Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [12]
Jude unveiled the pack of American Spirits he’d taken from Harriet’s carton.
“Thanks,” Eliza said, taking out a lighter. They all stood in a circle on the platform, staring at the red eyes of their cigarettes, trying to keep warm, no obvious place to go. It was not hard to fend off the disappointment that she wouldn’t be meeting Prudence. She had been curious to know what Prudence looked like, to observe her from afar, but it was Jude, she realized now, that she had wanted to meet. Girls irritated her, intimidated her, and finally bored her; around girls she became territorial, sniffing their asses, showing her teeth. It was not a part of herself she liked. Around boys she was herself, she could relax; she had nothing to win but them.
Still, she’d expected . . . something different. The novelty of a foreign exchange student. Provincial fashions. Elaborately laced snow boots. These boys looked like they’d just stood up from Les’s stoop on St. Mark’s Place.
“You guys get into a fight or something? You look sort of bloody.”
Under the streetlight, she could see that Teddy’s mouth was ringed with red bumps. At first she thought it was acne, but Jude had it, too, a raw, rosy stubble, like a beard of hives.
“No, it’s huffer’s rash,” said Jude. “It happens sometimes.”
“From turpentine,” said Teddy.
“Turpentine,” she mused. Maybe they did have their tricks in the country. Maybe they wouldn’t be impressed by the cocaine in her makeup bag. “Are you fucked up right now?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Jude said.
“It wears off pretty quick,” said Teddy.
“I thought it was part of the Dracula punk thing.” She tipped her cigarette toward Jude’s devil lock. “You into the Misfits?”
Jude and Teddy exchanged glances.
“They’re not bad,” said Jude.
“I saw them at Irving Plaza when I was ten. It was my first show. With the Necros and the Beastie Boys.”
“No shit?”
“It was some show,” she said, looking up at the Vermont sky, remembering. So this is where Les used to live, in this snowcapped village, with his other family.
Jude said, “Your mom let you go to a show when you were ten?”
“Not by myself.”
“Who took you, then?”
She watched her smoke rise white in the air, and then her breath, fainter. “Your dad,” she said. “I sat on his shoulders.”
Jude’s desire for girls was indiscriminate, feverish, and complete; he wanted them all equally, and he wanted them not at all. Blondes or brunettes, big ones or small ones—they were cold, fragile, impenetrable creatures, all desirable as they were undesirable, all perfumed and pretty. To get one, he would have to get near one. He’d attempted this at a barn party in Hinesburg, kissing the girl unkindly and without asking, kind of pressing her up against a wall, and the whole drunk drive home in the backseat of the Kramaro, he’d felt so bad that he hadn’t said a word about it to anyone, not even Teddy.
Eliza was different and not different. She was a girl, a painted doll. Her hair, bobbed to her elfin ears, was thick and black, her heavy bangs straight as a blade. Her eyes, too, were black, Egyptian, or was it an effect of the makeup shadowing her lids, the stiletto lashes, the feline inflection of the black, what was it called, eyeliner? Her lips were red, her skin translucent as wax paper. Her coat was white and puffy and slick, with cinched cuffs and a hood that looked like it was made of feathers, and she wore tights and a kilt. She could not have been much more than five feet; he could have opened up his own coat and smuggled her inside.
The fact that she possessed knowledge about his father, for instance that he still sold pot and that he still owned his 1968 Dodge camper van, was what was disconcerting. It was as thrilling and as freakish as if she had revealed to him that she was his flesh-and-blood sister, come all the way from Manhattan to find him.
“Here’s the thing,” she said, getting down to business. In an effort to offer her the Vermont experience, they’d taken her to Ben & Jerry’s, the only place on Ash Street that was open