SolSombraYSoldados
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A Trip to the Playa: Chapter 8
🕑 Added 2023-03-10 00:45:14 +0000 UTCBetter late than never, and much better late than it would have been if I forced it out last night. Enjoy Keeley and Trish's first day exploring Burning Man!
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Physical exhaustion was unable to save Keeley from what she would come to call Burning Dreams. Not that she’d expected the Playa to be quiet at night, but expecting a festival atmosphere and sleeping through one were different things. Keeley’s dreams were a blender-mixed amalgam of action movies, memories of rave parties, and the story of “Where the Wild Things Are”. When consciousness returned to her, she was rested, but discombobulated. Worse, there was no nanny or babysitter waking her up. Baby girls don’t have to get up on their own! Keeley pouted indignantly.
The baby monitor light was on. Considering her wet diaper and total lack of gruntles, Keeley gave serious consideration to crying like a baby. Luckily, all she had to do was sit up and rattle her crib bars a bit before Trish appeared. As a bonus, her babysitter’s return coincided with the end of an annoying metallic pounding noise.
“You made me wake up on my own. Bad babysitter!”
“Uh oh, do I have a grumpy baby girl on my hands?” Trish lowered Keeley’s crib bars and palmed her crotch. “Or are you just fussy because you need a change?”
“I can be a grumpy baby if I want!”
“You sure can, but it’ll be a shame for you to miss out on the festival. Grumpy babies stay in their playpen. Good girls get to go out and see the party.”
“What? No fair!”
Trish gave Keeley a kiss as soon as she had the Little girl out of her crib. Her babysitter was dusty already, and was wearing a crazy Mad-Max-esque getup with chrome kneepads, chunky boots, and a genuine bandolier. The costume pieces were tied together by the ripped canvas pants and dirty canvas jacket Trish was wearing. That wasn’t to say that Trish had gone completely non-sexy, all she was wearing under her open jacket was a corset top that did a lot more to push her breasts up than it did to cover them.
“Is that your costume? Oh my gosh, what’s my costume?”
“Your nannies picked out costume stuff for you, so I’m pretty sure it’s full on baby stuff.”
“But we won’t match!”
“First off,” Trish said as she levered Keeley up onto her changing table, “the whole point of post apocalypse fashion is that nothing matches. Second, I bet we can punk up your hair and even throw some color in it. Once the dust gets on you, you’ll be perfect.”
“Oh, good idea! Okay, but you have to make my baby outfit really extreme for it to work.”
“You sure you want that? I remember how nervous you were at the Sea Witch – I wish I’d known that you weren’t there by choice.”
“Aren’t people dressed all crazy and naked and whatever?”
“Some people are. Lots of people are dressed down even more than I am.”
“Well, I mean it’s not like the Sea Witch was the first time I wore a diaper in public.”
“What?” Trish paused with her lotion-covered hands on Keeley’s rear, her eyebrows shooting up.
“I mean uh – I always used pacifiers at raves. Once Vi dared me to go full rave-baby and wear a diaper to a party that Zach couldn’t go to.” Keeley frowned. “Wait, was that all part of their plan?”
Trish giggled. “I don’t know, cutie, but you just asked me to put you in a really extreme baby outfit so…”
“Let’s – let’s do it. If you’re okay with it.” Keeley squirmed from the butterflies in her tummy and the heat she could feel lower down.
“I am. You’re sure?”
“You’ll protect me. I trust you. I was just fussy before. You’re not a bad babysitter, you’re the best babysitter.”
“I told you I was back at the beach house.” Trish grinned, taped Keeley into her diaper, and set about dressing the Little girl up in a whirlwind of energy.
The first layer was sunscreen, which Keeley endured with as good of grace as she was able. A major difference of opinion developed between the baby girl and her babysitter over if Keeley had actually been a good girl during her sunscreen application, but it was all in good fun. The lower half of her outfit was simple in the extreme, thigh high pink socks stuffed into Mary Janes, with a pink plastic diaper cover. Above the waist Keeley sported a pink bralette with bunnies, moons, and stars on it. Instead of a proper shirt, she got an oversized bib with a pacifier clipped to it. The final piece was a hoodie with a mouse-eared hood in fawn brown that Trish left unzipped.
