Another excerpt from my work-in-progress novel, Grey. Like previous excerpts (click here for those), this is all a rough draft, so everything could change.

The asshole with the camera sees him going first, and instinctively raises his lens for a shot. A couple of the plaid-shirted men at the fire move forward, their hands raised. The world constricts so that it looks like it’s at the end of a long hallway. Everything goes black and white. The dude lets out one last soundless bellow. And Mike flops over the edge of the roof like a sandbag.

Not everyone notices right away, until someone behind Grey screams. Then the whole roof goes silent and the sound of Mike’s electro is gratingly loud. No one moves toward the edge of the roof. Grey can’t move. He’s staring toward the DJ booth, where the dude stands with his mouth open, his hand still extending in shoving position. Grey expects that any moment, Mike will climb back over the ledge, take a little bow, and resume DJing. Several moments pass and nothing of the kind happens.

Grey dimly hears running over the blood pounding in his ears and, as if on cue, the whole party rushes to the side of the building and looks down. There’s a streetlight right below the building so the sidewalk is well illuminated, and there, in the center of the spotlight — like some fallen circus performer — Mike is splayed. His legs are bent at odd directions and there’s a pool of red blossoming around his head. The crowd is silent.

Grey feels like he’s watching a movie. That he could get up if he wanted, take a break for a leak, and grab some popcorn. But instead he feels phantom pin pricks all up and down his arms and under his armpits. He can smell baking bread emanating from the bakery below. The smell of people going about their business, baking loaves for tomorrow’s shipment. People who live during the nighttime hours and fall asleep when the sun comes up. Grey thinks of their hands dusted with flour and sweat. He almost imagines that he can smell blood mingling with yeast.

He stares at Mike until the body below makes no sense anymore. Until a shadow enters the pool of light and everyone breathes in as one. Slowly, a dark figure wanders toward Mike’s body, and then enters the pool of light tentatively, like it’s testing the temperature. It’s a girl, with long straight blond hair. She kneels down next to Mike. Touches his wrist. Puts her hand in front of his face carefully. She drops her head, and everyone on the roof knows that she didn’t find anything there. But instead of moving away from the body, the girl sits down on the sidewalk, heedless of the blood creeping toward her jeans, and puts her hand on Mike’s still head. She bows her own head and is still.

“Is that Laura?” Jack whispers, appearing at Grey’s side. Grey shakes himself and looks down at the girl.

“Yeah.”

“Are they — I mean were they, friends?” Jack asks.

“I don’t know,” Grey says blankly.

“C’mon, man,” Jack says, putting his hand on Grey’s shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

Grey nods silently, and turns to ascend the ladder as the first sirens start crying in the distance. His hands feel numb and his heart feels like it’s going to burst out of his chest and flop, bleeding and throbbing, on the warehouse floor. His mouth tastes like cotton.

A friend told me I should copyright posts like this… So, uh, copyright 2011, Brenna Ehrlich

Check it — up there at 4pm EST I’m be on MTV.com helping choose the OMA for Most Innovative Music Video.

Panelists include me, Jermaine Dupri, legendary music video director Wayne Isham, and music journalist Caryn Ganz. It’ll be hosted by James Montgomery with appearances by Robyn, Tim Nordwind of OK Go, Andy Grammer, Perry Farrell, My Chemical Romance, Ke$ha and more.

And to think — 20 years ago I was watching the collected music videos of David Bowie, playing a broken guitar in my attic before school. #Changes, yo.

Gird your loins for another thrilling installment of First a Dream, my unfinished (but unintentionally hilarious) “novel” from 10 years ago.

Welcome to Mica’s World

“Homecoming Dance. October 31st,” read the poster in the hallway.

“Are you going to the dance Mica?” asked an overly sweet voice behind her.

“Yep,” Mica replied, turning to face the leering grin of the tall blond.

“You gotta date?” Liz asked, fixing a hair clip and looking distant, she was good at that.

“Nope.” Mica replied, looking past her to Physics, her first class.

“Why not?” Liz persisted, her words making Mica look to the girl’s make-up enclosed face. Liz was not pretty. If you took three seconds to look at her closely you’d see that. Under the layers of makeup and blond dye #34 dwelled a pimply plain brunette, her egotism making everyone believe her beautiful. Mica took a deep breath, she was sick of this question. All her friends had asked it.

“There’s no one I want to go with, besides no one asked me.” she spoke the last line in a half whisper.

“Too bad,” Liz cracked her gum and turned towards study hall, which she had two of.

It was Christmas time. Gaily colored lights were hung about in sheer glee and the aging Victorian Inn clung like a desperate mountain climber to the sheer peak, the sea crashing in great arching waves below. Mica hurried up to the front desk and rang the rusty bell.

