About A Girl

     The kids on the back of the bus are all doing angel dust and singing about haircuts and bad trips and Madeline hates sitting up front with Joe because she knows he's just waiting for his chance to go back there and act cool to those kids, go back there and show them everything he's got. She sits on her hands the way she always does when she feels impending anxiety and embarrassment and tries not to look at Joe, tries not to encourage him with any movement at all.
     "I'll be right back," Joe is already getting up before she can ask where he is going and ask him to please just sit down. Joe lights his cigarette in the aisle and heads toward the back of the bus, ready to impress someone. Madeline slides down a little in her seat and looks around and wipes her nose with the back of her knuckle, stares at her smudgey reflection in the window. Trees and farm fences pass over her cheeks and she pictures herself on a white horse, hair flowing out behind her, racing along side the bus, along side the highway and away from where she is going. The beautiful and strong white horse flies over hills as nothing, leaping over ditches and small barns in their way.
     Joe just got back from Europe, he had told Madeline he was going there to clean up. Joe is an artist and Madeline used to love to tell everyone about him: My Joe is a sculptor. My Joe draws pictures of me naked, standing on chairs. Madeline used to carry a Super 8 camera around with her all the time, but lately she doesn't do anything. While Joe was away, Madeline stayed in their dirty warehouse apartment, hanging out and listening to records with their other roommate, Felix. Sometimes she would speed up and scrub the bathroom all day, shouting out conversations with Felix in the other room.
     Madeline glances back at Joe standing in the aisle with a knowing look on his face, at the little girl looking up at him with glassy eyes of adoration. She wonders if she used to look that way when she used to look at Joe.
     Madeline wants to get an apartment in Portland, somewhere Joe can work in peace and she can go to school. She has dreams of him waking her up in the morning and making her breakfast and meeting her on the corner to walk her home in the afternoon, just like the old days - just like in the fun old days when she was seventeen and used to make little patches to sew on Joe's jeans and they would go with Felix to U.S.C. parties and make fun of all the arty kids and go home and tie each other up and smoke hash and laugh at jokes that didn't make sense to anyone but them.
     Madeline smokes cigarettes in the rest stop cafe, hoping to get Joe's attention. He is standing with the fucked-up kids over by a bunch of trees and Madeline wonders if they've given him anything. A blond-haired man tells her about his good job and loss of a wife and she stares at his teeth which are weirdly big and have tan patches of tartar by his gums. Madeline imagines going with this man, becoming his new wife. She imagines having sex with this man and not feeling anything. It appeals to her, like watching tv. She walks away from him, over by the highway and behind the bus.
     Madeline sticks her thumb out at the first bunch of cars she sees but no one stops. She can see their eyes, safe behind their windshields, looking her over with their curious, fearful eyes. She can hear their self-righteous, inside-their-cars conversations, What is this world coming to? Did you see that Girl? Poor thing. But no one stops and Joe sees her; he's probably been watching all along. Madeline thinks this would be just like him and he smokes as he slowly walks across the grass. Madeline gets a desperate lurch in her throat, hoping someone will stop and pick her up before Joe gets to her, before she dies of humiliation.
     A brown car is coming, coming to rescue her and take her away. Reaching out for the handle, a small girl's face smiles from the open window.
     "Hi." Madeline gets in and she hears Joe yell something like What the fuck, and in the car two little girls are eating french fries and their young Latina mother is driving.
     "Trouble with your boyfriend?" she asks as they are pulling away. Madeline imagines Joe standing there, unbelieving in the dust of this car, her runaway car leaving him behind. One of the girls is asking her name and the other is holding up a yellow french fry, offering it to her with a little ketchup smile.
     Joe pounds on the door and Madeline looks over at him, her head rotating slowly around to look into his eyes. The driver-lady is asking her if she should keep going and Madeline doesn't know; she feels lost in the intensity of Joe's gaze, frozen and floating through time. She never would have guessed everything would come to this, to driving away from Joe in the middle of the colorless Oregon landscape with a Mexican lady and her kids, suspended in the moment of no goodbye.
     Back on the bus Joe is holding her hand and staring straight ahead, sometimes slightly shaking his chin and hair. He held her for a really long time after she climbed out of the brown car by the highway and it felt good to Madeline, not so much like she was being smothered. Through bleary windows she watches the sun going down behind leafless trees and ceramic lamps and tv sets being turned on inside the houses by the highway as faces are washed and children made presentable for dinner.

