Melody and Erica found the purple castle the night before, hidden in some cedar trees, while they were on acid. Melody’s ex-boyfriend Amos was in there, they said. Amos had been dead over a year. His blood still stained the beige carpet in Dario’s house, where we bought our drugs. We told each other that it had been a mistake, that Amos didn’t know the gun was loaded, but Dario’s guns were always loaded.
I drove and Erica told me where to turn, leaning into the front seat, putting her head between me and Melody. “Right at the manatee mailbox,” she said, pointing at a mailbox in the shape of a manatee, its flippers held out, ready for deliveries. There was an open gate across the dirt road with tall grass growing through its frame where it hung crooked, angled toward the ground. It had not been shut in a long time. “Park by the fence,” Erica said. Her jaw clenched and unclenched in a chemical jitter. She smiled, her lips barely stretching across her teeth.
I was in love with Melody, with the way she handled tragedy, the way she wore clothes that were too small for her, the way she perfumed the car with skincare products and cheap cigarettes. Erica made me uncomfortable, but she and Melody circled each other like debris being sucked down a drain.
There was a trailer off to the side of the road that looked uninhabited, its front steps rotted through and collapsing. A light over the door blinked off and on regularly like an alarm or a beacon. Melody held onto my arm as we walked through weeds so high they brushed against our thighs. A barbed wire fence ran beside the road and we climbed through as Erica held the wires apart. Melody wore a black skirt and as she bent to weave herself through the fence I saw bruises on her smooth and shiny legs. My pants caught and a barb pricked my skin as I followed her through. On this side of the fence, a copse of cedars rose thin and straight beyond a cow pasture. When we reached the tree line I could see red bark peeling off the trunks like scabs.
“It’s still there,” Melody said, grabbing Erica’s hand. It took me a moment to recognize what I was looking at because the shape was so out of place. A small castle sat in the middle of the trees. Melody and Erica stopped and waited on either side of the arched doorway, beckoning me inside.
The castle was only six or seven feet tall, with towers in the corners and battlements stubbing its walls. Its bright purple paint was chipping to show concrete gray underneath. I dipped my head to pass through the door. The ceiling of the interior was low enough that I had to stay bent at the waist.
The inside of the castle smelled moist, like something dragged out of a lake. Amos sat at the other end of the small space in an aluminum folding chair with his hands in his lap. “Did you bring cigarettes?” he asked. My hand went to my pocket and I took out a crushed pack with only one cigarette left, flipped upside down for good luck. I held it in my open palm.
Amos took the cigarette and stuck it between his lips. I sparked my lighter and in the small flame I could see the missing left side of his head, where the bullet had exited his skull. His eyes and nose were slightly out of place. Flies crawled on the crusted skin at the edges of the wound.
His eyes caught mine as he inhaled and the tip of the cigarette burned. Erica laughed and I turned to see her taking a hit off a metal bowl. “Fucking crazy, right?” she said, holding the smoke in her lungs as she spoke.
“Ask him something,” Melody said.
I turned to look at her. Her head was almost on my shoulder. “Ask him?”
She nodded and licked her pink lip gloss. Her brown eyes looked black in the dark.
“Something you really want to know,” Erica said. She took another hit off the metal bowl and coughed, wheezing out the last of her breath. Melody put her hand in the middle of my back and pushed me closer to Amos. Cigarette smoke rose from the hole in the side of his head.
“What’s it like on the other side?” I asked, looking down at my shoes instead of at Amos.
“You can tell it’s all fake,” he said. He lifted his hand and gestured at the concrete wall.
Melody exhaled on the side of my neck, her breath floral and mildewed. “Ask him about the future,” she whispered in my ear.
Amos stomped his cigarette and reached out for another. I showed him my empty pack. “Can you see the future?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, reaching up to scratch the edge of the exit wound. “I can see all kinds of things I never wanted to see.”
I had exams the next day at school and I hadn’t studied or attended classes for most of the semester. “What’s on the exam tomorrow?” I asked. “Can you give me the answers, or does it have to be some kind of cryptic thing?”
Amos laughed. It was grotesque, the way his mouth hung open too far. Nothing held his jaw in place. “Don’t worry about the test, man,” he said.
I wasn’t worried about the test, but my parents had impressed on me the value of an education and I was well below the threshold for college admittance. “Like, don’t worry about it because I’ll do well, or don’t worry about it for some other reason?”
Amos gave me the kind of pitying smile that means you’re about to figure something out for yourself. “Does Dario still have the best drugs?” he asked.
I looked back at Melody. Her lips shined with flavored gloss. She nodded. “Yeah, he’s still got the best drugs,” I said
“I miss good drugs,” Amos said. “Everything here is like a cardboard cutout of what you expect it to be. Everything here gives you little paper cuts.”
