I was starting to understand now. I had seen Aly’s boyfriend, with his shaved head and combat boots.
“Oh, jeez,” I said.
“They stand for violence. Lately they’ve been marching with the Ku Klux Klan.”
“Oh, jeez.” I felt sick.
“You been having problems with skinheads? They been giving you trouble because you’re friends with Rawnie?”
I guess she hadn’t noticed. I mumbled, “I’m not friends with Rawnie anymore.”
“No?”
I shook my head, looking down at the guitar Gus had given me. It was a nice little electric guitar, bright enamel red, like the Caddy out back.
“You sure? Just because you’re fighting right now doesn’t mean you can’t still be friends.”
“I think I blew it pretty bad.”
“Ouch.” Dad would have been trying to get all the details out of me, but Gus could tell I didn’t want to talk about it. I guess it made it easier that I was not her own kid. She was pretty good about leaving things up to me. Which is what she did next. She said, “Bummer, Groover. And here’s another one. I got the Neon Shadow tickets all right, but they would only give me two.”
My brain felt tired, and I hadn’t been thinking much about the Neon Shadow concert anyway. I just looked at her.
She said, “That band is really hot. I couldn’t get more for love or money.”
“Um, two is okay. Thanks, Gus.”
“You don’t have to thank me.” It was the first time I’d thanked her for anything, and now she sounded like Rawnie, not wanting to be thanked. Jeez, I missed Rawnie.
Gus said, “You just have to figure out what to do with them.” She stood up and got the tickets out of a cigar jar and handed them to me. They were electric red, and they were in a little envelope with NEON SHADOW in neon gold letters against a shadow blue background. I wondered how much she’d paid for them, but I didn’t really want to know, so I didn’t ask.
The concert was Saturday. All day Friday I tried to cheer myself up by thinking about going to it with my dad or Gus, whichever one wanted to take me. But it didn’t work. I kept on thinking about Rawnie.
She wasn’t saving me a seat at lunchtime anymore, of course, and I didn’t want to sit with Aly and her snooty gang, so I went off to the back of the cafeteria and sat by myself. There were other people I could have sat with, I guess. Really, there were more nice people in that school than not, once you got past the clothes and haircuts and stuff. But I just didn’t feel like talking to anybody. Same between classes. And same walking home. I could have caught up with Benjy and his sister and walked with them. But I didn’t.
That night at supper I asked Gus, “Do you mind if I just give the concert tickets to Rawnie?”
“Fine with me.”
My dad looked real surprised. “Harper, what are you talking about? Gus got those tickets for you.”
“I know.”
“So don’t you think you’d better use them? Do you have any idea how much trouble and expense—”
“Buddy,” Gus interrupted him in a real quiet way, “Groover knows what she’s doing, and I think I do too.” She nodded at me. “Go ahead, Groover, run those tickets over to Rawnie if you’re done eating.”
I looked at my dad, and he looked kind of bug-eyed for a minute like he might explode, but then he nodded. “Gus says it’s okay. But you aren’t really finished with your supper, are you?”
“Um, yeah, can I be excused? I’m not hungry.”
I had to go to the bathroom too. On my way back down the stairs I heard Gus saying to my dad, “You want me to be a role model for her, Buddy, you got to let her get big and ornery like me.”
Big and ornery, huh. Those days I felt pretty small.
“And you got to let her do what she’s got to do.”
Which wasn’t going to be easy. I headed right over to Rawnie’s house before I could chicken out, but it took me probably half a minute to lift my hand and knock on the door.
Her father opened it, which was the first time I had seen Mr. Stellow. He was a slim man with glasses, and his skin was Pepsi brown. I think I looked at him a little bit too long before I said, “Um, is Rawnie around?”
Mr. Stellow was looking at me too. “You must be Harper.”
I blushed. Right then I wasn’t real proud of being Harper. But Mr. Stellow was smiling, a good smile, like he really meant it. He said, “Yeah, Rawnie’s around. I think. Why don’t you go up to her room and have a look?”