“This is about as extreme as I can get with your wardrobe.” Trish said as she stood Keeley in front of the mirror. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”
“Ha-ha, yeah!” Keeley danced and wiggled her double-crinkly butt at the mirror. “If you do my hair like you said, there’s no WAY anyone would recognize me in a picture.”
“You really like the outfit then?” Trish grinned, squeezing Keeley’s padded butt.
“I told you I like being a baby girl with you.” Crashing into Trish for a hug sent out a puff of playa-dust, nearly all of which stuck to Keeley’s sunscreen covered skin. A second look in the mirror confirmed Trish’s theory – she’d look like she belonged to her babysitter once she got dirty.
With Kool-Aid blue streaks in Keeley’s hair, and her long locks spiked up with craft glue, they exited the bus. Trish stopped outside the door to strap a car-tire pauldron to her left shoulder. What had been a sparsely populated area the night before was a bustling street with hundreds of camps and vehicles. Keeley looked around in shock, there were people and temporary structures as far as she could see. In the distance, huge constructions loomed above the mass of tents.
The sun struck Keeley as hard or harder than her surprise at seeing how fast the playa had filled up. She scooted gratefully under the tarp that her nannies had stet up the night before, finding it to be some kind of dense netting that blocked the sun and turned the desert’s powerful gusts into a soft breeze. Trish had already scampered over to the next camp over and had a sledgehammer in her hands.
“I said I’d finish after I got the baby girl up, you didn’t have to put the last of my stakes in.” Trish was addressing a group of people who’d set up a sturdy-looking cluster of tents around an old Winnebago.
“They’re all our stakes.” Laughed a woman in the group. “We appreciate all your help getting us set up, seriously. You’re way more friendly than the posh girls you came with.”
“They’ll figure it out, they have good hearts.” Trish turned back to Keeley and waved her over. “Hey Keels, come meet our neighbors.”
Keeley approached gingerly. Randos on the playa was one thing, but there was something weirdly intimate about having neighbors that she’d have to see regularly. Neighbors had never really been a thing in Keeley’s life, estates didn’t have neighbors, they had bordering properties.
“Holy shit, she looks incredible!” A different woman than the one that had addressed Trish gaped at Keeley. None of the neighbors had elaborate costumes on. They were all wearing comfortable loose clothing and bandanas that wouldn’t have been out of place in a hippie gathering outside of San Francisco.
“She really does. Everybody, this is Keeley. Keels, this is Carmen, Darlene, Pedro, Maria, and John.”
Keeley waved shyly. “Hi everybody. Um, we have a fridge and a freezer, and a bunch of ice. If you need something kept cold, we could help. I have some cool food that my mom’s chef made for me left from my trip that should get eaten today too, if you want to share.”
“Hey, cool.” Pedro grinned. “Sharing right out of the gate? You’ve got the burner spirit already.”
“I swear I didn’t have to coach her on that.” Trish put an arm around Keeley proudly. A new kind of love blossomed in Keeley. It was one thing for her nannies to be proud of her – on the rare occasions that they were, but she’d never expected Trish to be proud of her for anything except silly stuff like her pictures. That Trish would be proud of her for being a good person gave Keeley happy-bubbly feelings from her toes to her scalp.
“I don’t know what time it is, but if you’re hungry I can get the food now, and some bottles of water from our fridge.”
“Hell yeah, do it.” Carmen nodded. “I’ve got some strawberry wine I made that we can share with you.”
Strawberry wine under the beating hot desert sun sounded like an actual ticket to heaven. Keeley scampered back into the bus. With Trish’s help, she emerged with a pitcher of ice, courtesy of the bus’s ice-machine. On top of that they had a dozen water bottles, and the rest of Louis’s fancy lunch containers. They sat in a circle next to Carmen’s tent and shared food out with easy camaraderie. It was a bizarre feeling, Keeley couldn’t remember the last time she was around people so chill and kind, at least not without everyone involved being stoned out of their minds.
The glory of her lunch experience came to a halt when Keeley realized that the cup of cold liquid Trish handed her was full of juice, not wine. She glared up at her babysitter, brows furrowed. Trish’s stern, almost angry expression stopped Keeley in her tracks and made her stomach flip-flop.
“It’s not fair! Everyone else is having wine.”
