Beautiful Boys Read Free Page A

stood by the window and shut his eyes, listening to the echoes of kids playing outside way down there in the distance, and he said, ‘It sounds like when I was a little boy in Brooklyn and we ran around the streets in the twilight, hoping it would never get all the way dark so we’d have to go in. Kids playing sound the same wherever you are. They sound so happy. They don’t know what’s in store for them.’
    “I said it could still be happy, like kids playing in the street before they have to go in for dinner. My friends and I, we live like that. Come live with us. But he was far away already.” Weetzie closes her eyes. It’s real quiet for a minute and I can hear the canyon tossing her hair and her wind-chime earrings clinking like Charlie and Brandy-Lynn’s champagne glasses in the photograph.
    I wonder what it would be like to talk to CharlieBat. I bet he would get it. He died from drugs all alone. He was an artist but he didn’t make pretty things. Weetzie says he wrote movies and plays about monsters, but they were really about the monster feelings inside.
    “I miss him so much. But I can’t even dream about him,” Weetzie says.
    What she says reminds me of Angel Juan. Sometimes it almost feels like Angel Juan is dead too.
    It’s like Weetzie’s reading my mind for a second. “You really need to look for him, don’t you?”
    I am busy with my cuticle gnaw. “Can I go see Charlie Bat?” I mumble.
    Weetzie stares at me like she’s seen a ghost. “Lanky lizards,” she whispers.
    “I mean Charlie Bat’s —his place,” I say.
    Weetzie nods, looking at her photo album.
    In a way I’m glad she’s into letting me go. But another part of me wishes she didn’t want me to. It seems like she’s thinking more about Charlie Bat than about me.
    Dear Angel Juan,
    Why haven’t you written again? It’s been three weeks one day and three hours since the last time I saw you in the fog.
    I try to dream about you but I can’t. The harder I try to find you, the farther away you get. Instead I dream about my real mother Vixanne Wigg.
    There’s a knock on the shed door and I think—Angel Juan—and open it. But it’s a tall lanky lanka in a blonde wig. She has purple crazy eyes. And they are the same as mine. She’s my mother. I try to close the door but she shoves herself inside. Her wig falls off. Long black hair pours down wrapping me up like vine arms. She forces apples down my throat and needles into my fingers.
    I wake up choked, prickly. It’s one thing to read fairy tales when you are a regular kid but what about when your mother is a real witch? Or maybe it’s the same for all kids these days. People really do inject apples with needles full of poison and hand them out at doorways. The good thing about fairy tales, though, is that there is always a fairy godmother and/or aprince to take the curse away.
    Sometimes when this same dream used to wake me up in the middle of the night, you said, “The curse is broken,” and put me back to sleep with lullaby kisses.
    Maybe Vixanne can help me find you.
    I get up, put on my cowboy-boot roller skates and go out into a fog as green as the fog was green on the night before Angel Juan left.
    I haven’t been to the big pink house in the hills for years but somehow I know exactly how to get back there. The way our dog Tiki-Tee keeps going back to where he was born, the place my family uses as a studio now. He slinks out and trots through the canyon down the street named for the newest moon all the way to the cottage. Whenever he’s missing, we know we’ll find him there curled up in between the stone gnomes under the rosebushes.
    Just like Tiki-Tee finds the cottage, I find the place where I was born. It blooms out of the fog. It’s all falling apart now. The driveway is empty and the windows are caked with dust. Maybe Vixanne moved away.
    I take off my skates, creep up to the door and knock. No one answers. The door swings open by itself and I slip in,