    *

     Buell is full of fat, tired people who've lived here all their lives, who've died here all their lives. The main street, bustling thirty years ago, is now dead. Everyone shops in the Super-Hy-Vee-Markets and giant Pamida's and Alco's out by the highway along with all the Pizza Huts and Country Kitchens and fast, greasy food joints that provide quick meals to people with no where to go.
     Madeline likes to walk the gray streets of the deserted downtown, look into empty and mostly empty store-fronts, stare up at the dirty windows with their shades drawn above the now for-sale hardware stores and wonder if anybody really lives there and what it must look like inside, all dirty and dark. The Tic Toc Restaurant is closed, and only a few grimy looking loggers sit at the Chat 'n' Chew's counter, eating crumbly meat sandwiches and staring at their plates, elbows on the table. They're all wearing hats, filthy baseball hats with greasy logos advertising trucking companies and fertilizer.
     Madeline walks by The Store with its black front and blacked-out windows, the town's only "Triple X" shop. A hook-nosed girl with tiny rat eyes told Madeline about a room in the back where men go and put their dicks through a hole in the wall to get sucked off, never glimpsing the suck-er. After some dead President's wife's birthplace, the Store is pretty much Buell's most famous place. The north end of Center Street is almost empty, with only the mortuary and the deserted Orpheum theater inhabiting the end. The Orpheum was once the town's pride, with its red velvet seats and shining oak balcony, but now the back door of the theater hangs sadly off its hinges. The town's teenagers would rather frequent the Supermall's cineplex of movies.
     It's really dark inside the Orpheum, all the windows have been covered in newspaper and the light fixtures have long been stripped. Madeline steps over seas of broken glass and garbage and into the old main theater where the movies used to show. The once beautiful seats are all ripped open now and the ones that aren't, are hardened with years of spilled soda and semen and piss. Madeline isn't the only one to have discovered the deserted theater as an oasis, hundreds of bottles and cans and food and sex-trash litter the floor, the stage, anywhere there's a space.
     Madeline makes her way to the front, to a seat spitting out its yellow foam guts. Sitting down and closing her eyes, she runs shaking fingers through crispy frozen hair and over puffy, frostbit lips.
     "Where is my mind?" Madeline pictures herself going down on the stage, wrapping up in the once-red curtain lying on the steps and sleeping forever, silently forever, but instead she stays where she is.
     "I can't wait 'til Jeromy's out of jail. He's so hot!"
     "He'll buy for us, too. He's over twenty-one, right?"
     "Hey," a voice says and Madeline turns around, it is the girl with the hook-nose. "Cool haircut," the girl says, and she looks like she means it. Madeline didn't think anyone knew her in this town, but Rat Girl is beaming and introducing her to her friend Lily and, for some reason, Rat Girl knows her name.
     "I just got back from Texas," Lily tells her, "I was living with my aunt down in Austin for a year. My parents thought it would be good for me. I guess it wasn't though, 'cause here I am, I'm back."
     "You'll never leave," Rat Girl touches her arm and laughs. Madeline stares at Lily's angelic face and wonders what she could have done to get banned to Texas by her parents and what she'd have to do to get condemned back again.
     "I moved up here from L.A.," Madeline says, "My boyfriend and I moved up here. We had to get out of the city." Madeline shrugs nervously and twists the corner of her shirt, squeezes out some water onto the back of her chair.
     "Hey, you're dripping wet," the Rat Girl says. "Come to my house and you can borrow some clothes."
     "Yeah," Lily says, "Angel's house is just a few minutes away." Madeline feels shocked and a little horrified to finally learn that Rat Girl has a name.

