Twenty-Three

Sally had arrived at Clare Byrne's Oakwood apartment intending to spend a relaxing afternoon of sun and surf at nearby Venice Beach. They never made it out the door.

Now they lay on their bellies on the queen-size bed, Sally brooding with her chin resting on bridged hands, Clare sighing.

"Well, it was good for me," the woman said.

The first line in the scene they'd been rehearsing all day. Sally looked around the bedroom, which seemed to be themed toward an odd but workable juxtaposition of black hard-core punk and pink Hello Kitty. A decorative representation of Clare's duality. The apartment was small but pleasant, far nicer than the messy shoebox Sally shared with her stoner roommate.

Her eyes settled on a little TV and boxy VCR, on which rested a few rentals from West Coast Video in their clamshell boxes. Dirty Dancing, RoboCop, and a strange little movie called Repo Man.

"No, no, it was great," Sally insisted.

"What's wrong?"

"Well, I'm worried about her."

"People all over the neighborhood are dying in freak accidents, and she thinks it's all her fault. There's a word for that."

"But what if—"

"Narcissistic comes to mind. Paranoid—"

"What if she's right is what I'm saying."

"Weird stuff happens all the time," Clare said. "Sometimes all at once. That doesn't mean there's some genie or god involved. You start theorizing about random chance, you're on a slippery slope."

"Life is a slippery slope."

"You want to go back to Lonely Pines, don't you?"

Simply hearing the name of their dead hometown flooded Sally with denial, dread, and a strange longing.

"Paranoid or not, it's a good excuse to face some things I'm frankly tired of running from," she said. "And it gets me out of this place for a while."

She stood and mimed getting dressed, quick movements showing a sense of determination. As if steeling herself to leave for Lonely Pines, where her childhood ended in horror.

The situation fake but the emotions real.

"We could always hang out here," Clare said. "Stay in bed all day."

"I'm supposed to meet Brad. I'm already late."

"Yeah. You wouldn't want him to figure out what we've been doing."

"He doesn't own me."

"That's right."

"You don't either."

Clare winced, holding back tears. "It doesn't mean anything to you, does it?"

Focused on listening, Sally reacted by letting her emotions speak for themselves on her face. In a movie, solid reaction shots—where you acted without talking—were a film editor's gold, ensuring you received more screen time.

When Clare finished talking, she allowed a moment of not speaking, what actors called a thought pause. Dismay, reluctant agreement, and then hardness crossed her face.

"Actually, it means a lot," Sally replied. "Every time I fuck, I feel alive." A grin peeled across her face. "And scene. That was awesome!"

Clare rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. "How many times do we have to run lines?"

"Until we internalize our characters so well that we can step in and out of them whenever we need," Sally answered. "Until playing them is effortless."

"I thought we were going to have fun at the beach today." The woman still wore a bikini top and colorful Jams shorts. "I was going to show off my bodacious hacky-sack skills."

Sally smiled at hearing bodacious said in the Irish accent Clare had temporarily switched to American during the scene. Bo-DAY-shuss.

"Well, it was good for me," she said, echoing Katie's line.

Delicious, in fact. The dialogue flowed with a pleasing rhythm. Besides that, Wanda proved to be no cookie-cutter, horror-nerd-fantasy Bad Girl.

The character showed quite a bit of complexity. Every good time she chased and caught wasn't about serving herself for fun. She did it to avoid something real that haunted her. And while she carried no regrets about her reckless hedonism, it fed a bigger, deeper well of shame.

Sally's interpretation: Wanda existed as a creature of need. A small-town girl acclimated to the rough big city, her only family the fellow survivors of a horrific childhood tragedy, wishing for anonymity but lonely. She's ready to go back to Lonely Pines not because she wants to but because delaying it is exhausting.

Out of all the major characters in If Wishes Could Kill, Wanda knew merely surviving was not really living.

Sally had let that inner vulnerability come out in her performance.

"It worked," Clare agreed. "But I think it'd be even better if we were actually topless under the sheet like we'll be on set."

