Wild Awake (18 page)

“My phone was dead,” I blurt. “I went out of town and forgot my charger. I went to visit Denny in Victoria. I just got back, like, five minutes ago. The bus from the ferry took longer than I thought.”

“You went to visit
Denny
?” Lukas says.

“Um. Yeah.”

I don’t mean to lie, but the truth is suddenly too complicated to explain, especially to Lukas, especially in front of Lukas’s mom. How am I supposed to tell them I just spent the better part of forty-eight hours snarfling with Bicycle Boy? Lukas doesn’t even know about Skunk except as that sketchy guy who fixed my tire the night I biked to the Downtown Eastside. There hasn’t exactly been time to give him an update. And Petra would flip if she knew the truth. Plus, I haven’t eaten anything except omelets and toast for two days; that alone would be enough to make her call in the riot police.

Lukas looks different tonight, and it takes me a moment to figure out why. Then I realize he’s wearing all black, like he wanted us to do so we’d look like a serious band. Then I realize I’m still wearing Skunk’s aunt’s big-butt sweatpants and Skunk’s old T-shirt with no bra.
Real smooth, Kiri. Way to make a hot first impression for your band
.

“Next time you remember to tell somebody where you go,” says Petra, casting me a stern look in the rearview mirror. She’s wearing glasses with dark green frames, which make her look even more stern than usual. “I called your mother, and she said you were probably sleeping over at the house of a girlfriend. But if you were gone for any longer, I would have called the police.”

Petra pulls up in front of the venue and lets us out. She drives away to find parking while Lukas, his dad, and I hustle the gear up the stairs. I bang my synth on the wall by accident, and the seam holding the two pieces of silver plastic together pops apart.

“Crap.”

“What’s going on?” barks Lukas. We stop in the middle of the stairs, staggering under our armloads of gear.

“I think I just broke my synth.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It’s not my fault. If I wasn’t carrying your cymbal, I could have—”

“Can you fix it?” he squeals.

“I don’t know, it looks like—”

“Pop it back together. It doesn’t look like the electronics are damaged.”

“I don’t think I can—”

“Just try.”

“God, Lukas. Chill out.”

I feel around the edge of the synth. The top and bottom halves have completely split apart. I think a screw must have popped out when it hit the wall.

“Let’s just go upstairs, and I’ll figure this out when I’m not carrying half a drum kit,” I say.

Lukas stomps up the stairs. I pause to adjust the instruments I’m carrying so the edge of Lukas’s cymbal stops slicing into my arm. A few steps later, I stop again because I’m close to dropping a drumstick. By the time I get to the top of the stairs, Lukas and his dad are nowhere to be seen. I spot some of our gear in a pile by the wall where they dumped it. The Train Room is packed and loud, and it’s too dim to see anything except a crowded mass of horny underage bodies. I stand in the doorway, craning my neck.

Up onstage, there’s a punk band playing—one of our rivals, assuming we even get to play. All the kids in the band go to our school: straight-edge Alex with the Mohawk, Derick Mason, Ayo Ngebi, and that girl Nikky Sharp, who won’t even talk to you if you’re not punk. They sound like a shitty version of the Dropkick Murphys, all raspy-voiced shouting and bashing drums.

I drop my gear and go to hunt down Lukas and his dad. I find them at the back of the room, talking to a short, tightly built guy in his twenties with a black beard like a massive halo engulfing his whole face. I join them, panting.

“Hey. What’s the word?”

Lukas doesn’t even look at me.

“I can squeeze you guys in at the end,” says Blackbeard, squinting down at the clipboard he’s holding, “but you only get one song, not three. That’s four minutes, tops.”

“Can’t we get a little more time if we set up fast?”

Lukas loses his attractiveness when he pleads. His voice gets whiny like a little kid’s.
Shush, Lukas
, I beam to him telepathically.
Just be thankful he’s letting us play
.

Blackbeard crosses his hairy arms over his chest and shakes his head.

“Sorry, guys. Venue closes at midnight. We need everybody out of here.”

Lukas’s shoulders sag, and I can see him gearing up for another round of begging. I butt in, casting Blackbeard a knowing smile. “One song’s fine. Thank you.”