*

     Nothing is real. All of this is fiction, or at least tv. Angel's house stinks, worse even, than the theater. Madeline doesn't know if it's Angel's two giant slobbering dogs or Angel's two giant zombie parents. As soon as they get inside, Angel's mother yells at her and her dad sprays water across her chest with a squirt-gun. Angel whines Moo-om and walks immediately to the kitchen and puts a package of frozen cheese sticks into a wire basket and flips the on-switch of a big, serious-looking fryer. Inside the fryer is a hard, waxy substance that, after a few minutes, starts to melt and soon becomes a bubbling vat of grease. Angel drops in the basket of cheese sticks and it hisses loudly at her.
     "This should only be a few minutes," she explains, "There's pop in the 'fridge if you want one."
     "Aan-gel! You better get in here, guess who's on Knot's Landing tonight!" Angel goes out to talk to her mammoth mother and her dad corners her against a wall yelling Bra Check! Madeline shudders to think of living in this house, of living life as Angel.
     Angel's mother is obese. Her head is like a mountain, it is like the entire body of Jabba the Hut sitting on her shoulders, Madeline can't believe this woman's head is Jabba the Hut. Jabba keeps wiping at her red nose with a wad of crumbly pink Kleenex which she holds tightly in her left hand, and in the other, in a death-grip, is the tv remote. It is easy to see she is Angel's mother and Madeline imagines this is inbreeding at its worst. Lily whispers Weird, huh, and tells Madeline that Angel's mom has a life-size poster of a shirtless Gene Simmons with his tongue sticking out hanging in the back of her closet and she kisses his hairy stomach every night before bed. Lily says she knows, she's seen the lipstick by his belly button.
     "I need you to come and get me," Madeline tells Joe when she calls him at work, but she can't explain where she is, she doesn't know. Joe says he is sick of her outrageous behavior.
     "I'm sort of starting to consider thinking fairly seriously about moving back to L.A.," Joe threatens and Madeline hangs up. When she turns around, Lily is standing right there.
     "You want to get out of here," Lily sort of asks and when they walk through the living room, Angel and her mother are hypnotised by a talk show and Angel barely waves good-bye. Right next to the tv is a tiny square fish tank. It's filthy and grimy and, floating in the murky water, are two bloated yellowish fish. They don't swim or move or blink and the only way to tell they are alive are by the bubbles that sort of belch out of their mouths sometimes.
     "They only move when they eat," Lily says and Madeline doesn't know if she means the fish or Angel and her mom.

*

     The floor is sagging, curving in like a rotten apple skin and Lily tells her to be careful. They maneuver through the deserted house carefully, two pirate-ballerinas on a new treasure island. They sit in what used to be a kitchen, pink satin slippers toeing the line, and talk about their lives, their short, but eternal pasts.
     Lily tells her it feels great to be challenged by a personality again and Madeline wonders what she means, she doesn't understand but tries to live up to her expectations. They sit and talk and Madeline sifts through the dirt floor with her fingers, telling Lily about Joe and wondering if she thinks he sounds cool or not and if it's all jaded, if it's all warped by the distortion in her mouth. She tells Lily about her mother and about living in the American Hotel, about how she used to sit in her closet and cry for days. She tells her about getting institutionalized and says, "Therapy is the religion of our time."
     There's something smooth in all this dirt, there's some advice to make simple and wonderful sense of it all, something they hope is wine, the magical numbness of sweet grape wine. There's nothing they can use as a corkscrew so Madeline smashes the neck of the bottle against one of the walls, spraying both of them with glass and red liquor and they drink it down, cutting open their lips and smiling.

