There are about eight million videoclips of Nikki Sixx on YouTube. I watched him playing in the band, I watched interviews with him, I watched him drunkenly stumble around the stage and fall unconscious into a swarming audience of fans. He was larger than life, a primal force, a rock-and-roll icon reveling in constant, unrelenting debauchery.
I could relate.
Okay, so maybe I couldn’t relate, but it gave me something to think about as I visited my dad in prison. Nikki Sixx had become supreme after dealing with childhood trauma. Maybe I could do the same? Maybe I could understand what he had gone through in some tiny way? Maybe I understood him in a way that ordinary speech kids couldn’t?
Dad and I made our way, haltingly, through the small talk that usually composed half of our visits. I was doing fine; I was eating; school was okay; the weather was horrible. The usual things.
“We’re supposed to get snow this week,” he said.
“Yeah. I keep hoping climate change is going to make us more like Florida, but apparently that involves some type of global catastrophe, so I’m not supposed to root for it.”
“I don’t think it happens that fast.”
“You’re crushing my dreams, Dad.”
He smiled a little bit. “How’s your mom?”
Dating a model for Muscle & Fitness magazine. The usual.
“Uh… you know, working a lot.”
“Can you say hi to her from me?”
“I will pass that along. I’m not guaranteeing a good reaction, but I’ll let her know.”
“Thanks.” He pulled his arms behind him, stretching out his back.
“You okay?”
“Sure. It’s just nice to stretch. We don’t get a lot of chance to exercise, so…”
“I thought that’s all you did in the joint. Pumped iron. Got swole. Put tattoos on your knuckles.”
“You’ve been misinformed. Mostly it’s a lot of doing nothing.”
“Are you saying movies aren’t accurate?”
He laughed. “You should be a stand-up comedian.”
“I hear that’s a stable and rewarding career, especially for women,” I joked.
“Um… by the way, I can’t make it next week.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve got a speech tournament.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s, um… yeah, I’m doing speech.”
“Wow. I bet you’re really good at that.”
“The jury’s still out. I guess we’ll find out at the tournament.”
“You’ll do great. You could always talk. Not always… appropriately, but you could talk. I remember one time we were at the pet store getting your guinea pig and you launched into a whole argument that all the animals should be set free.”
I laughed. “I don’t remember this at all.”
“You must’ve been five. Went right up to the girl working the counter: ‘What have all these animals done wrong?! By what right are you holding them?!’”
“I’m one hundred percent sure I didn’t say ‘by what right.’ What was I, like a five-year-old lawyer?”
“You were absolutely a five-year-old lawyer. You thought it was a travesty that the birds were locked in cages. Birds should be free.”
“You are totally making this up,” I joked.
“I’m not!” He reached across the table and took my hand. “You always believed in justice.”
“Not all superheroes wear capes, I guess.”
“Nope. But I think it’s good you’re doing speech. It’s good for your college applications.”
“Yeah.”
“You need to have an extracurricular, right?”
I hadn’t told my dad about the fall. What was there to tell him, anyway? That I faked being sick fourteen times? That I stopped turning in my homework? That I stopped talking to people? What good was that going to do him? Better to just lie and say everything’s fine rather than pour the guilt on. He was hurt bad enough.
Was he?
Maybe he should’ve been protecting you instead of you protecting him.
I pushed those thoughts back down in my mind.
“You okay, Squidney?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’ll look good on my college applications. That’s important.”
He smiled. Do I tell him?
“And you’ll never guess who the coach is.”
He looked at me softly.
“Joey Sparks,” I said.
The air darkened between us, like a curse had been spoken. “Oh.” He swallowed. “Well, I’m sure that’s… interesting.”
“He’s, uh… he’s pretty tough.”
“I bet he is.”
“But the team is full of winners, so—”
My dad’s eyes were far away.
“Just be careful,” he said finally.
“I will.”
“And I love you.”
“Don’t worry. I love you, too.”
On Sunday, about thirty-five minutes into my first shift at the Great American Cookie Factory, I realized that eight hours was a long-ass time to do anything. How did anyone manage to be in a real factory? How could anyone stand on their feet that long? I could barely manage being in a Cookie Factory, and frankly, as far as factories go, the conditions might not have been that difficult.