“This isn’t the place for this discussion, Keels.” Trish kept her voice low. “These people don’t need to know why you’re not supposed to drink alcohol, do they?”
Hot tears prickled at Keeley’s eyes. Her juice cup trembled in her hand. It’d already been so long since she had a sip of booze, longer than the whole beach house trip had been – and she’d been drinking in the middle of that. For a moment she was ready to dive into an epic tantrum – to cry, scream, and shit her pants right in the middle of the gathering. That’dshow Trish what happened when she told Keeley not to cause a scene.
Only the fact that she already liked her neighbors stopped Keeley from unloading on Trish. She drank her juice sullenly, watching as the neighbors oohed and aahed over Louis’s exquisite lunch creations. Everything got eaten, people were constantly admonishing each other to pick up everything that fell to the ground too, even if it was a single grain of rice. When the lunch containers were empty, Keeley quietly took them back to the bus and dumped them in the garbage.
It took ten minutes for Trish to realize that Keeley wasn’t coming back out of the bus. She climbed the stairs with a puzzled expression that she doubled-down on when she saw Keeley sitting on the couch with her arms crossed and a stormy expression on her face.
“Keels, what’s the matter?”
“FUCK YOU.”
Trish stumbled back at the venom in Keeley’s voice. “I – I don’t know what’s going on but…”
“You think because you’re my babysitter that you get to be my mom? Well you’re not. You’re younger than me, and this is all a stupid game.” Keeley glared at Trish, eyes hot and itchy. “I’m going to go back to the bedroom, find your notebook, and tear up the page I wrote on.”
“Woah!” Trish held her hands up. “I still don’t know where this is coming from. If you want to stop the game, that’s totally okay. But will you talk to me, please, instead of yelling at me?”
“Like you don’t know what you did.” Keeley sneered at Trish. When her babysitter took a seat on the couch, Keeley turned her whole body away.
“I honestly don’t know. I – I don’t understand your reaction, but I’m not saying you can’t have it. Please Keeley, you’re freaking me out.”
The frightened tone that crept into Trish’s pleading put a crack in Keeley’s armor of rage. She kept herself facing away, but downgraded her tone from flat anger to emotionally tired. “You shut me up because you didn’t want me to make a scene in front of your new friends.”
“What? No, I thought you wouldn’t want me to talk about your problems with…”
“HOW DOES IT MATTER IF THEY KNOW ABOUT THAT?!” Keeley whiled around to face Trish. “I’m wearing a fucking diaper! Like – obviously wearing it. But you don’t want to talk about how I’m a bad girl. You don’t want me to embarrass you in front of our neighbors. If they knew that I’m not a good girl at all, that I’m a druggie, and a drunk, and all kinds of stuff you’re ashamed of – then – then…”
Trish had her hand to her mouth. Twin tears rolled down her cheeks. “Keeley – I did not mean to do that – but I did. I’m so sorry. Is that where the comment about your mom came from? Is that what she does to you?”
“Mom’s ashamed of me!” Keeley wailed. “She never wants to talk to me, or about me around her friends. She’d be happier if I was never born. I’m the family disappointment.”
“Oh honey.” Trish scooted over on the couch and took Keeley in her arms. “I’m so, so sorry. That was incredibly shitty what I said. I didn’t mean it – I didn’t even know – but I get it now.”
“I just couldn’t. Not with you too.” Keeley sobbed and clung to Trish. “Please don’t be embarrassed of me.”
“Never. I was trying not to embarrass you, but I won’t do it that way again.” Trish patted Keeley’s back and nuzzled the top of her head. “Would you rather that I explain why you’re banned from booze – or whatever in a situation like that? Even if it means the people we’re talking to hear it?"
"Yes. Then at least it would be real! We wouldn’t be fake and acceptable.”
“I’ll do that from now on. I promise.”
Keeley sniffled. “Thank you. It um, kind of reinforces the baby game that way anyway, right?”
“It does.” Trish’s smile wasn’t visible to Keeley, with her face stuck in her girlfriend’s dusty cleavage, but she could hear the warmth of it in Trish’s voice. “Oh baby girl, I’ll take care of you, okay? If I do something to hurt you again, please tell me right away if you can. I won’t do it on purpose, but I’ll always apologize and do my best to make it better.”
