Chapter Eleven Ana #2
It was total chaos, cars everywhere like in a parking lot where someone forgot to paint the lines. Music blasted from a speaker propped up in the trunk of a hatchback. It was so loud the bass notes shook the ground. One giant party on the last Saturday before the start of school.
They found a spot between a black windowless van and a silver sedan. Everyone could see them with the top down. IndyAna with cans of soda they’d sneaked out of the kitchen at Avery Hall. Kayla with her Jack Daniel’s. Jolene lit a cigarette.
The passenger door to the black van opened, and a wiry boy hopped out, his jeans falling from his narrow hips. He pulled them up, tucked in his T-shirt.
The driver’s side door opened next. Another boy. Then the double back doors, two more boys.
It was dark, well past nine. And dark in Echo was dark, even with all the parked cars, and the headlights of a gray pickup behind them. Even with the overhead lights shining from inside the van.
And in that darkness, the boys were just shapes in jeans and T-shirts. Still, they were boys, and Ana felt her brain out of sync, like she, too, had taken three swigs of Jack Daniel’s and her emotions were now drunk, not doing their job.
The show was over. Indy’s bruise crisis was over, for now, because Jolene had convinced her that they could make it better.
The getting-ready part was over, the drive with the singing and wind in their hair—also over.
It was time for this—boys getting out of vans in the dark—and where were the emotions this required?
Ana tried to analyze the boys like a science project, because the thinking part of her brain never failed her.
The tall wiry one. The sporty one. The two from the back, somewhere in between. Short hair. Long hair. Straight, wavy. One wore a jean jacket.
Then Jolene, with a different, more astute observation, said, “There’s four of them . . . and there’s four of us.”
“Cool,” Kayla said, taking another swig of Jack Daniel’s.
Indy leaned over, her eyes still red and swollen from crying, her breath smelling of alcohol and her face relaxed. “I need to find Hugo,” she whispered, as if she hadn’t noticed the four boys and what was about to happen.
Which then did happen when Jolene opened her door, and then Kayla opened hers, and the wiry boy from the passenger side said, “Want to party?”
They were around them in a second, Wavy Hair by Indy’s door, Wiry by hers. Jean Jacket went to the front to meet up with Jolene, and Sporty went straight for Kayla. As if they’d decided all of this beforehand.
And there they were, at last, Ana’s emotions catching up to the facts. Excitement. Check. Curiosity. Check. Anticipatory humiliation. Check. Fear. Check. Check.
“We’ve got some cool shit inside . . .” Sporty said.
Jolene liked the sound of that. “Really?” she said. “Like what?”
Kayla walked to the back of the van, and then Jolene followed. “Come on!” they shouted in unison.
Indy looked at Ana and shrugged. Like she was silently saying it’ll be okay if we stay together, and also like maybe it will be fun.
But Indy was a little drunk, and away from The Palace and Patrice and Dawn, so there was no telling what part of Indy she was seeing, and if she’d ever seen it before.
Excitement and curiosity won the battle of emotions, and both girls climbed out of the back seat.
The inside of the van was set up with beanbag chairs and a shag rug and two enormous speakers. Wiry put on Led Zeppelin, and Kayla shook her head and whispered louder than she realized. “I think we’ve been transported to the seventies.”
“Shhh!” Jolene gave her a shoulder bump.
But Kayla didn’t shush. “We’re a decade off with the shirts,” she said. “We should have gone with some bell-bottoms. And clogs maybe.”
Jolene ignored her, plopping down in the red beanbag. And when Jean Jacket plopped down next to her, Jolene’s smile was so big Ana thought it might devour her whole face. Because this was happening. Boys were happening.
“What do you think?” Sporty asked, his face beaming with pride at the party room they’d created in their motor vehicle.
He sat on the floor, cross-legged, and Kayla sat next to him.
Ana watched Kayla’s face change, slightly, the way Indy’s had.
Her disdain for life taking on more feminine attributes.
What was that look, Ana wondered? Pouty—that was it. Kayla, of all people, looking pouty.
This was going to be trouble.
Jolene asked Sporty, “What do you have to drink?”
And there they were. Kayla and Sporty, now sitting side by side on the shag rug that lined the floor of the van.
Jolene and Jean Jacket on the beanbags. That left Ana and Indy, trying to stand, their heads brushing the roof, next to Wiry and Wavy Hair, waiting for someone to decide what would happen next.
And then, like gusts of wind:
“Wanna score some weed?” And Kayla was gone.
“Wanna go for a walk?” Then Jolene was gone.
“Be good!” she said, winking at Ana.
Indy was next, hopping out right behind Wavy Hair, telling him she wanted to find their friend from Avery Hall, the Spanish skater named Hugo.
“You’re skaters?” Wavy Hair asked. And then, “Cool,” and then they were gone.
Leaving Ana alone in the van with Wiry, and all of her emotions, excitement and curiosity still in the lead.
Fear coming in next, but the other one—the anticipatory humiliation—was right behind it.
Saying things to her like don’t do anything stupid, and by stupid it meant things that would expose her ignorance, her inexperience, her age.
Because tonight she was not a skater. She was not an Orphan with a sick mother. She was not lying on the ice waiting for Dawn to slice her neck, turn her into a zombie.
Not being any of those things felt like a giant stone had been lifted off her chest.
And then, before she could hear the rest of the chaos going on inside her own head, Wiry moved closer, grabbed her wrist with his bony fingers, and pulled her onto the beanbag left vacant by Jolene and Jean Jacket.
Then, “Want a beer?”
Then, “What’s your name?”
Then, as if by magic, the opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven.”
And the sound of metal on metal as he closed the doors.