Chapter 1
The Grease and the Glitter
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The neon sign at the Starlight Drive-In bled red into the summer dark, smearing itself across the hoods of a dozen cars like a wound that refused to close. Danny Riordan sat on the roof of his 1949 Mercury, one knee bent, a Lucky Strike burning low between his fingers, watching the light do what light always did in Caldwell Heights — pretend to be something beautiful while everything underneath stayed exactly the same. The screen at the far end of the lot showed a man in a white hat kissing a woman who had probably deserved better, but the sound didn’t carry well from where Danny was parked, so the whole business played out in beautiful, meaningless silence.
He was seventeen, lean as trouble, with black hair that fell across his forehead in a wave he never bothered to push back. The leather jacket was his father’s — or had been, before his father found something better to do with his evenings than come home — and it sat across Danny’s shoulders like a second skin, broken in at the elbows, soft at the collar, carrying in its seams the old smell of motor oil and the fainter ghost of a drugstore aftershave that Danny could no longer associate with a face. On the back of the jacket, in careful red stitching that Tommy Baxter’s older sister had done for five dollars and a handshake, the words read: THE RIORDAN BOYS. Below the letters, a pair of wings with their tips slightly crossed. It was a name and a symbol that meant nothing to anyone outside their particular corner of Caldwell Heights, but inside that corner it meant everything — it meant: we are here, we are accounted for, we belong to each other if nothing else.
Danny didn’t have brothers. The name was a kind of joke that had long ago stopped being funny and become something else, something closer to a vow.
Tonight, the boys around him were Tommy Baxter himself — stocky, easy-grinning, currently arm-wrestling his own right hand on the hood of his ’52 Ford to Tommy’s left as if one limb had personally offended the other — and Pete Alvarez, who leaned against the Mercury’s driver-side door eating a chili dog with the focused, almost meditative devotion of a man who had not properly eaten since some time around Tuesday. This was, in fact, the case. Pete’s stepfather had come home in one of his moods Monday night, and Pete had slept on Danny’s floor two nights running and eaten whatever Danny’s mother left in the refrigerator before her shift, which wasn’t much, but it was offered and received without ceremony because that was the way things worked on Birch Street.
“You gonna watch the picture or what?” Pete said, not looking up from the chili dog.
“I’m watching something,” Danny said.
Pete turned his head and followed Danny’s gaze to the far end of the lot, where the other cars were parked. You could tell them from a quarter mile — the Fords and Mercurys on Danny’s side were battered things held together with wire and the stubborn optimism of boys who understood engines as a language of repair, a dialect of making do. But over there, along the far rope that notionally divided the lot into its unspoken sections, sat a row of automobiles in a different register entirely. Chevrolet Bel Airs in Cascade Green and Dusk Pearl. A Pontiac Star Chief in Arctic White, its chrome trim catching the screen’s light in long winks. A Buick Special that belonged to Robert Caulfield, whose father owned the Caulfield Savings and Loan, parked at a slight angle that suggested even parallel parking was something Robert Caulfield did with a certain confident negligence.
They were waxed. They were polished. They were parked in a row that wasn’t quite a row — it was a declaration. A row that said: we are the kind of people whose cars look like this, and this is a fact about the world that has always been true and will always be true, and if you find yourself on the other side of the rope, that is also a fact about the world, and both facts are simply the order of things, nothing personal, nothing chosen, simply the order.
Danny was not, by nature, a resentful person. Or rather, he had found that resentment was a fuel that burned fast and hot and left you empty in the cold, and he’d learned early to conserve himself. What he felt looking at those waxed hoods and clean chrome wasn’t quite resentment. It was something more like the mild, steady awareness of a thing he carried with him everywhere — the knowledge of exactly where in the world he stood, and exactly how much of the world was not available to him, and the particular quiet dignity that came from having made a kind of peace with that knowledge while never, not even for a moment, having accepted it.
He looked away. He took a long drag of the Lucky Strike and exhaled smoke into the August air, which smelled of popcorn and motor oil and the high sweet rot of the summer grass beyond the lot’s gravel edge, and he looked at the screen and saw the man in the white hat say something earnest and the woman respond and the music that he couldn’t quite hear swell into the dark.