When I climbed the stairs my legs ached. I felt ancient.
Rawnie was in her room all right, belly-flopped on her bed, and when I came in she looked up at me, but she didn’t say anything.
I told her, “Um, listen, Gus only got two tickets.”
She looked down, pretending she didn’t care. “Tickets?” she said in a bored voice a lot like Aly Bowman’s was sometimes, except in Aly not caring was real. “Oh. You mean to that Neon Shadow thing.”
“Yeah. I mean to that Neon Shadow thing.” I stuck the tickets in their neon-colored envelope under her nose. “Here. You go, okay? I want you to.”
She jumped like the tickets were made of fire, and sat straight up without touching them, and stared at me. Her mouth was moving, but she didn’t say anything.
“You take those,” I told her.
“No way!”
I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. “Listen. Suppose it was Nico and Ty. If Nico, like, really blew it and really did something stupid …” My voice had gone shaky, and my legs too. I sat down on the bed next to her. “What I mean is, if he hurt Ty, I think he’d try to make it up to him any way he could.”
Rawnie looked straight at me and said, “I don’t think so. I think Nico and Ty don’t ever have to tell each other thank you or I’m sorry or give each other stuff. They just, like, understand each other.”
“Well, they had to start somewhere, didn’t they?”
That made her smile. She broke into that great grin of hers, and then she said real soft, “Teah. I guess they did. Harper, I’m sorry.”
“Huh? You’re sorry?”
“Yeah. I was stupid. See, I thought you were being, you know, mean, and really—you just didn’t understand about Aly and her gang, did you?”
I made a face like something tasted bad. I didn’t want to talk about Aly and how she made a goofball out of me. See, I thought she liked me, when all she really cared about was that I had pale skin and light hair and blue eyes. That and making me hurt Rawnie.
“Just take the tickets,” I told Rawnie.
“I can’t! Anyhow, Dad would never let me. They must be worth a couple hundred dollars.”
“Gus said you could have them.”
“But I don’t feel right—”
“Listen, I’m not going without you, so you might as well take them.”
We went back and forth like that awhile, and I guess we might have kept going like that until Saturday except that I thought I heard something. I stopped arguing with Rawnie and said, “C’mon!” to her instead, and took her by the hand and hustled her down the stairs.
“Huh?” she kept saying. “Harper!”
But once I got her outside she understood. The notes came drifting on the air not much louder than dandelion seed, but we both knew what they were. We stood still, listening hard. Rawnie whispered, “They’re playing ‘The Friendship Song.’”
A car came along, and we couldn’t hear the music over the swish it made, that’s how faint it was. I said, “Come on,” and I led her across the street. “This way.” We weren’t going to go through the maze. I took her around back of the sheds. Once I looked at her to see how she was doing, because she was so quiet. But she didn’t seem scared. Just nervous. A little. I guess she could see I wasn’t scared anymore.
We could hear voices, deep distant echoing voices that did not belong to Nico and Ty, singing “The Friendship Song.” The music was kind of like a big radio turned way down low, but we could tell i
t was right on the other side of the sheds. We got to the pigeon coop, and I started around the corner. “Harper,” Rawnie whispered behind me, “I can’t go out there!”
“Yes, you can.” I turned back and took her hand again, but I didn’t drag her. She walked out by herself.
So there we were, Rawnie and me, standing in the open, side by side, and there was Gus sitting on the bumper of her big red Caddy. She had her guitar in her arms like a baby but she wasn’t playing it right then. She was just smiling at us fit to split. We couldn’t see anything else except now and then flashes of colored light amid something like mist in the air. But all the time the music went on.
… what we’ve always been
Is what we’re always gonna be.
We’re yang and yin,
We’re sun and wind,
We’re eternity.…
“Right on, Groover and company!” Gus called to us. “Me’n the band been rooting for you two.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Saturday came, and what should have been one of the happiest nights in my life turned into one of the saddest and scariest.
