Neon Angel Read online

  When she started rubbing the blue dye into the next section, Marie said, “I don’t know if this stuff will ever come out, Cherie.” She was looking at my multicolored hair, frowning with concern.

  “So what?” I smiled. “It’s only food coloring. If it doesn’t come out, I’ll bleach it out.”

  That silenced her for a few moments. She carried on, shaking her head at me.

  “Is this all about those jerks in school yesterday?” Marie said to me, her voice softening. She still seemed to think that she could talk me out of going to school with multicolored hair. “I think you’re overreacting to this whole thing, Cherie.”

  I stared at her for a moment. “For your information, I am NOT overreacting. I’m REACTING. That’s different. It’s important to react when you’re pissed off.”

  The incident happened the day before. I was watching these creeps harassing this seventh grader for stepping on the ninth-grade lawn. Those ninth-grade punks would pounce if you were caught cutting a corner of their precious lawn. The poor kid looked about ready to pee in his pants. They were shoving him around and laughing at him. “Hey, freak!” one of them yelled. “Nice glasses! You steal ’em off of Mr. Magoo?”

  The kid just took it. He was scared stiff. Then the ringleader grabbed the glasses right off of his face, and threw them on the ground. He got right up in this kid’s face and yelled. “YOU’RE A FREAK!” he taunted. “A FOUR-EYED FUCKING FREAK!” He gave him one last shove before upending him into a garbage can. He and the others stood around laughing like a pack of jackals. I went to help the poor kid out of the trash, dusting him off a little. He was crying. “Come on,” I said softly. “Lemme help you get your glasses . . .”

  Suddenly I was shoved from behind. The ringleader was bearing down on me already. “Whatcha helping this FREAK for? Huh?” Then he turned to the rest of his cronies and said, “I guess she must be a freak-lover BITCH!”

  As soon as he shoved me, I felt the anger rising in my chest. That feeling, like a red cloud was descending over my eyes as the rage began to pump through my veins, setting my heart off on a skittering, pounding rhythm. I clenched my fists till my hands shook.

  “You’re calling this kid a freak?” I screamed. “I’ll show you a REAL freak!”

  The kid started backing off, startled by my outburst, and the smile slid from his face. Thankful that the attention was off him for the moment, the kid I’d helped out of the garbage started hunting around for his glasses. The bully sneered at me, shrugged, and took off with the pack of wolves he was with. I watched them go, fuming. I had to show them! I mean, they can’t call this poor kid a freak just because he wears glasses! No, I had to be true to my word. Tomorrow these idiots were going to see a real freak, all right!

  Marie put down the blue coloring. She noticed that some of it had got on her pants. “Shit, Cherie, look at this! Goddamn it!”

  “Oh, chill out.” I laughed. “And tell me how I look!”

  Marie shook her head. “You look awful. Really, really awful.”

  “Good!”

  She held up the mirror so I could get a good look at the back of my head. “You did a great job,” I said, admiring her work. “You could do this for a living . . .”

  With my hair done, I went back into the bedroom and started picking out my outfit for tomorrow. The bedroom was divided neatly into Marie’s side and my side. You could tell which was which within seconds of walking in. Her wall was nice and neat, with a few black-light posters on the wall that were so “in” back then. On my wall . . . well, there was no wall; there was nothing but an endless collage of magazine cuttings and newspaper clippings on David Bowie. The collection ran floor to ceiling and it was beautiful, my pride and joy. I’d memorized every single line of every article. I’d memorized every angle of his devastatingly beautiful face.

  I settled on the most mismatched outfit I could find. A pair of old shredded jeans and my Diamond Dogs Tour T-shirt, topped off with a jacket that totally clashed with it. On the floor was my newest obsession: a pair of red platform tennis shoes. These babies had more rubber than the Goodyear Blimp, and made me a good four inches taller. They cost forty dollars. Or at least they would have cost forty dollars if I hadn’t stolen them. It was a piece of cake: I told the girl I wanted to try them on, and then sent her into the back room to get me something in a different size. By the time she had returned, I was halfway around the block, with the shoes stuffed under my jacket.

