Notes: Wow, it's been a while, hasn't it? I hope that "Chapter One, Extended Director's Cut Special Edition (in Widescreen Format)" kept you somewhat satisfied until this came out. This story is set midway through the second semester of the 1976-1977 school year, that is, during early spring -- about mid-April. I forgot to mention that, but that's why Phyllis was talking about GED courses to her father.
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JEM Stars
a jem fanfic by D.L. SchizoAuthoress
It was a typical morning for twenty-year-old Roxanne Pelligrini. She woke up, still wearing last night's clothes, to the alarm clock blaring some shitty disco song (disco being the only type of sound that both she and Link couldn't sleep through). Without bothering to hit the snooze button, she disentangled herself the bedsheets and stood up, nearly tripping over Javier (or maybe Alex) on her way to the bathroom. After she splashed some cold water on her face and brushed her silver-white hair out of its tangles, enough wakefulness was restored to her that she thought to check who exactly was in the apartment.
"Goddamn Bee-Gees," grunted a familiar voice, and the 'music' was stopped. That would be Link.
"Buenos dias a tú, tambien," came the sarcastic reply from the kitchen. Javier, that was, so it must have been Alex who had the sleeping bag last night.
Roxy padded into the living room on bare feet, avoiding discarded utensils and piles of dirty clothes with the ease of someone accustomed to such a state. A naked woman with short, spiky black hair was passed out on the couch, only partially covered by a ratty patchwork quilt. A black man curled up to a pillow on the floor was serving as a pillow to a woman with long, bleached hair, fully clothed, who still held an empty beer bottle in her right hand.
The naked one was Javier's girlfriend, Hannah. The man was Davis, lead singer of the Unsafety Pins; the woman using him as a prop was Bella, who played lead guitar. Hannah, Roxanne was irritated to admit, was the bass player, while Roxanne herself was on drums. It was completely unfair, because she was so much better than Hannah, but that's the way life was -- since Link and the other Red Aces (including Javier) were the ones paying rent on the apartment, Javier's little slut...sorry, girlfriend (who wasn't above sleeping around)...either played the instrument she wanted or went crying to Javier. And a displeased Hannah would result in Davis and Bella being kicked out.
Grabbing a pack of cigarettes from the top of the TV set, Roxanne fished through her pockets for a Bic lighter. Holding it up to one eye, she shook the plastic lighter slightly, frowning when she realized that it was empty. Scowling, she demanded, "Javier, gimme a light."
Javier came around the corner, holding a pack of matches. He flicked it in Roxanne's direction, and then draped his 'Red Aces' t-shirt over Hannah's body. Snatching the little cardboard packet out of the air, Roxanne flipped the cover up with her thumb, slicing one match off the pack with her sharp nail. She lit her cigarette and leaned against the wall, puffing contentedly for a few moments.
Not usually the most introspective of people, Roxanne was wondering how long these cramped living conditions could go on. Link and his two buddies all had part-time jobs: Alex was a janitor, Javier worked the night shift at a local grocery store as a stockboy, and Link himself delivered pizza for a living. Hannah had a full-time job flipping burgers. But Roxanne, Davis, and Bella were all out of work at the moment. Not that Roxanne particularly minded--it gave them time to practice and work on their sound.
Davis had his own studio apartment, which he shared with Bella. But the place was so crammed with musical equipment that there wasn't much of a place for them to sleep. So they often came to the Red Aces' one bedroom apartment to sleep on the floor. Hannah had been kicked out of her parents' house recently, and naturally had come to her boyfriend for a place to stay. And for Roxanne, it was either the Red Aces' apartment or her car. Sometimes, she'd choose her car, but she saw no reason why she, as a 'girlfriend' of one of the Red Aces just the same as Hannah, should have to suffer.
That was 'girlfriend' and not girlfriend because it was a conditional arrangement. Roxanne and Link were more like brother and sister than anything else; it had been that way ever since she'd left home and her mother had been arrested. Alex and Javier understood that, but it was hard to explain to other people. ("And besides," Roxanne was fond of pointing out, if such a thing ever came up in conversation, "what business is it of yours what Link and I do?") The truth was, although she'd slept with Link a few times, Roxanne didn't feel much like his girlfriend. That was all right, because Link admitted that he didn't feel much like her boyfriend. They shared a bed mostly out of habit.
