“What’re you doing in our glorious city, Robert?” Neon asks, collapsing back on the worn couch, and I take her cue, sitting on the even rattier couch opposite.
“I don’t know yet,” I say honestly. “I’ve only been here a week.”
Neon laughs, so different from Indah’s big, beautiful laugh. Neon’s laugh is sharp and demanding, like she is. The kind of laugh where you never know if you’re being laughed with or laughed at.
“Wow, one week and you already have Indah wrapped around your little finger,” she teases. “I’m almost too impressed to be jealous.”
“From the looks of things, you’ve got nothing to be jealous of.” I give a small nod toward where Indah has settled in at Neon’s side. “I get the impression I’m not Indah’s type.”
“Wow, you really are from the middle of nowhere,” Neon quips.
“What do you mean?” I ask, not liking the sensation of feeling a step behind.
“You can like more than just one, you know,” Indah explains, and Neon grins and tightens her arms around Indah. I try to smile back like I know what she means.
“But you’re right, emo white boys aren’t really my type,” she teases sweetly. “Especially ones who are eighteen.”
“No shit?” Neon’s eyes widen. “You’re eighteen?”
I shrug.
“Eighteen and fresh off the bus from the Midwest,” she goes on. “Lemme guess: you’re an actor.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh, though it’s not as big and unself-conscious as the laughs of the two women sitting across from me.
“No way,” I scoff. “I’m a … a nomad.” I smile at Indah, borrowing her word from the first night we met.
“Well, nomad”—Neon leans back—“what brought your wandering feet our way?”
“Seemed like as good a place as any,” I say.
“Ha, yeah,” Neon laughs around her cigarette, “I guess worse has been said about LA. People never appreciate our fair city. But you give it a chance, and you’ll learn to love it.”
* * *
And she’s right. Two weeks here and I’m sold.
There’s a thrumming in this city. The buzzing of neon. The desert heat in the air. The smell of exhaust mixed with the distant scent of salt water. The desperate, cloying sound of people trying to impress each other. Los Angeles isn’t relentless but it is demanding. It whispers promises in your ear, tells you sweet lies. It says, “You can have everything you’ve ever wanted, just sign here. Sign here and don’t look too closely at the fine print and all your dreams will come true.”
Those are the whispers that everyone else hears. The sly seductions that the foolish and the ordinary fall for. I don’t pay those sweet nothings any mind.
No, instead, I’m the one whispering to the city. “You’re mine. You’ll do what I want, be what I want. I’m here now. I’m where I should be and everything will be better.”
* * *
The porch light flickers above me. I’m looking out, out, out, over empty fields and big, black sky. Everything is empty. Emptiness everywhere.
The house behind me is empty too. Empty and silent. The fields are louder than the house—the sound of the breeze through the corn, the crickets. There’s life there. The house stands behind me like an animal carcass. Only bones.
They’ll come back, I tell myself. They have to.
“They’ll come back,” I tell the fields. The fields don’t answer. There’s nothing but silence.
* * *
The music is loud and punishing. I went to some punk shows in Lincoln before I left Nebraska—trying to find my people in all the shouting and moshing—but I couldn’t stand how the blown-out speakers made my teeth rattle, how the press of sweaty bodies was impossible to predict, impossible to control. The sound here is a little better—a little more balanced, I guess, it being an actual music club as opposed to the bar basements where semitalented men my age would scream into cheap microphones. But the claustrophobic crowds and sticky floor are the same.
Neon is somewhere in front of me, jumping up and down, slamming her tiny body into the mosh pit like she’s something that can’t be broken. Indah and I are leaned against the bar in the back, nodding our heads and watching Neon bob in the sea of people. I’m taking a break from dancing with Neon, out of shape and out of breath, while she seems to have an endless well of energy, but I can’t stop smiling while trying to suck in more air. Being in a huge crowd I can’t control isn’t as daunting with these two by my side.
“You don’t want to get in there?” I shout to Indah over the noise.
“Not really my scene,” Indah calls back, her eyes and smile directed toward Neon the whole time.
“Why are we here then?”
I’ve only known them two weeks, hanging out at bars and going to shows, and they’ve already folded me nicely into their pairing. I never feel like a third wheel, never feel unwanted, and I’m genuinely uncertain if that’s due to my nature or to the fact that they’re not really a couple. Maybe they’re just good at making and having friends. I don’t know what that’s like, what making friends is even supposed to look like, so it’s a difficult thing to measure against my ability.
“This is Blaze’s favorite spot,” she shouts, a complete sentence that doesn’t invite more questions. A closed door has never kept me out, so I’m about to prod when a particular loud clang of guitar and beating of drums signals the end of a song. There’s indiscernible talking from the stage, the cheer of the crowd, and then Neon is in front of us, blue and electric, the sweat glittering on her forehead and her smile big and open.
“Set’s over,” she pants, smoothly swiping the drink from Indah’s hand and taking a large gulp before handing it back. “Come on.”
She whips around, her hair thwacking me in the arm, and starts marching back toward the stage. Indah follows without question and I down my drink before trailing behind, curiosity thrumming in my bones as we skirt the edge of the stage and go through a black curtain to the side.
On the other side of the curtain, things are muffled and calmer. An enormous bouncer, larger than the three of us combined, looms in the narrow hallway, peering down his crooked nose at us.
“What,” he grunts, arms crossing in front of him, somehow making him even larger.
“Cory here?” Neon asks, matching the bouncer’s stance.
“Who’s asking?”
“We’re Blaze’s friends,” she says, absentmindedly looking around the bouncer into the hallway behind him, like he’s barely worth her attention.
“Blaze isn’t here.”
“I know.” She rolls her eyes. “That’s why we’re looking for Cory.”
Even though I don’t know what I’m doing here or who we’re looking for, I want this bouncer to let us pass. I want to find Cory, and I want to find out what makes Neon able to face a man a foot taller than her with biceps as big as her torso like he’s a lamppost in an unexpected place and not a potentially dangerous person.