”Welcome to the Inn,” stated an elderly man, hunched to the point on catatonicness though supported by a spiraling cane behind a pile of sprawling papers. Mica smiled and surveyed her surroundings. With lacy woodwork and frothy curtains, the Inn was all Mica had ever wanted in a Christmas house, which is what she called dwellings that evoking festive feelings.

“By the way, the Inn is haunted,” the elderly man behind the counter croaked, a glimmer in his eye that Mica had not noticed in her joy at the Inn’s beauty. Mica halted her inspection of room in fear mingled surprise.

“Haunted?” she whispered glancing sidelong as if not looking directly at it would put the ghost in view. The old man nodded.

“By what?” Mica asked apprehensively, fear shaking her voice, whittling it to a thin edge, her eyes opening wide. The innkeeper shrugged and ambled away, disappearing behind his papers. It was then that Mica heard the whisperings, barely audible, like a half-remembered dream. They were evil, they were hung with the perfume of it, sharp, bitter, bone-chilling, like black roses. Her hands turned icy and her heart froze, clenched in the fist of a great ice giant, encased in a glacier, chilled to every fiber.

“What is it?” she whispered.

Light peeked through the thin skin of Mica eyelids as waning moonlight quivered into her shady room. Mica grabbed for her dream map. She had to remember the Inn.

Never had her dreams been so vivid as the ones that had visited her those past two nights. Never had she seen the dream world so clearly. Except for the sixth year of her life. She would open her eyes widely, while still in slumber, and scream, her mother had informed her. These were called night terrors. The terror of these visions was immense. So immense that she wept every morning until finally, one gray foggy day, they ceased and nightmares had never visited again, until now.

But what was it that separated the dreams of her sixth year and these past few dreams from the ones that had lilted though her mind for the last 10 years?

Suddenly, as if dawn had erupted on her weary mind she realized the difference between the horrificly vivid dreams of her present days to the ones in the gentle past. She had opened her eyes.

“You have one week in counting before Homecoming and you don’t have a date. Let me set you up.”

Ashley was in her “It it my duty in this world to give my best friend a social life” mode and there was nothing Mica could do about it. Ashley had recently asked frosted hair boy — whose name she had discovered to be Scott — to come to the dance with her and he had accepted. Therefore, Mica’s best friend had decided it was only right that Mica go with a male also, any male.

“I don’t want to be set up.”

“God Mic, I know you won’t dance with anyone unless they have marriage potential, but still…”

“You’re right, I won’t,” Mica stated firmly. Ashley knew her ideals by now and was used to her friend’s romantic nature.

“Look, I know you believe in true love and all that, but come on, it’s just dancing does he really need to be Prince Charming?” The red-head reasoned.

“Yes, he does. Besides, no one’s gonna want to go with me anyway. I look like I’m twelve.” Mica pushed a few books into her backpack as she spoke, glancing at the passing landscapes as the bus rattled on. She was a short girl while most girls her age towered above her, looking somewhere in the age range of twenty rather than 16.

“Maybe if you wore some make-up once in a while you’d look a little older!”, Ashley tossed her hair, annoyed.

“I tried make-up once. I looked like a little kid who’d gotten into her mother’s stuff. You know, straying red lip stick and overly dark eyes. It was not pretty…” the two giggled, forgetting their anger.

She could not make the eyes look right. Her book was a veritable jungle of the feature, like beasts in the dark. The eyes she had looked into searchingly had been deep, deep as any black hole, never ending. The ones that she sketched now upon her Psychics book were flat and unseeing, they were no match for the dark light of the boy’s in her dreams. Mica leaned back frustrated, and looked once more to the board. Instead of concentrating on the problem being chalked numerous times upon the slate she wonder distantly at the number of pockets the teacher’s outfit sported. At least ten speckled the shirt. What could he need all those pockets for, she wondered.

“Hey!” came a harsh whisper that broke her pointless train of thought, right out of her line of vision. “Hey!”

This time Mica turned to face the blond boy behind her. All females in the room shifted there eyes to the whispering male, Tom. They all liked him. Mica could tell by the way they all fluttered their eyes and hit him playfully, giggling like wind-up dolls, on and on and on. Mica had no idea why. He was dull and quite dumb. An All-American boy. Not her type.

“Here.” he whispered and pushed a neatly folded note into her hand. Mica opened the paper confused and read the scrawling penmanship with a furrow in her brow.

“Hey, think your cute. Want to go to homecoming with me? Right back. Bye.”