"Uh-huh," said Sally. "I'm sure it would. We'd slip right into character."

"Can't blame a dog for trying." Clare grinned.

Sally stiffened, wondering for the first time if her phone breather might be a woman. Was Ashlee Gibson still messing with her? She had another flash of regret she hadn't been cast as Penny; she had the paranoia down pat.

"I'm just not into girls," she said. "Sorry."

"And I'm not trying to make you switch teams, love. I just thought you might want to fool around a bit. I'm horny, and you're so uptight."

"I'm not uptight!"

Now it was Clare's turn to say, "Uh-huh."

"Okay, I am a little. This is a solid role. It's not the lead, but damn, I'm going to bring it everything I've got."

Besides transcending stereotype, Wanda delivered a decent number of scenes with real meat on the dramatic bones. Playing her, Sally could show range. The type of role that could open doors to bigger and better things.

So yeah, she did feel a little uptight.

Make that a lot, and the looming shoot wasn't the only reason. The breather calls hadn't stopped.

Disturbing, of course, though hardly a rarity in Los Angeles, where creeps worked the phones around the clock to get off. What made the whole thing eerie was this creep knew Sally's name. On the rare occasions Monica shifted her ass off the couch to pick up the phone, he'd ask her to hand it over to Sally. Then he'd breathe into her ear, as only hers would do. Once he heard her voice, he'd remain on the line for a scant few seconds before hanging up, but it made its point.

Sally had a stalker.

Getting one's own freak was something of an unhappy merit badge among professional actors. It sometimes came with the game. In fact, the whole experience could be useful to her as a horror actor; creepy telephone calls remained a genre staple. Nonetheless, she hated the vague and constant sense of threat it imposed on every minute of her day. It felt like being under siege.

Sally wanted to live her life her way. She'd begun to understand that fame carried a price. And she wondered if she didn't want to go out today because of this man.

Her mind flashed to Jim Foster, the actor Max cast as Brad, another of Penny's childhood friends and Wanda's jealous quasi-boyfriend. She'd first seen him at the audition, where he'd given her a warm, genuine smile.

At the table reading at Max's house, however, he'd shown up a different person, eyeballing Sally with a loaded, unsettling stare. She couldn't remember how she'd responded to him at the audition; maybe he considered her stuck-up.

Or maybe he was a creep.

"Not a single funny line for me in that scene," Clare complained. "I'm supposed to be the witty comic relief."

Sally snapped out of her worries. "You're not, though, and you should be grateful for that. We all get to play complex characters."

The whole movie was complex, in fact, a highbrow drama with a lowbrow gory horror payoff, the kind of high-concept hybrid that could only happen in Hollywood but also never happen. The Big Chill meets The Evil Dead.

On the downside, Dorothy had a tendency to overwrite, particularly with parentheticals telling the actors how to deliver lines. Sally ignored these.

"Yeah, I have to say it's cool to play a woman who happens to be a lesbian instead of a gay stereotype," Clare said. "It's rare to see that on a screen."

"Are you up for doing it again?"

"Hell, no. Bitch, we're going out. We'll grab some tacos and catch a concert."

"Are you sure? We're in the booking window."

They might receive a call from an assistant director at any time telling them to report to set the next morning.

"You have your way of preparing," Clare said. "I have mine. And it involves living my life and blowing off steam. It's been six months since my last gig—a walk-on in a dumb soap—and I've been managing estate sales the whole time. I don't need any more stress. I'm going out and having fun."

Sally sized up the woman in her bikini top and garish shorts. Clare didn't have the linebacker shoulders she'd first imagined. The woman looked quite shapely, in fact. But solidly built. And very tall.

Yes, Clare would keep her safe.

"So, who's playing?"

"Scrape Nuts."

Sally laughed. "You're joking."

"They're awesome. And they're playing at the Palladium tonight."

"I have one more little problem, you know, being a full-time actor…"

The woman sighed. "I've got money."

"Then I'm all yours."

As if picturing this in the literal sense, a sly grin washed over Clare's face.

"Girls' night out!" she said. "But first, let's do a punk makeover."

