Rave Girl

By Cameron Glenn

In 2001 Shelly moves from Seattle to Salt Lake City and becomes a part of the local club scene. She befriends a neighbor girl, has complications with a roommate, meets an artistic boy, hardcore daydreams,and is forced to find work, among other adventures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cameron Glenn
• Release date: Dec 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310605680

Cameron Glenn

Cameron Glenn grew up the third of seven children in Oregon. As a child he dedicated hours to the pursuits of basketball and cartooning, as well as waking up way too early for his paper route in order to earn money to buy toys, candy and comic books. He also loved to read and write, which he continues to do voraciously. He currently lives in Salt Lake City after having earned a BA in literature from Boise State.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The wind struck my hair, straight and heavy from the rain. The wet blotches on my coked bottle glasses, which I hadn’t worn outside since middle school, smeared my vision. I wouldn’t have minded being hit by a car or struck by lightning— it didn’t matter as long as knives stayed out of it.

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Derrick dumped me that afternoon. Two days before we shared a blanket and sofa, watching Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer with my little brother. We decided to skip the Christmas party—too comfortable with ourselves—too important for high school socials. My fingers touched hip lip, red from the cheap cherry pop, as I fed him caramel popcorn. I laughed when he picked his teeth in an exaggerated bad mannered way, right after giving me his I’m about to kiss you look.

I thought of that look as I walked in the rain, wondering if he knew then what he would do to me. The world smeared into gray, as if everything had been painted by water colors and the downpour damped the canvas, causing colors to run off, settle in puddles and fall down gutters, along with my mood.

Neon ropes once entwined us. From our perspective people looked as small as Smurfs—the splash of the bottom of a water slide belonged to us—I thought our seriousness made us exclusive, raw, real. I thought we wouldn’t become the headline on silly high school gossip tabloids: Derrick dumps Shelly, seen kissing sophomore at the mall: a fucking pretty, slender sophomore named Daisy; I didn’t think the name Daisy existed outside Donald Duck cartoons and the Gone with the Wind South.

He liked The Steve Miller Band and so did I. I liked The Dave Mathews Band because he did. I followed him into his brief fascination with Elvis Presley. I hadn’t heard of Radiohead or Bjork before him, hadn’t listened to The Smashing Pumpkins or The Beasti Boys. My eyes grew big around him, my stature small, like a little girl becoming aware of the massiveness of the world. He told me we were getting too serious. I could tell he meant to say I’m getting too weird.

The rest of my senior year sucked. I can’t blame Derrick for that. I don’t know why I still think of him so much. I hate him but he’s wonderful. I still love him but he’s horrible.

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CHAPTER TWO

I don’t care about that fat shirtless boy over there, jumping as if trying to shake his flab off. Guitar strings stretch through a black hole to emerge out the other side celestial—my veins are guitar strings, my brain a drum, it feels stellar. I don’t care about that guy wearing the cat in the hat hat, a pacifier around his neck—the freak. Nothing matters but the music entering me. Negativity rises out, I’m smiling, images are blurred by speed. Then I clench my teeth and brake straps and rise and am free to do crazy impossible poetic things—like suck in all the patience in the room, spit it out and slap somebody (I smile at the thought).

I’m vapor for a moment. Then I land, angry that I can’t really fly but sometimes I come close enough. I grow wings and am an angel with pink soft lips that blow out cool helium on faces of those feeling god in a breeze. I don’t care about that kid on ecstasy over my shoulder, entranced by the glow sticks his freak friend in the Yoda mask waves in front of him. They don’t

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care about the music; they watch too much TV. I’m a drug-free raver although people probably don’t believe it. I’m not religious anymore or anything (or not in the same way I was). They say ecstasy rots the brain. So what? What’s really worth remembering? All that matters is now—now is the only place where true ecstasy exists—so don’t remember anything, just dance, go ahead, feel good. But I don’t need drugs.