Rawnie and I were both going to the Neon Shadow concert, that’s why it should have been happy. After she went home Friday night Rawnie talked to her father, and Saturday morning Mr. Stellow called the Arena and found out there was a soundproof waiting room for parents. So parents could take their kids and be right there in case their kids needed them, yet not have to pay for tickets. Mr. Stellow offered to take us, and he came over and talked with my dad about it, and I don’t know what he said, but somehow he made Dad say okay. Or maybe it wasn’t Mr. Stellow at all, maybe it was Gus. Or the puppy dog look I was wearing. Or maybe my dad was just starting to loosen up finally. Anyway, he said I could go with Rawnie.
Before we went to the Arena, though, we went to Just Jewelry at the shopping mall and got each other friendship necklaces. They were metal chains with metal pendants, not fake gold or fake anything, just real metal. The pendants were shaped sort of like fish, Rawnie’s with the head up and mine with the head down. Rawnie’s said BE and FRI, and mine said, ST and ENDS. The pendants fit together like a circle, and together they said BEST FRIENDS. We put them on right there in the store.
“I’m going to wear mine all the time,” Rawnie said.
“Me too,” I told her. “Even when I’m asleep.”
“Until you’re a hundred?”
“Yep. Or dead.”
So it really was an awesome day—so far. And then we ate at Wendy’s. Mr. Stellow treated us. And then he got us to the Arena early and waited with us while we waited for Neon Shadow’s limousine to pull in. When it finally came, there was such a crowd that we couldn’t see a thing, but we didn’t really care, because we were going to the concert.
Mr. Stellow helped us get to our seats. “You two stick together and don’t go anywhere else,” he told us once we were there, like we couldn’t find our way around. Like, what if we had to go to the bathroom? But we said we would, and he went to the parents’ room to wait.
It was so rad. Rawnie and I had way front good seats. “How did Spooky … How did Gus do it?” Rawnie yelled in my ear. It was loud in there already, so a person had to yell.
“I dunno. Spook power?”
“Don’t say that.”
The opening band came on, and people whistled and clapped, but nobody screamed yet. These guys were okay, they had some good songs, but I think they were lip-synching or something. When they sang or when they moved around or jumped up or went down on their knees, it was like they were just going through motions. I don’t even remember what they looked like or their band’s name. They were not Neon Shadow.
When they went off and we sat waiting in the loud crowd, Rawnie yelled to me, “I can’t stand it! I’d faint right now, except I’d miss everything!”
“I’m going to cry, and I look like a sick duck when I cry!”
Everything went black. We grabbed each other’s hands. People started screaming, and so did we. And then the spotlight came on, and there they were, and everybody jumped up and stood on top of their seats, including us. And it was Nico, Nico and Ty, only about twenty feet away from Rawnie and me, and the music was all around us, the drummer pounding out a beat like a million hearts and the guitars carrying it up, up, crying out loud, like me, and Ty and Nico were singing.
“Life is sharp as a knife,” Rawnie sang along with them. “I know we won’t grow old, but I don’t see how we can ever die.” It was a song called “Scars.” We knew all their songs, but I couldn’t sing, I was all choked up. There they were, Nico and Ty, right there, breathing the same air with me; if I reached out hard enough maybe I could touch them.… When they sang, it was like a prayer, they meant it. They lived the music, they let it move them around, they surrendered to it even when it slammed them to their knees.
“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh.” Nico had real tears in his eyes. One crept out and shone on his face. On me it would be just a crybaby tear, but on him it looked like a jewel.
“Did they look at us?” Rawnie yelled in my ear. “Did they see us?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, my God, you really think so? I’d die just to say hi to them.”
I didn’t want to say hi to them—I wanted to be them. To be in a band, me and my buddies against the world, to be a beautiful rock outlaw playing hero guitar with a very all-time best friend by my side—it seemed like all I could ever want. And everything I knew I could never have.
