From a novel in progress, tentatively titled Near Wild Heaven, written at Wayward Writer camp in the Catskills.
by Jessica Beard
Cassie showed up on a Saturday afternoon at my coffee shop. She was anxious as I counted my tips. She wanted to go downtown and sit at Cafe Pergolesi and smoke cigarettes.
“Dude, I just spent all day in a coffee shop, can’t we do something else?” I had spent three days in a coffee shop and two nights in a row at Matt’s family home and was starting to feel claustrophobic. Fridays were usually my night at Jess’s, but she called the shop and told me she wasn’t feeling good at around seven. I didn’t want to go home; Maggie had been out of work for a week and on the couch again with a back problem that was starting to feel like a pill problem. But I was glad to see Cassie, even if she wanted to go to the Perg.
We got in her boat car and listened to a new mixtape I made for Jess but didn’t get to bring to her house. “Wow, this Bikini Kill is pretty rad,” Cassie said and bobbed her head.
“Yeah, it’s cool, but it’s wild how crazy everyone is going for it. It’s like they didn’t know any of those other grrl bands ever existed.”
Cassie nodded and stared out at the highway. She was distracted. I wondered if her sister was ok. We spend much of the trip downtown each with our heads elsewhere, watching the familiar valley sights smear by—redwood burl carved into the shape of a bear, house with a blue tarp for a roof, three pit bulls running on the side of the road, their tongues hanging out as they veer off onto a dirt road.
We parked two blocks over from the Perg. We walked by the brightly painted Victorians of downtown Santa Cruz. Ever since I was a little girl, I picked my favorite one for that day and wished I would live there. Today I loved the yellow one with blue and white trim. It had a massive trumpet plant in the front yard and wisteria growing up the side on a white trellis.
While Cassie put on a sweater and fixed her hair in the car mirror, I stared at the yellow house and breathed in the wisteria sweetness mingled with the pungent trumpet. It reminded me of my mom’s latest place that had a smaller but no less fragrant trumpet plant in the back yard. My mom had left a message last time I was home that she wanted me to come visit sometime this summer. Another house to pack for. I would need to ask for time off work. Cassie took her skateboard out of the trunk, and we headed for the Perg.
Cassie brought out our raspberry mochas while I found a table in the back. Pergolesi was packed with high school and college kids out on break. I put Cassie’s skateboard under the chair next to me and grabbed an ashtray from the top of the garbage can. Cassie put the drinks down and I grabbed the chocolate espresso bean from the top of the whipped cream and popped it in my mouth. We positioned our chairs to look out onto the tables filled with kids like us out of high school or college for the summer. Crust punks hung around out front asking for change or a sandwich with their dogs wagging tails at each passerby. I saw a girl I knew who dropped out of junior high with them. She looked lost and happy in her baggy brown pants and old black hoodie. She had long blonde hair in middle school and now her head was shaved to mousey brown with black tips. Her green eyes glowed and she held a kitten in the pouch of her sweatshirt.
“So I heard Julia is going to be gone for a while,” Cassie said and held her pack out to me. She had started smoking menthols and I was warming up to them. I grabbed one and lit it and inhaled, the cool mint rising up my nostrils and into my throat.
“Yeah, I would imagine she needs to get out of here for a while. I mean her dad’s picture is in the newspaper. I would transfer too.” My lips were dry and I pulled out my cherry Chapstick.
Cassie laughed. “Didn’t my sister get you some good red lipstick Jean? What happened to that?”
“I really am so bad at putting on lipstick,” I looked at Cassie who always had perfect cat-eye
makeup and burgundy lips.
“When I go to college, I’ll learn,” I laughed and knew I wouldn’t.
“Poor Julia, isn’t this the second meth lab her dad has been busted for?” I said and looked out at
the goth kids in the corner. A breeze brought the smell of their clove cigarettes mixed with the star jasmine that was planted over the trash cans to try and squash the smell of the trash cans. One of the goth girls had clearly just dyed her hair the most perfect fire engine red and her hands were stained with the dye. She still looked amazing, but I thought to myself that if I was a goth girl with dyed hands, today would have been the perfect day to wear lace gloves. I loved coming to the Perg and watching all the kids in their costumed groups. I wondered if Cassie and me were categorized by the kids the same way we gave names to their groups. Our worn out thrift store clothes probably got us named or at least noticed as way out valley indie kids or backwoods alterna-teens or something.
