Personal Disco Ball

by Alyssa Beatty

Gaz stared down the lane. Shards of light sparked off the lazily rotating disco ball above and made the smooth wooden planks glimmer. The feathered tips of Gaz’s bangs tickled his cheekbone; he swept them aside. He preferred to look out from under a curtain of hair, hiding his true self from an uncaring world. But he needed to see clearly right now. The burst of scent from his hair dye—aptly named Black Heart, which prompted an embarrassing “oh, yeah!” out loud in the drugstore when he saw it—was sharp and bitter and black, indeed, as his heart. Gaz breathed it in and closed his eyes. You can do this, he told himself.

He opened his eyes. Swung his right arm back, savoring the way the weight pulled at his muscles. A few steps forward, the clip-clop of his hooves muted by the pinching red and yellow shoes—annoying that they didn’t have pure black but never mind—he raised his arm and released the ball and his breath at once.

Straight down the middle, pure and true, the sound of resin on wood, the sweetest thing he had ever heard. Then the ball swerved left as if pushed by some malevolent god, right into the gutter. The pins didn’t even sway.

Gaz exhaled in a burst, letting the hair fall back over his left eye where it belonged.

“Dammit,” he muttered.

“Nice one, goat boy!” Kiff’s voice brayed over the lanes.

“Fuck off, um…horse boy,” Gaz yelled back.

“Ooh, so original. I’m so hurt. I’m dying.” Kiff clutched at his heart, grinning at the giggles this prompted from the coterie of nymphs that always followed him around.

Fucking Tikbalangs. Where did they get off, acting so superior? They had big ugly horse heads, for Pan’s sake. But somehow, they got all the girls. Not that Gaz would want to hang out with any of those nymphs, anyway. They were so fake; they probably all said they liked The Cure, but then, when you asked them their favorite song, they’d say “Friday I’m in Love,” which, barf, that’s like the worst song in their catalog. Like, listen to a B-side sometime, you know?

Gaz pulled off his gloves and headed for the bar. Behind him, pins toppled with a crash and Kiff’s admirers squealed and clapped. Idiots.

Llara was busy with four downtrodden Adlet dads from some kid’s birthday party, all vying for a sneaky beer while their wives were distracted corralling their yapping offspring. Never, Gaz thought, leaning his arms on the purple plastic of the bar. Never, ever, in a million years, will I sell out and become that.

Finally, they slunk away, tails wagging guiltily, guzzling their beers. Llara slithered over to him. Gaz tried not to look at her boobs. They were covered with scales, so it wasn’t like she was totally naked or anything, and the Naga didn’t really have hang ups about, like, nudity and stuff, but still. She was—she had been, maybe she still was, it made his head hurt to think about it—his mom’s best friend and had known him since he was ten, so looking at her boobs felt weird.

“What’ll it be, kid?”

Gaz resolutely kept his eyes on her face.

“Beer?”

“Ha. No. Try again.”

“Come on, Llara. My birthday is, like, next week—”

“It’s in five months.”

“But that’s practically next week. Just one? I’m having a bad day. Please?”

“Nope. Your mom would kill me.”

Gaz sighed deeply and gave her his best mournful doe eyes from beneath his hair. She stared him down, unmoved.

“Fine. Just fries, I guess. And a Coke.”

“Coming right up.”

Llara dumped some frozen fries on a paper plate and popped them in the microwave. Gaz liked that she didn’t go in the back and pretend to use the deep fryer—which hadn’t worked for, like, an eon—like she would for someone else. He liked that she didn’t treat him any differently, after everything. And he liked that the fries were soggy and gray, musty with freezer burn. They were honest, which was something Gaz found sorely lacking in the world.

“How’s it going out there?” Llara asked, watching the fries rotate as they were nuked to oblivion.

“Bad. I suck.”

“You know what you got to do?” She dumped the limp fries into a cardboard tray and slid them over to him.

“Believe in myself? Stop overthinking it?”

“No. Just roll the ball down the middle, kid.”

Gaz sighed and popped a fry in his mouth. Mmm, gray.

“I was hoping for something a bit more…inspirational, I guess.”

“This is a bowling alley. You want inspiration, go to church.” She slid a sweating paper cup full of flat Coke over the bar. “Now go away. I’m busy, and you don’t tip.”

“You don’t charge me anything. How am I supposed to tip on nothing?”

“You’re still supposed to tip, to show your appreciation for my service, idiot.”

Gaz rooted through the various pockets of his cargo shorts and placed his findings on the bar. Three quarters. A wad of rock-hard gum in a twist of notebook paper. A crumpled flier for some band Gaz briefly thought were cool until they sold out. And a pair of eyeglasses, studded with rhinestones. They were broken cleanly down the middle. A snarl of duct tape held them together, inexpertly applied so the two halves didn’t quite match up. Llara and Gaz stared at them silently.

