This Must Be the Place: A Novel (42 page)

And now here they were, after their CD of creepy Halloween-appropriate covers was approved by the senior class and the Ruby Falls Rotary club, Halloween carnival co-sponsors. Eugene hadn’t heard them practice—he’d been too much in his own world, or trying to collide worlds with Oneida—but he could vouch for two-thirds of the band. Insane Armhole couldn’t be any worse than the other bands Eugene had heard at the Halloween carnival, which were always local and tended to be hairy and paunchy, old enough to be everyone’s dads and restricted to the greatest hits of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and The Doors. Patricia, in her own words, wanted to go Carrie White. “I want ears to explode,” she told him. “I want screaming. I want to bring that gym down in sonic flames.”

You’ll get your wish,
Eugene thought. The air was full of doom. It
mixed with the ghostly funk of the thousands of sweaty teenagers who had run and danced and smacked shuttlecocks in this very room, days and months and years before Eugene Wendell leaned against a shaky stage and wanted to throw up. He’d asked Oneida earlier in the week if she wanted to go to the dance with him, and there was no way he could cancel now without looking like—well, without looking like he was having a panic attack. Which he would then have to explain; because if he didn’t explain, he’d end up pushing her away. Armed. It was scary to be close to her, to tell her things, but it was a thousand times more terrifying to send her on her way with the equivalent of an information bazooka and, once scorned, a reason to use it.

He’d seen her in a few classes but hadn’t spoken to her much all day; there was no reason to assume she wasn’t coming, even though he really wished she wouldn’t. Inertia, Eugene thought; inertia would save the day. She’d show up; they’d dance; they’d make out. It would be fine. Maybe he’d take her out to his car in the parking lot and try to go down on her. Another chilling prospect, yet slightly less chilling than the inevitable conclusion of his family torn apart, his mother on the lam, his father in jail, all because he’d opened his stupid mouth.

Chas was tuning his guitar, the amplifier fuzzing and growling and hurting Eugene’s head. He jumped down from the stage and wandered out of the gym, across the hallway to the cafeteria, bustling with costumed kids and their parents and teachers. The lights were too bright, too fluorescent. Eugene felt required to slink away.

The hallway by the Haunted Home Ec Room was quieter. It was just seven o’clock, almost time for the packs of middle-schoolers that were its primary audience to start showing up. To his surprise, Dani Drake was standing at the door of the home ec room, hair coiffed in shining curls, bright red lips parted in a maniacal smile. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress, high-heeled shoes, and a white apron, all splattered with blood, and there was a string of pearls and a gummy-looking red slash across her throat.

“Canapé?” she chirped, holding up a tray of eyeballs and ears and noses, neatly arranged in concentric circles.

Eugene’s natural instinct was to continue slinking by, glued to the
lockers on the far wall, but there was something unmistakably awesome about what Dani was doing. He hadn’t expected such a thing from her, though that may have been a side effect of Oneida’s vocal dislike of her, which Eugene felt obliged to echo.

“The blue eyes taste the best,” she said. “Raspberry or something.” She stuck out a lurid blue tongue.

Eugene silently chose the proffered candy and looked over Dani’s shoulder, but the rest of the home ec room was shrouded in darkness. A recording of creaks and rattles played nearby, and he heard a familiar voice—maybe Heather Atkins?—saying
Oh my God, he did
not.

“It’s pretty lame inside,” Dani muttered out of the side of her mouth. “I feel like a false advertisement.”

“You saying this is as good as it gets?” Eugene pointed to her costume.

“As far as the Haunted Home Ec Room is concerned, hell, yes.”

“I heard that, Dani!” It
was
Heather Atkins. “That doesn’t sound like sophomore spirit to me!”

“Suck it, Heather!” Dani shouted back. To Eugene, she said, “I kind of . . . had a run-in with the local authorities.” She grinned, showing all her teeth. “This is what community service looks like at Ruby Falls High.”

“It looks good,” Eugene said, and then caught his breath, because he couldn’t quite believe he’d said it. He coughed. “I have to get back to the—the band, my sister—my sister’s band?”

