Beautiful Boys by Francesca Lia Block Page B

who’s that? There is someone hiding in the crowd watching you that shouldn’t be there. Someone in the rubber monster mask from Charlie’s trunk. They want you to belong to them. They want to lock you up in a tomb so you can’t breathe, so no one else can evertouch you, so you can’t sing anymore.
    I wake up with a cold. One of those bad almost flu-y things where you feel all your nerve endings splitting on the surface of your skin and your ears ring like you’ve been playing a tough gig at a loud smoky club all night. I’ve slept for hours—it’s dark. When I go to turn on the globe lamp nothing happens. I try the bathroom switch. Nothing. Electricity out. And you know what it is? Christmas Eve.
    In Los Angeles my family is all together feasty-feasting in a house lit with red and green chili-pepper lights. There is a big blazing tree. After they eat they are going to make home movies of each other dancing and opening their presents.
    I wish I was home with all of them and Angel Juan having a jammin’ jamboree, playing music and sharing a stolen-roses cake in front of the fireplace.
    “Charlie?” I say.
    No song. No light.
    I light candles and wrap up in my sleeping bag and some of Mallard and Meadows’s blankets on thecarpet. I remember that my heart is a broken teacup. I remember the feeling of my own heart shredding me up from the inside out. I think about the dream.
    “Charlie!”
    “Are you all right?” he asks flickering in a corner.
    “I had a bad dream about Angel Juan. I have to go out and look for him.” I try to stand up but I have Jell-O knees.
    “You look like you have a fever,” Charlie says. “You can’t go out.”
    “But Charlie, I think that man in the museum wants to hurt Angel Juan.”
    “Just rest now, Baby.” His voice is like a lullaby.
    I feel creepy-crawly. I shiver back into a fever-sleep.
     
    When I wake up this time my skin feels sore—like it’s been stretched too tight or something—and hot. Outside the firefly building is shining in the night.
    Then I remember my dream again and I feel splinters of ice cracking in my chest. Now what? All I know is that I have to go out no matter what Charlie thinks.I’m so sick of him telling me what to do, keeping me from finding Angel Juan. And he’s hiding in his trunk now anyway. There is something I have to do.
    I get up and dress in baggy black. I put my hair back under a black baseball cap, grab my camera and roller skates.
    When I get down to the street I put on my skates and take off into the darkness. My hands are frozen inside my mittens and my frozen toes keep slamming against the pointed cowboy-boot toes. My nose is running and my chest aches. Fog is coming in and the air smells salty and fishy. A few glam drag queens in miniskirts and high heels are strutting in the shadows cooing and hollering. Sometimes a car drives by, stops and picks one up.
    It’s freaky. I kind of know exactly where I’m going. Or I don’t know but the roller skates do. They just seem to carry me along over the cobblestones. I can feel every stone jolting my spine but not enough to jolt the fear out of me. Driving it deeper in.
    The place where the roller skates want to take me is the meat-packing district down by the river.
    Meat Street, I think, remembering what the junkiesaid.
    In between the big meat warehouses on the cobblestone pavement is a little fifties-style hot-dog-shaped stainless-steel diner-type place lit with tubes of buzzing red neon that make the shadows the color of raspberry syrup. The neon sign reads “Cake’s Shakin’ Palace.”
    And standing there in the window of the empty diner is Angel Juan!
    I think it is really him. Not so much because I feel tired and spooked and sick but because I just want it to be. I want him to be all right.
    But this is a mannequin. It has Angel Juan’s nose and cheekbones and his chin, his dark eyes and hair and even the tone of his brown skin under the raspberry-syrup light. He’s