Mayhem Read online

  Also, I’m pretty sure they are drugs.

  Neve shakes some from her palm into mine. She measures out an amount equal to what she gave me. “It’ll just be a little boost, you know? It’s not that many. It’s not like it’s acid or something.”

  “Who’s going to take care of Kidd?”

  “Jason. He’s abstaining so he can be there for us if we need him, which we’re not going to.”

  “And they’re going to come with us? We’re going to do drugs in front of Kidd?”

  “Stop saying that word, Jesus!” She looks irritated all of a sudden. “You think we’re going to sprout wings or turn into demons as soon as we take them? We’re still us, just with sparkles.”

  When I stare at my palm, she says, “Give them back. I’m not twisting your arm. You either do it or you don’t. I’m sure you can still find your mom and she can take you home to bed.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.”

  I shove them in my mouth, which fills with the taste of cow and dirt. I gag but then force them down, freezing to make sure they don’t come back up.

  “That’s my girl,” she says.

  I’ve heard people jump off buildings, thinking they can fly.

  Maybe I’ll drown.

  Or swim.

  As though she can hear my thoughts, Neve says, “Mushies make you see things for what they are.”

  “They taste like literal shit.”

  Neve doubles over, giggling. “I like you.” She pats me on the back. “Try not to puke.” She hands me my can of soda. “Wash them down with the Coke.”

  Beside us, a couple throws down a blanket, settles into the sand, and turns on a black and silver boom box. Hardcore blares out as the couple starts kissing.

  “People really rut everywhere in Santa Maria, hunh?” The last of the mushroom flavor disappears and all I taste is sugary sweetness.

  “Summer love.” Neve shakes her head. “Crazy kids.”

  “Ladies.” A flashlight shines on us. “You doing okay over here?”

  “Yes, sir,” Neve says.

  The guy puts the flashlight down. When my eyes adjust I see he’s not that much older than us. He’s in a red sweatshirt and shorts with the word LIFEGUARD across his chest in white. He has the full-on surfer accent, drawing out all the vowels. “We’re walking the beach to make sure if there’s some guy bothering the ladies he knows someone is watching.”

  “Well, thank you,” Neve says. “We’re grateful.” She bows and he smiles, then walks past the couple and on down the beach.

  “The beach used to shut down and there were no guards on duty at night,” Neve explains. “Not like people didn’t party anyway. It was just more low-key, I guess. But all that changed a few years ago when they decided to keep the boardwalk open until two in the morning and like one million people started skinny-dipping and stuff. This one guy, Brent Lutsker, drowned. The lifeguards don’t really do much except make sure no one dies. They never tell us to put the alcohol away or anything.” We start back to the boardwalk. “It’s a new moon tonight. There’s a meteor shower, so this is going to be perfect. You can see the stars when there’s no moon, you know? But first, I have something to show you, something really, epically Santa Maria.”

  “What’s that?” I say

  “Sax Man,” Neve says, then makes devil-horn fingers at me.

  “Kidd told me about him.”

  As it turns out, I’ve never seen anything like anything.

  As soon as we find Kidd and Jason again, Kidd reaches for my hand, and though I am surprised, I take it and give her an extra squeeze.

  “I promise you’ve never seen anything like it.”

  * * *

  Jason has an arm around Neve again, and I’m grateful for Kidd skipping beside me. It isn’t hard to find where we’re going. We follow the throngs of people, and Jason throws Kidd on his shoulders when we get close so she doesn’t get tripped over. Everyone seems agitated. We finally stop at the top of a makeshift arena. Crates are stacked on top of each other in tiers, and in the bottom center is a band playing metal. The lead singer is sweaty and in spandex pants, his hair waving in the wind. The guy drops his guitar and picks up a sax. He is literally oiled from head to toe.

  It’s not so much that people are immersed in the music, although some definitely are. Instead it acts as a soundtrack while they do other things. They drink, make out, lean over to whisper in each other’s ears, smoke weed. I see no sign of police, or of anyone over the age of eighteen. To my right, a skinny kid attacks a kid with a shaved head and they topple to the ground at my feet, so I grab Kidd and we scoot out of the way.