Dani nodded. “Later, Donnie.”

Eugene blinked and half-waved good-bye before skulking back to the foyer between the gym and the cafeteria. He chewed the blue eye (Dani was right, it was tasty) and sighed. Nothing was normal and nothing was right, and it was only going to get weirder. And worse.

Because Oneida was standing in the foyer, waiting for him. Distracted by the little-kid rabble emanating from the cafeteria, the very promising sounds of Insane Armhole warming up, and the sour blue thrill of Dani’s eyeball on his tongue, Eugene didn’t recognize her at first. She was wearing black leggings and a tight black shirt with a shiny silver zipper down the front, unzipped an inch or three. The zipper pull, dangling and round as an aluminum pop-top, glinted hypnotically,
crying out for him to loop his index finger through and give a yank. She caught his eye and shrugged, holding out her arms and spinning to present the full effect. The leggings ended in high black boots, and there was a wide leather belt around her waist, a waist that was much smaller than even Eugene, who ought to know, knew.

“You’re”—his brain clicked—“You’re, uh, you’re Elizabeth Hurley in
Austin Powers
.” Oh, Jesus, his girlfriend was hotter and stranger than hell and scared the living shit out of him. Eugene actually felt his heart flutter, and not in a good way.

“What are you talking about?” She smiled and reached into her coat.

“Aren’t you supposed to be a spy, a British spy?”

He swallowed past a dry patch in his throat.

“I’m a cat,” she said, and slipped two black ears on a headband over her hair.

“Oh! You’re Catwoman!”

She shrugged. “I guess so. I mean, I’m a cat and I’m a girl, so I suppose it could be interpreted that way. But I”—she fluttered her hands—“I don’t know. I’m just a black cat. I thought you’d—”

“I do! I like! I very much like!” Eugene said, his voice a little too high. He tried to smile to show her he was happy, when he was really something else entirely, something that didn’t have a name but that he could vaguely begin to understand as insane and self-defeating, with a side of retarded.
Why don’t I like
?
Why am I such a stupid asshole?
A girl who lets me stick my tongue in her mouth shows up in a black bodysuit, and I don’t love it the way I’m supposed to love it. And it can’t be because she doesn’t look insanely hot, because she does look insanely hot—and it’s not because I’m gay, because I’m not—it’s just—

He thought of Dani as Dead Donna Reed and immediately grabbed Oneida’s hand to lead her into the gym. Oneida Jones, revealed: ordinary and artless—who, he suddenly realized, barely knew anything about him, except for the biggest secret he’d ever had and had been unable to keep.

In the war for Eugene Wendell’s soul, his penis lost to his brain exactly one day too late.

“I’d like to dedicate the next song to my little brother.” Patricia covered the mike with her hand and coughed. “You all know I have a little brother who goes to school here?”

The crowd, which clearly thought Insane Armhole was the greatest thing to happen in the gym since Annie Holmes fell face-first off a cheerleading pyramid, roared.

It was an unusually well-attended Halloween carnival. Eugene allowed himself a moment of pride-by-association, knowing the crowd had doubled after the first few songs brought out cell phones and calls of “Get down here, they don’t suck!” Patricia had changed into a truly righteous costume, a light pink nothing of a dress, skewed tiara on her head and floppy corsage on her wrist, her arms pale as bone under the harsh lights set high in the makeshift stage scaffolding, where, Eugene knew, a bucket of fake blood teetered, waiting patiently to be poured over his sister’s head at the conclusion of the first set. He loved his sister; of course he did. How could he not? She was crazy. She was talented. She could play the shit out of that bass. He tried to be as happy for her as he could tell, from the wide grin she couldn’t suppress, that she felt herself. But where once he’d been afraid
of
, now he was afraid
for
her—afraid this would be it. This would be her debut and swan song together. Whether because their parents got sent to jail or ran away or they were orphaned, their lives ripped apart—or if none of that happened, if Patricia simply never Made It Big. Eugene almost wished, for his sister’s sake, that she’d be able to blame it on her little brother if it never happened for her.
This must be what it feels like to love someone
, he thought, and felt both very big and very small. He squeezed Oneida, clenched in his arms, a little tighter.

