They didn’t say memes back then. So what did they call it? At the end, in the dark, Lizzie tried to remember. An in-joke but not a joke, a sign for the initiated. A Bob Dobbs sticker on the inside of your locker or a battered copy of an underground comic book. A way for those in the know to know you knew, too. And what the three of them knew, like Socrates, what how much they didn’t know, how much was out of reach. Everything was happening in hell or outer space or San Francisco, and there they were stuck in Ohio.
Violet Blue never called it anything. For her, it was always just the song.
They were the least cool kids at a school where coolness was high hair and Boys 2 Men, so who could care? They cared, they cared like hell, but they didn’t let it show. Violet Blue smoked clove cigarettes behind the portable classrooms and Jimmy was jittery from locker-room beatings and Lizzie was a nerd but without the grades. They were each hopeless in their own way and had nowhere to go but the rejected nerd table that the regular nerds abandoned when they started using lunch period to run Magic: The Gathering tournaments.
They were gods who ruled on high in their realms. Violet Blue declared it one afternoon by the reservoir where they hung out after school, and who were the others to deny their godhood? Lizzie ruled the Realm of Highest Low Art, which meant science fiction and comic books. Jimmy ruled the Realm of Cinema Cool. And Violet ruled the Realm of Significant Music. She made the only good mix tapes, and she knew local bands, so, of course, she was the music god even though Jimmy, who was in the marching band until he dropped out because the director flunked anyone who missed the band trip to the Woolly Bear Parade and Jimmy had to stay home and take care of his dad, was the only one of them who could play an instrument. Jimmy played clarinet. He was okay.
Violet Blue collected CDs and waterlogged paperbacks and zines. She got on music zine mailing lists and filled her parents’ mailbox with Xerox blasts across the broadside of the plastic patriarchy. People with zines wrote like that. Lizzie joined some lists for minicomics, but she never got the cornucopia that Violet Blue reaped from every postcard sent into the void.
She was looking for a song. Her babysitter used to sing it when her mom was late coming home, or maybe it was a counselor at one of the camps that was supposed to set her straight when she got picked up for shoplifting. Maybe it was at a music festival her parents took her to when she was a toddler, maybe it was playing last night on a pirate station out of Kent State. The story changed, and so did the lyrics, but the tune stayed the same.
So did the chorus, which went
Come away into the meadow
Come away out to the sea
Come away up the mountain
I’m in the lilac tree
Sister, come to me.
It sounded like the kind of folk rock that Boomers got into in the 70s, when they were almost done being hippies but hadn’t yet turned into yuppies. Digging through their parents’ LPs never turned it up. Violet Blue only sang it when they were on their own, but at school she hummed it to herself, fast or slow depending on where she was on her manic swing.
Jimmy inherited his uncle’s AMC Gremlin that still had three seatbelts and a working radio. At last they could go to Kent for coffee shop music and the arthouse movies that Jimmy loved and the other two tolerated, or all the way to Cleveland for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Violet Blue went as Magenta or Columbia and Jimmy went as Brad but not-so-secretly wanted to be Frank N. Furter and Lizzie was too self-conscious to be anyone. On every drive, Violet sat shotgun so she could command the radio.
“What’s so special about the song?” Jimmy asked once. They’d gone to a campus screening of Repo Man but the projector had broken, so they’d ended up at Denny’s with nothing to discuss.
Violet Blue’s fingers shredded a napkin. “It’s the song. It’s about the way out. Or it is the way out.” Her leg jiggled. “You can’t understand unless you’ve heard it.”
“We’ve heard it. You sing it all the time.”
“I mean heard it for real. Forget it, I’m bullshitting. I’ve just been looking for so long I can’t stop.”
“Sunk cost fallacy,” said Lizzie, who was always saying things like that.
Jimmy, sensing a temperature drop, said, “It’s a good song.”
“You haven’t heard it for real,” said Violet Blue.
Violet Blue started dating a college guy she met at a coffee shop and stopped having time for the other gods. On the rare occasions when she showed up at school, she passed mix CDs to them as apology gifts. She’d upgraded from tapes to CDs; maybe her boyfriend had a CD burner. The songs were mostly about love, sometimes about escape. The mix labeled IRONIC BLISS in Sharpie included “The Pina Colada Song,” which was about both.
Then the Local Tragedy happened.
