so much to say and no way to say it. Was chanting We became oblivion the key to vanquishing myself until I was a perfectly anonymous nothing just like Foley? I had watched Foley stuff his face until finding the courage to stammer these important three words.
Foley had grinned, showing me the corn dog ground by his teeth. “You listened,” he said. Then he’d hunched in and spun the most amazing tale—the time when his mother had taken him to Chicago to visit his aunts and he had been introduced to Vorvolakas by an older cousin who knew a doorman who didn’t bother with IDs. When the band took the stage the crowd coalesced into a single rippling beast. The peal of the guitars was deafening, ratcheted along by the machine-gun fire of the drums. The front man screamed as he played, his head banging so ruthlessly that each whip of his long hair terminated in an explosion of sweat. It was astonishing and staggering; it was the only real metal show Foley had ever attended. “I’m going back sometime soon,” he’d vowed. “I check their website. I know when they’re playing. One of these days I’m heading back if it means I have to hitchhike. You bet your ass.”
It was a delirious fantasy, this escape to Chicago, but Foley’s firsthand details made such an escape seem almost possible. Suddenly there was a path back to my mother’s home, only the road was treacherous and required acceptance of a frightening oath: We became oblivion. Caused our own extinction.
“I checked their MySpace last night,” Foley said, “and they’re playing up there in like six weeks. Now, driving’s out of the question. And I don’t have the money for Amtrak, and I know you sure as hell don’t. So I was thinking Greyhound. If we can get over to Monroeville, we can hop a Greyhound. Those things are cheap as shit. You ever ridden a Greyhound?”
I’d ridden a million buses in my life but never one that went any farther than the suburbs.
“Fair warning, then, it’s supposed to be pretty much the worst possible way to travel. I read that there was this Greyhound heading up to Canada and right in the middle of the night this guy takes out this knife, this big fucker of a Rambo knife, and starts chunk chunk chunk, decapitating the guy sitting next to him.” Foley shrugged. “I bet they barely blinked at Greyhound headquarters. I mean, it’s just reason number seven thousand and thirty-three why Greyhound sucks, right? Anyway, we’re taking Greyhound. But you get the aisle.”
“I don’t know about this we,” I said, thinking about how many slashes I would be adding to the sink between now and then, and how many of those slashes would correspond with late-night digging—unscheduled events that didn’t fit comfortably around trips out of town.
Foley turned on me instantly. “Take it or fucking leave it.” He rounded his shoulders and picked up the pace. “I’m seeing Vorvolakas on December tenth in Chicago. You want to stay home jerkin’ off your dad, hey, have fun.”
Foley had been volatile all night. In the locker room after Ping-Pong, I had been dizzy with the perfume of Celeste’s attentions; diminishing beneath those feelings were shame and fear over what had really happened to Heidi—the imagined manners of her debasement were numerous and graphic. Foley didn’t give a shit about either girl. He had pushed past me out of the gym and ignored me the rest of the day. I couldn’t be certain that he trailed me to rehearsal room B, but in the parking lot a half hour later he had savagely unleashed every rumor he’d ever heard about Celeste, most of them involving the maniacal measures she took to protect her triumphant future (example: she made Woody wear two condoms at once). Foley couldn’t understand why I would risk my burgeoning invisibility by interacting with Celeste Carpenter! and courting the wrath of Woody Trask! I needed Foley worse than he needed me—we both knew it—and so I choked out an apology. Appeased, he suggested that we walk around that night and scare trick-or-treaters—after all, he said, Halloween was a metalhead’s favorite holiday. Desperate for his good graces, I had shown up at eight o’clock in front of the school as promised, and we’d begun slouching through Bloughton, not attempting to scare a single kid.
And now I had pissed him off again. “Maybe I’ll be able to go,” I lied. “I’ll just have