No joke; the marquee of the Hollywood Palladium did indeed boast that a hard-core punk band called Scrape Nuts was playing. Inside, the concert space filled with restless youth sporting black leather, band tees, ripped jeans, and safety pins, all of it looking like it had been rescued from a dumpster tucked behind some apocalyptic warehouse. Jittery with energy, the kids checked each other out while they chain-smoked. The room carried the tart stink of an enormous amount of hairspray.

Accepting a plastic cup full of foamy beer, Sally looked around in wide-eyed wonder at the wild mix of neon hair, razor-edged irony, and tribal norms—this odd crowd of them who came here to be an us.

"So teach me punk rock," she said.

Clare laughed. "That has to be the most un-punk thing I ever heard."

"Well, come on. It's like a weird club that's majorly mad about everything."

The woman wore a black leather jacket bristling with spikes and pins. As for Sally, she'd dressed in the team colors of black and white and more black. Over this glam-trash outfit, she'd ripped the crotch and feet in a pair of Clare's nylons and fitted them over her arms. While the Ramones crowed about Sheena being a punk rocker on Clare's record player, the woman completed Sally's transformation into a living goth doll with black lipstick, mascara, and pigtails. Even her hair was no longer blond but very dark now, having already received a fresh and rigorous dye job for If Wishes Could Kill to follow the brute casting principle that female principals should have different hair colors.

Despite looking the part, Sally showed up at the Palladium feeling like an impostor. Here, she was the them.

"It's more like an attitude," Clare said. "Fuck everything."

"Okay."

"You know, you're more punk than most of these posers."

"I am?" Sally didn't know if she should be flattered.

"You're fearless."

"I'm not sure about that either."

"You're committed to acting, aren't you, though? Totally committed. Me, I'm too scared to quit my day job and take a leap of faith. Anyway, there isn't much to learn. Do as the Romans, and you'll do fine."

"Teach me how to dance to it, at least," said Sally.

"Oh, I don't think I should. Things can get quite physical in the mosh pit."

"The what?"

Clare explained the pogo, skanking, windmilling, slam dancing. The chaos of the mosh pit. The major ideologies: straight edge, goth, skinhead, and so on.

"Punk has a lot of rules," Sally noted.

"Yeah. That's sadly true."

Strutting past, a punk with a bristling crew cut and suspenders paused to give Sally a leering once-over. "Who's your lady friend, Clare?"

"Nazi punks, fuck off," Clare said.

He laughed and flashed her the backward peace sign that conveyed a very British piss-off. Eyeing Sally, he waggled his tongue between his fingers.

"Yup." Sally glared as the kid walked away chuckling. "Going out tonight was a perfect call. No stress here."

"And here I was thinking you were a student of experience."

"Not when I'm in the booking win—ah, screw it." She reminded herself she was again the Bad Girl, for whom do as the Romans was practically a motto. "Hey, you!"

The punk smirked at her over his shoulder. "Yeah?"

Sally flipped him the bird with both hands. "Fuckity-bye!"

Cackling, he waved her off.

Clare laughed too. "Feels awesome, don't it?"

Sally clenched her fists. "Fuck everything!"

As if in response, the crowd burst into hoots and cheers. On the stage, Scrape Nuts had finished prepping, and the shirtless, heavily tattooed singer walked out to glare at them all from the microphone.

"We're a shit band," he announced as if bragging. "And now we're going to play you a selection of our shitty songs."

The crowd roared.

He added, "This first one's for all of you in the ear-bleed section."

The drummer: "One-two-three-four!"

The stacked speakers exploded in a wall of sound that struck Sally like an almost physical force. The musicians bashed out the first song as if they were in a race to get it over with, sacrificing complexity for raw intensity and tempo. Eyes wide as if witnessing a car cash, the singer shouted his lyrics seemingly straight into her face, the only part of it she caught being You suck too! You suck too!

