Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [68]
And then, across the room and tobacco veil, the Bogdiscuit-tortured space, she saw the girl with white dreds, punk-dyke attitude scrawled on her white skin and another girl with hair as unreal as Daria’s snuggled under one arm. Six or seven kids were crowded into the big semicircular booth with them, the white-haired girl at their center.
Niki leaned across the table, not taking her eyes off the clot of goths, whispered loud to Theo, “Who is that?” Indicated who she meant with one hitchhiker’s jab of her thumb toward the crowded back booth.
Theo looked up from the cluttered depths of her purse, lipstick tubes and tampon applicators and a Pink Power Ranger action figure, following Niki’s thumb.
They all looked like underagers, ubiquitous black and glamorous dowdy. Robert Smith clown white and crimson lips, bruise-dark eyes.
“Oh,” Theo said, quick, dismissive wave of one hand and then her eyes back down to the purse, “That’s Spyder Baxter, holding court over her shrikes.”
“Shrikes?” Niki asked, and Mort chuckled. He’d stopped rolling the Miller bottle, bread-dough kneading the tabletop, was now busy making spitballs from his cocktail napkin and flicking them over Daria’s head. She hadn’t noticed, or if she had, chose to ignore him. They sailed by, just inches above her scarlet hair, and stuck to the black plastic Christmas tree set up behind the booth, decorated with rubber bugs and Barbie doll parts.
“That’s what Theo calls our local death rockers.”
And Niki nodded, though she’d always hated that label, death rockers, more reminiscent of heavy metal, headbanger crap than anything goth.
“You wouldn’t think a chicken-shit city like this would have so many of them,” Theo said, found what she was looking for, a worn and creased emery board.
Niki had treasured the dark children who congregated in Jackson Square, who haunted the narrow backstreets of the Quarter, the same white faces and black-lace pouts as these, the same midnight hair. These could be the same children, she thought, transplanted like exotic hothouse vegetation, identities as blurred as their genders. Seeing them here only seemed to redouble her homesickness, the vertigo sense of being misplaced herself, a refugee.
One boy stood apart from the others, better dressed than the rest. Bell-bottomed stretch pants and a wide white belt, puffy white shirt with balloon sleeves and a lace jabot that looked purple from where she sat. He stood with his back to the others, staring out into the crowd with vacant intensity, back straight, as alert and detached as a bodyguard. They made eye contact, and she looked quickly away, back to Theo.
“Why don’t you like goths?” she asked.
“Well, let’s see now,” Theo answered without pausing from her furious work on a hangnail. “They’re shallow and vain and whiny…” She stopped filing and held the nail closer to her face for inspection. “…pretentious drama queens with bad taste in clothes and worse taste in music. How’s that?”
“Oh,” Niki replied, a sound soft and hard at the same time, and suddenly she was much too tired from the hours of listening quietly to Theo Babyock’s diva prattle, too tired to care if she pissed off Daria by picking a fight.
“HEY! ASSWIPE!” Daria screamed over her head, and there was Keith Barry, pulling free of the throng, blotting out her view of Spyder Baxter. His head was shaved closer than the night before, and his dull eyes squinted through the smoke and shadows, recognition rising as slow as the sun on a cloudy morning. He towed some blond chick behind him like a little red wagon, Aqua Net teased bangs and trailer-park makeup.
“Key-rist on a boat,” Theo hissed, having entirely missed the brief flash of anger on Niki’s face. “What the hell did he scrape her out from under?”
Daria scowled down at them, “At least he’s learning how to come when called.”
“I’m not even gonna think about touching that one,” Theo said, dropped the emery board