***
It wasn’t a hurricane, and it wasn’t a tornado, according to Dick Goddard on Cleveland Weather. No one had a word for what it was. Lizzie watched it from the window of her family’s rec room, which was half underground, and she argued with her mom afterward, the safest place she could’ve been. There was a howling wind followed by a blue stillness followed by another howl and the sound of glass shattering as things whipped by, fenceposts and a tricycle and entire trees. Then, a patter of rain. Lizzie went outside, another thing her mom later chewed her out for, and half her neighborhood was gone.
Jimmy was at a video store, the one across from the IGA. He was looking at a beat-to-hell VHS of Tales from the Quadead Zone and was about to ask the clerk if it still played when the howl went up. The clerk dragged Jimmy behind the counter. The electricity went out. They sat in the blue shadows listening to things smash.
Around fifty people were killed, the newspapers decided later, in what no one would commit to calling anything more specific than a Local Tragedy. An exact count was tricky. Some bodies were impossible to identify. Some were mixed together in chunks, at least according to school gossip. And some people were gone. Really gone, not like the missing half of Lizzie’s neighborhood, which was found in bits and pieces all over town, but vanished.
Lizzie’s house lost windows and shingles. Jimmy’s house looked okay but had been lifted off the ground and dropped again, and the foundation was crushed to gravel. He and his dad had to move into the motel by the highway because their house would fall over if you blew on it hard, according to the insurance people. The Local Tragedy played pranks like that. It flattened a house but left the treehouse in the back yard standing, it scattered insulation over lawns like cotton-candy snow. A telephone pole was driven like a javelin into the ground outside the school. Final exams were called off, so Lizzie and Jimmy spent their afternoons walking familiar streets that had turned into crazed art projects.
Violet Blue was gone.
Her mother believed, or insisted on believing, that Violet Blue had taken advantage of the chaos to run away. She told Lizzie this over and over. Lizzie got a summer job working the checkout at the IGA, and every time Violet Blue’s mom came through the line, she’d confront Lizzie. When was the last time Lizzie had seen her? Had Violet Blue mentioned going anywhere? What about her boyfriend, who had been questioned by the police and then left the state for grad school, a move Lizzie suspected was at least partly influenced by Violet Blue’s mom.
“Why did she run away?” she asked Lizzie, pleading with red-rimmed eyes. “It’s not so bad here, is it?”
Lizzie shook her head. Of course, it wasn’t bad. It was a nice place, one of those towns where people went to raise their kids. They were lucky, everyone was, even Jimmy and his dad in their motel room.
“Then why did she want to go?”
Lizzie mumbled an I-dunno, wishing Violet Blue’s mom would take her bagged groceries and let the line move. What Violet Blue had wanted wasn’t important because Violet Blue hadn’t chosen to go. She’d been plucked into the air in one of those howling winds between the blue silence. She’d been ripped up or tossed in the river or caught like a kite in the branches of a tree, and maybe someday she’d be found, and maybe she wouldn’t, but she hadn’t run away, and she’d never be back in a way that mattered. Violet Blue was dead, dead, dead.
But she had wanted to go. That was true. She’d wanted to go just as Lizzie and Jimmy had wanted to go. They didn’t know why. They just knew the wanting.
Everyone except Violet Blue’s mom accepted that Violet Blue was dead. Almost everyone.
“I think she did run away,” said Jimmy.
“I wish that was true,” said Lizzie, not adding the obvious, but it’s not.
“You know what I think?” Jimmy tossed a brick into the reservoir. Summer was almost over, and the weedy lot was still littered with debris from the Local Tragedy. It would never officially be cleared away; teenagers would just keep tossing junk into the reservoir until it was all gone. “I think she found that song.”
“I don’t know if it was even a real song. I bet she made it up. That’s okay, though,” Lizzie added quickly, feeling a pang of loyalty. “It’s a good song.”
“How’s it go?” said Jimmy, but they both knew, and they both sang.
Come away into the meadow
Come away out to the sea
Come away up the mountain
I’m in the lilac tree
Sister, come to me.
“It’s not so bad here, is it?” said Lizzie.
“What do you mean? We always agreed this place sucks hard.”
“Yeah, but…that’s a thing you say. It’s the way it feels in high school. We’re not in high school anymore. It’s time we got some perspective.”
