It's all so dreamy and she loves to nod and scratch her ear. It is a lot like a lovely pale shade of shell. The world is in a brand new shade of pale-ease today. Everything tingles and she rubs her body, ears, nose, cheeks, neck, chin, stomach, under her breasts, above her crotch, only stopping to turn over her cassette, to wonder why couldn't her name be Candy? She presses her lips together - hard. She rubs around, but not on them, so as not to fuck up her lipstick. She sticks her hand down her thermals to scratch her inner-thigh, vaguely considering getting up to scratch, no, not scratch, to wash her face so she can rub her lips all she wants. She thinks of Javier and is startled by a shadow.
     When Lily opened her eyes in the warm darkness of this morning, a feeling of dread came over her. Well, not dread, exactly. More like immobility, or fear of change. She wanted only to turn back over into the comfort of the deep gray of her bedroom and the weight of Magdalen's arm (protecting me? holding me back?) across her chest. But then, sitting on the airplane, it all seemed like an old dream, a scene from a cooling tv set - picture fades to black. Magdalen wondered how Lily could guess where she was going when where she came from was so unclear.
     "I don't need to know. I will be walking, wandering, unafraid." They crossed the Mississippi on a bridge, on their feet. Hot winds, the backwash of semi-trucks threatened to blow them into the dark, creamy brown river, and then, fainting from heat by the side of the road, the gravel road, they sang, shouted poetry, dreamt of dewy forests and cool paths. Magdalen said these are the magic pastures of our youth, these are the crystalline moments to gaze upon in dreams.
     Lily said she felt strange and confused and Magdalen talked to her and Lily said "You say the nicest things," and Magdalen told her she was the nicest girl and that she loved her, too. And all across this great country seventeen year old girls are reading Kerouac for the first time, turning on to try and burn. But when it doesn't happen, who's next, who is it that relieves loneliness so great even bestiality seems close at hand, no longer obscure.
     Sitting in the sky on the Air-fone they say - It was cool talking to you - and - Yeah - after hours of nonstop verbal searching. And, after they say goodbye, Lily hears her whisper - I love you - quickly, softly and then hang up. But she goes anyway, she's got to go anyway, and the descent begins at sunrise. Orange stripes hang above massive expanses of black water. She remembers the detachable rafts she read about in her safety manual, looks down on New York, its impossibly bright shores. It's not even the city, but millions of tiny lights are burning - all of them green. There's no stopping from here on out.
     Later her Cuban taxi driver softly croons "Dream a little dream for me," and almost gets into five accidents. An angry bicycle messenger pounds on her window as they gently bump into him amid the slowly milling ocean of yellow cabs and black sedans.
     "Imagine a girl, contrasted by me, this song, this city, sitting by a campfire at night, in the woods," - dream a little dream of me - "She's thinking of me, but I, chin upturned, look ahead at busy crowds, flashing signs and think only of the future." But her words are lost on the cabby as he swerves to miss a pedestrian.
     The trees grow darker, closer together, they are a throbbing black mass - each one indistinguishable from the next. Dream a little dream for me.

II.