Lights were flashing, the guitars turned tornado colors, and the keyboards thundered. Neon Shadow swung into “Dark Ride,” which was about dying, but I didn’t care if I died someday. I did what Nico and Ty did, I let myself give in, I let tornado guitars and thunder drums take me deep, deeper into themselves, farther than I had ever gone before into a place where everything was made of raw voice and bent metal and hard rock music.
And I was still standing on my chair, I was still stretching my hands into the air and yelling along with the song and crying, but something had changed. I could see better than ever before. I could see more than ever before. And I saw something big as Neon Shadow coiled under the roof of the stage, something waiting just above the lights, something dark. At first it seemed like a dark fog, a black smoke thing, a hanging cloud. But I kept looking at it, because it was right over Ty and Nico and because I wanted to be like them, I wanted to be a desperado, a hero, not a middle-school girl with her books over her chest. Not scared. And as I looked I could see it more clearly.
“Rawnie,” I whispered. There was no way she could have heard me, but I felt her hand clutch at mine. She had let the music take her deep into the same place. She saw it too.
It was—huge, bigger than any python or anaconda, but it was made of air and darkness, and it had wings, scaly ones, webbed like bat wings, right behind its blunt coffin-shaped head. It was a snake, or a black angel, or something I didn’t have a name for. And it was on the move. It slithered. I saw its tongue flicker like lightning. Its head swung down.
“Maybe it’s just part of the show?” Rawnie begged me.
It wasn’t. We both knew it wasn’t. But there were people packed all around us so we couldn’t move. There was nothing we could do.
It’s midnight and the flowers are buried
Time to take the long ride,
Time to take the dark ride.
Ty and Nico sang like a high wind, they had not glanced up, they did not see the huge death hanging right above them, but Nico looked pale and sick. The music did not move him around now. He stood by himself and swayed on his feet, and he was supposed to be at the other mike with Ty, I could see that by the way Ty was staring at him.
The six-foot black-coffin head reached for Nico.
“No!” I screamed, and I hid behind my hands.
Rawnie told me afterward that it didn’t bite him or even touch him. It just breathed on him, and he closed his eyes and fell flat on the stage. And the music stopped. The yelling and
screaming stopped, and everything got very quiet except for people asking each other what was happening.
When I looked again, I didn’t see any snake, any shadow or fog, nothing except Nico lying there.
Ty reached him first, and kneeled by him, and felt his neck and chest, and yelled, “Somebody call an ambulance!” Then I heard people crying, and they weren’t even me.
It seemed to take forever for the ambulance to come. Police came in and cleared most of the people out of the Arena, including us, and then Rawnie’s father didn’t know where to find us, and it was a mess. We just stood against a wall and hung on to each other. We couldn’t talk or anything. Mr. Stellow put his arms around both of us when he finally tracked us down, and he walked us to the car that way. He didn’t want us to see the ambulance go.
“I’m sorry,” he kept saying as if it was his fault if Nico died. Which of course it wasn’t, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. Unless …
“Do you think Gus sent that snake thing?” Rawnie whispered to me in the back of the car.
“Don’t,” I said. It made me feel cold, what she’d said. Why would Gus do a thing like that? But I knew what Rawnie meant. The snake had looked like it might have something to do with Gus. It was made of air and shadows, like the band that played in her backyard at dusk.
I felt so bad that I didn’t even want to talk to Gus when I got home. She and Dad were surprised to see me home so early and they wanted to know what had happened, but I wouldn’t tell them. I couldn’t talk about it. They could see I was really upset, so Dad called Rawnie’s place to find out what was going on while Gus helped me get to bed. After she left I just lay there with my eyes wide burning open in the dark, staring at those big heavy metal circles that swung in the windows. A little later Dad and Gus came to my door.
“It’s serious,” Dad said, “but Nico’s made it so far. He’s in the intensive care unit.”
Mr. Stellow was a prosthetic technician, so he knew a lot of the people at the hospital, and he had been able to find out what was wrong. Nico was unconscious because of some kind of rare syndrome. His blood cells were breaking apart, but there was nothing the hospital could do for him except try to keep him alive with transfusions and oxygen.
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