I started out on the register, which seems like it ought to be fairly simple, but somehow managed to make me feel like an idiot because I couldn’t navigate the control panels properly. It probably didn’t help that I had loaded the cutting from The Heroin Diaries on my phone and practiced my lines in-between customers.
“I lay under the Christmas Tree, injecting two grams of Christmas Spirit directly into my veins,” I muttered, then turned around to see a small child looking up at me with wide eyes. “Nah, it’s cool, kid,” I said. “I lived.” His parents were also staring at me, openmouthed. “Don’t do drugs, folks. Trust me. Died twice.”
So I got moved to the back, where I could practice my lines as I decorated the enormous, wheel-sized cookies that formed the principal attraction of the place. My lettering, squeezed out through a frosting tube, was not terribly beautiful. Whoever normally decorated the cookies was some type of Cookie Monet. I was more of a Cookie Picasso (whose room I was in during fifth period—shit—I was actually learning things from the insane layout of the school). Picasso drew some cracked-out Cubist shit, which was definitely more in line with my aesthetic.
After my third pathetic attempt at HAPPY BIRTHDAY and HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, SWEETIE, I decided to mix in a CONGRATULATIONS YOU’RE NOT THE FATHER cookie to see what would happen. Rhonda, my only coworker aside from Chad, took the cookie in hand and slapped it into the front display case without so much as a snort.
Rhonda was a robust red-haired woman in her late forties who took smoke breaks every eight minutes or so, slipping out the back door, hustling down some godforsaken hidden passage in the Mall of America that led to a snowy break area where she could stand for five minutes, hunched against the cold, and suck down sweet nicotine from a cancer stick.
“I’m going for a break,” she said for the ninetieth time in the three hours I’d been there.
“Cool, cool,” I said. “What happens if someone wants to buy a cookie?”
She looked at me like roadkill. “You sell them a cookie.”
“Cool, cool,” I said, loading up my drug-addled nightmare narrative on my phone. Time to practice injecting heroin between my toes again.
I was interrupted by snickering at the display case, as a troupe of frat boys had spotted my artwork.
“Dude, we have to get this,” said one dude to another dude.
“Dude, yes,” said another one.
“Dude, fuck!” said one who was probably the poet of the group.
They handed over fourteen dollars and carried the cookie away like a trophy, saying dude some more.
From then on, I was unstoppable. I made a SMASH THE PATRIARCHY cookie, a HELL YES YOU’RE DIVORCED cookie, and an I KIND OF LIKE YOU cookie. They all sold within an hour. People were taking pictures on their phones and posting the cookies on Instagram.
Chad looked at one that read SORRY ABOUT YOUR ENDOMETRIOSIS and frowned. “Are you sure this cookie is going to have appeal?”
“Do you even know what endometriosis is, Chad?”
He bit his lip. He did not know.
“Do you know that one in ten women have it?”
He didn’t know that, either.
“I want you to imagine if your uterus ripped its arms and legs off and then beat itself in the face with the stumps every month.”
“Yeah. The people who have it deserve cookies.”
“Huh. Well, if you’re sure…”
“Hey. I’ve been doing this for the better part of a morning, I’m pretty sure I’m an expert now.”
“What a hoot.”
“Indeed, what a hoot.”
He smiled. “I like your spunk.”
“Me too.”
By the end of my shift, my feet ached and my neck was sore from leaning over the cookies. Even my hands hurt; I clenched and unclenched my fingers to try to bring feeling back to them. Not all of my cookies had sold, but the Great American Cookie Factory had done solid business. Even Rhonda had been impressed in between smoke breaks.
“Shit,” she had said to me, which I translated as I appreciate your creativity and the sense of artistry you bring to this retail hell-field.
I felt that strange feeling again: pride. I had tried something new, something I had no experience in, and I had excelled at it. I mean, yes, the lettering on the cookies was god-awful, but they were funny, and that seemed to override the aesthetic concerns. Cool.
“Hey there.”
I looked up. Elijah was standing at the counter, wearing his dark coat and a woolen hat. His coppery hair snuck out of the ridge of his cap, looking ever-so-slightly devilish.