And Sally thought, Yeah, it does suck! Society, Reagan America, Hollywood, Chazz Morton and his blockbuster, all of it! She'd never thought like this, always the picture of optimism and determination. Hell, her idea of teenage rebellion had been to piss off Maude by telling her she preferred Lee Strasberg's take on the Stanislavski Method over Stella Adler's, when secretly she favored Meisner's.

In short, it felt pretty righteous to say screw everything. She gave herself to the rage as something primal and cathartic, encompassing Ashlee Gibson and her stalker and Nazi punks too. Though, really, any handy target would do right now, not dissimilar to her performative hilltop scream therapy for the Joshua trees.

The first song ended, the few seconds of ear-ringing quiet offering Sally a moment of pure relief, and then they lunged into the second.

One-two-three-four!

Some fool in a T-shirt with a flannel tied around his waist skanked across the stage in combat boots before diving into the crowd. The audience boiled over into an all-out riot, thrashing at each other in an expanding fleshly whirlpool near the stage. But no, they were dancing. This was the mosh pit Clare described. Howling over the din, the mohawked woman waded into the throng like a warrior joyously greeting battle, all shoulders and elbows and flipping the bird with both barrels. Then she dove right into this human meat grinder, skanking during the buildups and slamming with the best of 'em at the dizzying crescendos.

It all struck Sally like one of the drugs she'd sampled, an audible cocktail of pure adrenaline rush. The air moistened with the smells of sweat, wet leather, and melting hairspray. The atmosphere splintered into a pell-mell sensation of living out of control. Her body trembled, itching now to throw itself into that vortex of aggression and pound the ironic smirks off some faces. Relishing the prospect of simulated violence as a form of personal expression, this perverse desire to not create for once but destroy and then destroy some more, because why not.

Don't even think about it, she told herself. Sally thrived on new experiences, but now wasn't the time to be taking risks. She pictured showing up on set with a black eye and a missing tooth.

Instead, she tossed back her foamy beer and returned to the bar for more to dull the edge the music kept sharpening. There, she watched Clare take a swan leap off the stage and disappear in the storm of bodies ricocheting like pinballs.

She's more fearless than she thinks, thought Sally, who appreciated anyone who lived for the day. She's a badass.

The unrelenting sound lulled her into a kind of angry trance of pent-up energy, and then the band stormed off the stage and the house lights came up. In the dazed aftermath, the slammers stood around blinking and drained in relative quiet that fell on Sally's eardrums like ice on an oven burn.

Clare appeared dripping and grinning, her mohawk wilting like a spent sex organ. Sally laughed, barely hearing it over the deafening ringing in her ears.

"God, you're a mess," she said.

"Right you are, love, but I'm a happy mess. I blew off a lot of steam." Whether due to happiness or exhaustion, her accent had thickened.

"So what happens now?"

"Now we try to escape in one piece," Clare said.

They followed the crowd toward the outside doors, lit up in colorful strobing light. As if they hadn't had enough, many people had started an impromptu mosh pit out on the street.

Oh, wait, Sally thought. That's an actual riot.

"The friggin' cops," Clare said. "They come after the shows sometimes to keep an eye on things and end up beating up on the kids."

"So what do we do?"

"We do a runner and hopefully don't get whacked by riot control."

Doc Martens crunching glass from the shattered doors, the punks poured out of the building and scattered, shouting and laughing. In the street, a knot of police officers fought a pack of kids in leather jackets, the entire scene made even more surreal by the flashing lights on the parked cruisers.

A van screeched into view and unloaded more police in riot gear.

Clare grabbed Sally's hand and yanked.

"Now's the running part, love!"

Dodging maniac cops, Sally bolted down the sidewalk. She ran both scared and elated, happy to burn off the show's energy and the soaring buzz the cheap beer had given her.

She stopped. Alone. Somehow, she'd lost Clare.

The woman caught up huffing.

"You're fast," she gasped.

"Now I know why you parked so far from the Palladium."

They walked arm in arm down Sunset. Clare gave her a little tug.

"So what do you think of punk now?"

"It's insane," said Sally. "Like visiting a different planet. You can be a different person there. Create a character and improv it."