“Thank you Trish.” Keeley shuddered as the last of her sobs faded away. “I’ll try. It’s hard, I’ve had to be quiet and fake my whole life.”
“I know, sweetie.” Trish sighed and sat back on her heels. “I think we need to address something else out in the open. You said some nasty stuff about yourself – and I don’t think those labels fit you – but there’s some truth there too, isn’t there?”
Keeley looked down and picked at the fuzzy cats at the top of her thigh-high socks. “Technically I’m not a drunk. But I do – drink a lot. I’m not a junkie either! That word’s for heroin and I’ve only done that once, I think.”
“Keels.” The distress on Trish’s face was palpable, it made Keeley shrivel up inside. “Those are some very un-okay technicalities. While I’m your babysitter, you’re not getting any drugs other than caffeine and prescription meds, understand?”
“But we’re at a party.” Keeley whimpered. “Everyone’s having fun, and there wasn’t enough wine for anyone to get drunk if we were all sharing it.”
“There are a lot of cops at this party, so alcohol is pretty much the only openly used drug – which I’m even more glad for than I was before.” Trish sighed and stroked Keeley’s cheek. “I know you want to have fun with people, but you can have fun sober. You didn’t notice, but I was drinking juice too. So was Maria.”
“It’s not like it matters. Nobody stops me from drinking at home.”
“Except that I’m moving to Ardenthill for school in the fall, you know.”
“What – what are you saying?”
“That I’ll take care of you.”
“What does that mean?! Are you going to be my babysitter all the time? My girlfriend on more than just the trip are – how – what’s happening?”
“We have to find that out between the two of us. But I’m not going away, okay?”
The first time she meets my mom, she’s gone. Keeley whimpered and nodded, letting Trish’s naïve fiction paper over their already distressing morning. “Can we go see the party now?”
“Yes baby girl. I can’t wait.” Trish pulled Keeley into a crushing hug.
~~~~*~~~~
There was life and laughter all over the playa. Trish was right, most people weren’t dressed in extreme costumes, but there were more than enough of them that no-one called Keeley out as weird. Half the people ignored her, the other half had something complimentary to say about her costume. She was getting more compliments than Trish, who’s apocalypse getup was pretty passe as far as burner costumes went.
Music and art were a constant presence. Keeley’s legs ached from all the impromptu dancing she’d done before she and Trish had made it down the length of their street. As Keeley was beginning to feel like she’d understood the rhythm of the festival, her expectations were reset by the Sky Dancers. A towering construction of steel and painted wood sprouted flexible steel rods like a carnival ride. Strung from each of those rods was a sturdy climbing rope, and in a harness at the end of each rope was a dancer. Male, female, rail-thin and pleasantly jiggly, the dancers were as diverse as the rainbow-riot of body paint that was their only clothing.
Keeley watched in fascination as they came together and danced apart, lifted into impossibly graceful jumps by the springy steel rods they were tied to. Squeals of childlike delight were as common in the watching crowd as applause – Keeley joined in with them with abandon. She even got to dance with one of the Sky Dancers for a few beautiful bars of music before the dancer spun her back to the crowd to pick another participant.
“That looks so fun! I wish we had one of those at our camp.” Keeley snuggled back against Trish, sighing happily as her girlfriend’s arms wrapped around her.
“I think our version would be more like one of those baby bouncers.” Trish said with a chuckle.
“You want to do stuff like that with me?” Keeley nuzzled Trish. “You like my crib and everything else, you’re not just humoring my nannies?”
“It’s all cute – and most of it is hot.” Trish nodded, kissing Keeley’s ear. “I’m up to try anything at least once.”
“Are you going to join my nana’s baby-sorority?”
“I uh…” Trish coughed bashfully. “Probably. I think so.”
“I bet they have all kinds of cute but extreme stuff there. You could bring me for show and tell.”
“Really?”
Keeley shrugged. “As long as it’s stuff other girls are doing, yeah.”
“I’ll think about it.”
From Keeley’s observations, Trish was thinking about it for a while. With a corset that barely covered her nipples, Trish suffered more than one wardrobe malfunction when those thoughts – activated the area. Glad to get to tease her babysitter for once, Keeley put her pacifier in. When Trish would ask her where she wanted to go next, Keeley simply made baby-talk noises behind her soother and pointed. Whoops, there goes a nipple again. Silly babysitter.