“Are those…” Llara’s voice was soft.

“Yeah.” Gaz pushed the glasses gently to the side and lined the quarters up in a neat row. Llara scooped them up.

“That’s insulting. But thanks.”

Gaz gave her a wry salute and slipped the glasses back in his pocket, leaving the flier and gum on the bar. He grabbed the cardboard tray of gross fries and his Coke and turned back to the lanes.

“Hey, kid. Believe in yourself. Don’t overthink it.”

Gaz grinned, quickly covering his mouth with his hand. It felt wrong to smile. He hadn’t done it in so long.

“Thanks, Llara.”

“And just, you know. Roll the ball down the middle.”

Gaz stared at the pins. They stared back. Mocking him. He didn’t understand why he was so bad at this. His mom was—had been, whatever—a really excellent bowler. He could see her now, the grace with which she took those three quick steps, her arm arcing a perfect parabola when she released the ball. The little happy dance she did when she got a strike, her rhinestone eyeglasses bouncing on the top of her head and catching the light like her own miniature disco ball. It should be genetic, or something, right? But Gaz just sucked at it. It didn’t matter when he was here with his mom. That was more about hanging out, spending time together before she went to work the night shift at the gas station. Now, though, he really wanted to be good at it. He didn’t want to think too hard about the reason it was important to him.

Whispers from behind him tickled his ears. He flicked them back, annoyed. He didn’t need to turn around to know it was a group of humans. Yeah, yeah, come watch the freaks bowl, he thought. Get a good look. There was a big sign out front saying “Mythical Beings Only,” but humans always ignored it. No one said anything when they came in, oohing and aahing like they were at a circus. Everyone here still remembered the early years when they first popped out of the books and into the real world, how they were hunted and killed. Better to have humans ogling you like a side-show than shooting you and mounting your head on their wall.

Things hadn’t been better, per se, before they all emerged from the myths. They were simpler, though. Gaz cringed at the memory of himself, maybe three years old. A good little faun gamboling in the clover, while his mom watched indulgently from the shade of an oak tree. He can’t believe he ever gamboled. It was so embarrassing. That wasn’t who he was at all. He’d found a copy of the book they were in and burned it. He felt bad about that, now. But that was okay because he mostly felt bad about everything now.

No one knew what made them come out of the books. Things were bad, before the laws protecting them as cultural artifacts got passed. Now they existed side by side with the humans, with their own businesses and neighborhoods, and the worst they had to put up with was being stared at and whispered about. There were some perks, like music that wasn’t played on a pan flute. And hair dye so Gaz could look on the outside like he felt on the inside.

Some of them didn’t handle the transition well. In the stories, a bacchanal was all well and good, and the next morning you just got up and started all over again. You didn’t have to deal with hangovers or broken bones from the fights and orgies. Or liver cancer.

If only his mom had had a goat liver instead of a human one, maybe things would have been different. Their biology was all messed up. No one gave it thought when they were writing the stories, Gaz guessed. But Gaz didn’t want to think about that right now. He blocked out the whispers from the dumb humans behind him—oh my god, look at his legs! They’re so furry!—and chose a ball. Black, and heavy enough to hurt when he picked it up. Perfect.

This time he didn’t overthink it. He swung the ball back, took three steps forward, and let it go. He closed his eyes, listening to it rolling away, picturing it crashing into the pins and sending them flying. He heard Kiff’s annoying laugh and switched to picturing the ball smashing into his face, shattering his big square teeth into shards. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the ball rolling merrily down the gutter. Again.

Maybe he should just give up. Wanting to be good at something was lame; like, what was the point? It’s not like getting a strike would bring his mom back or make up for what he did. He closed his fingers around the eyeglasses through the rough canvas of his shorts.

***

Gaz hated the hospital. It pretended to be all clean and bright, and the nurses had those fake smiles and chirpy voices that made Gaz want to vomit. But underneath it all was the truth: the antiseptic smell that didn’t quite cover the miasma of sickness and death. The beeping of the machines that were like a countdown of life. Gaz made every excuse he could think of to stay away, even though he felt crappy about it. But his mom asked him to bring her some stuff from home—her favorite pajamas, a book, salve for her hooves, which got all splintery-cracked from the dry air—and he couldn’t say no.

She didn’t look like his mom, lying there in the bed under the flimsy flower-printed sheets and blue blanket. She was so thin. When she smiled, all Gaz could see was a grinning skull. She didn’t sound like herself either, her voice fragile and quavery, like it would break at any moment.

