Morning, said her father.
The kitchen smelled sweet from her dad’s famous French toast. Charlie sat down and let her father pile three slices onto a plate in front of her, which made her feel little again, and also a little spoiled. She wondered what Kayla’s house looked like.
Let’s go for lunch later?
Yeah, great, she said.
But her father, a workaholic, returned to his desk and stayed hunkered down long past lunchtime. He’d told her more than once that he always wrote his best code on the weekends, when no one else was around to interrupt his flow with questions. So she left him to it, made herself a peanut butter sandwich, and pulled up Kyle’s number. Maybe she could at least get more weed.
hey, she said.
C! glad u messaged. just about to ditch this phone. how u been? how’s jeff?
dunno. transferred.
U move?
No, going to deaf school.
right on. I’m in east colson now.
wanna meet up?
have a show tonite…u should come tho!
A show, Charlie thought. She couldn’t remember Kyle having played an instrument. Then again, she hadn’t asked.
the gas can at 7. it’s on vine.
ok, she said.
She flicked on the television, half-watching as she weighed her options. She eventually settled on a classic tactic from the Divorced Parents Playbook: she told her dad she was going to visit her mother and would go straight from there to school the next morning.
You’re staying at your mom’s…on purpose? he said.
Charlie shrugged.
I’m helping with Junior Miss Ohio costumes, she said.
Have you been eating those laundry detergent tablets? I saw that on the news.
Charlie rolled her eyes and told him she would take the bus—this part was true, technically—then took the SORTA over to East Colson.
She disembarked in the parking lot of a casino, nauseous from the bus’s sway and heavy brake. It was already dark out, and though she didn’t want to admit it, Charlie was afraid. It wasn’t that she’d been fed a diet of six o’clock news horror stories by her high-strung mother—well, it wasn’t only that—what felt scarier was all the empty bits, where there was no one around at all. The stretch of Vine between the shops in Colson Center and the Gas Can was an expansive ruin. Even though she knew that just two streets over, hipsters were lining up for BBQ and microbrews, here was block after block of buildings boarded, sealed, and posted with neon No Trespassing edicts. The plywood was painted with candy-colored windows and doors and flower boxes, like a defunct gingerbread village—someone’s well-intentioned attempt at manufacturing cheer had quickly devolved into a metaphor for the city’s failures: surface-level disguise for decaying foundations.
Charlie had not been alive for the riots, but she knew about them, or of them; all through her childhood, East Colson would routinely make the list of Ohio’s most dangerous neighborhoods, and talking heads would appear on TV to point fingers. There were always renewal projects—tax abatements that enticed the breweries, the bionics plant, and that casino testing the waters. There were even rumors that an apartment complex not unlike her father’s was in development. Though most of the night’s more illicit activities had now been pressed out against the city’s seams, the disquiet remained in this boneyard of row homes.
When she got to the Gas Can it looked closed, with only a few teenagers and their smoke cloud out front, but the door opened when she pulled it, and inside there were a few promising signs suggesting a concert: a bar with stools and hanging lamps and booths around the perimeter, a shuttered window with COAT CHECK spray-painted opposite, and a plastic table with a pair of cardboard boxes, off which someone had ripped a flap and written T-Shirts $15. Charlie walked by the bar and through a set of black doors, which led to a large room with a stage at its front, also empty. A black sheet hung across the back wall, THE ROBESPIERRES! scrawled in uneven white paint across it.
She looked at her phone—it was 7:06. Two boys appeared—one with shaggy hair, the other with a mohawk—together heaving a huge black amplifier across the stage. Surely she was in the wrong place if the stage wasn’t even set. She turned to leave, but she could see the shaggy boy had spotted her. He shielded his eyes against the spotlight and called: Hey! You know seven means eight, right?
The mohawked boy snickered.
I was, uh, looking for Kyle?
The boys shared a glance, then busted out laughing.
Oh shit! said the shaggy one.
Is he here?
The boy jumped down from the stage.
Did you say “Kyle”？
She nodded.
Oh SHIT!
The mohawked boy, still onstage, was now doubled over with his hands on his knees. The boy beside Charlie turned and said something to him she couldn’t see. Dicks, she thought, and shuffled back toward the swinging doors. He gripped her shoulder.
No no, he said. He’s waiting for you.
Slash! The boy shouted toward the wings and devolved into laughter again as he pulled Charlie up the steps to a greenroom off the side of the stage.
Inside, the room was dim and hazy with smoke. A girl with short blue hair looked Charlie up and down with a gaze so searing Charlie felt preemptively embarrassed for the uncool things she was bound to do that night.
Your jailbait’s here, the girl said.
The boy who had been Kyle looked up from a tangle of wires and smiled. He was recognizable around the eyes, but little else about him was as she remembered. He was much skinnier, but his clothes were also tighter, his hair longer and greasier. At Jeff his style had been nondescript, borderline preppy—a boy in a polo shirt among a sea of other boys in polos. Now he wore a black shirt with the sleeves cut off, revealing slightly crooked black and red flag tattoos, one on each deltoid, that she knew were definitely not there last year. The starkness of his transformation was bemusing—what could have changed him so quickly and so thoroughly? She wondered whether it had been a mistake to come.
C! he said. Long time.
He stood and threw his arm around Charlie, offered her his cigarette. She shook her head. He shrugged.
Save yourself for _______ anyway. Everyone, this is Charlie.
Kyle pointed to the shaggy one, the mohawked one, the girl.
Greg, Sid, Lem, he said.
Lem? said Charlie? Like…lemon?
Yeah, said Kyle, just as the girl shook her head vigorously. Yes, that’s what it sounds like, ignore her.
Why did they have a fit when I called you “Kyle”？ she said.
He reddened.
Long story. But it’s Slash now.
The silliness of this nickname was a relief, in a way, and Charlie felt the urge to roll her eyes, but when the light hit right, she noticed a sheen of scar tissue running diagonal across his forehead to the bridge of his nose, a bald spot in his eyebrow in its wake.
I’m not jailbait, said Charlie, though in truth she didn’t know exactly how old Kyle-Slash was—nineteen? Twenty? Was that illegal?
Still an infant, Lem said looking up from a pile of makeup she’d dumped on the floor. That was the problem with hearing people—you never could tell when they were paying attention.
Doesn’t look like an infant, said Sid.
Kyle-Slash laughed. The girl jumped up and whacked the front spike of Sid’s mohawk, leaving it hanging limp to one side.