They found shade at a spiral-shaped structure that was made of triangles of multicolored cloth spinning inward to a central pole. It was also the quietest place they’d found, as it turned out to be a meditation center. Taking a seat in a proper lotus position got an impressed look from Trish. Her babysitter fed Keeley some water out of their bottle – for a minute Keeley wished it had been a real baby bottle. While Trish lounged back and cooled off, Keeley closed her eyes and spaced out.
It was the perfect time for spacing out, the wind had whipped up on the Playa and blended the riot of conversation and music into one more elemental noise. Along with the soft chimes and white noise playing in the meditation center, Keeley emptied her brain of all thoughts in record time. How long that went on was a mystery. Time didn’t exist during spacing out, it never had. All Keeley knew was that eventually she stumbled down to the world in response to Trish gently shaking her shoulder.
“That’s some impressive inner peace you had there, Little One.” A woman in a sarong and a spiral design painted on her face was sitting across from Keeley. “Your friend here didn’t realize you were such an experienced meditator. I’m Skysong, by the way.”
“Keeley, and – I wasn’t meditating. I was just spacing out.” Keeley shrugged.
“I see. What were you thinking about?” Skysong asked.
“Nothing. I don’t have any thoughts when I’m spacing out.”
“Well you don’t have to call it meditation if you don’t want to.” Skysong smiled. “You and your friend are welcome here any time, especially you.”
“Trish would have to come. She’s my babysitter.” Keeley grinned at Trish’s surprise, downright beaming when Trish smiled too.
“I hope you do come back, I’d love to learn more about you. I think your friend – babysitter wants to go see The Man though.”
“Ready to keep moving, Keels?”
Keeley nodded and hopped to her feet, refreshed in body and soul. “Yes please!”
After the peace of the Spiral Song meditation center, the thunder of the festival’s center hit like a hammer. Inner peace let Keeley embrace the feeling instead of flinch away from it. She waved at the weird mutant vehicles with their riders hanging off the sides, danced her way through a dozen camps, and blew kisses to a group of drag queens standing atop of ship’s mast they’d erected. Trish looked as euphoric as Keeley felt, keeping up with her baby girl with ease.
Finally, they broke into the center of the festival, where all the avenues of Black Rock City pointed at one place. The Man. A titanic sculpture of wood rose in the center of a broad bare expanse of playa. Massive ribs of wood were wrapped in thousands of overlapping planks to create the impression of feathers on the heads and shoulders of a tri-headed man. One of the heads bore an eagle’s beak, another tufted ears like an owl, and the third – that one had to wait for Keeley and Trish to walk a very long way around the sculpture. When they reached it, Keeley flinched. The third head glared into Keeley’s soul with orange-painted raptor eyes.
She shivered, breaking out into a cold sweat all over her body. The eyes rose up through the morass of Keeley’s dream memories, encapsulating all the wildness and confusion that she’d felt overnight. That terrible gaze consumed the peace that Keeley had found at the Spiral Song and left her feeling like a tiny mouse before a mythological bird. She squealed and threw herself into Trish’s arms.
“What’s the matter, baby girl?”
“It’s scary. It was in my dreams last night.”
“Sweetie, I won’t let it get you.” Trish hugged Keeley gently. “We can go if you want. I wanted to see it up close, and now I have.”
“Yes please. I need a change too.”
“It’s a long walk home. I could change you in a porta-potty if you want.”
“No, ew. What’s the point of wearing diapers if I have to use a…” Keeley’s jaw dropped. Her gaping expression morphed into a smile and then a genuine guffaw. “Oh. My. God. The nannies. They’re using those, aren’t they?”
Trish chuckled. “Everybody has to. I grabbed a quick break in one while you were meditating.”
“Not me.” Keeley grinned mischievously. “Come on babysitter, you hafta change my diaper!”
Comments
I liked the last line as well.
Great chapter. Keeley really let out some feelings there with Trish. Hopefully Trish will help her with that self confidence problem she has. Good that Keeley and Trish had a day to themselves working the Nannies. Can’t wait to see what happens next.
Keeley's really got the spirit!
That last line is adorable!