  Marie was standing in the doorway, watching me get dressed. “The teachers are gonna have a field day with you,” she said, shaking her head.

  I shrugged. “They live with it,” I told her. I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror. The image was good . . . but there was still something missing. I went to my dresser and grabbed some fluorescent makeup pencils. I walked over to Marie and dumped them in her hand.

  “Okay, last favor. Tomorrow morning, just before we leave for school, I want you to draw a big red-and-blue lightning bolt across my face. Just like the cover of Aladdin Sane. You’ll do that for me, right?”

  “Come on, Cherie. You’re taking this too far . . . !”

  “Will you do it or not?”

  Marie sighed, but she didn’t say no.

  Yeah, I wanted to make a point, but it ran far deeper than that. Seeing the abuse that poor seventh grader endured had sparked a recent memory that had haunted me every day since. A few months before, I had come face to face with the most notorious bully in the school. Her name was Big Red and she was the meanest kind of bully, plain and simple. She had bright, wavy red hair: that’s why they called her Big Red. I got the feeling that she liked it . . . that having a nickname like that made her feel big and important. Still, nobody dared call her “Big Red” to her face unless you were one of her goons or followers. Our first encounter was during my freshman year. One day after Phys. Ed. she and two of her goonies came up to me in the locker room. I was in the middle of changing, and all I was wearing was my shorts. I didn’t see her at first. Though I could sense something was off, like you would an impending storm, a gut feeling of a disaster looming in the distance. My eyes slowly and instinctively rose from my locker and there was Big Red, the hulking great she-bitch who had been terrifying the smaller kids all semester.

  She closed my locker. “I heard you ain’t afraid of me,” Big Red said, in a voice dripping with threat. Her two crooked cronies’ laughed in time, chomping at their gum, sneering wickedly at me. For a moment I thought how I never saw Big Red alone. She was always with her goons. It occurred to me that maybe she was afraid. Afraid what the kids would do to her if they ever caught her alone.

  I just looked at her confused. Up until this point, I hadn’t said anything to anybody about Big Red. Up until this point, I had only heard the stories and saw the tears and the terrified sobbing faces of the kids she had scared the crap out of. Up until this point she had only been throwing her weight around with the other kids. I had just been ignoring her, hoping she would leave me alone.

  “You deaf or something?” Big Red snarled, when I just stood there looking at her. I put my hands to my chest trying to cover myself. I shook my head no.

  “Well I heard that you ain’t scared of me. That you’re real brave, huh Cherie?”

  “Why would I be afraid?” I said meekly, “I don’t even know you . . .”

  Without another word Big Red backhanded me hard across the face. Everybody in the locker room stopped, and the sound of knuckles against flesh echoed around the room like a gunshot. I flew backwards, over a bench, and ended up flat on my back. “Haw! Haw! Haw!” laughed Big Red, as all of her cronies joined in. “Haw! Haw! Haw!”

  I stood up, obviously shaken. She didn’t miss a beat. She pointed a finger into my face like a harpoon and her mouth was so close to me I could feel her breath. I turned my head. “You BETTER be afraid, you little BITCH!” She sneered. “Next time you’ll be afraid!” She poked me hard in the chest, then she smiled and I could see her red lip
stick smeared across her teeth. She looked around the room. Everyone looked away and then, like a monster in a horror movie, she was gone. I was left standing there, half naked, paralyzed with fear. I could feel my body tremble violently until I crumbled in tears. The silence was deafening and only the sound in that packed locker room were the wailing echoes of my sobs.

  As I walked toward Mulholland Junior High, the catcalls started before I had even made it inside the gate. As I walked down the corridors, past the lockers, I felt a hush fall over the whole building. People stopped talking and turned to openly gawk at me. I walked past them all, looking down my nose at them.

  “Nice hair, Cherie!” someone yelled as I walked past. “D’you get mugged by a circus?”

  I kept on walking, flipping the kid off. Everybody had something to say to me today. “Your hairdresser have a psychotic episode, or somethin’?” “What happened—can’t afford hair spray anymore, so now you’re using spray paint?”

