I stare at the taco he brought me.

“No one’ll find you there,” he says, mouth full.

“You did some bad stuff out there,” I say. “Mary told me.”

“Bad stuff” he asks, confused, not faking it.

“That’s what Mary told me, man.” I shiver.

“Define ‘bad,’” he says, finishing the burrito off too fast, and then, once more, “Vegas.”

I pick up the taco and am going to eat it when I notice blood on my hand and I put the taco down and wipe it away and Peter eats part of my taco and I eat some of it too and he finishes it and we get into the van and head out to the desert.

12

ON THE BEACH

“Imagine a blind person dreaming,” she says. I’m sitting next to her, on the beach in Malibu, and even though it’s getting totally late we both have our Wayfarers on and even though I’ve been lying in the sun, on the beach, next to her, since noon (she’s been on the beach since eight), I’m still kind of hungover from that party we went to last night. I can’t remember the party too well but I think it was in Santa Monica, though it could have been down farther, maybe Venice. Only things that pass through my brain are three tanks of nitrous oxide on a veranda, sitting on the floor next to the stereo, Wang Chung playing, holding a bottle of Cuervo Gold, a sea of tan hairy legs, someone screeching “Let’s do Spago, let’s do Spago” in a fake high voice, over and over again.

I sigh, don’t say anything, shiver a little and turn the Cars tape over. I can see Mona and Griffin down the beach, walking slowly along the shore. It’s getting too dark to wear sunglasses. I take them off. Look back over at her. The wig isn’t crooked anymore—she straightened it while my eyes were closed. Then I look back up at the house, then back at Mona and Griffin, who seem to be getting closer but maybe not. I bet myself ten dollars that they will avoid walking over here. She’s not moving. “You can’t understand, you can’t comprehend the pain,” she says, but her lips barely move. Stare back at the beach, at the drifting pink sunset. Try and imagine a blind person dreaming.

She first told me about it at the prom.

I went with her and with Andrew, who was going with Mona, and we had this weird limo driver who looked like Anthony Geary, and me and Andrew had rented tuxes that came with bow ties that were way too big and we had to stop at the Beverly Center to buy new ones and we had about six grams that me and Andrew went in on and a couple tins of Djarum cigarettes and she looked so thin as I pinned the corsage to her dress and her hands, bony, shook as she pinned a rose onto my sleeve. High, I stopped myself from suggesting it should be pinned somewhere else. The prom was held at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I flirted with Mona. Andrew flirted with me. Snuck into the Polo Lounge, did coke in the bathroom. She didn’t say anything there. It was later, at the party after the prom, on Michael Landon’s yacht, after the coke had run out, while we were making out in the cabin below, that she broke away, said there was this problem. We walked up to the top deck and I lit a clove cigarette and she didn’t say anything else and I didn’t ask because I really didn’t want to know. The morning was cold and everything looked gray and bleak and I went home horny, tired, had dry mouth.

She asks me, actually whispers, to turn the Cars off and put the Madonna tape in. We have been on the beach every day for the last three weeks now. It’s all she wants to do. Lie on the beach, in the sun, outside her mother’s house. Mother is on location in Italy, then New York, then Burbank. I have spent the last three weeks in Malibu with her and Mona and one of Mona’s boyfriends. Today it’s Griffin, a beach bum with a lot of money and friendly and who owns a g*y club in West L.A. Mona and her boyfriends sometimes hang out on the beach with us too but not a whole lot. Not as much as she does. “But she’s not even getting a tan,” I had to point out one night. Mona waved a hand in front of my face, lit candles, offered to read my palms, passed out. She often looks even more pale when me or Mona run suntan oil over her body, which is beginning to look totally wasted—a tiny bikini already looks baggy, is draped around flesh that has the same color as milk. She stopped shaving her legs because she doesn’t have the strength and everyone refuses to do it for her and the dark stubble is too noticeable, greasy due to the oil and sticking up on her legs. “She used to be totally hot,” I shouted at Mona when I was packing a bag, ready to leave last Sunday. Tall (she still looks tall but more like a tall skeleton) and blond (for some freaky reason she bought a black wig when she started losing it all) and her body was supple, carefully muscled, aerobicized, and now she basically looks like shit. And everyone knows too. A friend of mine and hers, Derf, from USC, who was over here on Wednesday to screw Mona, said to me while waxing his board, nodding over at her, alone, in the same position, an overcast sky, no sun, “She’s looking pretty shitty, dude.”