The Disenchantments Read online

  THE DISENCHANTMENTS

  THE DISENCHANTMENTS

  Nina LaCour

  Dutton Books

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  dutton books

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by the Penguin Group | Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. | Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) | Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England | Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) | Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) | Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India | Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)| Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa | Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Nina LaCour

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CIP Data is available

  “School Days” by Kim Fowley and Joan Jett | Copyright 1977 by Peermusic Ltd. | Copyright Renewed. | Used by Permission. | All rights reserved.

  Portions of Melancholy Play by Sarah Ruhl used by permission of the author.

  Published in the United States by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014 | www.penguin.com/teen

  Designed by Irene Vandervoort

  Printed in USA | First Edition | 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 9781101575437

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  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

  Table of Contents

  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.

  And then whenever we’re done, whenever we’re ready, we’re going to come home and go to college. I explained this to the college counselor and I explained it to my parents, but I don’t explain it all to Craig. I just nod and say, “To each his own,” and draw the curve of Bev’s neck where it meets her shoulders.

  Sunday

  The turquoise VW bus arrives in front of my house at 7:00 A.M. The rumble of its engine dies down, the front door slams shut, and my mom’s brother shuffles into the kitchen. He’s smiling but bleary-eyed, wearing his usual worn Rolling Stones T-shirt and a bandanna tied around his messy hair.

  “Look,” he says, “I dressed for the occasion.”

  “Uncle Pete,” I say, “you dress like this every day.”

  “True.” He nods solemnly. Then he takes the coffee mug from my hand, sips, places it back in my grasp.

  “Any more where that came from?”

  I get up and pour coffee into our biggest mug. My uncle sleeps less than anyone I’ve ever met. Whenever someone asks him what keeps him up at night, he leans in close, looks the person in the eye, and says, Just can’t get the music out of my mind.

  When I asked Pete if I could take the bus on a road trip, I had no idea what he would say. It’s hard for strangers to fully grasp the connection he has with this vehicle. Pete doesn’t have a wife, but if you knew him only casually, you would assume he did. When someone asks him, Hey, Pete, what did you do this weekend? He’ll say, Melinda and I went to the ocean. Or, Melinda felt like traveling, so I just let her take me wherever she wanted to go. By the time he says something like, Melinda wasn’t feeling so hot, so we laid low and took her for a tune-up, it dawns on most people that Melinda is the bus, and that my uncle Pete is the kind of person who spends a lot of time alone.

  I think if I had asked to borrow Melinda to move a piece of furniture, or to go to the grocery store, or for any other brief and practical reason, Pete would have turned me down. But this was about music, and as soon as I used the word tour, Pete’s glassy eyes opened wider and he smiled a nostalgic, f
araway smile. I knew then that he would say yes, and for the rest of the night, he and Dad listened to records and talked about the years they spent traveling around the country, living out of the bus, and playing small town shows. This was before Ma showed up at a South of Market bar for a surprise visit to her brother and fell in love with his bandmate who she’d heard about for years but never before met. The story is that Pete was so moved by the love between his sister and his best friend that when my dad told him they were going to buy a house and have a kid, Pete never said another word about the open life they were supposed to have, nothing about the music or the adventure. Instead, he wrote a song for my parents’ wedding that became a hit on many college radio stations and made him briefly famous among a small circle of tenderhearted young fans.

  Flash forward twenty years and Dad and Pete are walking me out to Melinda. I throw my duffel bag into the back and take my seat behind the wheel. Pete reminds me of how everything works—unnecessary, considering that he’s been giving me weekly VW driving lessons for the past couple months—and then closes me in. Through the open window, Dad slips me a wad of cash even though I’ve been saving up for this, and then, ceremoniously, he hands me a credit card.

  “Are you kidding?” I ask.

  Dad and Pete insisted on living like hippies all through the eighties. Even now, Dad hates to charge anything.

  “Your mom wants you to have it,” he explains.

  This makes more sense. Ma’s the worrier in the family. Of course she would take a break from studying the subjunctive to make sure I was ready for unplanned expenses.

  I look out the window at Dad and Pete, standing happily side by side, and I turn the ignition. Dad whoops. Pete flashes a peace sign.

  “See you in a week,” I say, and I pull away from the curb.

  My first stop is the Sunset. I turn onto Irving Street and see Bev leaning out of her upstairs window.

  “Hold on,” she says when I slip out of the driver’s seat.

  She leaves the window. I take a couple steps back and lean against the bus to wait for her, and soon she reappears with a blue pinhole camera. A group of hipsters in skinny jeans and sunglasses makes its way toward me. Their dog strains against its leash, starts sniffing at my Nikes.