What We Do Is Secret Read Online Free PDF Page B

spiraled inside like a snail. And he’s always lifting his shirt up. I think he knows it’s sexy. I think that boy’s showing it off.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    And I don’t know how Squid’s voice does this reach-out-and-touch thing, mostly it’s with Siouxsie but sometimes she turns it on for me, it’s low and warm and you can feel it on your skin like the ghost of her hand or something, ghost because it’s not physical, it’s not even the vibration of the words barely lapping through the air between you in the tiniest waves, it’s more the way the sun moves on you when you’re sitting still by a window with a grate and the cool of the shadows comes and goes in different places and you can fall asleep like that and dream you’re not alone even though you really are.
    “But you know who, darlin’, don’t you?”
    I breathe in black cherry for a while and count backwards from the year 2000 to myself to know how old I’ll be if I live that long, not too fuckin likely, now is it.
    “I guess.”
    She says they watched Blitzer do a singin’ in the rain dance down the factory steps. And he hardly even smiles anymore. So there must be a reason.
    “He wants to go somewhere. With me.”
    Siouxsie says, “Rockets,” all Harsh Vader, and I know she likes Blitzer less than she used to, I just don’t remember why.
    But Squid stops her, with a look I guess, she doesn’t actually say anything, they do this couples thing. It’s like Siouxsie’s the foreground one, and Squid’s more in the background, but she kind of clears the decks to keep Siouxsie on her same-old course, without capsizing, she’s always been one of the down-we-go-cradle-and-all chicks, back in the day she wore a bloody chicken’s foot pinned to her jacket, she was the one who’d kick in a window on the street when no one else would, or else put her fist through it, we called her Stitches, because she had so many. And it’s still like a trademark of the scene, the way Darby cutting himself was, Siouxsie passed out cold on the floor after a gig or a party, or Siouxsie dumping a pot of spaghetti all over somebody’s house, or Siouxsie squatting over the punch bowl peeing, but since she met Squid there’s someone to keep her from going too far, with nothing said and no hard feelings, Siouxsie’s lucky, Darby wasn’t.
    “And I said I would.”
    Siouxsie puts a bindle in my hand and curls my fingers over it.
    “For later.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Your hand’s cold.”
    “Is it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Maybe yours is warm.”
    “Maybe.”
    Squid leans towards me too.
    “Darlin’, we heard Blitzer’s in trouble.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “With some people. The wrong people.”
    Siouxsie just sighs.
    “You be careful,” Squid says.
    “I heard that once tonight already.”

7
    Squid and Siouxsie bail for Oki Dog, to chow on french fries and maybe maybe pretty pretty please with Heinz Hot Ketchup on it bring some back for me. They went into hysterics practically when I told them I’m waiting on Blitzer, he might score us a sleeping bag, they don’t think guys fooling around together is disgusting, they just think it’s hilarious, especially guys they know. But if I made fun of them rubbing their smoothies together, they’d probably kick my ass.
    They could too. Darby always said the toughest guys in the scene were the chicks.
    Like Phranc.
    Oh most defiantly.
    She was always at the Masque, she had a flattop, she played in the Bags and Catholic Discipline. And then she went Napoleon Solo one night at the Starwood, came out strumming an acoustic guitar and said, “I’m Phranc, with a
Ph
and a hard
c,
and I’m just your typical all-American Jewish lesbian folk-singer.”
    By that time Clockwork OC boys were like a tide that came in hard but never went back out, so the youth of today in the crowd were maybe half surf Nazis, maybe more, and just like that you could hear yourself sweat, it was the closest