*

     "Laid and left! Diddled and ditched!" Lily and Madeline laugh hysterically and drunkenly in the road, screaming into the empty night, passing their bottle of Night Train back and forth and stomping along the highway. The air is freezing and when they breathe, their throats constrict and burn and when they've got to pee they climb through the stiff, waist-high grass in the ditch to the flat field and squat and laugh and piss into the hard powdery brown dirt, melting its frost cover.
     They got really stoned at Lily's sometimes-boyfriend's house and had sex with him and one of his friends on a mattress in the corner, holding hands the whole time and laughing. Afterwards, they said they were going to the convenience store across the railroad tracks to buy some cigarettes and would return, but never did. Instead, they laughed so hard in the bathroom after Lily swiped a bottle of Night Train that they were sure the police would come and took off with their loot, forgetting all about Chad and Darren waiting for them in bed. They'd been walking ever since.
     Over the bridge, staring into the river below, Lily says she can't wait to get out of Oregon, away from all the Oregonian hopelessness and pathology. Madeline listens and doesn't, balances on the rail, stares at the huge sky and drinks the Night Train, which doesn't even burn going down anymore. She sings and feels some sort of victory, like she is at the top of some great totem pole of existence looking back and across the misty fields and snowcapped peaks of Lonely Mountain from a new and clear vantage point, like some exuberant person in a menthol cigarette ad.
     Listening to trains and sitting on cold concrete, they talk about things that expand ribs and fill lungs with helium and rush and that have to be said because they are burning to be out there - just like us, they are burning to be real. Lily says Everything will always be like it is now, standing on the rails, no train will ever come, and if you throw a white rock hard enough, you can sometimes make a spark.
     "Come walk with me," Madeline holds out her hand and the two of them balance and yawn, look up at the stars and down at the river. Headlights shine in the distance, getting bigger on the desolate road. Lily watches them, squinting her eyes and craning out her long, white neck.
     "It's Chad's truck," she says. "They're out on the search for us." Madeline starts laughing and Lily says it's hopeless how in love with her he is and Madeline shrugs and says Let's hide, but there's no where, really, to hide in the middle of a bridge and Lily says They're going to be so pissed! and the truck is driving onto the bridge when Madeline grabs Lily's hand and they slip together, backwards off the rail.
     They fall through the air, through the water, down, down, forty feet down, eyes open and paddling with giant bubbles escaping from their mouths to the top and Madeline thinks for an instant that the surface will be solid, a Plexiglass cover that they will bump their fingers against and be trapped underneath, inside the cold murkiness forever. They hold hands all the way, kicking and looking for each other, but in the black water they are only dark mermaids caught in peripheral vision and when they burst through the water's edge to the air they are both screaming with laughter.

*

      The walls of their apartment, once a light brown, are all lime green now, just like the walls in L.A., just like the walls in Joe's basement bedroom at his mother's house in Georgia. They paint black outlines of musicians they like and big, red band logos on top of the green, giving the walls a cluttered, negative print effect. Madeline scribbles quotes in corners and behind doorways, usually something by Emily Dickinson or from People magazine. Joe likes the way the walls look in the flicker of the tv set at night.
     Nothing ever happens and nothing ever changes, that's the way life is in these towns, that's the way life is everywhere, Madeline thinks, except maybe New York, maybe not Paris. When Madeline was eleven she bought a copy of The Sun Also Rises at a Methodist Church book sale. She read and re-read it, fascinated by its secrets and what she fantasized was its scandalous content. She knew life was everything Hemingway cracked it up to be, and someday she, too, would be rich and drunk and beautiful and say things like I'm a little tight, you chaps, so don't let's fight, not tonight. The biggest problems in the world were soluble in water, a few well-shed tears and everything would be fine, everything would be perfect.
     Angel told Madeline that sometimes she thinks in her voice, she'll just be doing something and all of a sudden realize that the voice in her head belongs to someone else. When Madeline told Lily, she said How pathetic and That's scary, but, alone, Madeline imagines Angel sitting in her basement "apartment" in her parents' house, watching Knots' Landing on videotape, eating and masturbating. She imagines her trying to find her "On" switch and narrating in a voice not her own.
     Now in the bath, Madeline forces her own head down with both hands and wishes the water were deeper so she could open her eyes and see herself floating down and down. She grabs at the short hair on the back of her head, short from the haircut she gave herself yesterday with the longest blade on her Swiss Army knife, and tells herself Nothing is real. Shower rain splashes on the clear flesh-colored pavement in front of her eyes and Madeline imagines falling and scraping the skin off her palms, screaming and embarrassing herself in front of a lot of people. It makes her smile.

Zoey Mondt

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