  I didn’t even make it a minute in Mr. Thomas’s first-period history class. He took one look at me and sent me straight to the dean’s office. I liked Mr. Thomas. He was a gray-haired, middle-aged ex-Marine-looking type of a guy. He kind of reminded me of my dad. He seemed to understand that I was going through a pretty rough adolescence, and although he would never come right out and say it, I felt like he really did care. Out of all my teachers, he was easily my favorite.

  The dean took one look at me and sighed. “Okay, Cherie,” she said. “Would you like to tell me what’s going on?” I gave her some ridiculous story about how I volunteered over at Encino Hospital, and how the outfit was for some special event we were doing there after school. Amazingly, she believed me. In fact the dean, principal, and the rest of the school staff bought it hook, line, and sinker. The story worked so well that they told me that if things “got out of hand” with the other kids, they would release me early from school, “just this one time.” Very nice of them! Now I could keep my promise to those dumb-ass bullies, and cut out of school early . . . all compliments of the Mulholland Junior High staff.

  It went on like that all morning. Teachers pulled me aside to ask me if everything was all right at home. I just chewed my gum and gave them my best thousand-yard stare. When I sat down to eat lunch, it got worse. The catcalls, and the laughter, and the snide comments . . . “Nice shoes! Can you dunk a basketball now?” “What’s with the face? Is it a rash, or did a graffiti artist mistake you for a wall?”

  The thing is, I wasn’t angry. Not really. The more they laughed, the more they stared, the better I felt. The more powerful I felt. Everybody in this cafeteria knew who Cherie Currie was! The more they took notice, the greater was my victory. I turned around and looked for the kid with the glasses who they’d called a freak yesterday. He was sitting by himself at a distant table. I walked over there and sat down right next to him. As I sat down he just stared at me, his mouth hanging open. I don’t know if he even recognized me. Maybe he thought I was about to beat him up or something. Instead I smiled and said, “Aren’t those guys creeps?”

  He nodded quickly and said, “Yeah!”

  I leaned in and said, “They’re always ragging on normal people like us!”

  He laughed a little at this and started to relax, cautiously. He still couldn’t stop staring at me, though.

  “Did it cost a lot of money?” he asked eventually. “I mean—uh—your hair?”

  I shook my head. “Not a penny. I like your glasses.”

  He got a little red in the cheeks and looked away. “I hate them,” he said quietly. “I keep asking my parents to get me new ones but they won’t.”

  “I like ’em just fine,” I told him. Then I leaned in again. “Listen—if any of those creeps bother you again, just tell me, okay?”

  He nodded, looking a little unsure.

  “I mean it. I’ll beat the crap out of them for you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I could still hear the creeps laughing, right behind us. It didn’t matter: I’d made my point. Let them laugh. Its not like it was me they were making fun of. It was the creature that I’d created. The Cherie-thing. It hurts to be laughed at when people are laughing at you. I know what that feels like . . . like when Marie’s preppy friends would tell me to buzz off whenever I tried to hang out with their little clique. Oh yeah, that hurt a lot. But I could take it if those creeps laughed at the Cherie-thing I had created, because it wasn’t really me. The real Cherie, the Cherie who gets afraid and embarrassed and hurt, was safely locked away. She was somewhere deep inside of me, in a place where nobody could hurt her. Now I was bigger than them. And I had already made a conscious decision not to be afraid of anybody anymore.

  When the lunch bell rang, everybody started to leave. The kid with the glasses sitting next to me hurried off in an effort to avoid the bullies who always picked on him. I took off, too—straight out the back gate. Outside of the school, I pulled a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it. I smiled to myself—today was a pretty good day. I’d made my point, all right.

  I had my cigarettes, and I had my music, and that was quite enough for me, thank you very much. I’d had enough of school for one day. Anyway, tonight I was heading to Rodney’s with Paul, and I didn’t want to blow my mood by hanging out with a bunch of creeps. I scrunched up my eyes against the blazing, midafternoon sun. School was hell, but when I was fifteen years old, Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco was my idea of heaven. Back then, the glam-rock scene was the only place where I really felt at home in my own skin.

  Crushing the cigarette under my platform soles, I exhaled a great plume of gray smoke and stormed away from the constraints of Mulholland Junior High, back to the only life that meant anything to me.

