Read Online Screaming Divas by Suzanne Kamata - Free Book Online Page B

through her.
    It was weird. They’d played together all through childhood, spending the night at each other’s houses in each other’s beds. And then suddenly, nothing. Esther had never been so lonely in her life.
    At night, she cried herself to sleep. Then she had dreams—vivid erotic dreams—about Rebecca. Or sometimes she dreamed of Cassie, of licking her scar and wrapping her in yards of pink silk. She was haunted by all the wrong things. Maybe some kind of exorcism was in order. A visit to a shrink. But how could she bring this up with her parents? This kind of problem didn’t appear in
Good Housekeeping
or
Family Circle
or the other magazines her mother read. Whenever her father saw a guy with an earring, he muttered “homo.” She was alone.

9
    When Jack threatened to send Trudy back to Sarah, she lit out on her own. She was living now in a rented house. Every month her grandparents sent her a check for eight hundred dollars to cover living expenses. She wouldn’t come into her trust fund until she turned twenty-one, but her Charleston grandmother had taken pity on her. She didn’t want the girl eating out of garbage cans.
    Trudy’s room was at the back of the house, off the kitchen. At the moment, the sink was filled with a week’s worth of dirty dishes, some of them furred with grey. Trudy tried to mask the odor by burning incense.
    She was stuck with a slob—Madeline—but at least she had her own room. She had a futon in the corner and a few milk crates for her books and candles.
    She’d met her apartment-mate at The Cave. In between slamming and dancing and taking turns in the DJ booth, Trudy took breaks in the Pink Room and became intimately acquainted with the clientele. She’d decided to start a band.
    Trudy got her hands on a guitar. Actually, it was her father’s guitar, the one he’d played back in the day, with Swamp. The instrument had a history of smoky bars, fields of wildflowers, park benches, Greyhound buses. It had been all over the place, probably even Dahomey.
    She was going to ask to borrow it, but when she dropped by Jack’s apartment, he wasn’t home. Trudy decided to cart the guitar off anyhow. He never played it anymore and besides, he might say no if she asked him to loan it to her. He didn’t trust her so much since all the trouble with Adam.
    She’d practice and innovate and turn herself into a brilliant performer. And then she’d start a band. It would be the most exciting thing to hit the town since General Sherman. Yeah, these were good thoughts.
    By day, she practiced. By night, she hung out at The Cave, playing records or slamming on the dance floor. During breaks, she looked for musicians in the Pink Room.
    â€œHey, Maddy. I’m starting a band. Wanna join up?”
    Madeline tossed a lock of black hair out of her eyes. “You must be out of your mind.”
    Trudy shrugged. She asked Jeff, the David Bowie lookalike. She even asked Johnny Fad. People laughed, blew smoke in her face. Sometimes they just turned away as if they hadn’t heard her at all.
    Why did everyone treat her proposition like some sort of joke? She was as serious as she’d ever been. The more she practiced, the more she knew that her dreams lay in music. She closed her eyes and saw herself on the stage, crooning into a mic while a huge crowd lit and lofted their Bics in tribute.
    When people were drinking and dancing, they weren’t in the mood for serious talk. She had to find another way to put her band together.
    Trudy made a flyer with scissors and magazines and Elmer’s glue. When she was finally satisfied with her work, she rode her housemate’s rickety bicycle to Kinko’s and made a hundred copies. Then she ran around Five Points, where all the college kids hung out, and plastered them to every telephone pole in sight with a staple gun. When she was finished, she went back to the apartment,