Jimmy twitched noncommittally. He shuffled through the grass, head bowed. He picked up a chunk of cinderblock the size of a baseball. “See this?”
“Yeah…”
“Mike Snow and Gary Prince threw a rock this size at my head from Mike’s car and yelled fag. That’s why I had a black eye at graduation.” Jimmy wound up and pitched the chunk into the reservoir. “This place sucks.”
***
That was the last time Lizzie saw Jimmy. They went away to different colleges, and both dropped out by the end of the year. Lizzie had hoped college would be the escape she’d been looking for without knowing why, but it was just high school with more expensive parties she wasn’t invited to. She never found out why Jimmy dropped out, but he and his dad hadn’t really been able to afford it in the first place. When Lizzie returned home, she found that Jimmy’s dad had finally moved into an apartment, but he still seemed to be struggling. He always showed up in the IGA line with a fistful of coupons and a bag of loose change.
Jimmy moved to Maine. Lizzie couldn’t picture Jimmy in Maine. She couldn’t picture Maine at all.
They weren’t gods anymore; that was clear. Lizzie got an apartment in the same building as Jimmy’s dad. She applied for jobs in town—nothing permanent, she told herself, just to get out from behind the checkout counter. Violet Blue’s mom had started giving her grocery bags full of Violet Blue’s things, zines and CDs mostly. Lizzie didn’t want them, but she couldn’t throw them out. They piled up in a corner of her apartment. She played the CDs sometimes and leafed through the zines, but she never found anything like the song.
Violet hadn’t found the song. Jimmy had been wrong about that. And if she had, why would that matter?
Lizzie got a job as an assistant at the local library. It didn’t pay much, but she didn’t need much. She’d been the God of Highest Low Art once, she reminded herself as she shelved graphic novels. Knowing about that kind of thing was useful at the library; they were always looking for ways to draw in teenagers. The head librarian suggested that Lizzie go back to school and get a library science degree. She enrolled part-time at Akron U, but then she got pregnant and it something had to go, so college it was. She started telling people to call her Liz.
Time stole away. One day, Liz looked up from frying ground chuck for taco night and realized she had a divorce and a teenager and a cluttered apartment. Well, that was all right, wasn’t it? She loved her daughter, who was named Laura after her ex-husband’s bossy aunt, but it was still a nice name. Her job at the library was fine, with no room for advancement unless she could somehow finagle that degree, but fine. There were no dating prospects in town, but she didn’t want any. Everything was fine, and she was lucky when you thought about it.
But that night, she felt the way she’d felt years ago, like the only thing she knew was how much she was missing. She dug the grocery bags out of the closet and pulled out Violet Blue’s mix CDs, glad that she still had a CD player gathering dust in the wall unit. She smiled at the titles inked across the discs in Sharpie: ESCAPE and NIGHT NOISE and THAT BAD AFTERNOON and MUSIC OF THE GODS. Violet Blue hadn’t written down what was in any of her mixes. She loved surprises.
Liz got on Facebook—Facebook had happened, memes had happened, the world was moving faster than she could understand—and found Jimmy. He was still in Maine. His posts suggested a boyfriend, maybe a series of boyfriends, but no other personal information. He posted about movies and music. Scrolling back, he was always hunting for some rarity or other, swapping leads with other collectors. There was nothing about a family, a home, or a career, but Liz, sipping wine, felt the warmth of old friendship. Jimmy’s life in Maine, whatever it was, belonged to a stranger, but this fidgety passion—this was Jimmy. This was the God of Cinema Cool.
She finished off a second glass of wine and messaged him. And so, for a while, they became friends again.
***
“What is this?” Laura asked. Liz was folding laundry to LET’S MOVE TO ANTARCTICA.
“One of the old CDs from the closet,” said Liz.
“Yeah, I’ve seen them lying around. But what’s this? What’s the song?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. A friend made these a long time ago.”
“You know, you can find out. There’s an app—”
“That’s okay. It’s kind of nice not to know.”
“But if you know who the band is, you can get more of their stuff.” Laura’s head bobbed. She had bleached her hair and dyed the tips green, then pink, and when she tossed her head she made Expressionist paintings. “You should. I like this.”
Liz smiled, pleased to have accidentally passed a test of teenage coolness. She could never be cool on purpose, not when she was a teenager herself and definitely not as a mom.
