Free Beautiful Boys by Francesca Lia Block

he gets up from the table and goes over to his mother. He throws his arms around her all of a sudden so clutch tight. Even though he’s a kid he’s almost bigger than she is.
    “Charlie?” she says. “What is it, bubela ?”
    Charlie just keeps holding on. Then he kisses her cheek, lets go and sits down again.
    “They’re all gone now,” he whispers.
    I look at Charlie’s hat-making braided-bread-baking beautiful phantom mom. I think about how it must have been for him when she died. And for hissister and his father with the bat eyebrows. Now they’re all dead. And I feel like it’s hard for me to unclutch Angel Juan!
    The Bat family is starting to fade. So is all the furniture in the room and the dinner smells. I press my eye to my camera trying to keep the picture but it’s almost all gone. And then it is—gone. Just a deserted apartment about to be filled with night.
    “Charlie!” I almost shout. Scared he’s going to leave with them. I put down my camera searching for the light. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t want to come here with you.” I look at the photo booth strip of me and not-Charlie.
    Then, “Over here, honey,” calls a voice from the doorway. Honey like salt in my throat making me want to cry. He’s here. “We’d better go,” he says.
     
    We’re back in the Village. I am sitting on the floor eating a rice cake.
    “Couldn’t you put something on that thing?” Charlie says. “It tastes—I mean it looks like you are eating cardboard.”
    I shrug. “I like it plain.”
    “You’re getting so skinny.”
    Because I want him to enjoy my meal a little I go and get some peanut butter.
    “Charlie, how did you deal when your mom died?” I ask.
    “I wrote. I was okay as long as I was writing. Whenever anything hurt me I wrote, but after a while I couldn’t anymore. I just stopped. It was like the sadness stopped filling me up with stuff to turn into art. I was just empty.”
    “That’s how I feel.”
    “Make yourself keep taking pictures and the pictures will start filling you up again. And isn’t there something else you like to do? Come on.”
    We go out of his apartment into the silent, shadowy hall. It seems like nobody else even lives in the whole building. We start down the stairs.
    That’s when I hear them. There on the eighth floor. The drums.
    The sound makes me want to play so bad I have to stop and chew my nails. It’s African drums in waves breaking again and again taking me out of my body.
    A door is open and inside lit by pale winter sun from a big window dancers move in tides toward the drummers. The dancers wear batik sarongs—burnt-orange skies, jade-green jungles, violet-blue flowers—and shell belts that shiver on their hips. Their feet beat the floor like hands on a drum and their hands are bound by invisible ropes behind their backs, then turn into birds as they leap free. There are two little girls, and a woman with braids to her waist and a high dark gloss queen’s forehead holds their hands and leads them down the room, her solid feet talking each step so that even though the kids probably just started walking a little while ago they are getting it. The drummers are men with bare chests and rainbow ribbons around their muscly arms. Some have dreads. Everybody in the room is sweating like it’s summer and the music is setting free their souls into the air so I feel like I can almost see them.
    All I want to do is play drums. I know the dances from when my dad filmed some African dancers and I got to jam with them.
    When they take a break Charlie says, “Go ask him.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Go on. How often do I have the chance to hear my witch baby play drums!”
    Why do I listen to this crazy ghost? I don’t know.
    My witch baby.
    I go over to the head drummer—a tall man wearing full batik pants. His dreadlocks must be as old as he is, thick and wired with his power. I feel like a pale weasel baby staring up at him.
    “Can I sit in?” I