The Rest of Us Just Live Here (18 page)

Which, I admit, is kinda catchy.

“Are you
singing
?” Mel says to me, eyes wide.

“No,” I say, too fast.

The amphitheatre lights go down, which is ridiculous as it’s still daylight, but never mind, eighteen hundred little girls burst into simultaneous overwhelmed tears. I think my eardrums are about to explode. Meredith, though, is practically levitating. She’s between me and Mel and she’s so excited she doesn’t know whether to hold our hands or clasp her own or just stand there and hyperventilate. She tries to do all three, which basically makes her like every girl here.

She looks up at me, tears in her eyes. “I’m so happy.”

“They’re not even on yet.”

She just cries some more.

The screams get even louder as someone comes onstage, but they drop respectfully quickly as we all see it’s a girl in a big-deal hospital wheelchair being brought on by what I’m guessing is her mother and a nurse. The girl’s got an oxygen tank with her and looks really bad. The non-nurse/possible mother takes the microphone that’s centre stage.

“Hi, everyone,” she says, “I’m Carly’s mom.”

There’s another huge scream.

“Thank you,” she says. “Carly has something she’d like to say to you.”

The audience quiets down. Every girl there is pulled as taut as a bow to listen to Carly. I hear a girl behind me say, mournfully, “I wish
I
had cancer.”

Carly’s mom brings the microphone over to Carly. We can hear her ragged breathing for several beats before she says anything.

“Yikes,” Mel mouths to me with a sad look.

“Would you…” Carly says. Breath, breath. “Please…” Breath, breath. “Welcome…” Breath, breath. “Bolts…”

That’s all she gets out because the audience screams like they’re watching their families be murdered in front of them.

Bolts of Fire are walking onstage.

There are five of them, they’ve got names, I could probably tell you what they are if I search my memory, but how can it matter? The noise in here is so bad my phone is vibrating even though it’s not ringing. Mel has her fingers firmly in her ears, and I can see a father in the row in front of us sympathetically pointing to the earplugs he’s wearing.

The Bolts of Fire guys – all in fashionable stubble with fashionable lopsided hair that manages to weirdly suggest that they’re both thirty years old and fifteen years old
at the same time
– bask in the applause for a minute, then gesture for the audience to quiet down. This takes a while, and even then it’s only relatively. The dark-haired one who does most of the singing talks anyway.

“Thank you all so much!” he says.

Another skull-fracturing roar.

“Ready for a good time, people of–” and then he names, not our little town, but the larger town about an hour away. The audience roars anyway. Mel shoots me an irritated look, but I can’t hear a word she says.

“We’re here today,” says the blond one who doesn’t sing very much but who’s prettier than the others, “for one special Bolts of Fire fan.”

Another roar as they put a Bolts of Fire cowboy hat on Carly’s head.

“We’re going to start,” says the one whose voice you can always tell is modified by computer to make him hit the right notes, “with Carly’s favourite song.”

“Maybe you know this one,” says the main singer.

He sings an “oooh” and holds it, the others joining in one at a time. I look at Meredith. She’s pretty much tearing her shirt in ecstatic weeping. I put an arm around her and she leans into me, holding on like I’m comforting her at a funeral.

Then Bolts of Fire, all together, a cappella, surrounding poor Carly in her wheelchair:
“I broke Bold Sapphire’s heart on the day she turned eighteen…”

And the scream from the crowd is so loud that it takes a second before we realize that a bomb has gone off.

At first, we all assume it’s some kind of bizarrely timed firework from behind the stage, but then pieces of stage set and burning curtain come flying straight at us, Bolts of Fire have been knocked to the ground, and Carly’s mom and nurse have wrapped themselves around Carly’s body to protect her.

As the debris starts falling – fortunately it seems to be mostly styrofoam and cheap fabric – the screaming of the audience changes so much you can feel it in your body, a rising terror that seems to come out of the ground like a flood of water, rising up to choke you before you even start to swim.