High school was better for Laura than it had been for her. The school had anti-bullying policies. There was a rainbow heart poster in the counselor’s office. Laura had gone out with one girl, then another, and no one cared except for friends who helped her pick outfits for dates. Some boys on the basketball team had made fun of her hair and she’d given them the finger.
Some things were better. But other things weren’t, and Liz knew from the posters on Laura’s bedroom walls and the buttons she pinned to her backpack that Laura was aware. The school had added active shooter drills to the old schedule of tornado and fire. Laura carpooled with her friends, as Liz had once carpooled to hang out at coffee shops, to join protests against discrimination and for lives mattering. And there was global warming—no, they called it climate change now because no one would commit to calling it anything more specific. It wasn’t just about warming, Laura would explain. It caused Extreme Weather Events.
There was more good than bad in the world. Liz wanted Laura to believe that. She wanted to believe it herself. But the only really good thing in her world was Laura.
“It reminds me a little of that song you used to sing,” said Laura.
“Mm?”
“The one that goes—argh, I can’t remember a tune while another tune’s playing.” Laura rag-dolled over to the CD player and pushed the pause button. “How does this not even have a remote? You know, the one that goes…” She hummed.
Come away into the meadow
Come away out to the sea
Come away up the mountain
I’m in the lilac tree
Sister, come to me.
Liz froze mid-fold. “Did I sing that?”
“Yeah. It had to be you, right? Or else it was on one of the tapes we used to play on long drives when we had the car with the tape player. It still gets stuck in my head.” Laura turned the CD back on. “This is good too, though.”
Watching Laura nod to herself, lost in the music, Liz reminded herself of an idea she’d had for a long time: that Violet Blue’s song was a symbol. The song itself wasn’t important, it could be any song, could be the song playing at that moment. You could listen to any song at the right time, at the right age, and it could become the song that meant everything. Violet Blue’s song wasn’t magic. It was the moment that mattered.
Later, Liz thought about how stupid she could sometimes be.
***
i found the song, Jimmy messaged.
Like hell you did.
cross my heart, needle in eye etc.
that is to say, i got a lead. won a bid on a lot of 45s in an online estate sale and i think one of those beauties is the one i’m looking for.
Liz didn’t want to know more. She had Violet Blue’s CDs—at that very moment, VAMPIRE SEX PARTY was playing—and that was enough, wasn’t it? She had plenty of songs. She didn’t care about the song.
Didn’t she?
Okay fine. I’ve got to know. What’s the title?
i’ll tell you when i’ve listened to it. want to make sure it’s the !
the 1
Liz minimized the chat and went back to sifting through emails. At work, she was supposed to be organizing the library book sale, but she hadn’t even started on the books; she’d only sorted through the deaccessioned AV materials, the videotapes and cassette tapes, and, good lord, Betamax cassettes that no one wanted to check out and only the very old or very eccentric would want to buy. She pretended she hadn’t gone through the audio materials first in the secret hope of seeing some track that might be the song.
Most of the emails were passive-aggressive CCs between two librarians in the midst of a complicated and boring power struggle. Liz pulled the chat up again.
How long have you been looking for it?
Jimmy was still there. i look for a lot of things. it’s been on my list, that’s all.
That’s all?
n
no
A long, blank silence. Liz should have gone back to deleting emails, or gone to bed, those would be adult things for an adult to do.
it took violet blue
Oh, Jimmy, come on.
the song took her
i truly believe that
That’s crazy, Jimmy.
dont mind being called crazy. happens all the time
but listen
i think its a way
What?
out
a way out
its not the only way. i’ve been reading up. collecting books too.
Your house must look like a museum.
lol yeah sure does
i think
there are times in your life when the walls of the world are thin
does that make sense?
No. Are you drunk? Tell me you’re drunk.
not more than usual
when the walls are thin
you can hear the call
did we ever stop hearing it?
Liz closed the chat window. She turned off the computer. Laura was always telling her she could put it to sleep instead, and if she was going to turn it off, she definitely shouldn’t just push the power button. Liz pushed the power button as hard as she could, held it for a minute, then went to bed, pretending to herself that she’d be able to sleep.
Sister, come away, went the call.