  At center stage, the guy thrusts his muscular pelvis against the sax, greasy curls bouncing along his shoulders, and wails out a solo as the part of the crowd that’s there for him claps along.

  I check Neve’s face to make sure she has an appropriately judgmental look, but she’s busy scanning the crowd as though looking for someone. I’m starting to get a little nauseated, a little tingly in my fingertips.

  “This is Sax Man?” I say. “Really?”

  “I know he seems crazy, but he’s an innocent,” she says. “Sax Man is his actual name. Changed it legally last year. And you know what?” She hands off a soda to Kidd. “If you’re going to be here on the beach at night for your first time, you are going to have to understand that cheesy cock rock and beach treats are part of the deal. Tacos, low-riders, surfboards, the carnival. I don’t want to misrepresent Santa Maria. This is it.”

  “Hey, sweetie.” A guy with a leather jacket and a spike coming out of his nose weaves toward us, and Neve kicks out her leg so he trips over it. He flexes his arms. I think maybe he’s going to brutally murder all of us, but instead he looks from Jason to Neve and back again and straightens. “I didn’t see you there. I’m sorry.” He leaves immediately, hands in his pocket. No. He scurries.

  Kidd wedges in between us and looks from one to the other. “So are we taking her?” she says to Neve.

  “No,” Jason says.

  “Why not?” Kidd scowls.

  “Didn’t you hear anything Elle said?” Jason flickers his eyes to mine, then looks away.

  “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” Neve says to Kidd. “Some smart chick said that. We shouldn’t always listen to what people tell us to do.”

  “Neve—”

  “I think it’s time. She’s supposed to be with us. Elle will understand.”

  “You’re playing with the roof over our head,” Jason says.

  “What matters is what’s right here.” Neve points from her heart to Jason’s to Kidd’s. “What we have right here is sacred, and no one is going to mess with it. We could be under any roof so long as we’re together.”

  “What about Mayhem?” Kidd says. “Doesn’t she get to be sacred?”

  “We’ll see,” Neve says.

  The guy in the band is gyrating over his guitar now. “Christ on a cross.” Neve watches as Sax Man humps his way across the stage. “He’s our pride and joy, but sometimes I wish he would calm down a little.”

  “But are we taking her to the hideout?” Kidd presses.

  “Hideout?” I ask.

  “It’s in the ocean,” Kidd says.

  “In the ocean?” I say.

  Kidd nods. “You don’t walk there. You can’t even run.”

  “That’s enough, Kiddo.” Neve puts a finger across Kidd’s lips. “Let’s take a vote. All in favor of showing Mayhem our hideout, raise your hands.”

  Neve lifts hers, and so does Kidd. Jason doesn’t move. I put mine up high.

  “Three to one,” Neve says. “It’s decided.”

  Behind me, the ocean whispers. Maybe I can step into the water and find my dad. Maybe find my mom, too. A memory yanks me under. Sun, a bright day, the sky perfect blue. A surfboard. My mother, her hair brown in pigtails hanging off her shoulders. Her smiling. My father, the color of a redwood tree. Roxy laughs. Perfeito, amor. His arms are
around me as I balance on the surfboard, hands out like I’m flying. His hands steady everything as I bob on a small wave.

  My dad.

  I take a full breath, lungs open, and sigh as I exhale, which is when I realize my eyes are closed.

  I snap them open and Neve is grinning at me.

  “Girl,” she says. “That hit you quick.” When she turns her head, another head follows, licking its lips.

  This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?

  I nod, but the music has gone from bad to way too loud, though when I dare to look at the band again, Sax Man’s golden spandex pants do sort of make him look like a superhero. I mean, for just a second, he is glorious. A rainbow halo dances around him.

  “You’re hallucinating,” Neve says. “It’s nothing. Just tracers. Your pupils are dilated, so light does strange things. What I do is try to let it happen. If you fight, you’re screwed.”

