The Future of Another Timeline

^SEVENTEEN BETH

Beverly Hills, Alta California (1993 C.E.)

On New Year’s Eve, Lizzy drove the four of us to Beverly Hills for the Matador Records preview party. We’d gotten dressed up in our fanciest vintage dresses and Soojin had swapped her plastic barrettes for metal ones crusted with rhinestones. I had cheap silver rings on every finger, ranging from chunky 1930s-style dinner rings to a coiled snake.

I probably should have known this party was going to be a shitshow as soon as we arrived. When we got to the gate, Lizzy told the bouncers we’d been invited by Richard—the guy from the backyard party who had told her about it. Their hard faces melted into juicy winks as they patted us down, joking about how it was an “ass check.” As we walked into the front yard, one made sure to say loudly that Richard’s girls were always the hottest.

“What the fuck kind of party is this, Lizzy?” Soojin paused halfway up the winding driveway. Her index finger picked out an illuminated tent ahead of us on the vast lawn, where a bunch of white guys were playing what sounded like warmed-over Nirvana.

“It’s a party with free alcohol?” Lizzy adjusted her studded belts to fit perfectly over her vinyl skirt. Then she shrugged and stuck out her tongue. “You can treat it like a scientific expedition into the heart of commercial rock music.”

I have a hard time resisting the idea of a scientific expedition, and Lizzy knew that would make me smile. “Onward!” I cried. I raised a fist as if I were hoisting a flag.

Beyond the awful music tent was an enormous peach-colored mansion built to look like a box nestled inside an artful explosion of Tinkertoys. Triangles and cylinders stuck out of the walls at odd angles, painted in wavy yellow-and-black lines. Plaster rectangles hovered over the massive brushed-steel front doors, hanging from two skeletal towers made with crazily angled struts painted in various neon colors. It reminded me of mall architecture in Irvine, full of roofless pseudo-gazebos that suggested places to sit but contained no benches and cast no shade.

The door banged open, and a guy in a tiny pink sweater stumbled outside to throw up under one of the towers. Soojin and I exchanged glances. Clearly there was alcohol.

“Let’s do this, kids.” Lizzy marched ahead of us into the house. I’d never been around so many adults who were obviously wasted. Most of the backyard parties in East L.A. were full of high school kids, and the few people older than us were easy to avoid. Here, it seemed like we were the youngest girls in a one-mile radius. The house itself was weirdly un-house-like. The bottom floor was a giant party room edged by a full bar and DJ rig. At the center of the room was a massive, transparent spiral staircase that rose up through a shadowy hole in the roof. Somebody had strung a thick chain between the banisters at the bottom and hooked a DO NOT ENTER sign to it. Which was probably a good idea, because the place was packed.

We could barely move through the dancing, drinking, and yelling bodies. A guy grabbed my ass and laughed. It felt a thousand times more deadly than a mosh pit. As we squashed our way toward the bar, another guy offered us a bump of coke that he’d cleverly scooped into the indented filter of his cigarette. I shook my head and grabbed Lizzy’s hand so I wouldn’t lose her in the crowd. Soojin grabbed mine, and Heather took hold of one of Lizzy’s belts.

We got beers and stood in a corner. “I think there’s another band back there!” Lizzy pointed at a hallway to our left. “Want to check it out?”

Nothing could be worse than where we were, so I nodded.

We found ourselves in a less crowded room with a slightly elevated stage. It was darker in here, and a band was setting up. It really looked like Million Eyes, but they couldn’t possibly be here, could they?

“Is that—”

“Holy fuck it’s Million Eyes!” Heather started jumping up and down. We were five feet away from them, and could practically have walked onstage and hugged them if we’d wanted to. Which I kind of did.

Kathleen Hanna grabbed the mic. “Hey, everybody, we’re trying to make our instruments work.” Her hair was in a half-wrecked ponytail and she was wearing gym shorts. After a few more shrieks of feedback, she let out a whoop. “This is a song about the seedy underbelly of the carnival! The part that only the kids know about. This is a song about sixteen-year-old girls giving carnies head for free rides and hits of pot. I wanna go… I WANNA GO TO THE CARNIVAL!” The guitars screamed and we screamed too, and slammed into each other, and forgot that we were at a shitty party in a bizarro rich guy’s house. Finally, we had a reason to be here.

That’s when Richard showed up behind Lizzy. He wore a Kill Rock Stars T-shirt under his expensive blazer with padded shoulders. Spotless Converse sneakers poked out from his pegged pants, and a six-o’clock shadow stood out like a layer of ash on his pale cheeks. I guessed he was in his late twenties, and I tried to remember where Lizzy had met him. “Hey, girls! Wanna see the rest of the place? The upstairs is rad.”

“Sure.” Lizzy gestured frantically for us to follow.

Million Eyes continued to march around the tiny stage, cursing the patriarchy. I looked back yearningly in their direction as we pushed under the DO NOT ENTER sign and I felt the heavy chain cables pass across my stooped back.