I’m tattoo free, I’m wholesome, like grain and water and dirk and sun; I drink bottled water, I jog, I fall in love with nature and the city and this noise right now. I imagine, for a moment, I’m a naked Pocahontas, running barefoot over pine needles in a forest, about to dive in a river and swim with salmon. The trees shine like metal; the river is mercury, nature is a factory making dance songs. I’m not afraid to think whatever crazy thoughts come.

Amuscle man in a tank-top tries to grind his pelvis into my butt—I slide away leaving him standing stiff and stupid. I don’t care about those people simulating sex over there. Like the band Weezer once sang, I’m tired of sex. Just love yourself I think. Just have confidence, do what you want, just be who you are and rise that way and do it quick before it becomes out of fashion and once it’s out of fashion do it anyways—say yes.

Outside the club I don’t smile as much as I used to. I used to be a bimbo. When I smile now I want it to be genuine and done with awareness. The DJ’s new song goes boom, weer, bom bot but boom boom weeer. It feels like eternity is in my fist.

Jaime didn’t want to come tonight. We ate Spanish rice and burritos for dinner. We talked about being better than other people. Just look at all the hopeless sad people: quiet desperation is what I think Emerson described most of the masses living in—people who don’t care or care too much (about anything); people who accept boredom and routines, people who try to fight off the mundane but just end up insane—just ride a bus or watch reality TV or look inside a McDonalds; those suffering in quiet desperation are everywhere. Maybe I’ll go to hell for pride but it’s really not hard to think of oneself as being

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better than most people, although sometimes I sort of feel like the worst person on earth. But you have to think of yourself as better than the homeless, the murders, the perverts—it’s not elitism it’s necessity. Still, people should be nice to each other. I’m nice to people.

Anyway, Jamie told me the conversation put her out of the mood to dance. I told her I want a big brownie, moist enough it could be sucked through a straw, with chocolate sauce and caramel and cold soft ice cream and I want it down my pants. I can be so dumb.

I’ve been in Salt Lake City, Utah, for about a month. After one week funny as hell became crazy as hell that I’m living here. I had to leave home (a small suburb of Seattle); just had to. Jamie moved here to be with her boyfriend but he dumped her because of her tempting wickedness, she liked her job as assistant to some young millionaire, she invited me to be her roommate, anyplace is anywhere (anything is anything), so I came, the end. I’m embarrassed that I live here but it won’t be for very long or anything, just a place to hide out for awhile while the word crashes down on me. It’s kind of funky here, with the mountains and Mormons and Karl Malone, the only black NBAall star who listens to country music.

Eighteen is young and old: sometimes I feel thirteen, sometimes I feel thirty. They say I’m in the real world now. They say this is an exciting time in my life. If this is supposed to be the best time in my life I’ll be one fucked up sad grown up. If I’m not bored I’m afraid: it feels that way, when I stop and digest everything. Not when I dance though. I whip my hair from side to side and it slaps my face and I don’t care about anything sometimes and it feels good not to care. Sun, moon, planets, stars, it’s all bizarre.

I heard somewhere that the brain isn’t fully developed until age twenty two or twenty three or something. Jamie and I talked about that one night, the weirdness of that, how everything I think now, everything I am now, might be totally different from who I really am once my brains fully settled in. I

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actually think that idea is sort of cool—I mean I better evolve from the little teenage Shelly, the mixed up girl I’ll look back on one day and sigh and blush at, while typing a message on my laptop while riding a concord to Europe or the Middle East. Eighteen, living in Salk Lake, of all crazy places, going to clubs and raves every night, releasing myself to the music as if some sort of primal virgin sacrifice: what a brief strange funny time. Weren’t those silly teen angst years so humorous I’ll think, once my brain has it all finally figured out and I’m eating salad reading a magazine, sitting across from a former Bill Clinton intern, telling me gross and sexy stories no one’s heard before which makes me laugh so hard Italian dressing almost shoots out my nose. No, I won’t be a person who looks back.