That was when he saw her.
She stepped out of a cream-colored Bel Air — the door opening with the solid, expensive click of well-engineered things — and she turned, and the Starlight’s neon caught her as she did. Caught the pale gold of her hair, which was pinned up on one side in a way that left a soft wave falling toward her jaw. Caught the white of her dress, which moved slightly in the warm night air. Caught the clean line of her face when she tilted it upward toward the screen, and in the red wash of the neon she was for a moment like something painted rather than real, a girl from an advertisement for a world Danny had never been invited to visit.
But then the girl beside her said something, and she laughed.
The laugh broke through. It was not the practiced, deployed laugh that Soc girls used at parties, the laugh that said: I am having more fun than you and I would like you to know it. It was the kind of laugh that surprised its owner — it came out too fast and too real, and she pressed her fingers briefly to her lips after it escaped, as if catching something that had gotten loose. Her head went back a little. Her shoulders lifted. And for those two or three seconds she was not an advertisement for anything; she was just a girl who had found something genuinely funny and had not been able to control the fact of it.
Danny looked down at his cigarette.
Tommy had come awake somehow — Tommy had a radar for these moments — and now he was watching the Soc side of the lot with the lazy, hopeful attention of a golden retriever who has spotted something worth investigating.
“Don’t,” Danny said, still looking at the ember.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were forming it. I could feel the shape of it.”
Tommy made the particular sound he made when he wanted to disagree but couldn’t find the factual basis, a sound somewhere between a grunt and an exhale. He settled back onto his hood.
Pete looked at Danny. “You all right?”
“Fine,” Danny said. “Eat your dog.”
The movie played. The man in the white hat saved the woman from something Danny couldn’t follow without the sound. Pete finished his chili dog and acquired Tommy’s, which Tommy had abandoned in sleep. The August night pressed its warm weight down on everything. Danny sat on the roof of the Mercury and smoked and did not look at the far end of the lot.
Except when he did.
The girl in white had gathered with a small group near the Bel Air — three girls, two boys with the kind of haircuts that required appointments and the kind of shirts that required ironing. The boys were talking in that way that young men talked when they were performing for an audience, loud and overlapping, each statement a bid for standing. The girls listened with the patience that was not patience but endurance, the practiced expression of girls who had long ago understood that certain performances were part of the price of admission to certain kinds of evenings.
The girl in white was not listening. She was looking up.
Not at Danny — she didn’t know he existed, had no reason to — but at the sky above the screen, where the stars persisted bravely above the light pollution, a faint scatter of cold fire written across the August dark. She looked at the sky the way you looked at something you needed to memorize before it was taken away, or the way you looked at something you were trying to dissolve into, to climb up through the layers of the warm night and disappear into that cold clear fire and become, for a while, purely yourself and nothing else.
Danny knew that look. He had worn it every night of his life.
He finished the Lucky Strike and crushed it against the roof of the Mercury, the carbon smear joining a small constellation of similar marks. He lit another from the pack in his jacket pocket, and the flare of the match lit his face for a moment and then went out. He told himself to stop looking, because he was seventeen and not a fool and nothing in the history of Caldwell Heights had ever suggested that looking at things you couldn’t have produced any outcome other than a particular flavor of ache that served no purpose.
He kept looking.
He watched her stand apart from the conversation around her, watched her look at the sky with that expression that he was already — even then, even in those first minutes — cataloguing as something distinct from the expressions he was used to reading on the faces of girls he knew or wanted to know. There was no performance in it. There was no audience she was playing to. It was simply a face turned upward, doing its own private work, unmaintained and unguarded.
The screen flickered. Somewhere across the lot a car horn honked once, reflexive and apologetic. A child at the snack stand dropped a paper cup of root beer and began crying with the total dedication of the very young.
And then she turned.
He didn’t understand later why she turned at that moment, what made her look away from the sky and across the darkness of the lot and directly — directly, without hesitation, as if she had known exactly where to look — at him. Their eyes met across the distance, maybe sixty feet of gravel and exhaust and the invisible but perfectly solid wall of everything that divided his world from hers. The red neon moved between them in waves.
