Beautiful Boys Read Free Page B

skidding on my socks.
    There’s the hallway lined with mirrors where I freaked myself once. Now I know they’re me but I want to smash my reflections. So in the mirror I’ll look like I feel. Pieces. But if you break a mirror there are just more whole little yous in every piece.
    I go into the dusty sunken room. Empty. Cold air burns in the empty fireplace. There are squished tubes of paint and canvases everywhere. And lots of big portraits of Vixanne Wigg in colors like tropical flowers—almost glow-in-the-dark.
    Vixanne powdery-pink and sparkle-platinum as Jayne Mansfield chomp-gnawing off a cluster chunk of crystally-white dry-ice rock candy. Vixanne lounging in a fluorescent green jungle tied up in her own jungle-green writhe-vine hair. Dressed in milky apple blossoms and holding a grimacy shrively monkey-face apple. Wreath of giant blue and orange butterflies around her head. With a rainbow-jewel-scaled mermaid tail. A ripple-haunched horse from the waist down. Vixanne with black roses tattooed on her nakedchest. All of the Vixannes staring at me with purple eyes.
    I go up to the one with the tattoo. Pain-ink flowers. Meat-eating roses in a demony garden. The paint is rich and smooth like batter. I wish Vixanne would paint me:
    Angel Juan’s name tattooed on my heart in a wreath of black roses.
    Something rustles. Heavy crunched silk. I turn around.
    “You’ve been gone a long time,” says a voice. She sounds tired.
    Vixanne’s long dark hair that she used to wear under the Jayne Mansfield wig is hacked short and kind of uneven like she did it herself. It reminds me of me when Cherokee cut off my hair with toenail scissors when we were babies. Vixanne wears a black silk dress with watery patterns in it. She is so different from the glam lanka I remember.
    “Remember those photographs you gave me?” she says.
    When I found her the first time, I gave her some pictures I took. An old woman shaking her fist andscreaming at the sun. A man who was too young to be dying. Me looking like a little lost loon waif thing. I wanted my mother to have something when I left. I wanted her to see.
    “At first I put them away and didn’t look at them but I kept thinking about you. You were so little skating around with that camera seeing all the pain.”
    Her eyes roll in her head. I want to leave but instead I sit down and start playing with the paints on the table. It feels good to squeeze the tubes of paint. Smell the stinkster turpentine. Vixanne sits down next to me. I want to paint a picture of Angel Juan. As big as life. A boy that will never leave.
    “I like to be alone,” Vixanne says. “I’ve started painting. I’m not anyone’s slave now.”
    I listen to the sound of her voice and feel all the twilight purple eyes watching me while my hand moves by itself in the shadowy room.
    Maybe hours go by.
    “I look things right in the eye now. That’s the best way. Right in the eye and without anything to make it easier,” says Vixanne.
    I look down and drop my paintbrush. It skidsacross the floor. Instead of Angel Juan I’ve made a picture of a man with big teeth eating a cake that drips icing all over his face and hands. It gives me a creepy-crawly-heebee-jeebee feeling.
    I pretend the goose bumps studding my arms are ’cause I’m cold.
    I take black paint and wipe out the man with the cake like he was never there. “I don’t want to look at anything or anybody except for Angel Juan.”
    Vixanne shakes her head. Then she says, “You have to leave now, Witch Baby. You can come back after your journey.”
    She goes to the door with me and I put on my skates. I wonder how I will ever make it home and then all the way to New York. The parts of my body feel held together by strings you could cut with a scissors.
    “Remember to look in the eye. That’s what you taught me,” Vixanne says. “Look at your own darkness.”
    I leave my mother all complete in a gnarly snarly forest of herself, and the puppet parts of