“This is the VIP area.” He gestured at the world we saw after passing through the ceiling portal. It looked like a regular apartment, with a kitchen and dining room and a long hallway lined with closed doors. A few other people were sitting around on couches, and VH-1 was playing on a TV the size of a refrigerator.

“Okay cool, well, let’s go back to watch Million Eyes.” My voice sounded more whiny than I intended.

“What? You girls just got here. Let’s go to the music room and do some coke.” Richard put his arms around Lizzy and Heather, practically dragging them down the hall. Soojin and I followed. When Lizzy looked back at us over her shoulder, she had a look on her face that I’d hoped never to see again. That’s when I noticed the leather garter buckled around her upper thigh, peeking out from her skirt. It had a knife sheath built into it.

“Oh no.” I breathed it in Soojin’s ear. “No no no.”

She managed a shaky laugh. “Don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen.”

Something definitely was. Had they planned this behind my back? Was everyone in on it except me?

The “music room” was actually a spacious bedroom with a turntable on the dresser beneath a framed poster from a 1979 Cheap Trick concert. Candles burned in niches on the wall, and Richard gestured grandly at the bed. “Have a seat, darlings. We’re going to have a feast.” He started to chop lines on a mirror built into the bedside table.

When all of us turned him down, Richard shrugged and rolled a ten-dollar bill into a tight tube. “More for me.” He snorted two of the eight lines he’d prepped, then seemed to change his mind and snorted a third. “Hell yeah! Let’s do something awesome!” He pulled off his jacket and yanked the T-shirt over his head violently. “What are we doing?” He bounced on the bed several times, then repeated himself. “What are we doing? Music? Music?” He raced to the turntable and put on whatever record was next to it.

It turned out to be a Def Leppard album. This was getting terrible in ways I couldn’t even quantify. Richard launched himself onto the bed, nearly body slamming Lizzy, who was leaning calmly against the pillows, her Docs digging into the comforter. Heather and Soojin watched with the same expression I’d seen on their faces during the beheading scene in Re-Animator.

“God, you are so fucking hot.” Richard grabbed Lizzy by the hips, dragged her toward him, and bit her right breast through her camisole. Then he looked up at the rest of us. “You are all hot. Don’t be jealous. Let’s do something!”

Lizzy made her left hand into a claw in his moussed hair and gave us all a blank look. “Take off your pants, Richard. Let’s see you do something.”

She let him go and he jumped over to snort another line before wriggling out of his pants and tightie whities with hyperactive intensity. “Now you’re talking! Yes!” He sat down at the edge of the mattress, spread his legs, and hooked Lizzy around the waist, practically scooping her into his lap face-first. She knelt between his legs and he lay back, closing his eyes but not his mouth. “Suck it, you slutty bitch. God, you love it, don’t you?”

Lizzy moved so deliberately that she reminded me of a monitor lizard I’d seen at the zoo, its body operating in some ambiguous space between mechanical and organic. When she went for the sheath, I slid off the bed, trying to get as far as possible from whatever was going to happen next. Lizzy had the knife positioned over his artery, in the soft place where his leg connected to the rest of his body.

“You love really shitty music, don’t you, Richard?”

He opened his eyes in confusion. “What?”

And then Lizzy made the cut. That knife must have been incredibly sharp because she opened two holes, quickly—one on each thigh. Unfortunately, the coke had made Richard’s reflexes preternaturally fast. He sat up instantly and grabbed Lizzy around her neck. As Lizzy struggled, Heather rocketed forward and snatched the knife. Richard gurgled as Heather stabbed him in the back and blood sprayed intermittently out of his crotch like an X-rated Cronenberg flick.

I wanted to reach in and stop what was happening, but a more powerful force was pulling me toward the door. I stumbled backward, trying to look and not look at the figures on the bed, jerking in time to “Rock of Ages.” I crashed into the door, my arm on fire with pain, and then I was in the hallway running. It wasn’t some supernatural power propelling me after all. It was Soojin, her nails digging into my arm so hard that for a blissful moment I felt nothing but physical pain.

“Let’s go now! Fuck that guy. Fuck everything!” She was crying and so was I, and nobody on the sofas in the other room seemed to think that was strange at all. Was it normal for girls to come screaming and sobbing out of a room where Richard was listening to music? Maybe it was.

“Bye, ladies!”

I heard the lazy voice behind us as we spun down the spiral staircase, under the chain, out the door, and into the cold air that still carried the sounds of bad grunge from the tent. It had only been about half an hour since we’d arrived.

The guys at the gate saw our smeared makeup and became oddly subdued and chivalrous as they called a cab. One patted me on the head. “Hope you had a good time tonight.”

I looked into his face and wanted to kill him.

Soojin and I hugged without talking for most of the ride home. She promised her sister June would pay for the cab—they had some kind of mutually assured destruction deal that involved rescuing each other from the surveillance apparatus of their parents. I buried my face in the good smell of Soojin’s neck, inhaling unidentifiable perfume and clove cigarettes. It was strangely comforting to realize that Tess had been right. I’d told myself so. I couldn’t be Lizzy’s friend anymore.