Murmuration: Chapter Three - He'd Pass for Normal
Terroir: Season One - Episode One
3
Everything runs red at the intersection, like something giant and not-quite-human bled out in the street. The traffic signal, AutoZone and Texaco, a liquor store with its Budweiser sign hemorrhaging neon. Brake lights burn ahead in a crimson chain all the way to the 110.
Second To A Tragedy plays through the van’s shitty speakers. Morphicide, their one real album, thirteen tracks of her voice and all he’s got left. He’s listened to it maybe six times total before the funeral. Now he can’t stop.
The album’s midway through on “Gets Cold,” track five.
It gets cold when you’re not breathing
Cold in rooms that won’t stop freezing
Cold until I can’t remember
What it felt like, pulse and pressure
It just gets cold
Chiara shifts in the passenger seat, staring out the window beaded with rain catching vermillion. Earbuds in with Twenty One Pilots or whatever emo bullshit she’s into this week.
Until she tugs one free. Cortney braces for the usual performative suffering—but she instead reaches over and turns it down. Not off, just... under. Her hand hovers there, holding Connie low.
“You listen to this literally every single day now.”
He keeps his eyes forward, because the only answer is the most pathetic thing he could say.
For a moment, she watches a group of gulls rip something apart in the gutter. “You know she wouldn’t want you doing this, right? Like... this weird shit you’re doing.”
Green blooms through the spattered glass, and he accelerates. “What, listening to the album she gave me?”
“Oh my God, don’t! You know what I mean.”
“No I don’t, Kia. What the fuck are you trying to say?”
“I mean you’re literally obsessed, like, to the point it’s lowkey scary.” She breathes fog against her window. “You play this shit every single day in the van, in your room, probably even when you’re downstairs with the bodies for all I—”
“Are you serious? She was family.”
“She was like seven years older than you, Cort! She had an actual boyfriend too! She was basically an adult and you were, what, thirteen when she gave you that? Fourteen?”
“So I’m not allowed to mourn her because of an age difference?”
“I didn’t say that!” A small, mean smile twists her lips. “I’m saying maybe you cared in a weird way and now you’re being all... I don’t know, maybe you felt—”
“Don’t.”
“—things you shouldn’t have—”
“I said fucking don’t!”
“Come on. You seriously think nobody noticed, Cortney? How your whole vibe changed when she walked in?”
“Shut the fuck up, Kia. I swear to God.”
“Well, I did.” That smile’s digging in deeper. “I’m your sister, stupid. You think I wouldn’t notice? And honestly? I think Connie noticed too. She had to, the way she, like, let it happen—”
“Shut up!”
“—bringing you to shows when you were literally in middle school—”
“It wasn’t like that!”
“I didn’t say it was! But she wasn’t exactly... I don’t know, she wasn’t exactly discouraging it either—”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Rubber screams against wet pavement—eeeeeEEEEaaaah—and everything tilts left before he rips the wheel back. A horn blares behind them.
“Don’t you fucking talk about her like that. Don’t you dare—”
“I’m just saying—”
“You’re saying nothing.” He whips toward her, eyes on fire. “You wanna talk about age gaps? How about Cliff? How about your twenty-one-year-old Croatian boyfriend who buys you Fireball and picks you up from sophomore classes, you fucking idiot? Huh?”
Her face flushes even through the brake lights blazing up again, scalding everything. “That’s different!”
“How? How is that fucking different?!”
“Because—because we’re actually together, for one, and he’s a guy, so it’s not the same thing. Guys are supposed to be older—”
“Yeah, you’re right. It’s worse.” Traffic shudders, starts to lurch just as the fresh green ahead flips to yellow. He guns it, punches through. “So maybe shut the fuck up about Connie before you start comparing shit you don’t understand.”
Nothing. She just stares out where the shipping cranes loom like gallows against the cyanotic dawn, then moves to plug the earbud back in. But mid-motion: “Whatever. At least I have someone who’s actually here.”
Fucking little ghoul.
His hand shoots to the volume, cranks it until the speakers distort. Till there’s nothing left but noise.
Connie sings them on until Machado rises through the rain like a shipwreck. A compound of stucco gone gray and salt-stained and netted in chain-link, fan palms whipping themselves raw in the winter squall.
He pulls to the same curbside spot as always, and Chiara’s out before he fully stops, hood up and not looking back.
Cortney watches her cut slick pavement toward the crowd by the auto shop bays, where vape shears through snapbacks and streetwear, someone deeply tanned and tall in Cliff’s Obey. She welds herself to him without reservation.
The rest is ritual as he navigates the lot’s maze of speed bumps and arrows to the end near the corrugated maintainance shed, where he reverses into his usual spot. The mortuary black Econoline might as well be invisible, and that’s exactly how Rocco wants it—not that it stopped some mouth-breather from keying ‘DEATH MOBILE’ into the sliding door back in October. The van still wears it.
Messenger bag anchored with textbooks he’s barely touched, Cortney steps into the wind and slams the door behind him. The rain’s let up, but the air still reeks of kelp and diesel as the storm rolls in off the harbor. That’s January in Pedro: washed-out and sea-soaked, waiting out the weather.
Halfway across the lot, someone shouts. “Ey! Yo, Serpieri!”
