“What was it?”
He ran his hand through his short, curly brown hair. “I don’t want to tell you.”
“OK, I’ll just call you Herman.” I held up my hands to show him I was joking. “That was really cool what you guys did. Letting us hang and listen and everything.”
He looked back to our table, where the guys and Emily were watching. She waved and he waved back.
“Is that you guys’ boyfriends?”
I laughed. “No. I just met them.”
“What’s wrong with people you just met? You just met me.”
I couldn’t decide if he was coming on to me or what. I got quiet and so did he. I didn’t mean for it to get awkward, and I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit upset if he was coming on to me, it just seemed like it would be different for a famous person. Like he’d send an assistant to flirt or something.
He broke the silence as we filled our plates. “Have you ever been to this part of Virginia before?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t been to many places.”
“You should. Travel broadens the mind.”
We less awkwardly chitchatted about pointless things. I followed him until a couple security guys stepped out to stop me. Quasi waved them away.
“It’s cool,” he said. “She’s just trying to kill me.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize I’d followed you back here.” I now saw the restricted area was not only a separate section but was also guarded.
“No worries. Want to join us?”
“Um.” I looked back at my friends.
“Ask your friends to come too. We’ve got tons of room.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “As long as those two aren’t your boyfriends.”
Definitely flirting. I didn’t have to be asked twice. I also didn’t have to actually go get them, because they were staring at me. I waved. They came running.
Quasi guffawed. “You guys forgot your plates.”
They went back for them, and he waited till they returned to walk us all past the security guards.
“Dude!” Davis said.
“Dude,” Todd echoed.
“Dude.” Quasi held up his hands and laughed.
* * *
I was starting to like Quasi. C Note was still a little standoffish, but Emily was winning him over, probably by being beautiful. Even Bevan was coming alive, though I was learning he had a naturally stoic disposition. You could tell they were all friends, not just bandmates.
They were seated at a big table with a bunch of roadies and techies and security guys, all long hair, tattoos, and testosterone. More roadies overflowed to a couple other scattered tables. I ended up at the main table with Quasi, and Emily sat near C Note and Bevan. The guys ended up with some support crew, but they seemed pretty excited by that, so I wasn’t worried about them.
The thing that became clear about the band was that they really liked fried chicken.
“You guys eat a lot of fried chicken,” I said, as Quasi started on his third piece.
“We just got here from Boston,” C Note said, by way of explanation.
“They don’t have good food in Boston?”
“It’s OK. But the farther south you go, the better it is. Austin has the best.”
Emily tried to talk about music, though they seemed less interested in that. I guess because they lived it all day, every day. They were all cool guys, not at all stuck up or full of themselves like you’d think, except C Note, who was a little full of himself. Quasi was really nice, asking us all kinds of questions about what kinds of classes we took, our families, and stuff. He was fascinated by my job at the funeral home.
“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen there?” Quasi asked.
I couldn’t answer that honestly. Probably it would be the time we hired a ghoul and then caught him trying to eat a corpse, though that had weirdly been funny.
“One time,” I said, though I probably shouldn’t have, “An old woman came back to life.”
“No shit?” Quasi put down his chicken leg.
“She wasn’t dead.” This wasn’t exactly true. I’d just done something very dumb and removed the salt that was keeping this particular witch incapacitated. It was my first day. I didn’t mention this.
“What happened?” Quasi asked.
I couldn’t even begin to answer that one. “She died. She just came back for a little while. Kind of like sleepwalking.” I don’t know why I described it like that.
“That’s kind of sad.”
“I guess. I never thought about it like that. I mean, I was caught up in what was happening. I didn’t really think about it, you know, in emotional terms.”
He shook his head. “I bet it was pretty freaky. I’ve heard that sometimes bodies will move and stuff.”
I nodded. “They’ve got wicked gas sometimes, if they’ve decomposed a bit.”
“Wow.”
“Actually, one time we had a victim of a serial killer.”
“No shit?” Quasi considered this. “Did you—“
“This is like really good dinner conversation,” Emily interjected.
“Sorry.” I was actually glad she’d stopped me. I was on the verge of talking about something I shouldn’t.
“Hey, I asked,” Quasi said.
After we finished, we all stood around full and happy until Emily invited them back to our campsite.
“It’s not the Taj Mahal,” she said. “But we could hang out.”
“Yeah, man,” Davis said. “We can totally smoke up.”
The guys looked at each other. Bevan yawned and shook his head, but C Note and Quasi agreed to come along with a couple of the roadies. I was surprised, but they were probably just happy to have some different people to talk to since they spent all their time together. We piled into Emily’s jeep and her friends’ car and headed back.
I was up front in the jeep’s passenger seat with Emily driving. Quasi and C Note were in the back. Emily had recovered from her fan-girl lapse and wore a slightly amused, slightly mysterious, damned sexy look. She reached to adjust the rearview mirror so she could see the boys, and, I suspected, so they could see her. I still wasn’t sure which one she was interested in, or if she even had a favorite, or if I was just a crazy person. I wasn’t used to having female friends.
“So, um, how long have you guys been on tour?” I asked, trying to dispel the tension that I was probably making up in my head.