"Actually, it's the one place where I can be the real me. Christ, love, even when you're having fun, you're working. Don't look at it as a new experience or a fresh crack at character. Experience isn't living. Living is living. It's an experience in itself. You don't have to force it."

"You were wrong. What you said before."

"About what? I'm not arguing, I just want to know."

"I am scared. I'm scared all the time. Everything you see is an act." Her playing Sally Priest, her alter ego.

"Well, you had me fooled," said Clare. "What are you so scared of?"

"Mostly? That I'm not going to make it as an actor and I'm wasting my life."

"Come on! You're about to do a major part in a horror movie."

"My mom says even if I succeed in horror, I'm still failing. To her, it's almost the same as becoming a porn star."

"That's her age talking. The lady is out of touch. Genre is huge now. Respected, even. It's added pressure you don't need. I wouldn't pay her any mind."

"Look, she can be overbearing, but she may not be wrong."

"Well, you can't do both," Clare said.

"What do you mean?"

"You can't win her approval and your own. You'll have to—what's the matter?"

Sally had stopped listening. Her body stiffened in instinctive alarm. Something didn't feel right. She glanced behind her.

Half a block back, a presence matched their pace. The bearish figure passed under a bright sodium streetlight, revealing a burly man in a hooded sweatshirt, his face a black oval of shadow.

It's him, her mind blurted. The Breather.

Sally had always considered Los Angeles too sunny, colorful, and cheerful for supernatural horror. The human kind, however, it packed aplenty.

She tightened her grip on Clare's bicep. "It could be my imagination, but there's a—"

"Why are we whispering?"

"Don't look, but I think that man is following us."

Clare shot a glare over her shoulder. "Him?"

"There's this guy who's been calling me and hanging up."

"You think he's the one?"

"Maybe," said Sally. "I've got a bad feeling."

"All I'm hearing, love, is this dude is bothering you."

"Well, yeah, a little—"

"It's nice to make things simple." Clare wheeled. "Oi! Mate!"

The man froze.

Clare now stomped toward him with fists clenched like sledgehammers.

"I said, oi, you creepy shit—"

Backpedaling, he turned and bolted back down the road.

"That's right, run," she called after him.

The woman nattered all the way back to Oakwood. Sally barely heard her. Her ears still rang from the blasting music, or maybe it was her blood singing. The night's adrenaline had burned the beer out of her system and left something coiled in her chest, making her amped and restless with nowhere to put it.

Back in Clare's apartment, the punk went into her bedroom to check the answering machine, leaving Sally blinking in the dark living room and wondering why they were here. She wanted to party all night and dance these feelings out of her. She wanted to explode.

"You were right!" Clare called out.

Sally walked in. "What?"

"They need us on set tomorrow morning. Call time is nine sharp."

That changed things. It left only one option.

"We should go to bed then," she said.

"Yeah, you're right about that too—"

Sally stepped forward and planted a wet kiss on her mouth. It tasted salty.

Coming up for air, Clare said, "Yeah?"

"Fuck, yeah," Sally breathed.

They tumbled onto the bed. She hadn't planned this, but she'd faced violence tonight and her body demanded proof of life. Before her mind blanked out in bliss, her brain came up with the thought that the pure and chaste Final Girl probably didn't remain a virgin very long after confronting the masked, machete-wielding maniac. Horror wasn't always about the battle between good and evil, but it was always about life and death. After surviving the night, the Final Girl likely grabbed the first clueless deputy who showed up and screwed his badge off.

Clare absorbed Sally's assault until its ferocity wore itself out and the act became gentle and tender. Sally had never done this before, but mechanically it all worked the same, and she trusted this woman and felt safe with her. She pictured Nicholas in the role of Michael down there licking and nibbling, and then for a single perverse moment he morphed into Max Maurey.

Right then, she went over the edge, the orgasm exploding between her thighs and at last purging her mind and body of everything.

Sally giggled in the aftermath. She was definitely alive. Long live Sally Priest. Another chuckle. Max Maurey! She really was a Bad Girl at heart.

Maybe she was a little punk rock.