The Disenchantments

Dutton Books

A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

To Kristyn,
for our first road trip, and
everything after

Used to be a trouble maker

Hated homework, was a sweet heartbreaker

But now I have my dream

I’m so rowdy for eighteen

—“School Days,”
THE RUNAWAYS

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Acknowledgments

Bev says when she’s onstage she feels the world holding its breath for her. She feels electric, louder than a thousand wailing sirens, more powerful than God.

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I say.

She says, “Okay. More powerful than the universe, then.”

Bev is the lead singer of a band called The Disenchantments. They aren’t very good, but they play so loud the speakers crackle and the bass makes your bones tremble. And they look amazing.

It’s almost 3:00
A.M.
I am so tired I can barely stand, but I have to stand anyway and go out onto the living room couch so Bev can fall asleep. Even though we’ve been best
friends since we were nine, she’s a girl and I’m a guy, and there are certain rules neither of us is powerful enough to challenge.

“We need to pay for those tickets,” I say.

Bev nods.

“I mean, really soon, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she says. “Good night.”

She’s getting the way she gets sometimes, all faraway and quiet, so I say, “You’re tired; okay, I’m going.”

I head to the door, but then I remember something and can’t help myself: “I read today that the Stockholm Archipelago has more than twenty-four thousand islands. Isn’t that rad? I can’t wait.”

She kicks the comforter to the foot of my bed, pulls the sheet over her shoulder.

“There’s also this amusement park that’s right in the middle of the city. An old cool one,” I add, “with one of those swing rides that lift over the water.”

I turn off the light and step into the doorway. I can almost picture Bev and me, circling through the sky with islands all around us. Suddenly the room I’ve lived in all my life with its wood floors and high ceiling and single, skinny window feels smaller than it ever has before.

Then, Bev’s voice through the dark: “Don’t forget about the tour. That comes first.”

“I know,” I say. And then, “We’re almost free.”

“Yeah,” Bev says. “Almost.”

In the morning, Bev walks out of the bathroom in her cutoff shorts and the Smokey the Bear T-shirt we got in seventh-grade summer camp, to the kitchen, where my dad and I are eating cereal and reading the
Chronicle
. She rumples my dad’s hair and says, “Morning, Tom,” then opens the junk drawer and takes out a pair of scissors. She shuffles back to the bathroom.

Dad looks at me from over the Bay Area section.

“My son, going on tour.” He gets a little misty-eyed.

I say, “What about, ‘My son, graduating high school.’ Probably a little more important.”

“That, too,” he says, nodding. “This is a big day. A very big day. Your mother called when you were in the shower. She’ll call again a little later.”

I check my watch. It’s 7:15 here, nine hours later in Paris.

“Bev, we have to go soon,” I call into the bathroom.

“Yeah, I’m just finishing something,” she calls back. “You can come in if you want.”

I push open the door to find Bev with scissors raised and waves of blond hair drifting to the floor. I grab my toothbrush.

“What is this?” I ask. “A symbolic gesture?”

She chops off a long piece by her ear.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just something I felt like doing.”

Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I brush my teeth and watch her cut until her hair is as short as a guy’s and the tile floor is covered. I go to the sink to spit and she puts the scissors down, steps back, and studies herself. She kind of looks like a movie star and she kind of looks like one of those punk-rock homeless kids who panhandle on Haight Street. In any case, she looks incredible.

“Rad,” I say.

She cocks her head. “You think?”

“Um, yeah.”

I lean over the sink to rinse my mouth, and when I stand up again, there we are, standing side by side. Bev’s hair is barely a shade lighter than mine, and now almost the same length. Matching blue eyes, a similar darkness under them.

“We didn’t get much sleep,” I say to her reflection.

“We rarely do,” she says to mine.

The phone rings in the other room.

“I’ll sweep up,” she says, “and then we can go.”

Dad comes into the bathroom with the phone, so now the three of us are crammed into the smallest room in the house.

“Whoa, check you out,” he says to Bev, and Bev laughs, and Dad nods his approval and hands me the phone.

“Bonjour, mon chéri,”
Mom says to me from 5,567 miles away. The distance between San Francisco and Paris is one of the many facts I’ve picked up from Bev’s and my nights up late researching Europe. Like the number of islands in the Stockholm Archipelago. Like the fact that in Amsterdam, there are more bicycles than there are people, and Holland supplies seventy percent of the world’s bacon, which is not really something I need to know considering that I’m a vegetarian.

“Comment vas-tu?”

“I’m good,” I say, propping the phone on my shoulder and taking my place at my dad’s desk. “I’m just about to pay for our tickets.”