***
Two weeks later, there was a freak snowstorm in eastern Maine. Freakish because it was summer. That was Extreme Weather for you, said the new Cleveland meteorologists whose names Liz never could remember. Storms came howling in out of nowhere and swept parts of the world away. It was the new normal, they said.
After that, Jimmy wasn’t online anymore. Liz looked for his name in news stories, but they were vague about who had died, who was missing. No one seemed to know much. And outside of local news, no one seemed to care. It was far from the only sudden storm or flood or fire that summer.
Liz was pulling leftovers out of the fridge and mentally organizing outdated encyclopedias for the book sale when Laura, seated at the computer, shrieked.
Liz was at her side in a breath. There were earphones in Laura’s ears. Liz yanked them out. “What is it? What did you hear?”
Laura laughed. “Sorry, Mom. It’s nothing. I’m such a dipshit—sorry, dip-crap—”
“What did you hear?”
“No, really, it’s just…” Laura pulled the earphone jack out of the computer so Liz could hear what was playing. “I thought this CD was over, and then it started up again after like ten minutes of nothing. It made me jump, that’s all.”
“Is that one of her—I mean, one of my mix CDs?”
“No, it’s from the box you brought home from the book sale. I’ve been putting on random stuff to get playlist ideas. See?” She pointed to the album thumbnail and tracklist on the screen.
Now, it was Liz’s turn to laugh. “Oh. It’s a hidden track. They used to put those on albums. They’d just add some space at the end of the last track and stick a song or noises after it.”
“That’s hilarious. Sorry for freaking you out, Mom.” Laura reached for the earphones.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. Laura?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s nice here, isn’t it?”
“Where’d that come from?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just…promise you’ll stay with me.”
“Geez, Mom, of course. I mean, not forever. That’d get weird.”
Better leave, squawked the hidden track, when to stay is nothing but being alone.
***
Hidden tracks. Liz waited until Laura was out of the house, out with her friends, maybe hiking to the reservoir to throw the last few bricks in the water. Liz jammed each of Violet Blue’s mixes into the CD player and skipped to the final track. Nothing. Nothing was hidden. There was no secret revelation. It was just a song, half-remembered, a long time ago. Tragedies happened, extreme events happened, but they didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean a thing that they had happened to her friends.
The next day, at work, Liz remembered something. On vinyl, you could only hide tracks at the end of an album. But on a CD, you could hide them at the beginning, too.
She tried to focus on her work. She was sorting unwanted YA novels, overflow copies of the bestselling series of five years past. Patrons were already tired of them. Teenagers moved on quickly, Liz thought. They were always in motion. The walls were thin, and they could hear voices calling.
She went home. She checked the news online. Laura wants to move on to a better world, she thought. It wasn’t a bad thing to want. Sensible, even. The world was full of weeping.
But it’s my world, Liz thought. I live here.
Laura asked if she could go out with her girlfriend and another couple for pizza. Liz suspected there was more than pizza planned, but she said yes. Alone again, she sat on the floor in front of the CD player. One by one she loaded in each silver disc.
And there it was. A track behind Track One of MUSIC OF THE GODS.
She pressed play.
There was the tune. And there was a voice that sounded like Violet Blue, or like Liz’s memory of Violet Blue. The real Violet Blue had been so young when she left, and this voice was too wise. This was a voice that knew what everyone wanted to know.
The chorus came.
Come away into the meadow
Come away out to the sea
Come away up the mountain
I’m in the lilac tree
Sister, come to me.
Liz let it play. The song ended and Track One began, “Bette Davis Eyes,” a song for Jimmy the God of Cinema Cool. Liz listened to the music. She listened to the wind rising outside.
She didn’t want to go. But other people, younger people, did. They didn’t know where they were going, they didn’t know what they were looking for, but they knew how much they didn’t know, and wasn’t that more than she’d ever figured out? She didn’t have the right to hold them.
Liz went to the computer. Gently, she inserted MUSIC OF THE GODS.
“What’s it like there, Jimmy?” she said. “What’s it like, Violet Blue?” No one answered.
Liz knew how to burn a CD. She didn’t know where teenagers shared music these days, so in the end she just posted the track on her Facebook page. The people who were looking, she thought, would find it.
Extreme events were the new normal. Local tragedies in every locale. She was just helping with an exodus that had already begun.
The lights went out. She listened to the howl that wasn’t really wind and waited to find out if Laura would come home.