Blackbeard looks grateful to be talking to someone who isn’t hysterical. He nods at me, uncrosses his arms and walks away. Lukas moves to chase after him. I grab his arm. “Don’t worry about it, Lukas. We still get to play.”

“One song?”

“We can kick ass with one song. Plus, this gives us time to fix my synth. D’you think your mom has any duct tape in the car?”

Lukas looks at me like I’ve just asked him if his mom keeps a bazooka in the glove compartment. “I don’t know! How am I supposed to know?”

I don’t think I ever realized this before, but Lukas really doesn’t handle stress very well. “Come on. Let’s find your mom.”

Lukas’s dad, who has been standing there silently this whole time, starts pushing his way back toward the entrance. We follow him, avoiding each other’s eyes. I can’t tell if Lukas is pissed at me for being late, or if he’s just embarrassed to be seen with me in this outfit.

The Dropkick Sucktards play for another ten minutes, during which Lukas sulks and I do my best to cobble my synth together with a box of Band-Aids the manager gives me from the first aid kit, which he says is the only tapelike substance he could find. As long as I don’t bang on the keys too hard, it should hold together for one song. I can fix it when I get home.

Lukas’s parents sip coffee from the refreshment booth and browse the internet on their phones, seemingly unaware of how out of place they look among all the teenage scenesters. That’s one thing I love about Lukas’s parents: they always seem comfortable wherever they are. My parents would last about two minutes in here before saying it was too loud and going home.

After the punks vacate the stage, there’s a twenty-minute set change. A drippy indie band from another high school goes on. Their lead singer is a girl with bleached-blond hair and purple highlights who seems more interested in looking cute than in getting the notes right. She
oohs
and
aahs
her way through the chorus until I’m ready to throw up. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they play three minutes overtime and Blackbeard doesn’t even stop them.

When Blackbeard finally gives us the nod to set up, I feel a stab of guilt. It’s already eleven forty-five. Lukas made a big point of signing up weeks ago so we’d get to play first. Now, even the judges look tired.

“We got this, Lukas,” I hiss while we’re slapping together the drum kit.

Lukas tightens the screw on the high hat.

“Careful with that. You’ll scratch it,” he says.

I leave him to it and go back to my busted synth. While I’m crouching to plug it in, I sneak a peek at the crowd. A bunch of kids who were here to see the blond girl’s band went home after the last set, but there are still enough people left that the room’s not totally empty. Lukas’s parents are waiting patiently, still nursing the dregs of their coffee. I wonder where my parents are. I imagine them sleeping in a big white bed in a Luxury Berth with waves lapping the porthole; moving slowly down the breakfast buffet; petting manta rays; reading trashy romances on the deck; pawing through a rack of pink coral necklaces at a gift shop, trying to decide which one to buy for Auntie Moana.

“Kiri.”

Lukas is calling me.

“You ready?”

“Oh. Yup.” I spring up and get into place behind my synth. Blackbeard ambles onto the stage and announces that Sonic Drift will be playing a quick set to wrap up the night.

I shoot Lukas a we’ll-discuss-this-later look. Sonic Drift
my ass
.

There’s sparse applause. Skeptical glances. People are staring at my sweatpants, which I already forgot I was wearing. I wonder if it’s really obvious under these stage lights that I’m not wearing a bra. A riptide of regret starts to pull me under.
Sorry, Lukas
. But there’s no time to apologize now. I hear Lukas count to four and then it’s on.

The moment we start playing, the last two hours of panic and lateness and getting yelled at by Lukas fade away, and I’m left in a golden dimension of sound. The synth possesses me. The purple stage lights are hot on my skin. Knowing we’re screwed just makes us play better. There’s no way we can win, therefore we have nothing to lose. I blitz up and down the keys, launching chords like bombs and deploying sixteenth notes like heavy artillery. At the end of the song, the last chord I play sends the synth flying. It sails through the air and explodes when it lands, people dodging the synth-shrapnel left and right. You can tell it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to them, this synth-bomb. The crowd goes wild. I fall to my knees and yell, “Good night, beautiful people!”

I could listen to them cheering forever.

While we’re packing up our gear
,
Blackbeard comes up and tells us the judges want us to play in the finals next week.

