12
Lillian
“Why did you park so far away?”
asks Quinn as we approach the Mercury. There’s a warm night wind blowing through the city, which feels soft against my skin even though it carries the smell of overflowing dumpsters.
“Next time, you parallel park the station wagon,”
says Cyprus.
Quinn kicks a loose piece of concrete into the street.
“You know I can’t do that. Plus it’s your land yacht.”
I’m trying to visualize me, Quinn and Cyprus from a third-person perspective, as a passerby might see us. It’s a dangerous exercise. I might disassociate and have an anxiety attack.
Racing heart.
Tunnel vision.
Catastrophizing mind.
The feeling that nothing is real.
A desperate need to somehow prove to myself that I exist here, right now.
It’s the same as the fear of being dead, really. It’s a fear of nonexistence. Of nothing and aloneness. It’s odd how rationally I think about it when it’s not happening. But most times it’s not that bad, better than when I was younger. Instead of buckling under the weight, I slip out from under it by distracting myself or outlasting it.
From the outside, the three of us look like a full complement of friends going out for the night. From the inside, it feels like there’s a string that’s snapped. Unreplaced. Unreplaceable. We’re still a chord, but there’s a gap in the middle.
I’ve been analyzing Emelia’s message. I try to take it at face value, not coded to hurt me. I’m failing. Because who is th.
“Love, Emelia”
meant for? When she kept saying “friends,”
was that Cyprus and Quinn, or was that me too? How much time i.
“some time”? She said she neede.
“some space”
right before we broke up, and look what that became.
One part makes me smile. “Rock on.”
It was so cheesy, cringey, what-have-you. I was always trying to get her not to say things like that, but she couldn’t see why they’re awful. And she doesn’t even say them cynically. From that, there’s the grief, washing over me and threatening to sweep me away from my friends, off the sidewalk, into the street where I hope the cars will swerve around me.
Cyprus is gossiping about some big pop band.
“I’m not saying what Augustus Ash did was right, just that it was consensual.”
“Also, statutory rape,”
says Quinn.
“Which if you’re not famous, is, you know, a crime.”
I chime in even though I only peripherally know what they’re talking about.
“Maybe age gaps in relationships that make us uncomfortable now are the next sexual barrier to be broken down? Like how there were ‘anti-sodomy’ laws against anal sex in half the country until like twenty years ago. And now it’s normal.”
Cyprus stops to take a picture of an alcove between buildings with a bright piece of trash in the middle.
“Older men with younger women isn’t exactly a sexual barrier that needs breaking down.”
“I was thinking more like younger people in sexual relationships with each other,”
I say.
“Our lines around adulthood are arbitrary. Like there’s no magic age when you’re suddenly mature enough to not hurt people and not get yourself into toxic sexual relationships.”
“Do you know what we’re actually talking about?”
asks Quinn.
“I just saw an opportunity for controversy and seized it,”
I say.
“But we were talking about the Admiration trial, right?”
“Admirer.”
Cyprus crouches down to get a more cinematic angle on the trash.
“And strictly speaking, only Augustus is on trial. Alexander has been mysteriously quiet about it.”
“What was the age gap?” I ask.
Quinn pulls Cyprus away from the alcove.
“Four years. What they’ve released says it started when she was thirteen and he was seventeen. Last year he turned eighteen, she was only fourteen, and that’s what’s known as stat rape.”
“I’d like to retract my heedless argument,”
I say.
“That’s sleazy. That will never not be sleazy.”
“Predatory is the word.”
Quinn’s got ahold of Cyprus’s sleeve, and she’s switched over to taking video of him.
“Send help,”
she says to the camera.
“My friends no longer want me to produce artsy promotional content that’s also personal and makes us seem more interesting than the friends you already have.”
Truly, Cyprus is a genius at it. She says you have to believe publicity is a lie to play the game right. I get fed up too quickly, and Quinn’s mostly excited about designing logos and befriending people, less on the turning connections into opportunities. My eternal gratitude for Cyprus’s work goes somewhat under-expressed. In my defense, she once tried to make me dance on camera in middle school. It almost ended our friendship.
“Am I going to have to take your device away from you?”
I try to grab her phone, but she moves it just out of my reach, almost stumbling on some steps jutting out into the street to dodge me. She’d run into a burning building for it, I swear.
“Because Augustus is a celebrity,”
continues Quinn.
“They say she was a normal fan. Power imbalances.”
With him pulling her along and me trying to reach the phone, we’ve devolved into a six-legged stagger down the sidewalk.
