“Can you meet me outside? In the back?” I ask in the lull between over-amped pop music tunes.
She regards me suspiciously but nods. “I’ll try. I have to get changed, though.” My hand stays where it is, holding the twenty extended, but she just looks at it, clearly disgusted, before collecting the other bills that have accumulated on the stage. She saunters off, and as she turns I get another glimpse of her neatly waxed nether regions. I wonder how Zelda felt about that. She was fervently anti-waxing. Predictably. She always liked things messy.
I nod to Wyatt and we walk back outside; I flash a pack of cigarettes at the bouncer by way of explanation.
“You smoke now?” Wyatt says in the parking lot.
“France. You know,” I say, lighting up.
Wyatt looks distressed. “I always thought…never mind.”
“What? Zelda smoked,” I say, taking a drag. I smoke occasionally with Nico, because it seems like the right thing to do on a Parisian street while you’re flirting outside a café. But I don’t like cigarettes. I appreciate them as a prop, but there is something essentially dirty about inhaling them. I don’t tell Wyatt this, just watch as he battles disappointment in who I’ve become. “Want one?” I tease.
“No,” he says humorlessly. We walk around the side of the building; I have no idea what’s out back, but I figure there has to be somewhere for patrons to sip inconspicuously out of their flasks. Surely. I’ve driven by this place dozens, maybe hundreds of times, always assuming that it was a bar, imbued with the cozy safety inherent in a public drinking place. Knowing that it’s technically dry transforms its architecture into something suddenly strange, unreadable. It no longer makes abstract sense to me.
We loaf around the back, near a door I’m hoping leads to the stage. The cigarette is making me feel light-headed, a replacement high in the absence of booze. I know it will very shortly lead to nausea, but whatever. We mill around uncomfortably, and I check Zelda’s phone and Facebook again. Could she be here? I scan the exterior walls, as though I might be able to suss her out with some twinly X-ray vision. I tell myself I’m not a prude, that I wouldn’t care, but I really hope she hasn’t been working here.
After a few minutes, Holly walks outside, a cheap kimono covering her schoolgirl costume. My addict reptile brain notes almost immediately that she has a bottle of something under her arm.
“You’re Ava,” she says huskily. The blue eye shadow is even more jarring away from the stage lights.
“You’re very sharp,” I say, before I can stop myself. I need this girl to like me, answer my questions. But I imagine that if she’s friends with Zelda, she has to be used to some emotional abuse. “And this is Wyatt.”
“I know,” she says with a flirtatious smile, and both Wyatt and I raise our eyebrows in alarm. I shoot him an arch look, but he seems as surprised as I do. “I’ve seen pictures,” she explains. She turns back to me and holds out the bottle. “Drink?”
I take a swallow; it’s cheap coconut-flavored rum. It tastes god-awful, like sunscreen, but I’m grateful.
“So,” Holly says after she’s taken a slug. “Zelda’s dead.”
“So it would seem.”
“Idiot girl. I told her to lay off the smack.” I think her expression softens, though I can’t really tell. “I assume that’s what happened?”
“You were friends?” Wyatt asks, not answering her implied question.
“Yeah. Zelda came here looking for Jason a few months back and ended up in the dressing rooms. She brought nice Scotch with her, and we got talking.”
“Jason? You know him?” I say quickly.
“Everyone does. His brother’s the manager. Jay takes care of the…side business.”
“Drugs?” I blurt out. She just smiles back coyly, like I’m a fucking idiot.
“Was she dancing? Here?” I ask, not able to completely conceal the note of anxiety in my tone.
Holly looks surprised, though not offended. “God, no. Zelda just wasn’t the type, you know. And her tits were too small.” She smirks and regards me sympathetically. My tits are no bigger than Zelda’s. She reaches over and plucks my cigarette away. She takes a long drag, eyes half-closed in pleasure.
“You smoke the same brand,” she says, amused. “She said you were every bit as crazy as she was,” she continues. “Damn. That girl was something.”
“Can I ask you something?” I say, lighting up another cigarette. She nods. “Why did you post that photo on Facebook earlier today? I mean, had you not heard about the fire?” I can’t bring myself to say “that Zelda is dead,” because I’m worried that it will sound like the lie I know it to be.
“No, I had. But a few days earlier, she asked me to post the photo at ten A.M. on the twenty-fourth. She was really insistent about it, said it was really important and she needed me to do it at exactly that time. Even if it looked weird.” Holly shrugs. “Zelda was pretty damn weird, though, so I didn’t think too hard about it. I owed her some favors.” She smiles that mysterious smile again, sleepy and supremely relaxed.
“And Jason? Is he ever here? I kind of need to talk to him,” I say.
“Is this because he went over to the house? Before the fire?” Holly says innocently.
“Yes. I need to know what he was doing there.”
“Well, how about you ask me?” a voice behind me says. I whirl around to face the man from Zelda’s Instagram photo. He’s only a few inches taller than me, but he is wide and muscular. His arms are huge, each one the size and color of a small ham, and his shirt is tight across an inflated chest. That has to be uncomfortable, I think. All that muscle. It looks unwieldy. The Maori tattoo from the photo curls out from under one taut shirtsleeve. I realize that he’s probably been lurking there for a while. Absurdly, I stick out my hand.
“Holly told me you showed up. Wanted to introduce myself,” he says, shaking my hand with a slight smile. He has a chin dimple. Of course he does. “And you are?” he asks coolly, rounding on Wyatt. Testosterone is thick in the air.
“Wyatt Darling. Old friend of Zelda’s. And Ava’s,” he adds, and I feel a slight niggle of hurt at being second.