Melody put her hand on my shoulder. Erica took another hit from the bowl. I wanted to ask Amos more questions, like why he did what he did with the gun, but I was embarrassed. I guess Amos could see I was starting to get restless, because he politely slapped his thighs. “Okay,” he said, “thanks for coming.” He didn’t stand up from the folding chair as we left the castle. The sun had gone down. On the way back to the car Melody and Erica held my hands to guide me through the cedar trees and to the cow pasture where the moon lit the way to the car.
Dario’s house was in the suburbs. His backyard was brown dirt because no grass would grow in the shade of two wide oak trees. His parents had left him the house and when they died in prison he took over their drug distribution network. We weren’t big customers, but we’d known each other since middle school so he let us keep coming around, even after Amos died, when other people stopped partying at the house because of the bloodstains and because the police started driving by all the time, parking down the street, making note of the cars that came and went.
That night, I sat between the girls on a white leather couch in a white-tiled living room while Dario paced and peeked out the blinds every few minutes. Gas masks were lined up on the windowsill facing the street and rifles leaned in the corners. He was always saying if the cops ever came to the door that he was going to die shooting, and I knew that he would.
Amos’s bloodstain was in a small den off to the side of the living room. The dark spot looked like a chasm in the carpeted floor from where we waited for Dario to divvy out pills and tabs. We didn’t tell him about Amos.
“This is good stuff,” he said, opening a jewelry bag of white powder and inhaling a little bit from his overgrown pinky nail. “It’s clean, though, so be careful. A dab will do you.”
I picked at the peeling leather. My head felt too clear. I could see everything that was happening in the room at once: Melody pulling on her eyelashes, Erica licking her teeth, Dario looking back and forth between us.
“Did you guys take those yellow tabs the other night?” he asked Melody and Erica.
“Yeah,” Erica said. “It was pretty medieval.” Melody put her hand on Erica’s forearm to quiet her. The gesture looked loving in the slivered moonlight coming through the blinds.
The girls and I hadn’t spoken about it directly, but I knew Dario wouldn’t handle the Amos thing well. They had been best friends.
Dario smiled. “That’s great,” he said, rubbing a sad strip of hair on his jawline. “They had me feeling out of place, too.” He gestured at a line of red gas cans against the sliding door to the back yard. They were brand new, with price tags still on them, but I didn’t need to ask to know they were all full.
Melody clapped and bounced on the couch. “Is that a project?” she asked.
Dario nodded. He always had a project going, because he didn’t sleep and didn’t leave the house much. “I can’t tell you about that,” he said, looking at the front window, then walking quickly toward it and pulling the blinds slightly apart to peek out onto the street. “The HOA has been on my ass lately. Are you wearing a wire?” He fingered something in his waistband that I’m sure was a handgun.
Melody smiled and lifted her shirt. A too-small black bra cut into the tops of her breasts. I wanted to stare but I looked away, at the oak trees in the back yard, past the red gas cans.
“That’s good,” Dario said. “You ask too many questions, you know?” He patted her on the head and her hair-sprayed curls bounced right back.
“I love projects,” Melody said.
Dario handed her the sandwich bag of drugs. “Come see me when you’re out.”
We stepped out the front door and into a yard overgrown with weeds. It always felt warm and good to leave Dario’s house because he kept the air conditioning cold, to keep the humidity down so moisture didn’t spoil the drugs hidden in closets and cupboards and safes.
We got a hotel room by the freeway, at a rundown chain that let teenagers pay in cash. Melody and Erica took turns putting tabs and pills on my tongue, then meeting guys in the parking lot to sell off some of the drugs we’d bought, leaning into driver’s side windows, coming back with handfuls of money and stacking it on the faux-wood table.
Sometimes the drugs Dario gave us were fake. I kept taking more tabs and pills whenever the girls told me to open my mouth, but I didn’t feel anything. Melody and Erica went to the bathroom together every half hour or so. Their pupils got wider as the night went on. We lay on the bed, the comforter scratchy against our bare skin, and watched TV with the sound off. Melody held my hand on one side and Erica held my hand on the other. They vibrated just a little when they inhaled, drawing breath for too long, like they might overinflate. They rested their heads on my shoulders. When cars pulled into the parking lot Melody stood up with a smile, looking out through the curtains to see if they were customers. Her phone buzzed on the bedside table. Each time she answered it, Erica traced a finger on the inside of my elbow and looked up at me, but I kept my eyes on the TV where a talk show host reached over to grab the exposed thigh of his guest, part of a gag I couldn’t understand without sound. She slapped his hand but his fingers crept back across the desk toward her, over and over, and she became visibly uncomfortable until the show cut to commercial.
