Ashley Roth
We glue bindis between our eyes and sing off-key to Tragic Kingdom. We dance on dirty laundry and change into the clothes our parents won’t let us wear — slips that want to be dresses, short plaid skirts, the dog collar and leash my dad found tangled in my socks.
“Do you know what this means?” he had asked before grabbing my shoulders and pressing my head into the wall. I shut my eyes and said I thought it was punk and goth and all the things he called adolescent and strange. He shook his head and yanked my paintings off the living room wall.
We start a band. We call it Delirium Star. My dad gives me a guitar for Christmas and signs me up for lessons with a man who looks like Andrew McCarthy and quizzes me on chords I never practice. He won’t let me learn “Cherub Rock” until we practice “Happy Birthday” and the theme song from Hawaii Five-0. Dad shows me how to play “Smoke on the Water.” He says my rhythm is off. She plays her dad’s forgotten bass. We lean our instruments on the wall and will them to work. I can smell the watery rust on her bass’s thick strings. One night her dad comes home singing “Home on the Range” and waves wiggly, bloody pieces of meat at me — says, “It’s venison, it’s Bambi.” He pushes us out of the way and cradles the bass like he cradles the deer he kills, the way he probably once held her. We hold hands while he strums something melodic and sad we’ve never heard before.
We conduct interviews with my dad’s old tape recorder. We make fun of boys with yellow bleached hair and pretend to marry the ones who look like Ethan Hawke. We invent elaborate, sensational divorces and fantasize about becoming junkies who only wear sequins, fishnets, and boots from Wild Pair. She’ll wear the silver ones with the glowing rubbery sole; I’ll wear black ones with chunky, serrated heels.
We record ourselves singing the songs we write in Sharpie on our bedroom walls, lyrics that don’t rhyme on purpose. Lyrics about things like patricide and love we know nothing about. We interview each other with dramatic syrupy voices; we ask about masturbation and orgasms we’ve never experienced. We turn off the lights and try it ourselves from opposite sides of the room with rumbling handheld massagers we muffle with blankets her great-grandma crocheted. The blankets smell like rotting flowers and wet vitamins.
“Are you done?” she asks. I hear the tape recorder click before I tell her I’m finished. I worry about being famous one day.
When Kurt Cobain died, we came to school with our cut out articles from the Oregonian. We cried and the newspaper ink smeared into our fingerprint ridges. We carried the folded scraps, lodging them in the plastic pocket of our decorated binders. The other kids tease us. They say our leather jackets smell funny and our flannel is frayed. They don’t understand why we bring our lunch in metal toolboxes or why we shop at Value Village on purpose. They don’t understand why we sew patches on our backpacks, over the holes in our jeans. They don’t understand why we still mourn Kurt. They like Amy Grant and Boyz II Men. They like that our teacher brings a shiny acoustic guitar and sings to us about fractions and brain parts and the meaning of irony. She and I hate his guitar. We hate the way his hair swoops like Jason Priestley. We hate how tan his skin is and imagine he’s from somewhere like Florida and probably hates how much it rains here. When Kurt Cobain died, he didn’t play his guitar, but didn’t stop smiling either. We don’t eat our lunch, we just sit in the quiet hallway kicking the bottoms of our Converse on the slippery stairs.
“How would you do it?” she asks, her hands little balls nestled between her denim legs.
I think I might jump off the Hollywood Sign when I visit my mom in the summer. An old actress did that in the 30s when they told her she was washed up, that there was someone better. My mom and her husband live within walking distance of the sign. They would never hear me walking up the dry sandy road. They wouldn’t hear the metallic ring of chain-linked fence when I jump over it and crawl up the letters I imagine feel like plastic, like the handles of spoons.
“Well?” she asks again.
“I wouldn’t want it to be messy,” I tell her, “so maybe I’d swallow pills. That always seems like a fancy way to go.”
“But what about the ones that puke all over themselves? That’s messy.”
“I’d turn on the oven and stick my head in.”
“Nope. That’s taken. It wouldn’t even be right to do it that way—it’s like she owns it. Pick another.”
“I’d stuff silk stockings into the pipe of a car and park it in a garage.”
“You don’t have a garage.”
“My aunt does.”
She smiles, but her eyes fill with tears. Her irises and pupils look like they’re floating on an oceanic horizon. I wonder if she’s even seen that—the sun dipping into a blackened strip of water, painting the tips orange and pink and yellow.
“The way I’d do it would be messy,” she tucks her chin into her chest and her shoulders shake. “I’d take that gun my dad uses to kill deer that didn’t do anything to him and I’d blow my brain all over his living room. Maybe all over his baseball cards he keeps in that glass cabinet.”
She looks at me again and wipes her eyes.
“I’d be like Kurt,” she smiles.
The bell rings and we stand up. We walk back to class and talk about how we want to get silver pants and want to make jewelry from old bottle caps.
ASHLEY N. ROTH writes from Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has previously appeared in decomP, Literary Orphans, Moonsick Magazine, and others. You may find her anywhere there are historic buildings, stray cats, vegan sweets — or at www.ashleynroth.com.