The Exene Chronicles

Chapter 5

Away from the clean, wide streets of Coronado, downtown San Diego, with its vagrant hotels, Salvation Army treasures, and errant trash tumbling along the gutters, provided Ryan and Lia some undefined relief. The grit egged on their teething pathos, their emerging view of life through some inverted prism, where on the one hand, they believed that in some far-off distance they would attain a sort of middle-class contentment, but for the present, nothing besides a noncommittal flirtation with the dark, baneful, and untoward, procured in the pedestrian way of most fourteen-year-olds (through books, music, and imaginative musings), could create for them a sense of satisfaction.

In order to feed their insatiable quest for all things bleak on a diet more substantial than what Danielle Steel had to offer, the girls’ eighth grade English teacher introduced them to Baudelaire. Whether or not they had really understood The Fountain of Blood was hard to say.

“Romeo and Juliet isn’t so melodramatic,” Ryan murmured reflectively.

“I mean, who wouldn’t die for love? I would … if it came to that.”

“You’re nuts.”

“It’s just … I think that Prince song is right: the party’s over in the year 2000. Do you realize we’ll be, like, thirty years old, if we even live to see 2000?”

“Wait. What’s that got to do with anything?” Lia frowned.

“I dunno, it’s just … I’d rather die young for love instead of living without it, not knowing what might happen. Have you ever seen those warships down at the end of Palm Avenue? I hate them.”

Lia paused to consider Ryan’s words.

“You’re right. I never thought about it that way … but you’re absolutely right. I guess I’d prefer it that way too.”

Apparently, what Mrs. Buchanan had offered as a cautionary tale had suffered gross misinterpretation.

With the endless choices of the Salvation Army thrift store came the opportunity to take on whatever costume, and with it, whichever fantasy role they chose. Much like their descendant courtship with melancholy, their love of the clothes and hairstyles of the late 1950s and early ’60s was not grounded in reality, but in the promise of some Shangri-la where girls beguiled with hooded eyelids and teased hair, the glimmer of pale, iridescent gloss on full lips.

“Lia! You’ve got to see what I found for you!”

Ryan gave up waiting and raced to the back of the store, where Lia was admiring jewel-encrusted pocketbooks, and grabbed her by the hand. In a row of old frocks, some of them musty and stained, others absurd in their grandiose embellishment of floor-length drapery, puffed sleeve, and sequin, Ryan had discovered a jewel.

“Stand still now.” Taking her by the shoulders, Ryan made Lia stand tall and straight while she held the sleeveless, pink satin, ’60s-style dress up to Lia’s small frame.

Stepping in front of a mirror with the dress draped against her body, Lia cried, “Oh my god. I love it! I can’t believe how rad you are!” She threw her arms around Ryan’s neck.

“It’ll be your Supremes dress,” Ryan decided.

Ryan wasn’t as lucky in finding anything special at the thrift shop that day. To strike out at the Salvation Army was one thing, but at the drugstore there was never any shortage of items for consolation. With exactly $8.37 worth of merchandise between them, the girls were delighted by the prospect of getting back home where, imprisoned inside their still girlishly furnished bedrooms turned out in fluffy white comforters and stuffed unicorns, which they clung to during witching hours, when they dreamt of being spirited away by those creatures come to life, they would work up their sadness like warm palms dredging up the dark forces of a Ouija Board.

As they clambered onto the bus that would take them back to their serene pocket of suburbia, the two girls clasped hands.

“I love you!” Lia squealed. “You’re my best friend in the entire world!”

“You’re mine too!” Ryan cried.

If spilling peroxide on the pale green bathroom rug, which caused a spreading white stain and made Ryan’s mom yell at the girls, wasn’t foreshadowing—a telling clue that all that conjuring had been unnecessary—then Ryan’s cocky attitude once the peroxide took hold, and she showed up to school the next day tossing her long blond hair all over the place, should have been.

“Coming over after school?” Lia leaned over to whisper as they prepped for a science lab.

Ryan shook her head. “Elizabeth Cole’s sneaking boys over while her mom’s out. I’d invite you, but you don’t drink, don’t make out…” Ryan flung her hair off her shoulder and abruptly turned away.

Ryan’s introduction to Neil Jimenez two weeks later wasn’t exactly the dream prescribed by the clutching of those unicorns, or their infant attachment to Baudelaire’s feverish lamentations; neither was the fact that Lia would end up donning her pretty pink “Supremes” dress on the loneliest day of her life.