Blue Bottle Tree

2. Penny: Penny Langston Freaks Out-1

Penny: Penny Langston Freaks OutI knew Seven LaVey stared at me, that he watched me when I practiced. Seven was a weird kid. Didn’t he have anything better to do? We had been in band together for two years, but he still had not figured my name out. He called me Longstocking. I guess he was making fun of me. As if he took a perverse pleasure in reminding me how inconsequential I was to him. So I returned the favor. Which seemed so unnecessary between us. After a party last Thanksgiving, we were talking and then he kissed me. It started snowing right that second. And it was like rose petals, millions of them, falling from the sky. It was so romantic I could have died right there. Back at school on Monday he asked me if I had fun at the party. Like it was nothing! Like he had totally missed it. I said, sure, it was great until I tried tequila, and I guess I blacked out after that. He never took his trumpet home, never practiced. He thought he was too cool to be in band. It was like cheating, pretending to play when he was not. The band director knew and just let it go. “Playing badly is worse than not playing at all,” he said. There were about seventy kids in band, and a lot of them faked it. Not me—I played every note of every song.

The first time I met Seven was at a music store in Nashville. He seemed to know me, but I didn’t know him. He knew I was in band. My mom and I were there to find me an upgrade on clarinet. I was getting ashamed of the beginner’s model that I had. I had explained to my parents that if I was ever going to be any good, I would have to have a better instrument. I had to move out of the Etude and into a Selmer. It could be used, but it had to be pro quality. So that’s what we were looking for and it was a coincidence that Seven happened to be there at the same time. He was about twelve years old and had apparently made his way to Nashville by himself.

He had a trumpet, trombone, and sax all laid out in front of him. He was testing their weights, trying to get a feel for them. Picking an instrument can be hard for some people. I always knew I wanted clarinet. The music store guy was giving him the pitch. He was a little man with a mustache, a musty tweed suit, and bow tie. But he knew his stuff. He could play all the instruments better than anybody in high school. While the guy was talking, Seven looked past him and asked me, “Which one do you think?” I pointed at the trumpet and he shrugged. “I’ll take it,” was all he said.

I came to my tree early today, still ticked off with Velvet West. I had approached her at lunch and slid my yearbook across the table to her. “Velvet, will you please sign my annual?” I asked her. Three of my former friends rolled their eyes and coughed like my presence was polluting their oxygen.

“Oh, sure, Penny,” Velvet said. She smirked and snapped her fingers. Her right-hand attendant produced a pen. Velvet gritted her teeth and jutted her delicate little chin. She had to be dying her hair—nobody’s hair could be that black. And I took the moment to appraise her fashion choices. Somewhere between Cleopatra in stilettos and the wicked Snow White. Her golden arm bands looked like they were supposed to deflect bullets. It all was topped off with hair pulled tight and spouting out the top of her head like a petroleum fountain of thread. Her choker was a three-inch leather collar with locks and silver chains. It was some kind of t*****e device. If the teachers knew what it was, there’s no way they would let her wear it.

She gave my yearbook back and shooed me away. So much for my effort to make amends. We had been friends most of our lives and now high school was almost over. We might not see each other that much anymore. I wanted to set everything right and be done with our grudge. Apparently, she did not feel that way. She found an empty space in the ads, one by a furniture store, and it had a picture of a chair. She wrote, You will be cursed for this. Her signature took up two pages. Wow. And this was how I was wrapping up my high school career. Dead in the water because of one mistake, one time I chose revenge. I thought I would leave high school on a high note, having accomplished something. But it felt more like a failure now. I wasted my life for this, to be the first chair clarinet, and I just wanted it to end. There wasn’t anybody in high school I cared about anyway, so maybe it was good. It would all be over soon enough. I could reinvent myself and begin again. f**k them. f**k them all.

Except Seven, who was adorable in his weird way. I was conflicted about how surprisingly comfortable I felt about having him up there, spying on me like a jerk. He was crouching, watching me now from the mouth of the cave. He might even live there. Creepy. I think his mother was a nurse and used to work nights, so he could probably do whatever he wanted. I also heard his mother disappeared and his grandmother was a witch, but nobody knew for sure. Everybody in Bellin knew everybody else, but nobody really knew them. They bought a shack in the woods somewhere outside of town. But I asked around and no kids in band, nobody at all had actually even seen it.

He came out of the cave, stretched and yawned, then went around to the back of the hill. Soon he came back and stood with his ridiculous mop of hair dripping like a black jungle fern. His face was all wet. He crouched down, staring at me. A deluded warrior. He ruffled up his hair and made it spikey. He was plotting something, so I decided to turn the tables.

I stopped practicing and laid my clarinet down on the newspapers, slipped behind the tree out of his sight, and then behind a rock, a fence, and some bushes. He was momentarily distracted and I could tell he was surprised when he glanced back and I was gone. He scanned the field, and when he couldn’t find me, he stalked down.

I kept him in my sights but crept around behind him, and watched him zigzag until he was at my tree. Then he grabbed my clarinet! Asshole!