“Can you clean these for me?” she’d asked, holding out her eyeglasses. Gaz focused on the smudged lenses so he wouldn’t have to see how her arm trembled.

“Why’d you let them get so dirty?” He took them from her and started polishing the lenses with the edge of his Cure T-shirt.

“Don’t use that,” his mom said, but gently, teasing. She was never mean to him, never yelled, even when he didn’t visit for days on end. “You’ll make them all sad. There’s tissues in the bathroom.”

Gaz sighed and trudged to the bathroom. He felt like maybe he should pretend to be happy and accommodating. But, then again, fuck that; he didn’t want to pretend to feel anything than what he did, which was angry and sad and awful. He didn’t think his mom would want him to pretend, either. She’d always encouraged him to be himself. She’d bought him his first box of black hair dye years ago when they first arrived here, and she knew he had all kinds of black feelings about it. She could tell blonde hair didn’t express who he was on the inside.

He sat next to her bed in the plastic chair that poked him right in the small of his back—who did they make it for, people with weirdly curved backs, he guessed—and rubbed and rubbed at the lens of her glasses so he wouldn’t have to look at her. He tuned out the sound of her breath, the way it caught in her chest like it didn’t want to come out. He held the glasses so hard the cheap plastic snapped in his hands. A stray rhinestone fell off and rolled away under the bed. He crouched down to get it, but he couldn’t reach it. When he came back up, ready to say, sorry mom for breaking your glasses and for not visiting you and for being just generally a crap son all around, she was gone. Her body was there, but she wasn’t in it anymore.

He sat there holding the two halves of her glasses, remembering the way they caught the light in the bowling alley. He tried to wrap his head around the fact that she was gone, and the last thing she’d seen was him breaking her glasses. Finally, the nurses rushed in and started doing things to the wailing machines and to her body. They ushered him out and sat him in a chair in the hallway with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, which was stupid because he wasn’t cold. But he clutched the edges of it around himself anyway, until they came out to tell him what he already knew.

He tried to fix her glasses. He thought maybe he could put them on the pyre with her. She would like that. But then the funeral director said they wouldn’t burn right since they were plastic; they’d probably just make a big stink and make everyone who came to her funeral sick. He’d been carrying them around for the last year, to remind himself of what a shit he was. Not that he needed much reminding.

***

“You suck, goat boy!”

“Fuck off, horseface!” That was marginally better, as insults went, at least.

The humans behind him giggled and whispered. Ooh, the freaks are fighting.

Gaz wheeled on them. “Get the fuck out of here! We’re not some sideshow. We didn’t ask to come here, to your dumb world where everything is so messed up. You think we wanted to have jobs? Or pay bills? Or get fucking cancer? No. But we’re here, and now we’re just trying to fucking bowl! Leave us alone.”

Gaz became aware that the entire bowling alley had gone silent. He brushed aside the hair from his eyes and saw Llara behind the bar. She gave him a smile and little thumbs up.

The humans stared at him slack-jawed. There were three of them, all girls about his age. One had spiked hair dyed blue, and a ripped Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt over black jeans.

She stepped forward. “Sorry. We just thought it would be cool to see you guys. I like your shirt.”

“Smashing Pumpkins suck. Get better taste,” Gaz said, and turned his back on them. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kiff’s nymphs eyeing him coyly. They always did gravitate to the biggest asshole in the room, which he guessed was him now. He ignored them.

He picked a ball at random. He noted with some part of his brain that it was pink, but he didn’t care. He positioned himself on the mark, just where his mom had always told him to stand. At the last second, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his mom’s glasses. He put them on top of his head, the ends resting against his ears. He knew they would look dumb, but he didn’t care about that either.

Three steps forward, swing back, and then release. Right down the middle. He closed his eyes, but this time he didn’t picture the pins flying or Kiff’s teeth cracking. Instead, he pictured his mom’s smile, and her happy dance. He barely registered the crash of the pins falling—a perfect strike—or the squeals of the nymphs as they drifted closer to his lane.

He heard the soft sound of Llara’s scales whisper against the linoleum as she slithered up to him. She rested her hand gently on his back.

“Good job, kid. Your mom would be proud.”

Gaz let out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

“Thanks. Can I have a beer now?”

“No, idiot. But come by my place later, if you feel like it. A bunch of us are getting together. We’re gonna light a bonfire and remember your mom. I know anniversaries suck, but they’re a little easier when you’re not by yourself.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Gaz waited until he heard Llara leave, then did the smallest shuffle of his hooves, a little happy dance in honor of his mom. The rhinestones made a web of light around him, which pierced through the curtain of hair covering his eyes and found the tears there. They glimmered and shone: his own personal disco ball.