Opening Act (36 page)

When Shay awoke in the hospital, he was on a gurney but still in his own clothes. So things couldn't be that bad. He swung his legs over the side and felt a little twinge in his chest. He'd obviously pulled or sprained something, maybe broken a rib. If it was the latter, that was a problem. The tour started up again in just a few days. He needed to be leaping around onstage. Maybe with enough painkillers…

He was just wondering how he'd manage this when Pernita entered the room, looking so shiny and burnished she might've been sculpted in copper. All at once it occurred to him, she must have come straight from the dinner with the record executives he'd missed because of his sad, stupid attempt to rebel.

He steeled himself for the first onslaught of her anger and outrage.

But, amazingly, she dropped her purse onto a chair and came up and hugged him. “Oh, sugar-pie,” she said. “What a nightmare! I'm so glad you're all right.” Then she stood back and smiled at him. “And a hero, too!”

He blinked. “A hero?” It hurt his jaw to talk. He gave it a quick massage.

Pernita nodded. “You were so quick on your feet. Calling for help so soon, the way you did.”

Oh, yeah—it was coming back to him now. The crash. Jonah, slumped over the wheel. “Is he all right? Jonah?”

She nodded. “A little banged up. Some broken bones. He's got some physical therapy to look forward to. But he'll be okay in time for the Palladium.” She ran her hand down Shay's arm. “I just shudder to think what would've happened if you hadn't been there. That man's got a self-destructive streak a mile wide.”

This was emphatically not what Shay had been expecting. There were no questions about where he and Jonah had gone, or why. No demand that he account for his actions, defend his decisions. No furious accusations of ingratitude, of having missed the dinner she and her father had put together
just for him
. Could it be that Pernita actually
cared
for him? That the news he'd been in a crash made her realize the depth of her feeling for him?

He sure as hell hoped not. He couldn't imagine anything worse than Pernita being even
more
proprietary of him.

“Am I okay to go?” he said, having examined himself and found no bandages or any sign of treatment.

She nodded. “You're fine. They just gave you a sedative, 'cause you were apparently raving a bit when they brought you in.”

“I was?”

“Yes. It's silly. You kept going on about whether a forest is still a forest if it's lying down. Or something. I think you must've bonked your head.”

He took a deep breath. “Yeah. Probably.”

As they made their way down the corridor toward the exit, he said, “Calling 911 is hardly the mark of a hero. It's what any idiot in that situation would do.”

She gently brushed the hair out of his face. “Don't sell yourself short,” she said. Then she slipped her arm through his and added, in a breathy little whisper,
“Hero.”

It wasn't till the next day that he figured out why she'd reacted the way she had. The news of Shay and Jonah's accident was a big local story covered by all the newscasts. There was footage of the wrecked car, some concert clips of both Overlords and Jonah and the Wail, and there was an interview with Halbert Hasque, who said that Shay reacted “like an absolute hero” and probably saved Jonah's life.

It was ridiculous, of course. Jonah's life hadn't been in any danger; he'd just been banged up. The only reason he was even unconscious was probably from all the “party mix” he'd ingested. (And in truth, the only favor Shay had done him was to take that vial of poison and hurl it far, far away before the ambulance arrived.) But of course, that wouldn't be a news story. The flat, unglamorous, messy truth of the matter—that Shay and Jonah had gotten exactly what they deserved for acting out the way they had—served no one. So why settle for the truth, when the razor-sharp mind of Halbert Hasque saw a way to make a fictionalized version profitable for everyone involved?

That's why Pernita hadn't been angry, or accusatory, or even curious. The accident on the highway was a much, much bigger boost to Shay's career than any dinner with record executives ever could have been.

CHAPTER 19

So, it turned out all those sappy songs about following your dream were just a load of bullshit.

Loni lay on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, and actually found herself missing her crack—the hairline fissure in her room at Zee's place, which had been the focus of so much of her scrutiny and analysis. If she'd had something like that still in her life, some proof of the inherent crappiness and shoddiness of everything, everywhere, then she'd never have fooled herself into thinking she could ever achieve anything, ever create anything lasting or beautiful.

By rights, she should hate Shay Dayton, too, with his yammering on about “jumping the barricade.” But she couldn't. He, at least, had admitted it was a risk. You jump the barricade, you might get shot. And Loni was certainly feeling bullet-riddled at the moment.

She'd drawn a pretty fair crowd for her reading, standing room only, even. Props to social media. Mindlessly inviting everyone she knew—students, fellow faculty, friends from years gone by, not to mention a pretty good swath of people she didn't know at all (any unfamiliar name that floated her way on Facebook or Twitter)—had really done the job.

Too bad she couldn't say the same about her poems.