“
C’est fantastique!
I can’t wait to see you.” When she switches to English, she sounds more like herself. “I wish I could be there to see you off on your last day.”

“I know,” I say. “It’s okay.”

“We’ll celebrate for days when you and Bev get here.”

“Sounds good.”

“Ready?” Bev calls.

“I’ve gotta go,” I tell Mom.

“Good luck,” she says. “
Je t’adore.
Call from the road if you can.”

Dad hands me my sketchbook as I’m hanging up, and I stick it in my backpack and say, “It’s almost like she’s forgetting how to speak English.”

He laughs, runs a hand through his gray-brown hair, and says, “Guess her language classes are working.”

And then Bev and I are out the door into the San Francisco morning, rushing past the produce markets and well-dressed strangers, catching the F train up Market Street just before it glides away.

The school day is a collection of moments—five good-byes from teachers; a free period spent retrieving my drawings from the airy studio; lunch from the taco stand, our mouths full, asking,
Can you believe this is the last time we’ll all eat tacos on this street corner together?
All of us answering,
No, no.

After school I lean against the building and look at the sea of rainbow-haired teenagers. Everyone is out on the lawn with portfolios and instruments and sculptures, signing yearbooks and playing music, setting down backpacks and kicking off shoes as though now that we’re free we’ve decided to stay here forever.

I’m sketching Bev, who sits a few feet away from me practicing the verse of a new song while Meg plucks the strings of her bass guitar. Nearby, a group of ninth-grade girls watches them rehearse. One of the girls wears a Disenchantments shirt that we made for their first show. Bev and Meg came up with the concept—a close-up of a girl’s eyes with dark makeup and a tear starting to fall—and they had me draw it for them. I used Bev as a model and the first
sketch turned out perfectly, and they had it printed in silver on these fitted black T-shirts that sold out the first night.

It’s rare to hear Bev without a microphone, so I listen hard. She’s working out the vocal melody. One second she’s low and throaty, and the next she’s doing this badass breathy thing. Her head is turned away from me, and I’m sketching her neck, realizing that I’ve never seen it this exposed. Her hair has never been so short.

“Hey,” someone says, and then this guy Craig sits down next to me. “So first the tour, and then Europe?”

I nod. “We’ll be around here for a few days in between, though.”

“That’s so cool,” he says. “I respect that. You’re doing something different, you know? You’re getting out there.”

Even though this is San Francisco’s arts high school and people probably expect us all to go off and do unexpected and interesting things, everyone except Bev and me is going to college. When I told the college counselor our plan, she looked pained and asked me if I was sure, but I told her that, yeah, I was completely sure, had been completely sure since the summer after eighth grade when Bev and I found
Bande á part
in my parents’ DVD collection and watched it three times in a row. The counselor was worried but I didn’t let her get to me. Instead I told her about some Dutch guy who spent a fortune on a single tulip bulb, and how now there are tulip
fields
just thirty miles outside Amsterdam.

“Picture it,” I told her, “fields of tulips.”

She softened a little, took off her glasses.

“I’ve seen them,” she said.

“You have? Were they great?”

She nodded, and I swear she got a little emotional.

“See?” I said. “This is what I’m talking about. If I had asked about, like, Biology 101 you probably wouldn’t even remember it.”

“I’m not crying about tulips.”

“Yeah, but you’re crying about the experience, right? Maybe not the tulips themselves, but whatever was happening when you saw the tulips, or the person who saw them with you. And the tulips were probably part of it.”

“Yes,” she said. “They were part of it,” and then she cleared her throat and put her glasses back on and said, “Colby, going to college is incredibly important.”

Eventually she gave up, and word quickly spread around campus that Bev and I were actually doing it. Leaving together after graduation. Going to Europe. And everyone wanted to talk about it, about where we were going to go and where we were going to stay, and how amazing it sounded and how they wished that they were going, too.

Now, just a couple weeks before we leave, I glance up from my drawing toward Craig and say, “Remind me what school you chose?”

Craig was in my art history class last semester. We didn’t talk that often, but he’s pretty cool.

“Stanford,” he says.

“Wow,” I say.

“Yeah, well. We’re all off to college like a flock of fucking sheep, man, but not you.”

Most people who hear about the plan think that Bev and I aren’t ever going to go to college, that we’re just going to bum around Europe forever. That isn’t really what we have in mind, though. We want to spend a year there, getting to know Paris, traveling to Amsterdam and Stockholm and maybe even Oslo or Helsinki. Lately I’ve been dreaming about bodies of water: the Seine, the canals in Amsterdam, the Archipelago. Bev and me on trains, moving from one new place to the next.