Eugene thought Chas was stalling by strumming a repetitive riff that sounded like the whirring of an industrial fan motor. Then Patricia growled the word
Beetlebum
into the microphone.

Eugene’s body went rigid. This song.
This
song. It was the kind of thing they played at the prom in hell. His sister’s voice flew over everyone else’s heads but pierced Eugene’s brain:
what you done
, she sang.

What you done?

“Who sings this?” Oneida asked his shoulder, where her face was pressed. “It’s creepy.”

“I’m thirsty.” Eugene coughed. “You want a drink?” At great peril, he removed his arms from Oneida. Someone jostled him from behind and he walked. He didn’t care if she followed or not, he needed to get away from this crowd of swaying morons, and this horrible song, this horrible horrible dirge of a song that knew too much, that asked perfectly awful questions in his sister’s voice.

A lunch table had been set up with punch and plastic cups, and when it came into view, Eugene was so desperate to get to it that he elbowed someone hard in the back of his head. He didn’t realize who he’d knocked until Oneida, following close behind, said, “Andrew Lu”—as though she were shocked to see him; as though he didn’t go to the same school they went to; as though the cosmic forces that hated Eugene Wendell
wouldn’t
put his archenemy between him and the salvation of punch, directly in line with the point of his elbow.

Eugene kept walking. Lori Whitman, unpopular, dull, pathetically eager to ingratiate herself, had been given the job of punch ladler, Eugene suspected, because she could be easily convinced to look the other way while some senior dumped a quart of cheap vodka in the punch bowl. Eugene tossed back three tiny cups, which were disgusting but not yet spiked. The song droned on, its refrain repetitive, monotonous, “Hey, Jude” but a thousand times more evil. There was no way Patricia could possibly know how apt that dedication was. There was no way. Chalk it up as a moment of prophecy. His brain burned and he felt like crying.

Then he saw Oneida and Andrew, standing a few feet clear of the crowd. Talking. Just talking. She was smiling, just a little, but he wasn’t. What were they talking about? Andrew Lu rubbed the back of his head and Oneida said something, and shrugged, and then Andrew Lu smiled at her, and the music was loud again, different, a new song. The punch warmed Eugene’s stomach; maybe it had alcohol in it after all, and he’d just sucked it down too quickly to taste it.

But no—no, it wasn’t the punch—oh, it wasn’t the punch—it was anger. It was rage, and Eugene hadn’t felt it in so long, he’d forgotten how to recognize it at first. A hot stone. Brilliant pain. A helpless, mindless
thing that built upon itself until it took him, took him over and took him under—and here it was again, it was self-destruction, self-immolation, and it was going to happen, here and now. There were no velvet-filled bottles to smash. There were no projects, no works of art in the making, no distractions—there was only Oneida, the uncontrollable variable, and Andrew Lu, who hated him, and this was the way it started. This was the start of something bad, the beginning of his end.

All those feelings of doom, those precognitions of destruction, had been about this moment—this moment when he could choose either to let the end come on its own or be an active agent of the apocalypse. And Christ, he needed to do something.

The anger lit him like neon. It drove him across the floor and squared his shoulders. He swung at Andrew Lu with more fury than he’d ever mustered in his life. But Andrew, athletic, deflected, ducked, and clocked Eugene, this time in his left eye. Insane Armhole had moved on to something with a nefarious disco beat, and Eugene, who loved to move to music, jabbed at Andrew once, twice, three times on the beat. Nothing landed. Andrew swept his legs out from under him. Eugene, on his back, kicked Andrew in the stomach with both feet and rolled out of the way. He felt large hands on either side of his shoulders, felt himself lifted off the floor and pulled out of the way, out the gym doors, down the hallway past the locker rooms, and pushed against the crash bar on the door to the student parking lot. He stumbled down the short flight of steps and spun around to see Harrison, fat, lazy—of course, the PE teacher—pointing and yelling for him to stay the hell away from the dance for the rest of the night, you screwup!