For now though, I’m eighteen and just want to scream sometimes—I don’t know why or what at—but I feel like my whole body is a clenching fist and I’m bleeding internally, the world pressing air out of me, I’m dying and no one cares. Sometimes I feel like a bright yellow balloon, floating high in clouds, sometimes I feel like a rock at the bottom of a lake—I wrote a poem recently that used that metaphor. I guess I should describe myself before I go on. Or maybe that’s what I’ve been doing and I should let dialogue and action describe me; whatever, I don’t know, fuck it.

I tried to write the prologue nice and interesting with the descriptions of the rain hitting my middle school glasses, blinding me. Maybe there’s a metaphor there but I didn’t mean for there to be. I tried to make that section real visceral, emotional and pertinent because I don’t consider myself as really beginning to be until after Derrick dumped me, which is ironic since before I thought I hadn’t begun until I went out with him. I hope I used ironic right.

Anyway (sorry) I’m five seven and have hair the color of manure, my eyes shine, sparkle I’m told, when I’m happy like glossy manure in the sun. I’m told I’m pretty but I’m not stunning, not like a model or anything, but I’m not super repulsive either. I don’t know if people expect everyone to be ugly, so a pretty person is a surprise, or if everyone’s expected to

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be pretty (or passable anyway) so that an ugly person is a surprise; either way my looks aren’t surprising.

I used to be meticulous at making makeup make me go, mmmm, you look marvelous (it’s fun to overuse alliteration sometimes) but now I just put on bright lipstick and smear the volcano red shade over my cheekbones and eyelids with my pinkie finger. I don’t care if I look like a whore: I don’t know who’s worthy of trying to impress.

I don’t have noticeable breasts, either from being too big or too small—I don’t want a guy who just wants a girl for breasts anyway, so it works out. I think it’s sick how a girl isn’t considered properly described until her breasts are mentioned. It’s sick how breast obsessed American culture is, as if they made the milk that fed the world.

So I’m not real smart although I want to be. I admire brains and think it would be cool if I know a lot about the world and philosophy and important things that could get me all passionate over worthy causes and able to converse with anyone about anything (hell, even religion and politics, but music mostly) instead of being so afraid and clueless. I want to be witty, fast, funny and smart, not dull. I wouldn’t be snobby about my intelligence or anything; I hate snobs. My memory isn’t the best although I’ve only taken marijuana and ecstasy once. It’s my ambition to be an interesting and admirable person; I don’t think most people really are.

All my old high school friends just started their second years of college. My parents hate me for not going; they’re having some sort of crisis over it. You can’t be anything, do anything, without college. But I don’t care. Most of my old friends never thought of college as something they wanted or not, but just something they had to do, taking the next step, as one goes to fifth period after fourth period. But bells don’t dictate life anymore and I didn’t know if college could satisfy me and so I didn’t go; maybe I’ll go later, I don’t know, maybe my dad’s right and I’m just scared of it, of life, or whatever.

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You’re pushing it I imagine my high school English teacher saying; get to some kind of point or direction or action already. He’d tell me I need to streamline, like Hemmingway. He’d also tell me to add more setting and details probably, if he read this. I don’t care about him and his bullshit class. I used to; I used to care so much about him giving me A’s as if they actually meant something. Now I think he’s bullshit.

He’d put a fish, a trout or something, to use a specific, on a chair in the classroom and we’d be assigned to describe it so well that a blind person reading what we wrote, using Braille or something, might as well be looking at a photograph of it—our writing should be that convincing. I think writing should be more like a painting not a photograph. Reality is so boring anyway, sometimes, I think. When something’s written down it becomes like a dream anyway, like memory. Here’s another thing Mr. Green (my old English teacher) would hate: how I’ll sort of sometimes skip between present tense and past tense.

The thing is, everyone knows this is all past tense—like, when I’m at the club I actually can’t be writing while I’m dancing— but I wrote about it in the present tense to give it an exciting immediate feel—like how dancing feels to me.

I’m the rave girl and a rave girl doesn’t sweat an hour over every sentence wondering if it’s pretty and pertinent and if the English teacher will like it or not, writing a note by it saying it’s true and beautiful like you are (why don’t you meet