He looks up, sees Ricky Batiz slouched against a blue Civic sitting low enough to catch the speed bumps. Next to him is Omar something, who’s busy thumb-flicking through his phone.
Ricky’s got a shit-eating grin. “Yo, for real, why don’t you guys roll up in the hearse? That’d be badass.”
Cortney breezes past without slowing. “Because it’s for services, not going to Vons.”
Ricky laughs, cracks something to Omar that Cortney doesn’t catch.
He’s almost through the next row of cars when he hears the chud-chud-chud-chud of an engine choking on its own oil. He glances over.
Trawling down the lane is a dark gray Silverado with a toolbox bolted to the bed rail. Or maybe it used to be black—it’s hard to tell with how flat the paint’s gone. The thing’s imposing in that way old work trucks are, with its monstered-out suspension and battered steel bumper.
Still another beater in a city full of them. Cortney’s just about to turn away—when he catches the driver’s door. Oxide red and mismatched like it was pried from a junkyard, which it probably was.
And there, hanging upside-down from the trailer hitch to drag so low along the asphalt it’s probably illegal… is a busted blow-mold Madonna the size of a license plate, her painted face ground to gray plastic.
Wait.
That’s Maurizio Sanzone’s truck.
A centipede of dread skitters up Cortney’s spine. Everyone knows what Sanzone is. Twenty-three and dropped out yet still here. Still orbiting Machado, prowling the lot for kids desperate enough to climb in.
The wreck of a Chevy rolls on, Madonna trailing with a sound like rebar over concrete.
He’s cruising for buyers. Or maybe worse.
Cortney lingers at the lane’s edge, bag strap biting into the meat of his shoulder, and watches the truck grind slow down the far end of the lot. Brake lights flare before it hooks left and starts its slow circuit back, vanishing behind the buses lined along the loading curb. That haunting scrape is somehow audible even this far away.
He should move. Should just get inside, because it’s got nothing to do with him.
Sanzone is a certified parasite. Greasy gavone trash from a family that’s a stain on Pedro’s paesani. But Cortney’s not desperate, and he’s definitely not the prick’s clientele.
So he crosses the lane.
The rain’s just a sprinkle now, enough to keep a wet skin on the walkway as it winds him toward the school’s glassed-in mouth. The moment he slips under the admin awning, the noise hits him.
It’s the usual crush. Voices layering into chum, some girl’s laugh like teeth on glass, skater bros plastered in Vans and Volcom logos slouching at half-speed, Samoan guy with his own gravity well posted by the bulletin, cholos trading Spanish by the turn at the stairs.
Cortney puts his headphones on before he’s three steps inside. Track seven, “Level Orange” fills his skull, Connie’s voice climbing that corroded bridge where the guitars drop out and it’s just her, suspended over arctic synth stabs.
He moves through the main hall at a starched clip, stare set nowhere, wool coat drawing eyes because it’s too Sunday, too funeral, like he raided a dead man’s closet. Which, in a house like his, isn’t far off.
“—the fuck is Titanic—” Some asshole with a comb-over fade to his left. It’s muted through the headphones, but the shape of the douchebag’s mouth is enough.
Then more of it, scattered through the crowd static. Hyenas by the water fountain, factory-interchangeable with flat-ironed hair, laughing loud enough to saw through S2AT.
“—name is actually Courtney?”
“—Cortney Love!”
Right then the music betrays him. Connie’s voice is suddenly gone, the synth pads and guitars are gone, and there’s nothing left but the naked click of the sequencer. Machado floods in.
“No, seriously, like Kourtney Kardashian but dressed like a Mormon missionary.”
The girls crack up behind him—and Cortney turns so hard the mailbag strap jerks across his coat.
They catch it at once. The bitch who said it makes her mouth small, like “what?,” like poor little angel her didn’t do a thing. Another shapes both hands into a heart against her chest.
Cortney just stares. Lets them have the full, empty ice of his eyes.
Heart girl drops her hands first. “Okay, psycho.”
They peel away from the fountain, too close together, already loud again before they hit the corner.
One of them looks back just long enough to make a megaphone of her hands. “Bye, altar boy!”
That one’s not even original, but he scowls all the same. He’s heard it since freshman year, when some attention-seeking brat found out about the family business and decided he was basically a character from an exorcism movie. Doesn’t help that he’s got the blond fringe of a choirboy and the frame of a candelabra.
He turns, keeps walking. Lets the distance fill with what it always does.
His locker’s off the main hall, B-wing. Combination by feel, yank, open. Swaps the calc binder he should’ve studied last night for a paperback Frankenstein.
A peripheral glance down the row shows that Shane Segarra’s locker is shut. No Shane.
That’s unusual, because he’s the type who’s already at his locker well before first bell, briefcase out and doing whatever it is he does. Cortney’s seen it enough times that the absence registers.
It’s not like he’s worried, though. Worry would require the kind of attachment Cortney doesn’t really do—not anymore, anyways. He doesn’t have friends; rather people he tolerates, and people who tolerate him. Though Shane is probably the nearest exception. They’ve shared enough margins that the silence between them stopped being awkward, at least.
The bell rings. Cortney closes his locker, shoulders his bag, and heads for Kleinman’s AP Lit in room 214.
Shane’s probably just late. Nothing to worry about.