned CDs, and bodies of teenagers smack against each other. The air smells like weed, everclear and sweat. Half of the human beings in this room are on esctasy. Their blood is pounding through their veins, sweetened with the distinct umami of serotonin syndrome. It’s so hot in here. The air in this warehouse smells like a rave, like sweat, and blood. And it tears, tears like the devil, like a tsunami through the entire fucking crowd.
Raves are great places to committ acts of mass murder. Usually they take place in a remote location, and invites are only conducted through word of mouh, or through myspace bulletins obscured by leagues of survey posts. Nobody really knows who you are, and anyone who does is too high to care. The sound of the music blaring covers up the screaming.
The only downside is that you don’t know when the cops are going to show up. Will they show up after a few people got devoured in the parking lot? Will they be there because someone near by called the police on the sea of trespassers? Is there an officer already there, ready to do a drug bust and rack up a few possession tickets? Who knows. It’s the luck of the draw. It has all the glamour and risk of playing the blackjack table at Vegas, but with the added bonus of deliciousness.
It tears through the crowd with audacious acrylic nails, polished in UV paint, sharpened like needles, shaped like hooks. It’s nails tear under skin, it’s jaws wrap around arms and necks and bite through anything that it can. People, those people, they were dancing but now they’re pushing and yelling. They’re swarming like a hornet’s nest that had been hit with a stick. They don’t care who they have to trample to death just to get the fuck out of there.
And then the lights go dark.
Good night.
Dr. Kale is stumbling down the sidewalks of what could be any of the suburbs in northern New Jersey. He is wearing something that most doctors wouldn’t even wear if they lost a bet. Somebody ripped the ring out of one of his lip piercings. Which isn’t that bad of a cover story for the real reason as to why he’s covered in blood. It’s been a long night, and the street lights are starting to turn back off as the sun rises.
He peels the blood-soaked faux-leopard fur coat he was wearing and chucks into a garbage tin a few blocks from his house. When he finally gets home, people who work the morning shifts are just starting to get into their cars and drive to work. Nobody notices, nobody cares. The garbage men pick up the dumpster and the blood-soaked fur coat goes into the trash compactor because it is nothing.
Aura was sitting in his bedroom listening to his favorite grindcore music. He really hated his name, it was stupid, though to his credit, it at least made him fit in with the other kids at his high school. They all had these scene names. There was Kaitlin Kamikaze, Veronica Velocity, Marissa Medusa, and Aura Atrophy. He rarely used the alliteration but he did need to keep up constantly with his myspace and his crew of girls that followed him around.
It was part of their scene. He was skinny, didn't do sports, didn't get good grades in school, and he got all the girls because he grew his hair long, and put on lots of makeup. He had big blue eyes that he accented with different colors, today it was bright green and black that he wore to school. His hair was dyed blonde with blue and black streaks going through it. He clipped little racoon stripes in it.
All those years he spent getting beaten up in elementary and middle school, and the sexual jokes he endured ('Aura' sounds like 'oral', get it?) were worth it. You want to make fun of me? Oh, I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of my follower count, bitch. He was laying on his stomach, staring at the cuts going across his arms. Some of them were new, some were faded and scabbed.
He made the newer ones about ten minutes ago. He did it with a safety pin that barely scratched the skin, it took awhile for the blood to pool up in little droplets. He took the safety pin and artfully dragged the droplets out to the sides so the cuts looked bigger and bloodier, yes this would be perfect. He rolled over onto his back, his head resting against his checkerboard printed pillow.
He stretched out his clean arm and reached over for his pink digital camera. He lifted it up and held it over himself, and snapped a picture, making sure to hold it at angle that made his features look as distorted as possible. He held his bleeding arm up across his chest, making sure all the cuts were clearly visible in the picture. It took him a few tries until he got just the right pose that made him look a china white helpless Ophelia of a man. It was perfect. He heard a slight knock on the door and quickly slipped his cut up arm and camera under the pillow.
"Aura, can you come down for dinner?” his mother asked him.