Hannah had the day off from her job at the burger place because the Unsafety Pins had a show at the college campus tonight. Roxanne wandered into the kitchen and stubbed her cigarette butt out on a used plate. If the bitch wasn't up at the same time as Davis and Bella, Roxanne was gonna kick her off the couch. Literally.
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Moodily, Phyllis Gabor stared out the window as her plane touched down in Philadelphia. She'd spent four days in Boston since last speaking to her father, running up room service charges and shopping all day -- and she had been bored out of her skull. She had decided to spend an extra day in Philly, waiting for her father and checking out the action in a new city. It wasn't exactly what she wanted, which was to head straight for Los Angeles, but Phyllis couldn't really do anything about that.
'Daddy would be upset if I went back on my promise and didn't meet him,' Phyllis thought. But she frowned deeply as she admitted to herself, 'Unless he forgot our conversation already...'
He wouldn't, though. Phyllis had made sure of that -- she'd told Lee, her father's personal assistant, about her plans. So there would definitely be room made on Harvey Gabor's busy schedule for dinner with his daughter.
She hoped.
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Roxanne had managed to secure the bathroom to herself for half an hour -- time that she used to get all dolled up for the gig. She fluffed her hair with her brush, adding just a touch more Aqua Net to keep it in place, and added a few zigzagging highlights of temporary bright blue hair color, spraying a section of her bangs with the black. To her minimal everyday makeup, Roxanne added an extra coat of mascara on her lashes, and a quick retracing of her eyeliner to thicken the black lines framing her eyes. Then she coated her lids all the way up to her eyebrows with a clear lipstick, after which she closed each eye in turn and dusted her face with silvery glitter. Black lipstick and a blue heart on her left cheekbone finished off the look.
She'd already changed into her special outfit for playing with the Unsafety Pins : a black bra underneath a black mesh shirt, black nylons and bright blue stilleto pumps, and her shiny blue vinyl pants, held up by a silver belt. To this she added a double string of round black plastic beads at her neck, a blue heart earring in her right ear, and a two-inch long safety pin in her left. An incongruous hot pink bangle on her right wrist clinked against the doorknob as she exited.
Link whistled appreciatively. While he couldn't listen to the Pins play tonight because of his work shift, he was still in the apartment while the four musicians ran around getting ready. Roxanne laughed when the leader of the Red Aces began to pant like a cartoon wolf, and gave him a quick hug.
"Man, oh, man!" Link exclaimed, "Roxanne, you're gonna have to beat the guys off with a stick! Otherwise, they'll be all over you!"
"That's okay," she replied with a grin, pulling her drumsticks out of her back pocket, "I've got two right here!"
"Ha ha ha," Hannah snapped out insincerely. When Roxanne turned to glare at her, the black-haired girl commanded her, "Get down to the truck, Roxanne. Davis and Javier hauled your drum kit into the back while you were playing dress-up."
"Coming, Hannah?" Roxanne replied in a cloyingly sweet voice, "Or do you need a couple extra handfuls of toilet paper to stuff your bra with?" Then, without waiting for Hannah's surely stupid retort, Roxanne blew a kiss to Link and ran out of the apartment.
When Roxanne got to the street level, she waved to her bandmates and Javier, who was driving Hannah and Bella since Davis's truck only had room for one other person and the instruments. Everybody in the Red Aces and the Unsafety Pins knew about the feud between Roxanne and Hannah, and they tried their best to keep the two women apart.
Like Roxanne, Bella was dressed in mostly black, with similarly mascara-ed and lined eyes. But her top was made of leather, not mesh, and had no sleeves. Bella's jeans and boots were black, and she had sewn silver star-shaped buttons in random places along the length of the legs. Her makeup had a red theme, with bright red and yellow eyeshadow flames leaping up from the upper lids of both eyes, and equally bright red lipstick. Bella wore cut-off gloves of red leather, and had her hair tied up in two schoolgirlish pigtails that trailed red ribbon bows.