  I need to get away from here, all these people. I need to get to the water. I’m covered in dirt.

  “I want to go to the hideout,” I say. “The hideout in the ocean.”

  Neve throws an arm around my shoulder. I feel it in my legs.

  The ocean pulls at my belly again like there’s a cord attached. I have always wanted to live in the water. Die there, too, swimming laps back and forth. No more back and forth. I want to go somewhere, to go.

  “I’m ready,” I say, unfamiliar certainty surging. “I’m ready.”

  Jason pulls his necklace out, removes the cap, squirts his mouth, then pulls Kidd’s chin downward and does the same to her. Then he replaces the silver under his shirt.

  “Okay, then, it’s decided. Come on,” Neve says. “Let’s head out.”

  SIXTEEN

  HIDEOUT

  I can’t see it at first, even though Jason tells me he’s shining a light right on it, something directly below the cliffs where my father died. The water is almost still. There’s hardly a wave. It looks like all the other cliffs jutting from the water at a hard angle, unreachable and treacherous.

  In the distance, the sounds of the carousel, of Sax Man thumping the night away.

  My feet sink into the sand, and when I look up, the stars swirl. It’s not real. I know that. I strip to my underwear and a bra, and Jason takes my clothes and stuffs them into a dry bag they carry with them.

  “Right there!” Kidd’s curls bounce, and I want to pull on them and watch them boing back up.

  Neve gets behind me, takes my arm and uses it to point. “See through my eyes.”

  I try to let her eyes be mine, and within seconds, the split in the cliff is obvious, how the rocks are covered in moss and there is an opening underneath, like a howling mouth.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Good.” Neve lets go of me and starts gathering things that are hidden under a nearby rock. “It wouldn’t be a hideout if everyone could see it. There’d be all sorts of people trying to live there. Jay, will you take this?” She throws him a bag he straps around his waist. “I’m going to make sure Mayhem gets there okay.”

  “Alleeoop!” Kidd climbs up onto Jason’s shoulders, and they speak to each other in Spanish for a minute.

  Neve nudges me forward, firmly.

  As I step deeper and deeper, the water is not all around me, it is all the way through. I push off the ocean floor. I follow Jason, his head dipping in and out of the water as he takes long, measured breaths. Kidd throws one fist in the air.

  My feet hit the craggy rocks at the entrance of the hideout, and Neve pulls me up into the cave. It’s narrow, and then it’s not. A few feet through a tunnel and it’s wide open.

  Neve lights candles that border all the walls.

  There are tapestries, and a coffee table sits balanced on two flat rocks. Blankets are everywhere—purple, pink, brown. Little cups and saucers. The floor is flat and warm and I sit, following Neve and Jason. There’s space, the room is open, ceiling high. Water trickles from somewhere out of sight, and other than that, there’s nothing but the swish as the ocean brushes against the rocks outside and the sound of towels rubbing against skin.

  “How’d you get all this stuff here?”

  “Dry bags. Some of it was already here. People probably brought it by boat at some point.”

  “It’s so warm,” I say, palming the floor, which is at least eighty degrees and keeps me from feeling the chill of the swim.

  “We’re on a hot spot, baby.” Neve looks bright and less menacing with her hair wet and no makeup on. “Come on, I want to show you our treasure. Jay, bring the flashlight.”

  He guides us down the tunnel.

  “They say the caves run under all of Santa Maria. If we kept going, who knows where we’d end up,” Neve says.

  We follow the thread of yellow across the flat rocky ground.

  “If the tunnels are the arteries, we found the heart.” Neve points back into the darkness. “And it bleeds.”

  “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could climb out of here into someone’s closet?” Kidd says. “You could be the bogeyman and you wouldn’t ever have to be scared again because you would be the scary one.”

  “Duck,” Jason says, and Kidd lowers her head as we cross into another part of the cave. It does look like arteries leading into ventricles, as a large room separates into quadrants that are nearly walled off from each other. The room they lead me to is no bigger than a toilet stall, and it’s all mud and rock. Water flows from the wall. I’ve been here before. I’m sure I have. The earth rolls under my feet.