“I told you to call me Vincent,” he said. He hated to hear her call him that name. The only people who could call him Aura were his bitches
“Your name is Aura, now come down for dinner, and please take off that makeup, you're not a girl,” she told him before closing the door again.
She was one of those all-organic crunchy hippies, but she worked as a lawyer for a GMO lobbyist. She probably didn't regret how her hippie phase was unceremoniously forced on her kid. The hatred he felt for her burned with in him slowly and unseen like the small methane fires gathering beneath landfills. She didn't know about his myspace, she thought it was of the devil, but with so many people making up fake names with the name Aura in it, and with all the editing he did to his photos, she'd never know it was him!
Aura slipped on a black hoodie over his tight pink tshirt with an image of a gun shooting multicolored hearts on it. He was wearing skinny jeans, which he knew pissed off his mother, but he didn't have time to change pants without getting yelled at for taking too long. He sulked his way down stairs into the kitchen. He was making sure to frown as much as possible, even though he was looking forward to posting his pics later.
His parents had a big house with a nice kitchen that had granite counter tops and stainless steel everything. His father and sister weren't home, and that left him alone with his mother. For dinner she had cooked up kale, quinoa, and some grilled chicken. His plate was already piled on high, he was beginning to suspect that his mother was onto his new intermittent fasting diet plan. Vincent let himself slip up, this stuff was too healthy to get fat on anyways. No sugar or fat was allowed in this household.
“Aren't you too warm with that on?” she asked him. It wasn't that warm in the house, it was only at the start of fall in new jersey, but it was warm enough in the house that the hoodie raised attention.
“No,” he said, picked at the food with his fork and ate without much enthusiasm. He tried not to meet his mothers gaze and to keep his sleeves down in place.
“I'm not sorry for grounding you, so stop sulking and get a hobby or something,” she scolded him. Aura looked up at her with a scowl on his face. She was impenetrable, she had no empathy for his cause.
“This is my hobby,” he said adamantly, pointing to his face. He was proud of his face and how he looked. It was the only reason why anyone liked him.
“Get a new one. I'm not letting you go out anywhere until you stop dressing like that,” she told him. Aura didn't know what was wrong with how he looked. He sulked and picked at his quinoa.
He washed his plates, put them in the dishwasher and walked back upstairs to his bedroom. He had his laptop and his camera full of pictures of his latest photographic victories. His mom was still mad at him because she found out he had been applying make up using his friend's make up in the bathroom at school. She told him no more makeup and threw his away so so he had to mooch. He was grounded from going to a show tonight, so there was a loss. He couldn't show his cuts off with his friends at the show, but at least he could post them on myspace. He opened up his laptop and put up photoshop CS2, his favorite image-editing program. It was the cheapest, since anyone could torrent it for free. He upped the contrast so that the contour of his nose was barely noticeable. He darkened his eyeliner, made his eyes brighter, and put more emphasis on his cuts. He looked cuter than any young man his age should have. He posted the images with no captions. Aura wanted to post a bulletin instead. He kept it short, all it said was 'mom said I couldn't go to the show :('. It was all he needed to say. Soon enough, his inbox was full of comments on his bulletin.
'Your mom is such a bitch'
'Agreed, and a hypocrite.
'That sucks'
Then there was an 'I was looking forward to seeing you at the show' from another super popular scenester he talked to a lot on myspace. And his favorite kind of message. 'I can drive you there if you can get out of the house,'.
Perfect. Thank you, older friends. Some pictures of fresh cuts could get him pity so he could in turn get what he wanted. He was only fifteen but he was friends with a few college kids, and they all had cars. They admired how hip he was in the 'scene' scene. He might have been young but he had social connections.
'Awesome, meet you at the end of the street', Aura replied.
Now he had all of fifteen minutes to get ready. He could do it. He snuck in his parent's shared bathroom, and raided his mothers medicine cabinet for the barebones make up kit she had. It was nothing compared to his, but it would have to do. He took of the old makeup from this morning, he needed something fresh and impressive.