Davis, as the only male of the band, was the most tame looking, really. The neon-green tank top he wore was mostly hidden by his beat up leather jacket, and he wore normal-looking, if ripped, blue jeans. His naturally curly hair was fairly tame, although he had let Bella stick a silver star hairpin in it tonight. He wore no makeup, which was a rising fashion statement of the punk music community, but he did have big, glittery silver platform boots -- in the style of KISS -- on his feet.
Hannah burst out of the door a few minutes after Roxanne did. She was wearing a black button-up blouse that had been ripped in order to show the purple bra she was wearing, and a nearly pornographically short pleated purple skirt. She had fishnet stockings and purple pumps on as well. Her makeup was normal-looking in application, only dark red lipstick and purple blush on her cheekbones. Roxanne was of the opinion that Hannah's makeup was dull because the girl had no imagination whatsoever.
"Hope we're not late!" Davis cried, as Roxanne got into the passenger's seat of the truck.
"Nah," she replied, "but I can't wait to get there!"
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Roxanne maneuvered her way through the crush of musicians backstage, clutching two beers. One was for Bella, and the other was for herself. She'd used Bella's ID, because Bella's bleach-blonde hair looked a lot like her naturally white hair, and everybody who saw Roxanne's pink eyes assumed that she was wearing color contacts. It was easier that trying to pass off a fake ID.
Bella popped up and snagged her bottle. Roxanne was about to take a drink from her own when somebody ran into her from the side, and Roxanne just barely avoiding spilling the alcohol on herself. She came face-to-face with a scowling teenager with acid-green hair and clashy-colored makeup.
"Watch it!" she cried, at the same time that Roxanne did.
"Watch what? You were in my way!" Roxanne accused quickly.
She gave the green-haired girl a quick onceover. You couldn't tell sometimes, whether people had dyed their hair those crazy colors, or if it was natural. This girl was wearing a black miniskirt and a T-shirt with writing on it underneath a navy-blue blazer with pins stuck all over. Roxanne didn't know what the shirt, or half the buttons, said. But, really. The schoolgirl look was overdone.
'Maybe she's a Hannah-groupie,' Roxanne thought scornfully, and asked the girl, "You here to play, kid?"
"I'm not a kid!" the girl shrieked. Because of the noise in the club and backstage, it was necessary to shout, but this girl was loud even in such an environment. "I'm just back here because I couldn't get in the front door!"
"Ain't here to play, out of the way," Roxanne responded coldly, and shoved the girl aside as she went to find Davis.
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Phyllis fumed. How dare that trashy bitch talk to her that way? Phyllis Gabor was gonna be a star, while that stupid woman was stuck playing on college campuses.
Phyllis shoved a path out of the backstage area and managed to fight for a position right up near the stage. There were several men in her wake, smarting from a cutting retort or a stomped foot. Phyllis knew how to use her high heels to her advantage.
She ripped off the silly orange scarf she wore around her neck, and tied it to her upper arm. No sense in losing a twenty dollar accessory at this shithole. In retrospect, she kind of wished that she hadn't worn her Edgewood Academy blazer, but she'd been too lazy to remove all the pins and put them on a more appropriate jacket. The Club Avernes tee she was wearing might earn her some points, though.
Most of the bands here were crap. Touchy-feely pop music and horrible disco-flavored original songs were the order of the evening for the majority of the groups. A lot of the patrons seemed to dig it, though Phyllis had joined the very vocal minority that was throwing stuff at the band onstage and demanding the Unsafety Pins. Phyllis, of course, had no idea who the Unsafety Pins were, but she hadn't seen the punkish girl with the weird pink eyes in any of the acts so far.
After three of the awful bands' twenty-minute sets, Phyllis was beginning to lose hope. The university's campus club had been the only one she'd been able to locate that wasn't a disco dance place. If she had to listen to any more covers of Donna Summer, she was gonna scream and bolt back to her hotel room.
"This sucks," a young man nearby said.
"Yeah," his girlfriend (Phyllis guessed, but the woman was hanging on to him pretty tight) replied, "But Davis Kemp's band is here. He and his girl, Bella, they rock it pretty hard."
Maybe she could ride it out, if the Unsafety Pins were any good.
TO BE CONTINUED...
A/N: This time, I promise that I won't add an extra scene to the end of the chapter. I decided to be nice and do what Flare and Stormkpr told me to. Hahaha. But I promise I won't make a habit of it, either.