What's Mine and Yours(39)
“Are you going to that march?” she asked.
“Maybe. There’s a bunch of us walking over after church.”
“Then you can go with my mother.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“It’s like a movie. People are making signs, trying to keep the new kids from coming in. You’d think it was the sixties.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Duke said. “It’s got nothing to do with them being black.”
“Don’t be such an idiot. Of course it does.”
Duke turned to her in shock, his face flushed from the beer.
“I’m sorry.” Noelle leaned over to kiss him behind the ear. “I’m not feeling good tonight. I’ve got a lot that’s bothering me.”
Duke looked at her disapprovingly, but he didn’t say anything. He picked his battles, and he didn’t like to disappoint, not his mother, not Noelle. It was one of the reasons he made such a decent boyfriend. He had sculpted his red-blond hair into spikes for the show, put on the Black Sabbath T-shirt Noelle had bought for him at a record store on one of their dates.
“Let me make it up to you,” she said and slipped her hand between his legs.
Duke looked at her, measuring. He had eyes the clear green of pines. She unzipped his fly, untied his belt, and he lifted his hips, which was how she knew she’d been forgiven. She rooted around in his pants, and he was sighing even before she stroked him. He set the cruise control in the car.
“Put your seat belt on,” he told her, then, “Faster.” He kept his eyes on the road.
The club was fifty miles west, and Duke paid their way in. They were checking IDs at the bar, so he got them sodas with lime. Noelle chewed the limes, hers then his, separating the pulp from the rind with her teeth. “My stomach hurts,” she explained, swallowing down an acid taste in her throat.
The stage was in a dingy, windowless room, papered with banners from old shows and black-and-white stickers that said things like Meat Is Murder and Support the Police—Beat Yourself Up. The band was in town from New Jersey, and both Duke and Noelle considered themselves devotees. Their music was loud and simple, the guitar parts easy enough for Duke to imitate on his guitar, the singing mostly shouting. There was fury and energy to their sound, a thumping bass to move your hips, a drum solo to bash your head, breakdowns where you felt your body soar, the music lifting you. The chain store in the mall didn’t carry their CD, so Noelle had downloaded their whole EP over her dial-up connection, waiting an hour for each track.
The first set started, the crowd surging toward the stage to welcome them. In the crush of bodies, Noelle felt herself a part of something, a movement of misfits who weren’t sure what unified them besides that they didn’t fit in anywhere else. It was this feeling of being out that had led her to start wearing black rubber bracelets, stacked a dozen high, and to start painting her lips blood red. It was part of why she’d chosen Duke. His parents may have been deacons in the church, but he wasn’t quite a square.
In a way, it made sense to her to feel adrift, out of place, in North Carolina. The band was from close to New York, where she imagined it was easy to find other vegans and anarchists and feminists, other white boys who wore their hair too long. She screamed and thrashed alongside the teenage boys in eyeliner, the girls with titanium rings pushed through the cartilage in their ears. They batted around blown-up condoms, inflated like balloons. They smashed their bodies together and slid across pools of sweat.
The first set was nearly through when Noelle spotted a crew of brown kids, all boys, except for one girl, whose face Noelle couldn’t see—she’d tied a red bandanna just below her eyes. She wore a cropped white shirt that exposed her long, hard belly, a large indigo bird rising out of the hem of her sweatpants, flying across her rib cage—a tattoo. Noelle sometimes fantasized about getting a black butterfly on her hip bone, a seashell in the cleft between her breasts. All she needed was the cash, a ride to Charlotte, an artist who wouldn’t care she wasn’t yet eighteen. But here was a girl, not much older, who wasn’t stuck dreaming, who had done it. Noelle watched her windmill her arms, grab white boys by the collar, and swing them around. The girl and her friends made a little protected knot at the center of the mosh pit, and Noelle, at the edge of the circle, held her hands out in front of her to shove away anybody who came too close. The beautiful girl with the bird on her body never did. Noelle would have liked to touch her. Duke kept his arms tied fast around her waist.
The set was nearly over when the nausea came on hard. Noelle felt as if liquid were collecting in her throat, and she went off running, pushing her way through the crowd. When she reached the stall, she threw up.
She sat down on the seat to recover. She felt dizzy and warm. She was at the sink, rinsing her mouth, when the girl strode in, her bandanna pushed down around her neck. She had a wide, beautiful face, her makeup smeared around her dark eyes. She nodded at Noelle.
Before she knew it, Noelle had sputtered her name, her whole name, out at the girl, who smiled at her indulgently. She said she was Alexandra, a student at UNC, and she and her friends came to all these shows. They had started a band of their own, in the style of the Chicano hardcore bands from Chicago and L.A., although they were all North Carolinians, only two of them Mexican. Alexandra was from El Salvador.
“You half?” Alexandra asked, offering Noelle a stick of gum.