He sharpened the tip of her black eyeliner and applied it. He cleaned off the tip of her mascara and ran it through his lashes. Taking her pink lip liner, he covered the entirety of his upper eyelid and smudged it messily with his finger tip. It wasn't up to his normal quality but it was better than going bare-faced.
Aura hastily ran back to his bedroom, hoping that his mother wouldn't notice that he had changed his face. He figured she was probably in the living room watching television that was blaring. He dug under his bed and found his stash of secret clothes he hid from her. He took off his pants quickly.
He had a pair of tight black pants that he had cut into short shorts and frayed the hems of. He had green, turquoise, and white glitter fishnet stockings. He layered them on his legs, snipping additional holes where he felt like they needed it. It would be chilly but it was so worth it. He put on some black converse that were splattered with different colors of neon paint. He had a couple kandi style bracelets around his wrist, but not enough to obscure the cuts there. He had a necklace with a glitter gun and rainbow star beads around his neck. He quickly teased up his hair and gave it a quick blast of hair spray, shaking his head back and forth.
He stashed his hair extensions, cigarettes, and a camera in the pockets of his black hoodie. He grabbed twenty dollars and put it in the pocket of his shorts. He hid his laptop in the back of closet so that when his mother came upstairs to find him missing, it wouldn't be the first thing on her mind to confiscate it. She already did that with his first razr cellphone.
He opened his bedroom window. It was right next to an awning. He closed the window, making sure that it didn't lock behind him. He could tiptoe across the roof, towards the garage. Then, it was a challenge. The roof near the garage was short enough from leap down from, if he dangled himself and jumped down feet first while holding onto the gutters. That part was easy. The hard part was that the living room window faced the drive way, and he'd have to walk down the drive way without being noticed. He got himself down in his lawn, and ducked beneath any windows. He crouched down and ran as fast as he could down the drive way. Once he was out of her direct line of sight, he ran like hell down the street. It was a good thing he wore sneakers.
He walked past the suburban houses that were nearly identical to his mothers. It was just starting to get dark outside. He stood by a stop sign, leaning against it casually. He wanted to look cool when his friends picked him up. He took out the cigarette pack, and the small lighter that was encased in it. He lit up a cigarette. His friends pulled up in a clunker of a compact car. He leisurely let out an exhale of smoke before sauntering towards the car. Aura climbed into the passenger seat that was reserved for him
"Glad you could make it,” his friend said.
She was a student at a near by community college. Her hair was done up like Aura's. He pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror. He clipped in his striped hair extensions and took a final drag of his cigarette. He cracked open the window and flicked the butt out of it. There were three people already in the backseat talking amongst themselves and drinking luke warm beers out of amber colored glass bottles.
“Thanks for picking me up, my mom totally grounded me again,” Aura said as he rolled his eyes. He was drinking a beer. It tasted like warm piss and went down
"What an old hag. I don't see why she has such a problem with the way you look,” she said.
Of course she didn't realize why, she was dressed the same as Aura. She took his choppy haircut- blonde, cut just below the chin. She got the same style hair extensions, save that hers were striped with dark purple instead of black. She wore several hair bows and kiddie hair clips, and a cheap plastic tiara. The kids in back were also dressed similarly.
Aura couldn't help it, he was the trendsetter in his group of friends. He had fifty thousand friends on myspace and it was growing every day. He went over the lip liner on his eyelids with some pink eyeshadow that he had borrowed. He looked like a messy wreck. He had china doll pale skin, lined with bright pink and black that made him look like a glittering mad man. It matched well with his colorful, mismatched and torn clothing.
The venue was down town in a nearby town. It was a pretty sketchy area but that junk car was safe. He left his hoodie in the car, and dusted some glitter on his arms. It was getting real cold at night but he wanted the attention. There were a few other scenesters in the line with him, but he was one of the better looking ones. He was hoping to get some pics with some prommies, and maybe a promo-for-promo out of this one. The line outside of the hardcore show was long, but he had cigarettes and a camera.