     Clanking steel doors slam closed with a deafening crash, a wood gate is added protection. The old freight elevator sets off with a jerk and Lily snaps her gum. The Boy waits outside in his Scirocco with the sheepskin-covered steering wheel and tinted windows, eating out of some hapless customer's take-out box. Lily only agreed to deliver these stupid cardboard cartons to get the fuck out of that smelly can. "I don't know what I'm doing with that kid anyway," she thinks. They'd spent the last three days together, ever since he'd caught her trying to steal his guitar. They were on the subway when Lily casually picked up the battered case and wandered off with it, wandered through graffiti-splashed walls with her new guitar, looking for a sign of life. It was nearly two stops later when The Boy noticed it was gone. Lily hadn't gone too far, she'd decided instead to find herself a spot to try and make enough change for the ride back into Manhattan and a phone. He found her muddling her way through "Hang on Sloopy" and chewing on her lip. "Whatever," Lily had shrugged, dropping the guitar and standing up when The Boy confronted her.
     "Hey, hand me that box, will you Jane?" he asks in that annoying voice of his every so often. "Could you open it too?"
Lily thinks he's so gross as he sticks shiny fingers into a grease-spotted box, lifts them back out, shoving more than a mouthful of someone else's Beef Lo Mein into his already working jaws. Lily sees them careening over the cracked pavement, two cartoon idiots foolishly outrunning death at every turn. The Boy arches his eyebrows at her, holding up a fingerful of oily noodles. Lily almost starts to cry or puke because she wants to run and run and instead she can only sit there and remind him that she is a vegetarian.
     The radio is playing "Wild Horses" by the Rolling Stones and Lily thinks she remembers someone playing it for her once and then she remembers it was she who had played it for a tiny girl late one night and made her cry. "You'll never love me the way I love you, Lily, you can't love anyone. You think love is giving up everything for one grand gesture, one word that will be the proof of everything." Lily had told her that she couldn't prove anything worth proving and that she was making her tired.
     These are the thoughts that everyone has. Someday everyone will know you are a fraud. Lily thinks it is the best thing when she is alone, alone to piss by that old road, wind and moss whispering through her legs. Lily says she doesn't need another to show her the beauty in this stupid world, she's probably seen the best of it already. Magdalen used to straddle one of her legs and kiss her on the mouth when she was playing the guitar and looking away. Sometimes Lily would play "Space Cowboy" just to piss her off. But Magdalen never got pissed, she usually got hurt. "I want to be with someone by myself," Lily would say.
     "Man, I've been snorting too much speed," The Boy says after his third trip to the bathroom at All-American Burger. "Or maybe it's that valium from last night. I feel shakey." They go out and get into his car to head back for another delivery. He drives like a maniac and Lily doesn't even laugh at him when he thinks that a fire hydrant is a midget. She feels bored. She's not that mad when he asks her to make the last delivery for him, he just can't climb those fucking stairs again tonight. The old studio building on Broadway looks pretty shitty but the seedy side of life has always been appealing.
     Lily always used to say she didn't want to forget any of the words she'd ever said. She used to say "If only I could give a certain something so I could save, retain a moment or interaction, so I could hear things I missed, record something I otherwise wouldn't know existed." But the echoes through these halls could fill anybody with complacency. The concrete ceiling, infinite, cracked, rectangular fluorescent light tubes buzz and glare. A heavy door slams behind her.
     Lily says she can tell right away when a man wants something from her. She can always read the predatory look they get, it's not too hard to ignore. The man who opens the door for his Chinese has that look, he has a really big smile. Lily wonders if anything can disappoint her anymore and she doesn't have to think twice when the Steven-man invites her in.
     "Have some food, Jane. Or, actually, you must be sick to death of this food by now," he laughs amiably. He isn't embarrassed to eat in front of her. He has blue eyes. Lily tells him that blue eyes remind her of a broken ashtray and he looks at her with a protective sort of fatherly lust. Lily makes up a story about a boyfriend she used to have with blue eyes who threw a cigarette-filled ashtray against a cement wall when she refused to go to New Orleans with him. Steven looks like he really likes the story but instead of his face Lily can only see salmon-colored chunks of ceramic bouncing and breaking into powder on the floor.
     Magdalen used to tell her, "You fuck me up," and Lily would say, "No, I fuck you," and "You're pretty. Fucked up." She would ask her who she thought she was and feel stupid when Magdalen wouldn't say anything, just pick at her unraveling sweater.
     Lily tells Steven stories about her mother and her cat, Oprah. As she talks, Steven keeps this really earnest look on his face and tries to appear intense. "I went to a couple of hippie boarding schools, got fed up, left, toured around for awhile with some assholes in an Oldsmobile until the peyote ran out and I split."
     They say their names are Mary and I'm Jane and he says his name is Neal and he keeps them entertained with pictures of cloudy kids with blurry eyes and sharp teeth and with the passenger bucket that floats up with a pump and down with a slow hiss. She stares out the window, trying to focus on fuzzy moons and deep trenches, the dense warmth of the trees that aren't really trees at all but friends standing shoulder to shoulder wondering where she is and what she is doing in that cab.
     Steven smiles an enduring sort of smile at her, one that says I'm glad I asked you in, this is better than the New Yorker. Lily thinks he's the type of man that you meet at an opening and he acts like you're so charming he just has to say Let's Go Somewhere To Talk. He's exactly that man. He's a boring type, but it doesn't really matter, Lily likes to tell stories and she says the thrill is in herself. Later Steven looks sad and laments the fact that she is from California and is leaving in two days. He barely blinks when she tells him her name isn't really Jane.
     Lily says she didn't always used to be this way. She used to be straight up. It was that boy who fucked her up. The things she used to do for that boy, things she was too smart for, things that were too big of a gamble, too big of a risk. Lily says the prize isn't worth the game. But she loved him. He's no motherfucker, and wasn't it sincerity that echoed in his voice when he sincerely thanked or pled or said good-bye. (My girlfriend's here...) But what the fuck. All false idols hit the dirt someday, they all fall someday. Lily says he was just her first bad influence and that everybody has one.
     Gray-eyed girls are always double-edged she thinks and drags her finger across the centerfold's lips, decides for the third time that tonight she's leaving while Steven is at his gallery. Lily slouches on his futon, sucking on Coffee Nips and waiting for him to come back with her baba ganoosh. Until then, she stares at tv, smugly thinking that her own life is incredibly similar to a bad sitcom. She calls Magdalen's parents' house, planning on regaling her with exciting tales of the big city and demanding her clothes back. Magdalen's slow mother says that Magdalen has run off again to God-knows-where and sounds surprised that she's not with her. Lily slams down the phone and sits straight up, cracking her knuckles and shaking her hair out of her eyes. She looks around Steven's stupid studio and feels cheated. She stalks over to the lame children's book Steven is writing and illustrating, the one he described as "sort of out-there". He'd told her, "It gets really crazy, you know, everything the boy wishes for really does come true - like, the ground is the sky. Really wild." Lily sees herself ripping it to pieces and then burning the remains, like at a funeral.
     She misses California, its bright waves that expand her eyes, clearing them out, putting them back in her head. When she was in California she used to think that when someone loved her, they would do anything for her, they would know exactly what to do. If she had a cut would he flick away the dried blood with his tongue? If it was on the instep of her foot the way it was so many times when she was three and four would he smooth the flap of skin back into place as he lovingly licked it clean? Lapped it pure? She wanted to have beautiful shoulders. She wanted him to love her in the glassy waves and the warm sand. She wanted to make him happy.

Zoey Mondt

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