Cassie caught me watching the goths in the corner and brought us back to Julia and the valley. “I mean, I would never say this to Julia of course, at least not right now, but maybe she should get emancipated like Wendy did when her parents wouldn’t accept she wasn’t Mormon.”
I nodded. It wasn’t my story to tell, but I knew Wendy wasn’t having the best time out on her own without her parents. They had moved back to their mission in the Philippines and Wendy had started off living with her boyfriend and his parents. Wendy wasn’t ready for that kind of life yet and dropped out of school to get a job so she could live with Kristen, our friend who had graduated a few years ago and lived in a studio in Santa Cruz. The two girls shared the tiny space and partied pretty hard. The last time I saw Wendy she was here, at the Perg. She was waiting in line for the bathroom, and she looked tired and maybe on a bit of a bender. She asked me how I was doing and if I had any money. I flashed back to the two of us watching Twin Peaks at her house while her parents were gone just a few years ago, how her chubby cheeks and braces made her seem so sweet and younger than me even. Now her skin was gray, and her natural roots had almost halfway grown out her bob haircut.
Cassie flicked her cigarette and looked at me to respond but I didn’t agree so I sat quietly. She figured out her almost independent life because it was tied to her high school boyfriend. There were a few couples we knew who rode out their tumultuous homes together, staying a few nights at one’s house and then the other. She and Josh both worked to support their families, but they also had an independence from them in each other. I could barely stand two nights in a row with Matt’s family without feeling trapped. I had fantasized about getting emancipated from my family too, but I had no idea where I would go. I also didn’t know how I would do it. I wondered how you untie yourself from a semi-estranged, on again off again mother? It seemed complicated and too much trouble as I only had a year and a half left of the chaos to ride. I took a drink of my mocha and felt good to be on the Pergolesi porch with my friend. But Cassie looked perplexed. I could hear her click her tongue ring against her teeth while she watched me watch all the people.
“Doesn’t it bother you, Jean?” she asked in a tone that popped me out of my haze.
“What? Does what bother me?” Many things bothered me, but right now I was just trying to enjoy something.
Cassie stared at me, her cat-eye heavy on her lid making her look mean. “Jean, doesn’t it make you mad that all these kids, us kids, are dragged into our parent’s garbage? It’s not ok.”
I looked at her and just wanted to keep watching these kids and suck up their fashion and laugh at their
dyed hands. I was so consumed with all my caretaker drama most of the time that I just wanted to sit here love on all my fellow weirds.
Cassie stared at me. “When were you home last Jean? You didn’t get Dan’s call?” She looked ghost white.
“No, Christian Dan–from Emily’s youth group? Why would he call me?” I sipped my mocha and pulled out another cigarette from the box. One of Matt’s bandmates walked by and waved. I waved back but didn’t make eye contact, keeping my eyes on Cassie.
“Emily lost her shit at youth group yesterday, Jean. She told Dan Taylor that Dean was coming into their rooms at night and . . . ” Cassie gulped down a tear and looked up at the sky. The jasmine garbage smell wafted over our table. I took a drag on my cigarette. I thought about asking Cassie to finish her sentence. But I didn’t need to. I knew.
A warbled tape started playing over the crunchy old speaker and the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now” blared out. Neither Cassie nor I spoke. We sat and finished our cigarettes in silence until the last minutes of Hatful of Hollow. The plaintive refrain rang out over the chatter of the smokers on the patio, please, please, please, let me get what I want this time. I had just been listening to this with Matt at his house right before I got scared to go home. Now it rang differently as I thought about my friend. My head hurt as I tried to imagine what she was going through. Was she at home? Were there police? How was Liz holding up and . . . Emily. I thought about the last year and how all the symptoms made sense now in the most unsettling way: the mysterious pain, the sisters always wanting me to stay over, the feeling in my body whenever I saw Dean. I felt sick. My mocha was cold and the whipped cream stuck to the side of the narrow glass—I pushed it away.
Cassie took the last drag off her cigarette and said, “let’s go to the Metro, we can call Dan on the payphone and see what we can do.”
Something like rage started burning in me and I looked at Cassie and nodded.
Jessica Beard is a writer and organizer living in the foggy southeast end of San Francisco. This is an excerpt of a novel in progress, all of which was written in the Literary Kitchen.