  Chapter 3

  The Queen of Hate

  I was in my bedroom with my headphones on, listening to Diamond Dogs again, the music cranked as high as it could go. After seeing Bowie perform these songs live, every note, every line, had taken on a bigger, more profound character. I found myself paying special attention to the instrumentation, to the inflection of Bowie’s vocals. The music was providing a clue, a map to where I wanted to go. I sat on my beanbag chair, floating high above my body, transported out of myself by the glorious noise in my head.

  My mind was wandering, far from the math homework I was supposed to be working on. I am thinking about a kid named Byron Friday, who was also in the first year of junior high. I had fallen hard for Byron, although he didn’t even acknowledge my existence, apart from the occasional casual hello coming in or out of class. Byron was a handsome kid, blond and tanned, with shiny golden hair cut in layers to just above his shoulders. Byron was quiet, introverted, a mystery man on a skateboard. Sometimes I’d see him when we were on lunch break, whipping figure eights in the back parking lot or popping wheelies on his bike where he wasn’t supposed to be. I wondered if this was what they meant when they called someone a rebel. I wasn’t sure, but I knew that when I looked at him whizzing up and down the asphalt, I’d get a shiver that ran throughout my entire body.

  I hadn’t told anybody about my crush on Byron, not even Marie. But sometimes, when I was all alone like I was that night, I had this recurring fantasy about Byron and me. In this fantasy, it was a weekend, and Byron and I were having a picnic on the school lawn while nobody else was around. Byron would give me this look, and smile his cute, crooked smile, and I’d realize he was going to kiss me. He’d reach his hand out and touch my face lightly, slowly moving his lips toward mine . . . I’d get this wonderful, butterfly feeling inside when I’d imagine our lips touching. I wondered if this was what falling in love felt like.

  A sharp banging noise that cut through the music in my headphones finally disrupted this fantasy. I didn’t even hear him at first, knocking lightly on the sliding door leading from the backyard to my bedroom. Didn’t see his silhouette, stark against the fading light outside.

  Mom was out to dinner with Wolfgang. Marie was at the movies with her friends
. Donnie was sleeping over at a friend’s house. I didn’t even know when they were supposed to be back. Marie said maybe ten o’clock, but that didn’t mean anything. I was enjoying having the place to myself. I had my homework laid out before me and it wasn’t until Derek banged louder on the glass that I finally looked up from my books and saw him standing there. He was yelling something, his mouth twisted up.

  Oh, yuck, I thought, what does this jerk want?

  I took off my headphones and clicked off the record player. I could hear him through the glass: “Hey, Cherie! Let me in!”

  “Marie’s not here!” I yelled back at him.

  He shrugged his shoulders and raised his palms up to the sky as if to say, “So what?” I shook my head at him and picked up the headphones again.

  “Cherie, come on, I just wanna speak to you for a second!”

  With a sigh, I put the headphones down and crept barefoot over to the door. I looked at him and wrinkled my nose. He was dressed in his usual uniform of skintight torn blue jeans and a filthy-looking Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Derek’s dark shoulder-length hair looked dirty, and when he smiled his ugly smile, you could see yellow crooked teeth poking through his thin lips. He wasn’t Byron Friday, that’s for sure. I unlocked the door and opened it a crack.

  “I said Marie’s not here. She’s out.”

  “Lemme in, Cherie,” he said, putting his mouth up against the opening. “I’m freezing out here!”

  “No!” I spat. “Go away!”

  Derek weirded me out, and the idea of being alone with him was not something I would ever consider. He was a real sleaze: when he and my sister were together, he was always pawing at her, trying to snake his hands up her skirt or down her top . . . like a fucking dog in heat! I could never understand why Marie put up with him, car or no car. Even worse, whenever he was here, and Marie went out to bring him a beer or something, I’d catch him staring at me with those dead insect eyes of his. He’d look at me a certain way, and it was as if those liver lips of his would get wetter and mushier. Ugh! If I’d get up to leave the room, I would feel his gaze on me, running up and down my body, appraising me. I could almost hear his breathing get labored.