He held the camera back and took a picture if himself with the line behind him and a cigarettes in his hand. That way he looked like he was standing at the very front. Probably wouldn't get him many scene points with his straight edge friends on myspace but the majority people thought smoking was still cool.
Another scene girl approached him from further up the line. Her makeup looked messy in the wrong way, and she was a bit too chub for the tight shirt she wore. Aura could see the outline of her bra's cup creased into her tight white tshirt. She looked at him like he was some kind of celebrity. This wasn't one of the regs he wanted to meet here tonight, but she would do.
“You're Aura Atrophy,” she said like it was a question.
“Sure thing, I'll take it with my camera and tag you, alright?” Aura asked her. That way he had full control over how he looked in the photo. No bad editing would ever befall his picture-perfect complexion. Any publicity was good publicity.
"Thankyou sooo much! My name is Ami Immortality, with an I,” she clarified.
“Awesome, thanks,” Aura said politely. He waved at her as she rejoined her friends.
He could hear them screaming amongst themselves and one of the girl squeal, 'he's so hot'. This what made it all worth it. He didn't even care about the concert, the highlight of his night would be posting about going to the concert on the internet. Getting comments on his pics. Getting friend requests. Watching that number go up, up, up.
He was here. The biggest scene queen in the area, even though he was a guy. Or said he was. Kale Katastrophe. Aura had been chatting with him on myspace for quite some time. Aura was just starting out with scene fashion after seeing in online, and Kale was one of his heroes. Aura wasn't sure if he'd ever get to meet Kale at show with a crowd of scenesters this big. He had the highest friend of any scene queen, on myspace or otherwise. He was walking towards Aura in his platformed pumps. His white hair was freshly dyed, without any roots. It glimmered lavender from the toner in the street lamps.
Kale walked with a certain swagger and flamboyant flare to his moves that Aura had yet to conquer. His heels clicked against the dirty concrete like the tap of a royal scepter. His makeup was just so good. He smiled with curvy lips that were covered with a bright pink lip gloss. Aura knew where it was from. Victoria's Secret, because Aura had asked him and bought the duplicate. Aura's heart was pounding in his chest. He was going to take a picture with Kale. Kale stood in front of him, just a few inches taller than Aura.
"You said you were grounded,” Kale told him. Kale put on a falsetto and a lisp in his voice that anyone could tell was fake. Yet, on him, it seemed so glamorous. Aura was completely starstruck. Kale looked older in person. In his photo he looked seventeen at most, but in person he looked like he was twenty or so. Looks like Aura wasn't the only person editing his pics, but at least his doll-face was natural. More or less. Kale must have used spot corrector or liquify on his.
"I escaped,” Aura said his a smile. He scratched the back of his head to show off the cuts on his wrist. Kale would pity him and his horrible, close-minded mother.
“So glad you could make it, I got tired just chatting with you on myspace, you know, it's so much better now that we can hang out,” Kale fluttered his falsies at Aura. They were fake. That's how he got such nice selfies. Aura would have to pick up some false eyelashes as well.
"Do you smoke? I have someone standing in line upfront for me, we could get high and come back when the doors open,” Kale said.
The cut routine was working magic for Aura tonight. This is scene royalty, right here. He's so cool he doesn't have to wait in line for a crappy grindcore band with his friends like the plebeian masses. That, and he gets an offer for free weed. This was the good life.
"That would be fabulous,” Aura said, emphasizing the word fabulous. He was in, in, in with the coolest scene kid in the northern jersey area.
Aura had a skip in his step, as he stepped away from his friends. He smiled to them and mouthed 'see you bitches later'. They waved him away, happy for his effort, Aura was happy that he was moving higher up the social ladder than his friends that followed him. Aura followed Kale to his car. Kale walked gracefully in his uncomfortable women's footwear.
Aura tread lightly behind Kale, saying nothing, for fear that he would say something wrong, and therefore get no low resolution blurry pictures with Kale Katastrophe to show off on his myspace profile. He didn't want to sound too ecstatic, or Kale wouldn't think he was cool. At the worst, Kale Katastrophe might even remove Aura from his top 8 list and that would be public humiliation.