“What?” Quasi said. The sides were off, so it was difficult to hear. I yelled my question. Quasi answered and I couldn’t understand what he’d said, so he had to repeat that.
“About six months straight,” was what I finally understood. “We had a couple weeks off before that, and about another six months of touring before that.”
“You must be fucking exhausted,” I said as we pulled up to a red light.
“No way,” Emily said. “I bet it’s exciting. I would give anything to travel like that, just playing your music, sharing your art. It must be amazing.”
I felt a twinge of jealousy at how she stepped right in and took over the conversation, and hated myself for it a little bit. I resolved to stop being an idiot. Or, well, you know, to try…
Quasi shrugged. “It is. Well, at first, it’s terrifying, because you’re out on the road, broke, and it’s all new to you. But if you’re lucky, you have good friends, and eventually you learn to settle down and enjoy things. But it’s lonely.” He made a mock sad face and I laughed.
“And boring,” C Note said.
“Really?” Emily stared into the rearview.
C Note nodded. “Everything blends together. Everywhere starts to look the same.”
“But you learn to find a balance.” Quasi held his hands out with one palm up and the other down and then switched them. “So you don’t go crazy.”
“You guys have probably traveled all over the world,” I said. The light had changed, but Emily was driving slowly so
she could keep up with the conversation.
“Yeah, pretty much.” Quasi shrugged. “Mostly big places, cities, you know, where they have clubs.”
“If you’re not careful,” C Note added, “You can miss all the interesting things. We fly or drive in, hit the venue, and then leave, and that could be all we see. But we always make an effort to at least wander around some and see more of the city.”
“Cool.” Emily nodded. “That’s smart.”
“Did you gain some kind of mystical insight? Like, are people just people everywhere you go, that kind of thing?” I asked.
C Note nodded. “People are just people, but in some places, they’re really fucked up.”
Quasi shrugged in agreement. “But they’re fucked up here too sometimes.”
“That’s very true,” I said.
It wasn’t a long drive, but it was long enough for us all to run out of stuff to say. Emily and C Note were paying more attention to each other, and it seemed like Quasi was focusing on me. It was nice, but I wasn’t sure I was giving him the right signals. I mean, the last time I liked someone he turned out to be a demon hell-bent on killing me, so I was a little shy these days.
* * *
When we got back to the campsite, it was dark and quiet. We settled in and the guys made a bonfire. Emily didn’t leave C Note’s side, which I guess solved that little conundrum for me. Quasi hung around with me, being almost as shy as I was. First, I couldn’t find a place to sit, so we pulled the picnic table closer to the fire and sat on that while C Note and Emily cuddled in our camp chairs. Then, Quasi wouldn’t sit until I sat. It was like awkward musical chairs.
After we got settled, Davis broke out the weed and offered it around. Todd took a hit and passed it to Quasi, who drew deeply off the joint. He passed it to C Note, who hit it and then sent it back to Quasi. The two shared it back and forth between them.
“Party foul,” I said.
“Sorry. We’ve just gotten into the habit.” Quasi offered it to me.
“I’ve never actually smoked before.”
“The first time I smoked, I hallucinated Aunt Jemima standing in the doorway of C Note’s dad’s house, shaking her head in disappointment.”
C Note laughed.
“And Averitt, man, remember him? You thought he was pulling his face off like a mask?”
“He laced the joint,” Quasi said. “With PCP. You don’t usually hallucinate like that with weed.”
“You’re not making a convincing case, here,” I said.
“You’re funny.” He stuck the joint into my mouth, and I inhaled deeply. “Suck it in and hold it.”
The smoke was hot, and I really wanted to cough. I gasped, but Quasi put his hand over my mouth, and I somehow managed to hold the smoke in. It tasted earthy, kind of bitter, like some green that vegans make fake meat out of, maybe kale, but stronger. After several seconds, he removed his hand, and I exhaled. I sputtered for about two minutes.
“That’s good. It hits you when you cough.”
He hit the joint again, and I watched him hold in the smoke. He nodded and then breathed smoke toward the fire.
“Want it again?” I shook my head. “Here, I’ll shotgun it.”
Before I could ask what that meant, he sucked smoke in and then put his lips close to mine. A thrill shivered over me and I gasped a little, and he exhaled pot smoke into my mouth. I inhaled it, trying not to giggle or shake like the fifteen-year-old girl I felt like. This time, I didn’t cough as much.
“Y’all got anything to drink?” C Note asked. The guys came back with a cooler and distributed beer around. I washed the taste of weed out of my mouth with the taste of horse urine, since it was cheap beer. Or maybe that’s just how beer is.
“This is worse than the weed,” Quasi said.
C Note and Emily were chatting with the guys and Tony and Doug, the roadies who’d come along with them. Quasi took my hand and drew me over to sit on a stump a little away from them.
“So tell me about Daisy Janney.” He closed his eyes.
The pot was kicking in, I think. I felt warm and over-inflated like a hot air balloon. I had a hard time focusing on anything, and even though I felt like everything was slowing down, my thoughts were jumping from one thing to the next, almost too fast to keep track of. I tried to focus and answer him.