He did not look away. She did not look away. One second. Two. Three.
Her expression did not change in any way he could name. It was simply: recognition. The acknowledgment of a presence. And something else, something quieter and harder to categorize, something that sat at the edge of recognition and asked a question he couldn’t hear.
Then she looked away.
Danny looked down at the new cigarette. The ember burned orange in the dark, a small self-contained planet with its own interior fire, indifferent to the distances around it.
He thought: that is nothing. He thought: that is the kind of thing that happens every night to a thousand people, eyes meeting across dark lots, meaning nothing, carrying nothing, leaving nothing behind.
He thought: forget it.
He thought about her eyes, which had been some color he couldn’t name in the neon — gray, possibly, or green, or some shade that needed more light than the Starlight provided to be correctly identified. He thought about the quality of the look, which had not been blank and had not been contemptuous and had not been anything he was used to receiving from Soc girls, who generally looked at boys from the Birch Street end of town with either deliberate nullity (you are not registering) or rapid dismissal (I’ve seen what you are and I’m already finished with it). This had been neither. This had been: I see you. There, at the edge. I see you.
He was making too much of three seconds. He knew this. He was constructing a cathedral out of three seconds and a look that might have been nothing more than eyes moving across a lot and finding an obstacle and moving on.
The movie ended. The lot filled with the ritual sounds of departure — engines turning over, headlights burning long arcs through the dark, voices calling good nights across hoods. Danny slid off the roof and dropped into the driver’s seat and Tommy piled in back and Pete rode shotgun, and Tommy talked all the way home about a girl he’d seen at the Tasty Freeze on Thursday, describing her in the exhaustive, hopeful detail of a person who had been saving up the telling.
Danny drove. He drove the Mercury through the familiar coordinates of Caldwell Heights — the 76 station on Garfield where his uncle Vic worked, the roller rink where the soft partition between the Soc section and everybody else was never spoken aloud but never once violated, the Woolworth’s lunch counter where the corner booths belonged, by unwritten law, to the families of the Caldwell Heights Savings and Loan board of directors, and other booths belonged to people who did not have savings. The dark shoulders of the high school gymnasium rose against the stars. The streets were exactly as they always were — a map of distances measured not in blocks but in belonging.
Danny drove through it at just over the speed limit, the Mercury’s engine a low persistent testimony to its own continued existence, the radio playing something with brass and with ache in equal measure, and he didn’t mention the girl at the Starlight, and Tommy didn’t notice because he was still describing Thursday’s girl with theological precision, and Pete had his elbow on the window ledge and was watching the streets go by with the mild, resilient expression he always wore after sleeping on someone’s floor, as if the world was a place that required only the patient expectation of slightly better arrangements.
Later, in his room on Birch Street, with the window open and the August night coming in full of the neighborhood sounds — a dog two houses down, a radio somewhere, the distant hydraulic exhale of a late bus turning onto Western — Danny lay on his back and looked at the water stain on the ceiling that was shaped, with a little generosity, like a running wolf, and he thought about the cream-colored Bel Air and the girl who had stepped out of it and laughed at something real and looked up at stars that didn’t belong to any of them and then turned and looked across sixty feet of darkness and found him.
He thought: there is no version of this that ends in anything but the particular kind of loss that comes from wanting something that the world has already assigned to someone else. He thought: I know exactly what I’m doing, which is cataloguing a thing that has no future, and I should stop.
He thought about gray-green eyes.
The dog stopped barking. The bus made its last run down Western. His mother’s key was in the lock at twelve-forty, her quiet steps down the hall to her bedroom, the silence that followed. Danny lay still and let the night do its slow arithmetic and didn’t sleep for a long time, and when he did, he didn’t dream about anything he could remember, only woke at seven with the sun at a low angle through the thin curtains and the immediate practical knowledge that the carburetor on the Mercury needed attention and Pete was probably already in the kitchen eating cereal and the day was beginning its forward motion, which was the only motion the day ever had.
But before all of that: three seconds of something with no name yet, sitting quiet in the back of him, small and patient, like an ember in a cold room.
Like a question waiting for someone brave enough to ask it out loud.
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