Lukas practically faints with happiness, and I dance around him, singing, “We did it! We did it!” until I’m hoarse. The car ride home is victorious. Petra pulls into an all-night diner, and we order garlic fries and watch the video Lukas’s dad took on his phone again and again. “It is incredible how you kids play,” Petra says, and she sounds so genuinely
incredulous
I sort of fall in love with her.

After Lukas and his parents drop me off at my house, I’m too wired to go to sleep. I can’t stop marveling over the coincidences, the way every little thing slid into place. If I hadn’t gone for that bike ride on Thursday night, I wouldn’t have run into Skunk at midnight mass. If I hadn’t run into Skunk, I wouldn’t have made us late for Battle of the Bands. If we hadn’t been late, we wouldn’t have played like we did, raw and driven and wild. If I hadn’t banged my synth against the wall, it wouldn’t have exploded so spectacularily. If my synth hadn’t exploded, the crowd wouldn’t have gone wild, and we wouldn’t have been chosen to move on to the next round. Every disaster, every whim, every seemingly random decision came together to make this night happen. There are no mistakes, I realize—just detours whose significance only become clear when you see the whole picture at once.

Even though it has started to rain again, I decide to celebrate my official launch into musical stardom by taking my bike on a personal midnight mass. I want to go back to Stanley Park and visit the totem poles and cross the Lions Gate Bridge again and turn around and look at the city lights from the North Shore, but this time I want it to be just me, like a pilgrimage, a victory lap, a way of saying,
Hello, Universe! Thank you for all the mystical wonders that have been sprouting up in my life, like Skunk and finding Sukey and Battle of the Bands and Om Shanti Om and also Hare Krishna, O Universe, Amen
.

First thing I do is change out of the sweatpants and put on clothes that are more befitting of the occasion—gold tights and green boots and a stretchy black dress that makes me feel like Catwoman. I don’t bother with a raincoat. I want to be wet. I want to be kissed by all two million raindrops in the sky. My hair is a mess. I brush it and sweep it into a towering updo. Now my neck is bare. I shiver.

Good
.

I hunt around my room for my iPod so I can have the right music, then stand in the kitchen mixing orange juice and brandy and vodka and Perrier because the Universe demands a ritual dram. I pour it into a pink frosty mug I find in the freezer door. I declare a toast to the Universe and drink the ice-cold witches’ brew standing right there in the kitchen in my boots. I mix another one. But once I’ve drunk the second drink, I still don’t feel ready to go, and the words
drunk
and
drink
start a little war in my head,
drink-drunk-drank
, then morph into raindrops that plink and plunk like a toy piano.

It comes to me in a flash. The shoes! Sukey’s silver shoes. I wrestle off the boots, scamper upstairs, grab the shoes, and sit on the stairs, strapping them onto my feet. The high heels make it hard to wobble down the stairs, but I do it with the grace and poise of a young Marilyn Monroe. I grab my iPod, bust through the garage door, and crash around in the garage, trying to find my bicycle in the dark because the motion-detecting light refuses to come on and I’m too busy to find the button that turns it on manually.

There’s a strange music surging out of my bones, the rhythm pulsing, the volume getting louder and louder. Maybe it will drown me out if it keeps going.

Maybe I don’t care.

When I put my hands on the metal post of my bicycle, it’s like getting an electric shock. The cold flashes through me, touching a match to the weightless golden kindling that’s been building up inside me all night, and I feel such a burst of delight I let out a high animal yip that reverberates circuslike on the cement walls. I wheel my bike out through the side door, not bothering to lock it. When I swing my leg over the frame, it’s like that moment in
Frankenstein
when the monster comes alive: I feel my bicycle tense slightly, ready, alert, its honed aluminum heartbeat syncing up with my own.

It’s windy tonight, damp gusts filled with raindrops. As I charge down the street, the leaves shimmy in the treetops and the stop signs flex and bang on their poles. Sukey’s silver shoes are slippery against the pedals. Wind reaches down to tug my hair out of its updo. As I ride along the beach, I greet the lampposts and street signs and telephone booths as if they’re everyone I know lined up to see me off.

Why, good evening, Nelson Chow, fancy seeing you out here! Fancy seeing you as a lamppost, a straight and tall and devious disguise
.

Lukas, hello, you street sign! Kelsey Bartlett, hello, you sewer grate! Skunk, you lovely caterpillar, hello!