Mica’s eyes widened. He thought she was cute? Someone thought she was cute? She was flattered, but disgust registered in her mind at the thought of going out with Tom, who had stayed back twice in kindergarten. What’s so hard about coloring and using scissors? She turned to give him the bad news. But before she could part her lips to utter a sound he sighed, exasperated, and stated, “No, pass it forward.”

Color rose in Mica’s face, slow and unwelcome, as she passed the note to Liz, who cracked her gum and smiled at Tom in answer to his question.

Green eyes stared into her own. What was it that guys didn’t like, Mica pondered surveying herself in the bathroom mirror. Her hair fell past her shoulders in lovely curling waves, like she had spent hours in a beauty salon, her mother always said. Her skin was perfectly clear, apart from an occasional pimple, which was a large feat at high school age, and her eyes were always complimented by strangers for their greenness. What was it that drove them all away? Mica sighed in defeat and drew a brush from her backpack, running it through her dark-brown-auburn waves.

“Hey Mic wanna go the mall to look for dresses on Saturday?” Ashley had just entered the bathroom after her last class.

“Can’t,” Mica replied, working a stubborn lock into place,

“I’m going to Boston this weekend. Some kind of family get away, you know. We’re going to stay at a fancy hotel and everything. Besides, I got my dress last week, remember?”

“Yeah, your dress is awesome. Roses, dramatic slit. Too bad you got to it first.”

“You have to be quick when you want something bad enough, or it’ll slip right through your still grasping fingers!” Mica pronounced, adding a dramatic flare as usual and waving her brush gracefully in the air.

“Yep, that’s why I asked Scott right away. Anyone you should ask right away? Any perfect guy you want to snatch up before he’s stolen away?” Ashley teased, raising her ruddy eyebrows to better empathize her statement.

“Yeah..in my dreams…” Mica joked, only realizing after the words had passed her lips their double meaning. She laughed ironically, a dry bitter chuckle.

“What? What’s so funny? Did I miss some weird Mica joke here?” the red-head asked, irked a little, thinking her friend was laughing at her.

“You’d have to be there.” Mica whispered, wishing she could return.

Gang tattoo leads to a murder conviction

Inked on the chest of a Pico Rivera gang member was the detailed scene of a liquor store slaying that had stumped an L.A. County sheriff’s investigator for more than four years. It leads to a jailhouse confession from Anthony Garcia — and a first-degree murder conviction.

[via LA Times]

And I thought that there was no tattoo stupider than that of your own face. ::Stands corrected::

This morning, I was reading The Fox by D.H. Lawrence (which I think I bought from some book table in Williamsburg) when the above fluttered onto my bagel.

For those who can’t read scrawling, teacher handwriting, the scrap says:

F

Nice writing. No knowledge of what you’re writing about — and you’re bored because you don’t read, so you don’t know what’s going on + you and your pals could be playing games outside, instead of paying attention + reading + writing on the walls about how bored you are. It’s clear. I get the message. Have you??

Now, this book could have been in several hands since this message was tucked inside. Or perhaps the message was from some other assignment in the past, and the book’s owner was reminding him/herself of some past folly by retaining it.

Still, judging by the notes inside the book, the reader had, indeed, read the book. And understood it. And, judging by the fact that the owner had kept such a… dare I say poorly written condemnation, s/he was pretty badass.

Either/or, I have always felt that grades were idiocy.

So my wonderful friends are having a “bad writing” party tonight, for which I plundered a ton of old CDs containing stuff I wrote on my old family computer when I was in high school.

In doing so, I came across my unfinished “novel,” First A Dream, featuring a girl who looks very much like me and whines about not having a boyfriend all the time.

I vividly recalled getting home from school and spending hours typing away about “Mica” and “Rev” and their various and sundry journeys. And the memory actually made me even more impelled to finish my current “novel.”

Therefore, from now on, I will post excerpts from said novel on Fridays. I do so at my own peril, as I was fond of purple prose when I was 16. You have been warned… My 16-year-old heart is about to starting leaking copiously out of my sleeve.

She was running. Her feet pummeled the forest floor, fatigue a nonexistent companion. She merely glided above the greenery like a lithe ghost. Her hair whipped her face, but she felt nothing, pressing on, in pursuit of something she did not know.

Mica sunk into her seat. In truth, she didn’t think herself ugly. Actually, she was very pretty. But the only people who seemed to think so that she knew of were her parents, her friends, and old ladies at the grocery store. Perhaps the young man in her dream thought so too, she did not know.

Just got home from SXSW and currently dead. Here’s a video I made on my iPhone.

Wayne Coyne, The Flaming Lips

Because when I write stuff by hand, it looks like this.

Novel notes written whilst waiting for the G one winter’s eve.