“I thought I would swing by after your first day of work,” he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets and shrugging his shoulders.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to see if you wanted to practice. If you want to get in with the cool kids, you’re gonna have to do well in the first tourney.”
“What does do well mean?”
“Probably final.”
I nodded.
“You have no idea what finaling even means, do you?”
“I’ve been a little busy picking out my piece.”
“Okay, so,” he said as I folded my apron and dropped it in the bin. I turned back to Chad.
“Hey, do I get paid?”
He chuckled. “You are such a hoot.”
“Do I get paid, though?”
“In two weeks.”
“Anyway,” continued Elijah as we headed out into the mall proper, “every tournament is divided into rounds. There are more or less rounds depending on the size of the field—the Brooklyn Park Invitational is one of the bigger ones; there will probably be five rounds.”
“You perform your piece in groups of six. Then the judge rates all the performances and the top two people move on to the next round. You keep going, round after round, until you make the final stage. So if you’re doing well, you might perform your piece three or four times on the same day.”
“Got it.”
“There’s usually one judge in the preliminary rounds, and more judges once you get to the later rounds. When you reach finals, you’ll have a decent-sized audience, but in the early rounds it’s basically going to be you in a classroom with like five other people.”
“Right. I got this.”
“And you’re gonna need like a competition outfit.”
I thought about the assembly, the kids onstage in their business suits. I thought about my wardrobe.
“Just like a business suit,” he said.
“I live in a tiny apartment with my mom and our dog; my dad is in prison; do you think I have a business suit? This is the nicest shit I own,” I said, gesturing to my frosting-coated khaki pants that were the required uniform of the Cookie Factory.
“Does your mom have a blouse that might work?”
“I think so.”
“And do you have like a pencil skirt? The judges like skirts.”
“I don’t wear skirts. And how the hell do you know these words?”
“Oh. And why should the judges care if you wear a skirt or not? Do the boys have to wear skirts?”
He smiled. “I’m just telling you how it is. Girls get marked down for not being ladylike.”
“That is some bullshit right there,” I said, vowing to make more SMASH THE PATRIARCHY cookies.
“You are correct.”
“Ugh. Sexist asshattery.”
“Sexist asshattery indeed.”
“Can I wear my dress from the Snow Ball?”
He gritted his teeth. “That’s probably too sexy.” He caught himself. “I mean… not like… um, like I was paying attention to how sexy you looked in that dress, but in a general sense, as an objective principle, you don’t want to wear something that… looks that good.”
“Right,” I said. “Feminine but not too feminine. Traditional double-standard bullshit.”
He swallowed and nodded. “We should probably just get you a skirt.”
“We?”
His cheeks turned pink. “Um… since we’re here at the mall and, um… we’re both members of a conspiracy, I thought we could… shop.” He took off his hat and smiled, two dimples forming on his cheeks.
“Where’s Thomas? I could use a gay best friend to do my makeover right now,” I joked.
“I’m the only gay best friend you’ve got right now.”
I looked him over. “You are a pretty sorry excuse for a gay best friend.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“I mean, thanks and all, but I don’t really have, um… what’s it called? Money for a skirt right now.”
“You can pay me back.”
I felt an alarm going off in the back of my head. He was going to buy me clothes? Take pity on the poor girl? What was this? Fear and shame spiraled inside of me; the fact that I couldn’t afford it on my own and here was this guy, who seemed nice, offering to take care of things. How many times had that turned into a trap for my mom? Wasn’t that exactly what was happening with Luke? Once they started buying things for you, you owed them.
There wasn’t anything like that on Elijah’s face, though. He seemed sincere, like he was trying to help out. But didn’t he like Lakshmi anyway? Why was he spending so much time with me?
Ugh. Stop overthinking this, Syd.
I nodded, finally. “So let’s Pretty Woman this bitch, then!”
“It’s like one skirt. For under forty dollars.”
“You don’t have any idea how much skirts cost, do you?”
One skirt from Macy’s and sixty-six dollars later, we were headed out to the frozen wasteland that constituted the Mall of America parking lot. Lot wasn’t actually the proper word; it was more like a parking zip code. Light snow swirled around the yellow streetlamps, drifting down onto the icy mountains of gray plowed snow that clustered around the edges of the parking spots.
