“That doesn’t matter.”
“What does?” I asked, after a little while.
“Just that we’re on it, dude,” he said.
Before I left, a woman had her throat slit and was thrown from a moving car in Venice; a series of fires raged out of control in Chatsworth, the work of an arsonist; a man in Encino killed his wife and two children. Four teenagers, none of whom I knew, died in a car accident on Pacific Coast Highway. Muriel was readmitted to Cedars-Sinai. A guy, nicknamed Conan, killed himself at a fraternity party at U.C.L.A. And I met Alana accidentally in The Beverly Center.
“I haven’t seen you around,” I told her.
“Yeah, well, I haven’t been around too much.”
“I met someone who knows you.”
“Who?”
“Evan Dickson. Do you know him?”
“I’m going-out with him.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s what he told me.”
“But he’s f**king this guy named Derf, who goes to Buckley.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh,” she said.
“So what?”
“It’s just so typical.”
“Yes,” I told her. “It is.”
“Did you have a good time while you were here?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad.”
And I see Finn at the Hughes Market on Doheny on Tuesday afternoon. It’s hot and I’ve been lying out by the pool all day. I get in my car and take my sisters to the market. They haven’t gone to school today and they’re wearing shorts and T-shirts and sunglasses and I’m wearing an old Polo bathing suit and a T-shirt. Finn is with Jared and he notices me in the frozen foods section. He’s wearing sandals and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and he glances at me once and then looks down and then looks back up. I turn away quickly and walk to the vegetables. He follows me. I pick up a six-pack of iced tea and then a carton of cigarettes. I look back at him and our eyes meet and he grins and I turn away. He follows me to the checkstand.
“Hey, Clay.” He winks.
“Hi,” I say, smiling, walking away.
“Catch ya later,” he says, cocking his fingers as if they were a gun.
The last week. I’m in Parachute with Trent. Trent tries on clothes. I lean against a wall, reading an old issue of Interview. Some pretty blond-haired boy, I think it’s Evan, is trying on clothes. He doesn’t go into a booth to try them on. He tries them on in the middle of the store in front of a full-length mirror. He looks at himself as he stands there with only his jockey shorts and argyle socks on. The boy’s broken from his trance when his boyfriend, also blond and pretty, comes up behind him and squeezes his neck. Then he tries something else on. Trent tells me that he saw the boy with Julian parked in Julian’s black Porsche outside of Beverly Hills High, talking to a kid who looked about fourteen. Trent tells me that even though Julian was wearing sunglasses, he could still see the purple bruises around his eyes.
While reading the paper at twilight by the pool, I see a story about how a local man tried to bury himself alive in his backyard because it was “so hot, too hot.” I read the article a second time and then put the paper down and watch my sisters. They’re still wearing their bikinis and sunglasses and they lie beneath the darkening sky and play a game in which they pretend to be dead. They ask me to judge which one of them can look dead the longest; the one who wins gets to push the other one into the pool. I watch them and listen to the tape that’s playing on the Walkman I’m wearing. The Go-Go’s are singing “I wanna be worlds away/I know things will be okay when I get worlds away.” Whoever made the tape then let the record skip and I close my eyes and hear them start to sing “Vacation” and when I open my eyes, my sisters are floating face down in the pool, wondering who can look drowned the longest.
I go to the movies with Trent. The theater we go to in Westwood is almost empty except for a few scattered people, most of them sitting alone. I see an old friend from high school sitting with some pretty blond girl near the front, on the aisle, but I don’t say anything and I’m kind of relieved when the lights go down that Trent hasn’t recognized him. Later, in the video arcade, Trent plays a game called Burger Time in which there are all these video hot dogs and eggs that chase around a short, bearded chef and Trent wants to teach me how to play, but I don’t want to. I just keep staring at the maniacal, wiggling hot dogs and for some reason it’s just too much to take and I walk away, looking for something else to play. But all the games seem to deal with beetles and bees and moths and snakes and mosquitoes and frogs drowning and mad spiders eating large purple video flies and the music that goes along with the games makes me feel dizzy and gives me a headache and the images are hard to shake off, even after I leave the arcade.