The next morning I woke up early. The girls were still asleep as I slipped out of the room and closed the heavy door behind me. I tried to look in through the window, putting my forehead against the glass, closing one eye and staring at the crack between the curtains, but I couldn’t see anything. The room was dark. I knew the girls would sleep past checkout.
I was still in school but Melody and Erica had informally dropped out by then. They stopped going and the school stopped calling. I pulled my car onto the country road leading to the school, the sky in my rearview mirror brightening but the sky in front of me still dark blue. The road to the purple castle went by and I thought about turning but kept going straight, toward the school and the exams I knew I would fail.
A silver sedan passed me too fast, swerving in and out of traffic. The air sucked out of my open window as the car rushed by and felt like a shockwave in my chest. A few car lengths in front of me the sedan became a flash, catching the morning sunlight as it turned sideways and rolled, showing its undercarriage, its shattered windshield before disappearing into a cloud of dust and steam.
The car was destroyed. It was upside down, its engine exposed like a ribcage. Books and papers fluttered and stuck to the dewy grass. I got out of my car and turned one of the books over with my toe, not knowing what to do.
“Oh God,” a girl moaned from the tree line past the ditch. “My head.”
I found her with her head nestled in the crook of a tree, where the trunk branched into two, a few inches off the ground. I had civics class with her but didn’t know her name. “Are you okay?” I said.
“I can’t move,” she said. “I want to move, but I can’t move.” I watched her arms and legs not moving.
I didn’t see any signs of trauma. She wasn’t bleeding. Her clothes were dirty but she was dressed in pastels that felt seasonally appropriate. She looked up at me. “Oh God,” she said. “I’m swelling. There’s not enough space inside me.”
I know that my memory here is false, impossible, because brain swelling doesn’t show outside of the skull, because the skull keeps the brain in place, but I remember her head growing like a water balloon, pushing her hair line away from her eyes, spreading her eyebrows apart. I was afraid she would pop.
Although I didn’t register it right away, our beloved civics teacher had stopped her car in the middle of the road. She pushed through the gathering crowd and knelt at the girl’s side.
“Look at my eyes,” our beloved civics teacher said. “The ambulance is coming. You aren’t going to pop. There will be plenty of room inside you to swell and then shrink again. Try to picture your own elasticity. Think of all the things you learned for your exams today. Remember how we were studied the branches of government, how one might get bloated, taking up space constitutionally intended for another branch, but how there is a system in place to put things back into their correct proportions? Remember how we discussed that things naturally seek balance? What would you say is the primary mechanism that maintains balance?” The girl’s eyes fluttered. “Think, now,” our beloved civics teacher said. “This will be on the exam.”
The girl with her head in the crook of the tree opened her eyes and said, “Congressional budget approval.”
Our beloved civics teacher reached out and touched the girl’s cheek, careful not to move her neck. “That’s one correct answer,” she said. “Budget oversight is a powerful tool.”
Our beloved civics teacher held the girl’s hand. A line of cars stopped on the road. People leaned out of their windows, their eyes squinted against the rising sun, trying to see what had happened. No one seemed to notice me backing away, getting in my car, turning around, heading in the opposite direction of the school. There was nothing I was going to be able to write on my exams that would make me forget the way the girl’s head looked in the crook of that tree.
I turned off the country road and pulled down the driveway to the purple castle and parked. Parting the barbed wire by myself was difficult but I made it through with only a few scratches on my arms and back.
Amos was in the same place, on the aluminum folding chair with his hands in his lap. “Gave up on exams?” he asked me, then held out his hands for a cigarette. I shook one out of my pack and lit it for him. “That girl is going to be fine,” he said. “You would have failed your exams anyway.” I nodded and sat down on the dirt floor of the castle with my back to the wall. “You’re in love with Melody,” Amos said, looking past me, out the door of the castle. “I knew the gun was loaded.”
“Do you feel different now?” I asked. “Better?”
Amos shrugged. His posture was too loose. I remembered the way he would get excited when listening to music, bringing his fist in front of his face to sing along with his favorite parts. “It’s not like it’s some big relief,” he said. “There are just other problems now.”
That was what I expected him to say. I could see into the hole in his skull where his brain used to be. Skin and bone jutted from the sides of the opening in jagged points. A green lizard cautiously climbed up his shoulder and perched on the shattered part of his skull with its tail hanging down into his head. The lizard extended a red flap of skin on its neck, retracted it, then extended it again, the same way that I had seen thousands of other lizards do thousands of times before.
Some books I have recently loved: Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez; Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin; Hole by Hiroko Oyamada; Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda; Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