“My name is Cyprus. If this is my last entry, know that I was killed by my bandmates in a heartless —”
“That’s not a short line.”
Quinn finally lets Cyprus’s arm drop.
We’ve rounded a corner to see people outside the entrance to the Mercury. We’ve arrived between the opener and the main act. There’s a mix of people trying and failing to get tickets along with some standing around smoking and chatting before Packing Boxes hits the stage. People are dressed in their own individual ideas of what indie rock should look like. So randomly. So self-consciously. They’re mostly older than us, which is typical. If industry-crafted pop bands like Admirer who play recycled-
sounding songs with all the lyrical complexity of corn puffs are trying to target my demographic, they’re fully missing me.
“That’s why we’re sneaking in,” I say.
Cyprus ends her video with.
“As you can see, Lillian has a long history of getting her perfectly innocent friends into trouble. Just one aspect of the badass allure you’ve come to know and love.”
Sneaking into shows is an art form. Emelia never wanted to, because rules and supporting musicians and venues and getting caught, et cetera, et cetera. Is it an art form I’ve perfected? No. But one time when I was fifteen, I managed to see the second half of a sold-out Fluorescent concert. I’m just chasing that high, baby.
Here are some sample methods:
A — Fake digital ticket. Sometimes it works if you have an old ticket from the same venue and you do a little bit of editing. And if it won’t scan you in, people do tend to jump to blaming technology.
B — Slip in with a larger group between the opener and main act. Whoever’s watching is usually relying on remembering faces.
C — Get ahold of the same stamp the venue uses, if it’s a venue where they stamp your hand (though some change theirs). Can also work if you’re underage but look older and you’ve just got to drink.
D — Bluff that you forgot your tickets or your phone’s dead. Possibly Emelia was less concerned about getting caught and more embarrassed about the time I tried to pull this off with her. I figured we’d have a better shot at it if we played the really adorable, incredibly in love sapphic couple. It almost worked too.
E — Find a back entrance or side door, and hopefully if you accidentally wind up in the greenroom the musicians will at least sign your shirt before someone kicks you out.
Initialism is one venue I’ve never tried to sneak into. I respect Christensen way too much, and I’m always up to date enough to get tickets. Though he did once pay me twenty dollars to try some of my methods out and see how effective his door people were at recognizing the tricks. One hundred percent effective, unfortunately.
Tonight, we’re aiming for option E. I don’t know of a back/side entry for the Mercury, so if that fails, we’ll try to merge with a larger group going back in, using the classic option B.
The Mercury’s only a few years old, built in what used to be an incredibly dingy club called Cock Rock. I think the new owners took one look around and gutted it rather than cleaning it. It’s on the lower two floors of an old brick building in a neighborhood that’s in the midst of the transition from run-down to hip. The interior has artfully exposed ductwork and pipes.
I call it gentrification. Emelia said if she had a beautiful apartment with an exposed brick wall, she’d know that she’d made it in life. She’d die happy, gentrification be damned.
And someday, I could see myself there with her. It was a rare thought of getting older that didn’t fill me with dread. Thinking about it now is just another missing string.
Sometimes you need a win. Sneaking into a sold-out Packing Boxes concert would be an emotional win. For a moment, I could forget three is the wrong number for this group, for the band, for everything. It’s an iffy thing to hang my hope on, but you take what you can get.
Me, Quinn and Cyprus skip the crowd and go around to the back of the building, where there’s someone standing on a garbage can trying to reach the bottom of the fire escape. They’re facing away from us, standing on their tiptoes. Short haircut, black suit jacket with a subtle white paisley design weaving around it, knee-length black pleated skirt, fuzzy calves.
“Sasha?”
asks Quinn.
The person on the garbage can turns around, and their face jumps straight to a sense of familiarity. They skip or hide that flicker of confusion and disorientation from running into people where you did not remotely expect to run into them.
Meanwhile, my brain grinds for a second before I realize they’re the one from the bike racks. I blame the great outfit. Even standing on a trash can, they look classier than I ever have in my life. Their impossibly white shirt buttoned all the way up and tucked loosely into their skirt really clinches it.
It’s all pointing toward my initial distracted gender assumption being one hundred percent wrong. Though Quinn does always tell me my radar for queerness is broken.
I’d counter that maybe I’m just incredibly open-minded about the relationship between gender expression, sexual orientation and gender identity. More likely, I’m destined for a life of inadvertently hitting on people who aren’t oriented to me.
As if I needed any help generating awkward social situations.