The reaction to them had been polite at best, bewildered at worst. Just the memory of all those blank faces staring at her whenever she looked up from her book—faces that seemed to ask,
Is that it? Do we clap now? Or is there more?—
made her want to pull the blanket up over her face and just hide there till the crack of doom or the zombie apocalypse or whatever.

She'd managed to sell nineteen copies, which hadn't sounded so bad till she factored in that she'd brought a box of fifty. Byron had told her she was nuts. “Fifty copies at a reading? Jesus, Loni, Seamus Heaney doesn't sell that.”

“Well, no, he wouldn't,” Loni had replied as she packed up her unsold stock. “Being dead.”

It was the kind of cheap shot she usually refrained from scoring off him, but she was angry at his never having supported her from the moment she'd told him what she was doing. “For God's sake,” he'd said, “what does the world need with
another
twenty-something chick poet? Do you
really
think you've got anything to say that hasn't been said countless times before by women
significantly
more gifted than you?” And when she'd accused him of cruelty, he'd gotten all shrill about it and said, “You stupid bitch, it's
kindness
. I'm trying to save you from the critical lambasting you're going to get when you go public with your little book of valentines.”

And then, when she'd compiled the first manuscript, he—now contrite and so very, very sorry he'd
ever
said a thing to discourage her—asked to see it, and against her better judgment she'd let him. He'd immediately taken it to the kitchen table, sat down with it, and started reading while she did the dinner dishes. After five minutes, he'd taken out a red pencil and started marking it up.

She'd thrown down the dish towel, whirled on him, and said, “What the
hell
do you think you're doing?”

He'd looked up at her, completely astonished. “What? Do you want my help or not?”

“Not.
Jesus, Byron, you asked to
read
it. I agreed to let you. That's
all
.”

He'd looked down at the manuscript, then up at her again. “You're awfully goddamn confident for someone who actually wrote, ‘the burthen of the insubstantial.' ”

So she'd taken it away from him, and he hadn't read it again until it was printed in book form, at which time she could hardly stop him. His complete silence with regard to his opinion was deafeningly eloquent. And then, of course, he'd capped it all off by actually getting into some kind of
fight
at the actual reading. He had, in fact, actually physically
punched
someone. In a
bookstore
.

Not just that, but he'd been all
proud
about it, strutted around afterward like he was waiting for her thanks or something. Was he out of his mind? After dumping all over her work in private, he thought she'd thank him for going off like an ape at someone who'd just been
talking
while she read? She hadn't even been aware of any muttered conversation in the audience until Byron had drawn her attention by getting all
High Noon
over it.

She'd managed to keep her composure and continued reading through the entire incident. She wanted to pretend it had never even happened, but afterwards it seemed like it was all anyone could talk about. Not Loni's work—not the verses she'd slaved over, sometimes for years—but her Neanderthal boyfriend avenging her honor.

There'd been a moment, too, when someone had mentioned the guy he'd confronted being a musician, someone who was currently in the news. Loni knew that Shay Dayton was in LA doing publicity and had immediately thought,
Could it be?
But then some young blond guy had said another name, Judah or Jonah or something, and Loni felt ridiculous that she'd ever thought it a possibility that Shay could tear himself away from his celebrity dream life to come and see her, even if he'd known she was doing a public reading, which of course he didn't.

And yet just that flickering thought of Shay Dayton, that momentarily conjured image of lean, leonine Shay, with his careless grin and his what-the-hell attitude, served to make preening, self-important Byron look all the more asinine. What was she doing with him? Why had she put herself under his protection—his
control
? Had she really been
that
afraid of living life on her own terms?

She'd refused to speak to him on the drive back to campus, and when they got home she'd refused to sleep with him. So there she was on the couch, unable to get comfortable on its lumpy cushions and kept awake by contemplating the wreckage of her life. What she wanted, more than anything, was to get up and walk out. Leave all this behind and start over somewhere else.

But she couldn't.

There was no place for her to go.

She'd just managed to drift off into a restless, fitful sleep when she became aware of someone in the room and sat up with a start.

It was Byron, in his wrinkled cotton bathrobe.

“This is stupid,” he said. “Come to bed.”

And so she gathered up the blanket, got up, and followed him to bed.

That was the way it had to be, apparently. The way it had been since she'd arrived here. The way she'd
chosen
for it to be.

Byron would call the shots for her.

Byron would tell her what to do.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 20

Zee stamped the snow off her boots, then entered the apartment, fell into the first available chair, and pulled them off. She massaged her toes to warm them up, then padded into the kitchen and put the teapot on to boil. When her phone vibrated, she took it from her pocket, checked the screen to see who was calling, and smiled. She tapped Talk and said, “Hey, rock star.”