He made a beeline back for his cave, but I was already there—I had snuck in. It was cramped and dark, but there was a little flicker from around a corner. I crawled on the dirty newspapers until I was in his room in the back.

I never knew this was here—I don’t think anyone did. It opened up into a surprisingly big room. There was a tiny fishpond with a candle burning over it, making a sparkly reflection on the water.

I crouched down behind a rock and tried not to touch any of the mud. He had my clarinet with him. I was hidden and wanted to see what he was going to do, what he actually did in here all the time. His shadow was huge on the wall, and his spikey black hair was distorted like tendrils, like Medusa snakes. He once told me that he never brushed his hair. Vanity, he said. Brushing hair was vanity, so he never did it. It looked like that, like he always just woke up. But it smelled good. I had to march behind him in band. His hair did not smell like shampoo, it smelled like cinnamon toast.

I had a crush on him a couple of years ago, when he first got to Bellin. There were no other boys here like him. The first time I saw him his shirt collar was sticking up—like it’s doing now—like a dagger jutting out of his neck. Sometimes he carried the disheveled look too far. He wore the kind of shirts that you were supposed to iron, but he never did. That first time I saw him he was wearing a black cowboy shirt with roses stenciled on it. A real cowboy shirt and heavy biker boots with a dozen silver buckles. Nobody does that. It was so retro and cool, unheard-of in Bellin. Once I asked him about it and he just turned up his nose, snubbed me. And it wasn’t just the crazy shock of hair. It was his eyes. His eyes were the palest blue I had ever seen, like swimming pool water, closer to clear than a color. And they pierced when he looked at me. I guessed he was Italian. But he told me, no, Creole. I had read that Creoles were from New Orleans a long time ago. They were all gone now, though, so I let it go. He looked like he came from another country, or another planet.

But he was so shy! I made myself available, standing around, waiting for him to say something, but he never did. He was a withdrawn, brooding guy. I think the first time he spoke to me was an accident, then he got away as quickly as he could. I figured he didn’t want anything to do with me, so I moved on. But he was always turning up. We just ended up at the same places at the same time. He was at that cave the first time I came to the tree to practice. I didn’t want to bother him, so I acted like I didn’t even see him there.

When Velvet and I had a little tiff over first chair, Seven came to me and said he believed in me. Nobody else said that. Nobody else had ever said it. And I fell for him again when that happened. I lost a lot of friends over getting first chair, but he really came out of the woodwork to stick up for me. It lasted a couple of weeks, and we made out a few times, but he never really would talk to me. We never became an item because he just sort of drifted away.

While I was in his cave and chiding myself for having wasted too much energy on him already, I happened to look down. There was a skull. I almost jumped out of my skin. It was small, like a child’s. My breaths came so fast and deep that I got dizzy. I reached out to the wall before I fell. My heart pounded like it would explode. He could not see me, so I knelt down behind the rock and tried to compose myself. I closed my eyes and focused on the swing in my backyard. When I was anxious, or as in this case, horrified, I thought about the swing. About my hair flowing behind me, the wind in my face, my happy place. Deep breath out. Swing to the sky. Kick legs and lean way back. Pull the chains. Deep breath out. Ready. My eyes opened again and I picked up the skull.

It was white—too white—and even the teeth were clean. One of the assignments we had in biology class last year was to preserve the bones of piglets. This skull looked like it had been through the process. Some of the bone tissue had dissolved, indicating a shoddy job, definitely not A-plus bone preservation going on here. One of the molars was cracked, probably from rapid temperature change during the preservation process. The intranasal suture was buckled because it had been boiled too long and shrunk. There was a c***k and small hole on the left side above where the ear should be. It was not from a surgical incision, or a bone saw. I would say it was from a hammer. I closed my eyes again. Deep breath out. Swing. Swing.

Somebody killed this kid with a hammer, boiled the flesh off, and bleached the skull, then hid it in this cave. I turned over the newspapers and found more bones, presumably the rest of the body.

Everybody knew Seven LaVey was a strange kid, but he seemed harmless enough. He kept to himself or hung out with Mad Dog Rickey Smith. They were both weirdos but they could not kill anyone. I would not have taken him for the kind of guy to steal a clarinet either, though.

I looked back over the edge of the rock and he was smelling my clarinet reed. Oh, my God, he just licked it. He tasted my reed! Then he held the clarinet like he knew what he was doing, like he would try to play it. He blew and got nothing but a whistle.

The candle burned on the opposite wall and his back was turned against it. I steadied my hand, swallowed my fright, ever so slowly held the skull’s mandible in front of the candle, and cast a shadow over Seven’s head. He was engrossed in trying to figure out how to make a clarinet work and did not even notice. I was getting past my panic attack and put the skull and clavicle down. I made hand shadows until one got into his peripheral vision. He yelped when he saw it and almost dropped my clarinet. I was hidden again and the shadow was gone. He did not say anything, but moved around, scanning the area. No doubt there were bats or bugs or things that got in the cave sometimes. So, he may have thought it was something like that and went back to figuring out how to work the keys. He blew again, got a screech, and he jumped like it bit him. Served him right.