“Not much to tell. I’m just a college student.” I realized I was grinning too much and stopped. Then I got scared he might think I was upset and grinned again. Being high was tiring.
“Who works at a funeral home where sometimes the bodies don’t stay dead.”
I don’t know if it was because he was nice or I was high. Probably because I was high. “It’s not just a normal funeral home.”
“No?”
I shook my head, pot-serious. “You know how like vampires, for example, have to be killed a certain way? With a stake? Well, if you sent a dead vampire to a normal funeral home, they’d pull the stake out, and bam, it would come back to life. So we cater to stuff like that. I guess you could say we’re specialists.”
He looked at me. I smiled big. Then I realized I was doing the one thing I wasn’t supposed to do: telling a normie the truth.
“Sorry. I must’ve smoked too much.”
He laughed. “You’re fucking with me hard.”
“Yeah.” I looked away. Fear settled over me like a cold blanket.
“Whoa,” he said. “You’re serious.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m just fucking with you. I’m high. Let’s talk about something else.”
“You are serious.” He leaned in. “Like zombies?”
I was screwed. “Not really. I mean, I’ve never seen a zombie in real life.”
“But you’re saying they’re real.” His eyes were like two moons.
I shrugged, trying to look nonchalant even though I was freaking out. “Wouldn’t know unless I saw one.”
He stared at me hard for what felt like about fifteen minutes. It might’ve been fifteen seconds or fifteen hours. I tried smiling again but immediately stopped and immediately started again. I bet I looked like a crazy person, but he was stoned too, so he probably didn’t even notice.
“So that woman you mentioned that wasn’t dead. What about her?”
“She was pissed. I mean, upset. Wouldn’t you be if someone thought you were dead? But you weren’t?”
“What did you do?”
“My bosses handled it.” Sort of. Not really.
“Wow. That’s crazy.”
“Yeah.” I was blushing so hard I thought I might die.
“So like, what was her deal?”
“I shouldn’t be talking about this.” I’d always heard weed made you paranoid, and it was kicking in, hardcore. I imagined my bosses—who’d made me sign a confidentiality agreement—already on the phone with their lawyers. I tried to laugh.
“I’m fucking with you,” I said half-heartedly.
He shook his head. “You’re not. You’re serious.”
I tried to smile, but he was eying me, hard. I sighed.
“I had no idea about any of this stuff. I was just a broke college student who couldn’t even get a job at McDonald’s. I answered an ad at a funeral home, and on my first day, they brought in this woman in a body bag full of salt.” I clapped a hand over my mouth; it was my turn to go wide-eyed.
“Salt?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I said too much.”
“Come on.” He nudged me. “Just spill it.”
We looked at each other, and he started giggling. “Spill the salt.” That made me giggle, and then we lost it, guffawing like…well, like two stoned people laughing at something that wasn’t really funny.
When I caught my breath, I explained. “Yeah. Salt purifies, see? So certain things are affected by it. Witches, for example.”
“She was a witch?”
“I didn’t know that. So I cleaned out the salt and she came back to life.” I laughed again.
“What did you do?”
I couldn’t stop giggling. “I freaked out and tried to get away from her. I thought she was just some old woman, you know, but she cursed me. She blamed me for killing her.” I mimicked her waking up, waving her arms around in anger.
“That’s fucked up.” He was giggling too.
There was nothing even remotely funny about it, but there you go. “Yeah.”
“So are you still cursed?”
I shook my head. “I beat it.”
“Wow.”
I shrugged.
Quasi went quiet. “So what about werewolves? Are they real?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I just work there.”
He nodded. I couldn’t stop grinning at him, and he smiled at me too. I was afraid I’d said too much, but it also felt really good to tell somebody the truth. I’d been hiding it from everyone for so long. Plus I was pretty sure he liked me now.
“Listen.” I said turning serious. “I could get in a lot of trouble if anyone knew I told you this stuff. It’s supposed to be secret. Like, completely secret.”
“Yeah.” He nodded too many times. “I can dig it. I’ll keep it on the DL.”
“Thanks.” We grinned like idiots.
“You know, one time I saw a ghost.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “It was in a haunted house. Doesn’t compare with witches, though.”
A warm silence descended. If I hadn’t been so stoned, I would’ve made out with him, but as it was, I was doing good not talking about something embarrassing like asking him if he’d ever tried to make out with himself, which I totally had, one time…
“What’s the coolest show you’ve ever played?” I asked, trying to keep things going.
His eyes came alive as he started to describe touring Europe, playing in Germany and Amsterdam. Pretty soon it was like we’d never mentioned my job or all the stuff I wasn’t supposed to talk about. It was invigorating to listen to someone talk about something he loved so much. I don’t know if I’d ever cared that much about anything in my life, not even Stargate: SG1.
The more he talked, well, the more I watched the way his lips moved, like two aliens. I leaned closer and closer, watching them. I could see some fuzz on his upper lip, and it made me think of a caterpillar, which made me envision them emerging from a cocoon.
Tall, Dark and Hairy (The Necro-Files Book 3) Page 4