The sound from the crowd gathering from the concert was fading away. It had sounded like a dull roar, then a muffled noise in the background, and now there it was gone. Now it was only the sound of Kale's heels clicking on the pavement and Aura's softer foot steps behind him. Kale had walked him down the streets for long enough that they were getting out of the dicey part of town. Now Kale and Aura were near a parking garage quite a few blocks away from the venue. Aura admired how Kale walked this distance like it was nothing in those shoes.
"Sorry, I parked so far,” Kale said. He sighed theatrically. He led Aura to a really nice convertible care that was parked on the lower level. Now wonder why he parked so far away from venue, parking it back there would have made it vanish
“I'm just glad to hang with you,” Aura said. He glanced at the expensive car, “Are you really a doctor?”
“I have access to a prescription pad,” Kale said.
Kale's eyeshadow glittered in the low lights as he winked at Aura. It was all good news to him. Aura felt weightless, breathless. He was just a nobody kid from Jersey. Now he's getting high in a doctor's car. He felt like a real cool adult. He felt so in charge of his life. He didn't need his mother's supervision, or her stupid, close-minded attitude.
He was being purely himself and he was getting so far with it. Kale unlocked the drivers side of the car, and clicked off the locks on the passenger’s side. Aura got right in the door and closed it quickly. Aura quickly looked down into his pockets and took out the paperboard cigarette box he kept his lighter in. He flicked on the flame to make sure it was working. Kale locked all the doors to the car and put up one of those aluminum blockers under the windshield.
Kale reached over Aura's lap and took out something that was wrapped in a red silk cloth from the glove compartment. Aura noticed there were tons of pill bottles in there, too. Kale was loaded. It was probably a pipe he had in the silk. Aura looked out towards the back window of the car. The coast was clear. He didn't even see a security camera. He turned back towards Kale and Kale was smiling at him.
"Hey, does this smell like chloroform to you?” Kale asked. It sounded like he was telling a punchline with no joke.
In the short moment that Aura was double checking for cops, Kale had soaked the cloth with something wet and pressed it over Aura's nose and mouth. He worked fast. It smelled too sweet, sweeter than fake sugar. It was burning cold against Aura's skin. The scent was nauseating and the scenery around Aura started to blur and run like watercolor paints.
He tried to push Kale away, but with the way he was thrashing around, Aura had to inhale. With that inhale, he got a lung full of the stuff. It felt like ice stabbing up his lungs. Aura wanted to cough it out but Kale had one hand over his mouth, with the other gripping him tight by his hair. He had to breathe but the only air he could get was poisoned. He wanted to throw up.
Kale looked down at him with lime green eyes and his pink lips peeled back to show off a line of perfect white veneers. His teeth were so perfect it was creepy. Aura's limbs went numb and unresponsive. He tried to get out of the car but his limbs weren't listening. Wrongness was going through his blood, straight from the vapors.
The sweet, sickening black only lasted seconds. Aura felt like he was coming up, and coming out of this black out. It was fast acting. He could make it out of the car if he tried. The world still felt blurry and he still felt sick, but he was getting hopeful. Kale was looking down at Aura and laughing at him as he tried to move his limbs and ended up looking like a flipped turtle.
Aura felt his hand wrap around the cold door handle and push it. He was still too drugged to think, to remember that it was locked. It was locked and he was fading too quickly to pull the knob to unlock it. Kale tossed the silk to the floor of his car and shoved Aura's head against the headrest of the passenger seat. Kale climbed over him, still pinning him down. Now Kale was kneeling on Aura's lap. His bony knees dug into Aura's skinny thighs. Kale riffled around the rattling pill bottle for some pills.
Aura looked at Kale, his vision still blurry. Kale lifted his hand off Aura's mouth for only as long as took to shove the pills down his throat. He swallowed them reflexively. Aura closed his eyes and he felt Kale get off him and heard the sound of him starting up the car. Then he felt a slight rumble of the car passing over the streets, too weak and too stupefied to do a thing about it.