They walked in the street, Slash and Charlie with hands clasped, swinging their arms. Charlie could no longer follow the group’s conversation, but she also no longer cared, taking pleasure in the soupy mix of their voices and the sounds of the city.
They stopped at a strip of warehouses, each adorned with signs warning of security cameras and fines. The sign on the last building in the row declared it condemned. But Charlie could feel things buzzing on the other side of the wall, and when Slash hopped onto the loading dock and tugged open a set of metal doors, an electronica throb spilled out as if from a vacuum seal. Inside, a woman drew Xs on their hands in Sharpie, then gave them each a Jell-O shot. Lem sucked hers down and hung the plastic cup on one of Sid’s spikes; Slash and Charlie followed suit. Greg hung back, leaning against the wall, staring intently his hands.
Sid waved his hand to show they should leave Greg be, then shook his head to launch the cups from his hair; they fell to the floor with dozens of others. Charlie liked the sharp crunch underfoot—it reminded her of the handful of times they’d had decent snow in Colson, and she imagined crushing icicles while Slash pulled her toward the center of the warehouse. Beneath a pulsing strobe, about a hundred people were already dancing.
This place is awesome, Charlie said.
What?
Best illegal activity ever!
I can’t understand you! said Slash.
I can’t understand you! she parroted.
He pulled her hips to his and kissed her fiercely. She allowed herself to follow his sway, in time with the rhythm of the room, and rubbed against him until she could feel him growing hard. Eventually they stopped kissing, but kept dancing braced tight against one another, Slash gently parting Charlie’s knees with one of his so she could slide along his thigh. The pressure made her woozy—her body was alight, her skin hot and prickly at the slightest touch, as if every sensory receptor had floated to the surface. Charlie thought again of her mother’s dancers, wondered if they ever also felt this weightless when they moved, but the thought didn’t stay long. She was rolling hard enough now that not even her mother could infringe on her high.
Lem and Sid appeared beside them, and she and Slash split apart and blended into the rest of the crowd, most of whom were now jumping with a hand in the air screaming song lyrics—like a cousin of the mosh pit, raw and sweaty, all moving as one.
Charlie lost Slash for a while, had a fleeting feeling of nervousness that was quickly subsumed by another tide of euphoria, and she kept jumping. When he returned, he offered her another Jell-O shot, and showed her his forearm, on which he’d written in Sharpie: Wanna get out of here?
She downed the shot and pulled him out of the warehouse.
charlie woke naked atop the blankets the next morning, harsh winter sunlight slicing through Slash’s broken blinds. She scanned the surrounding area for a condom wrapper, spotted one, and let out all the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. As her panic abated, she took in the room: Slash’s bed was a mattress on the floor and there was no other furniture, only stacks of books lining the remaining perimeter. She felt a hand on her shoulder and rolled over to find Slash looking at her with concern, no doubt from the weight of her sigh.
You okay?
She felt like she’d swallowed sand. She tried clearing her throat a few times, then just smiled and nodded instead.
Get in here, said Slash, holding up the blanket and beckoning her back toward him.
She slid closer, but he moved toward the wall. She tried not to look disappointed. She knew he had done it for her benefit; he wanted to talk and wanted her to be able to see. He had always been good about that, even when she was just meeting him for a hookup, like it was intuitive to him, like they were a team in figuring out how to make a conversation work. She wondered if things would’ve been different if more people at Jeff had seen it the same way.
So—he said, reaching over to brush her hair from her face—did you have fun last night?
I did, she said.
He ran his hand up her neck and the back of her head, to the place where the magnet sat beneath her skin. The scar had always interested him and she let him trace it.
What about you? she said, touching the bald spot in his eyebrow, the shiny tissue at the bridge of his nose.
Oh, it was nothing.
What happened?
Bottle to the face. At a protest.
Charlie winced.
Eh, it wasn’t anything, he said. Face skin just scars easily. The beating I took from the cops after was a lot worse.
The cops beat you up? Why?
Comes with the territory.
The band? said Charlie.
Among other things.
What things?
Oh you know, he said nonchalantly. The revolution.
Slash flicked his eyebrows up as if he was teasing, but she could tell he wasn’t. He was different, and it wasn’t just the scar, or the new clothes, or the tattoos. At Jeff, he’d had been the goofy kind of stoner, playing pranks on the aides who oversaw study hall, then laughing too loudly afterward. Now his appearance was brash but he was quieter, and in that quiet there was a depth that made Charlie feel a little nervous.
What happened to you this summer? she said.
Just started paying attention, is all, he said.
In their time together, Slash had never said anything political that she could remember. No one she knew at Jeff talked much about politics—not in a way that felt actionable beyond slogan T-shirts or stickers on notebooks. For her part, survival had kept Charlie too busy to care much about the bigger picture. But now the word “revolution” pinged something in her. She thought of the banner with the band’s name on it from the night before; she felt certain it meant something important, but whatever wisps of it she might have captured at school she couldn’t dredge up now.
Teach me your band’s name?
He looked confused at first, but when she placed a hand on his neck diagonally so it grazed his Adam’s apple he understood.
Robe-spee-air, he said.
She copied his sounds.
You got it. Not too hard, as French goes.
Why them? she ventured.
Who?
Robe-spee-airs, she said.
She could see he was thinking about laughing at this before he realized she was serious.
No, Robespierre. He was a dude, like, the inventor of the French Revolution. He stormed prisons, killed a bunch of rich fucks. Very radical shit.
A hazy memory of last year’s history class was surfacing, a PowerPoint about some kind of riots, and— Wait, she said. Is this the guy with the—
What was that word? She tried to picture it on the slide, but even if she could, she wouldn’t have known how to say it aloud.
You know, the head chopper thing?
So you do know!
But he killed a lot of people!
Sometimes violence is necessary for change, Slash said calmly. You don’t think so?
I don’t know, she said. What about, like, MLK?
Slash rolled his eyes.
Martin Luther King wasn’t some hippie, he said. That’s just how white people _______ after they murdered him.
How white people what? said Charlie.
Trussed him up. T-r-u-s-s. It’s like, how you tie up a turkey’s legs.
I don’t get it.
Charlie was losing the thread. She didn’t know what a turkey had to do with anything, and besides that, she was bemused by the way Slash talked about white people as if he himself were not paler even than her mother, nearly translucent, so that his veins ran bright green beneath his skin. She shrugged.
Look, he said. Say you’ve got cancer. A huge tumor! You’re not just going to leave it in there. So, what do you do?
Get surgery? she said.
Exactly. Cut out the bad stuff. Surely there’s something in your life you’d be better off without?
Probably a few things, Charlie thought—her implant, math class, maybe even her mom—though whether she was willing to cut any of it out to the degree Slash was suggesting, something so permanent, she wasn’t sure.
I guess, she said.
That’s all the guillotine was.