“So why did you quit the team, anyway?” I asked, hustling next to him. “I bet you were good.”
“You wanna know?”
“No, I just asked the question because I’m making sounds with my mouth with no purpose or intention behind them—”
“All right, all right.”
We got into his ten-year-old Dodge Caravan. Not what I expected.
“I thought your mom was in high fashion,” I said.
“She’s a buyer for JC Penney’s.”
“I’m not sure that’s fashion.”
“That’s fashion.”
I raised my hands. “All right.”
“So, um… the story of me and Coach Sparks,” he said, putting the minivan into drive and heading for the exit. He took a deep breath. “I was on varsity last year. Humor Interpretation was my specialty; I was really good at it. I had even gotten a couple of scholarships—decent places, too. I had an offer for a free ride at the University of Minnesota. I don’t know if I was better than Hanson or not, but I placed ahead of him a few times sophomore year. Obviously, he was the golden boy and I was the…”
“Silver boy.”
“Yeah. But, um… in the middle of the season my cousin was in a car accident—she skidded out on an icy road and ran into a tree—like serious, Jaws of Life kind of shit, they medevacked her to Minneapolis, and um… I went to see her—this was the day before a huge tournament—I was supposed to be at practice, but I wasn’t, and Sparks didn’t really believe me that my cousin was in critical condition, so he was pissed when I showed up at the tournament on Saturday.
“He said he wasn’t going to let me compete, to teach me a lesson about lying, but like—I competed anyway, and, uh… my head wasn’t in it, and I dropped out at octofinals, which was like the second round. Afterward he came up to me and he was like, ‘That’s what you get when you don’t try.’”
Elijah swallowed hard. He sniffed. “And I was blown away by that, you know? My cousin is in a freaking medical coma, she’s probably not going to live, and I’m visiting her the day before the tournament because I’m a human being, you know, I have actual priorities. Speech is not the only thing in my life, right? And he tells me that? But I started arguing with him like an idiot, ‘No, this is really important to me’ and ‘It’s never going to happen again’ and ‘I’m gonna work twice as hard,’ like I’m arguing with him that I’m never going to visit a dying relative again, you know?”
He shook his head and I saw his hands tense on the wheel. “It was fucked up. The whole culture is fucked up. Finally he’s like—I remember exactly what he said—‘You show up at this tournament and you do this to me? You embarrass me like this? I thought you were committed, I thought you cared, I thought this team meant something to you, but I guess I was wrong about you.’”
Elijah was looking straight ahead at the road, his hands trembling now. “Like he just tore out my heart in front of me, you know? And I’m like begging him to let me stay and he says he’s gonna knock me out of varsity and I suddenly see myself from the outside, like, what is going on here? And I said it wasn’t fair what was he doing and I blurted out that I was gonna quit. He looks at me, and he says, ‘If you quit, you’re gonna make me tell everybody who you really are. You’re asking me to call up my friend at the U of M and tell him about you. At those other schools? They’re gonna ask how Elijah’s doing, and I’m gonna have to tell them the truth about you. How you lie to people. How you pretend to care. Who you really are.’ And then he says, ‘Of course I knew it all along.’”
Elijah wiped his nose with the back of his arm. “He did it, too. I walked away and all those scholarships disappeared, my friends stopped talking to me, I went from being an important person to a nobody. And I felt like it was all my fault, you know? If I hadn’t made the decision to… see my cousin before she died, things would’ve been okay.” He turned to me. “I mean, that’s what Sparks does. You start thinking the whole universe rises and sets on that team. My cousin died four days later and I still questioned whether I should’ve gone to see her. Like I’d made a mistake.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” I reached out and took hold of Elijah’s hand.
“I complained to the principal afterward. He didn’t believe me. Said nothing that Sparks did constituted a violation of any rules. He hadn’t had any other complaints. And why was I trying to ruin the most successful program in the school? Maybe I was just jealous. My friends dropped me. Teachers started giving me lower grades. I lost my scholarships. Everything Sparks said he was going to do, he did.”
“We’re gonna get him. All of them.”
He nodded, still sniffling. “Thank you.”
“I just need to learn how to act like I’m on heroin.”
He laughed in spite of himself, his eyes twinkling in the light of the dashboard. “You’re gonna do great.”