Chapter Five
We started shooting Cheerleaders of the Apocalypse again in early August. Skella brought a few of the Hamsters—Sprocket, Dante, and Bianca—with her to work as extras on the movie. Dante was the only one with a car, so they came as a package deal. Carl was a little overwhelmed at first, but I assured him I could keep them all busy. You could never have too many mutants.
After the first few nights, I started bringing both Katie and Jai Li with me up to Everett to do movie work. Jai Li wasn’t going to school and kept some strange hours. If she got tired, she’d go back to my props cage and crawl in amongst the used goblin heads and the elephant ears from our old movies and go to sleep.
Katie would read or just play her guitar as long as we weren’t actually shooting a scene. It was nice to have them around. Reminded me of the days when Katie came out to Julie’s place to watch me smith. Seemed like a lifetime ago.
We ate from the food truck and made an adventure out of it. The crew loved Jai Li, letting her run errands and such if it wasn’t too late. Jennifer especially loved having them around. I caught her watching Jai Li wistfully and then casting glances back to Carl. Girl had baby fever pretty bad. I’d have to get her up to see Rolph, Juanita, and little Jacob before too long. Maybe make a field trip out of it and sell my on-location plan at the same time. It could work. The way she was looking and the way Jacob smelled, I could probably even ask for a raise. I just wasn’t sure Carl was ready to be a daddy.
On Friday, during the dinner break, Katie started playing this song she made up on the spot—something solemn and mournful. The lyrics, however, caught everyone’s attention. She was singing about the movie, about how the hero had seen the cheerleaders of his dream but had been unable to get to them through the sea of mutants.
The world ran sideways the day the poison fell from the sky
And the monsters crawled out of our skins
But among the blight and the hellish wastes
I find a vision of heaven in your bouncing ponytails
And your creamy thighs, devoid of cankers and sores.
It was a love song—you know, with monsters. Okay, a parody of a love song, with monsters. Whatever, she was hella cute singing it.
When she was done, the crowd that had built around her erupted in applause.
“You know,” Jennifer said to Carl, “she could do the soundtrack. She’s got the chops.”
Katie was excited by this proposition and said she knew a group she could get that had professional experience. They could totally lay down all the tracks needed for the movie.
Carl and Jennifer went off arguing about his personally created musical stylings on his mom’s electric organ, and they shut the office door a little too hard.
We watched through the window as they continued to argue, and with Carl’s hangdog expression, at one point, we knew who had won the day.
As we were packing up, I overheard Sprocket and Dante talking about Mimi. Seems she ran the boarding house they lived in. We chatted for a bit before we got around to the fact that Ginny had lived in the house when she first came to Bellingham. Seemed an odd coincidence. When I asked them if anyone else from the house had committed suicide, they changed the subject, crying exhaustion, and headed out for home. That was totally weird.
We cut out around two in the morning with Jai Li asleep in the truck leaning against Katie who talked the whole way back to Circle Q. We’d been staying out at Mary Campbell’s farm along with my blacksmith master, Julie Hendrickson, and my old neighbor Edith Sorenson. We were a motley crew of women, and I couldn’t think of a better place to be.
Katie had been away from teaching for a while and that was a hole in her. Music, normal music, may be just the tonic she needed to start finding her footing again.
It was a good feeling, listening to the excitement in her voice. I honestly didn’t care what she was talking about, I just loved hearing her talk. I’d missed it for far too long.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the look Dante shot me out of my mind. It wasn’t anger or anything, more like shock and anxiety. Had I struck a nerve there? Was there something more to look into? I didn’t like the way things were starting to gel together. I needed to check in with Qindra, if she would ever return my calls.