  Jason lets Kidd crawl off his back to stand. We are all crammed in together, and Jason breathes from behind me.

  “Are you okay?” Kidd says. “You look weird.”

  Neve laps. Her body leans into the wall so she can get closer. Water drips down her chin and chest. Her head hangs back at the neck so her throat is exposed, mouth slightly open. Then she snaps up and takes the flashlight from Jason.

  “It’s magic,” Kidd whispers, but her voice echoes through the cave.

  Jason takes a drop from the wall and lays it on his tongue, then does the same to Kidd. She shudders.

  “Go ahead,” Neve says to me. “I’ll hold the light for you.”

  “Aren’t you even going to tell her?” Jason says. “Before she does it?”

  “Tell her what?” Neve says.

  “Elle didn’t want us to bring you here,” Jason says. “You were supposed to find it by yourself or not find it at all.”

  “I saw her, Jay,” Neve says. “She made straight for it as soon as she got in the ocean. She’s a Brayburn.”

  “Once you drink, you’ll have to keep drinking,” he says, ignoring Neve. “You can’t stop. I wish we never had.”

  I laugh a laugh that loops through the air around us so I hear myself, brash and ugly.

  “It’s not a joke,” Jason says.

  “You just don’t want me to be one of you,” I say. “You don’t like me.”

  “He likes you,” Kidd says. “I do, too.”

  “Look at her,” Jason says, pointing to Neve, her dazed euphoria. “Look at all of us.” He grabs at his necklace. “We’re slaves to this place. That what you want?”

  Neve’s eyelids are fluttering like it’s an effort to keep them open. “There’s nothing better,” Neve says. “Nothing in the world.”

  “It changes you,” Jason says. “You can’t ever go back.”

  “I’m thirsty.” I take a step forward, and Jason pulls Kidd by the hand.

  “Remember this. Remember I warned you.”

  “Bye-bye, Jay.” Neve waves him off, peeling herself from the wall. She takes a finger and dips it into the water, then comes over to me and runs it along my lips.

  “Lick,” she says.

  I do.

  “Good girl.”

  For a moment the only sound is of the water falling across the rocks. Then Neve says, “Who needs boys?” There’s a smile in her voice, but there is also something animal coming from underneath it. It forms fr
om her shadow on the wall. She’s a crow, with a winged expanse that is frightening and absolute and stretches over me.

  “I see now,” I say, bliss moving through every cell. “You’re a bird like the ones at the farm. A beautiful, scary bird.”

  This stops her. Now that I’ve seen it, it is impossible to unsee. Her feathers. Her beak. Her beady black eyes.

  She runs a hand along my arm. She points the flashlight to the wall over the water. BRAYBURN is etched, carved there.

  “This place belongs to the Brayburns. Or it did. Now maybe it belongs to us, too. We can be a whole new generation. We can make it ours.”

  I don’t understand everything, but some pieces are coming clear. Somehow, I am in Julianna’s cave. The letter from Julianna to her daughter, Billie, the gifts at the gate, people being afraid and worshipful—it has something to do with this. I am proud for no reason, proud of my name.

  Brayburn lady coming for you

  Take your man and curse you, too.

  Brayburn lady knows your sins

  Reads your mind and kills your friends …

  Neve smiles. “You never heard that before?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know yourself yet,” she says, “but you will. People want to keep secrets from you, but it’s not right. You need to know everything.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “I get it,” she says. “It’s a way for people to control you. They’re afraid that if you know everything, you’ll turn into someone they don’t want you to be. But I believe in you. I believe you’re strong enough to handle it. The question is, do you? Here’s the truth, Mayhem. This water is the first step. I know it sounds fucking crazy, and it is. But it’s also something so powerful, you can’t even believe it. This water is everything, and it is made just for you. You can turn away from it. You only had a little tiny bit. Like Jason said, Elle didn’t want you here, because your mom will have a monumental-ass freakout. But ask yourself why. What are they trying to keep from you? What are they trying to hide?”