Beautiful Boys Read Free

begged her mom Brandy-Lynn not to let go of his old apartment in the Village. It’s like she doesn’t want to admit that he’s dead.
    Weetzie is sitting in the room with the dried roses and painted fans all over the walls and the stained-glass pyramid-palm-tree windows that look out on the canyon. From here you can see a few blue pools like the canyon’s eyes and the waves of palm, eucalyptus and oleander like the canyon’s swirly greenhair. The canyon talks in different voices. In the day she growls with traffic, but real early or late at night she sings with mockingbirds and you can hear her wind-chime jewelry. Angel Juan and I used to sneak over garden walls and swim in the pool eyes at night. We used to climb the trees, tangling in the braids of leaves, and Angel Juan told me he was going to build us a tree house someday. His dad Marquez, who makes frames and furniture, taught him how to build tree houses.
    In our house that feels like a tree house sometimes—deep in the canyon, nested in leaves—Weetzie’s working on the script for the next movie she and my dad are making. It’s a ghost story.
    “I’m going to New York,” I say. “Could I stay at Charlie Bat’s?”
    “Are you sure you want to go to New York, honey?”
    “I’m going to New York,” I say. I start to nibble at my fingernails, chew my cuticles.
    Weetzie goes over to her 1920’s dressing table with the round mirror and the lotus-blossom lights. The little genie lamp is sitting there—still gold but empty of genies and wishes now. Weetzie takes anold photo album out of a dressing table drawer. It’s so old that almost all the pile of the pink velvet has worn down around the gold curlicues and cupids. It’s so old that it was probably red velvet once, a long time ago. Weetzie sits on her seashell-shaped love seat that is the same velvet pink as the photo album and pats it for me to sit next to her. I climb up the side and perch, looking over her shoulder instead. Inside the photo album is a picture of a tall skinny man with sunken eyes and bones like the guys in those old black-and-white silent movies. Kind of like Valentino but a lot thinner and not so healthy-looking. The man has his arm around a little blonde woman with a big lipsticky smile and slidey gold mules on her feet. They seem really in love standing in front of this cherry yellow T-bird clinking champagne glasses: Weetzie’s mom and dad when they were young. Before Brandy-Lynn and Charlie and the champagne glasses and the T-bird got smashed. Before Brandy-Lynn kicked Charlie out and he went to New York and died there.
    Weetzie shows me a picture of her and her realdaughter, my almost-sister Cherokee, with Charlie from the time when they went to visit him just before he died. It was taken in one of those photo booths. Cherokee was just a baby then with little tufts of white hair like a Kewpie doll or something. Weetzie looks exactly the same as she does now—elf mom—maybe a little skinnier and her hair was a little shorter, kind of spiky. But Charlie doesn’t look much like a silent-movie star anymore. He looks more like a ghost. There’s a spooky light around his head and his eyeballs are rolled up. Weetzie has her arm around him really tight and her fingers pressed into his shoulder.
    She’s never held on to me like that.
    Not that I’d let her.
    “I think people leave here before we think they’re gone,” Weetzie whispers as she looks at the picture. “And when you’re with them you know it. Part of you knows it—that they’ve left. But you don’t let yourself really accept it. And then later you think about it and you know you knew.”
    I can see her going back to that time, trying to find her dad.
    “We had to walk up eight flights of stairs to his apartment in the dark and every time he whistled ‘Rag Mop’ to us—you know, ‘R-A-G-G M-O-P-P Rag Mop doodely-doo’ to make us laugh. But that time he was quiet. When we got to the apartment he went and