We are in the most incredible danger.

I pick Meredith up immediately, knocking her hat to the floor. She’s so scared, she doesn’t even mention it. I’m so scared, I don’t even notice my ribs. Mel presses herself against us, arms wrapping around me and Meredith.

“What was that?!?” Mel screams.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” I scream back.

“They’re coming!” Meredith yells and we turn down to the rows in front of us.

A tidal wave of panicked parents and panicked little girls is flowing over the seats up the wall of the amphitheatre.

Coming right at us.

There’s no time to even think. I turn with Meredith in my arms, and we run. I climb up over row after row, the seats above us quickly vacating, thank God. Mel is behind us, shielding Meredith from any more debris. I see a few bloody faces as we rush on and I can only wonder if there’s anyone really badly hurt, but there’s no time for that as I keep climbing.

We get stuck behind a frantic mom, trying to herd three girls in front of her. Without breaking stride, Mel picks one of the girls up. The mom, with what seems to be superhuman strength, picks up the other two and we all climb together, as that’s still faster than the clogged aisles. We’re lucky by a factor of a thousand that the biggest exits are at the back of the amphitheatre, wide staircases heading down into the green fields of the fairgrounds. Me and Mel and the woman reach the top of one and scramble down the steps, only just barely able to stay standing in the rush of people.

“There!” Mel yells and starts heading towards a bit of the fairgrounds that have been left wooded, with a clearing in the middle for picnics and barbecues. Most of the crowd pour out past the confused news crews to the parking lot, but we swerve to the side with some others, finally stopping in the trees, huddling together. Mel puts down the girl she picked up and the mom hugs her in with the other two, saying, “Thank you thank you thank you thank you,” to Mel.

I set Meredith down, and she instantly throws up. My adrenaline is so high my hands are shaking uncontrollably, but I do my best to rub her on the back. “It’s okay, Meredith, we’re out and we’re going home right now.”

“Mikey,” Mel says. “Look.”

Hovering over the amphitheatre, against the now-setting sun, a pillar of blue light is disappearing from where the explosion was.

“It wasn’t a bomb,” Mel says. “It was them. Whoever the hell
they
are.”

In the past, there’s been collateral damage from whatever the indie kids are involved in. But it’s hard to think of “collateral damage” when it’s me and Mel and freakin’
Meredith
and almost two thousand little girls.

Whatever it is has just gotten worse. A lot, lot worse.

“Aren’t you Alice Mitchell’s daughter?” we hear.

Cynthia, the bitter little blogger who’s always attacking my mother and who tried to drag Mel’s past into the press conference, is standing in the clearing, pad in her hand, filming us. “You are, aren’t you? The anorexic one.”

Another camera crew from the big city affiliate has seen her and is rushing over to us as well, trying to find someone who’ll tell them what happened.

“Where’s your mother?” Cynthia sneers at my sister. “Why isn’t she here to protect her children?”

Mel barely hesitates. She steps forward, snatches the pad out of Cynthia’s hands, and punches her right across the face.

The police are saying a gas main exploded.

A gas main.

The only person who died was an indie kid called Madison who was in Calc with me and Jared. I spoke to her a bunch of times in class. She was definitely not stupid, but they say she was smoking outside the amphitheatre after dropping off her sister at the concert and it ignited a leaky gas main.

Bullshit.

First of all, why does a teeny tiny amphitheatre in the middle of a field at the state’s smallest county fair have a gas main running right behind its only stage?

Second of all, Madison used an inhaler so totally didn’t smoke.

Third of all, bull and shit.

Lots of people were hurt, including Bolts of Fire – so the rest of the entire
world
hates our little town now – plus Carly’s mom and nurse. No one very badly, though. Four of five Bolts of Fire still performed “bravely” the next night in the big city while the blond one got his front teeth replaced. Carly didn’t get hurt at all, which is one small blessing. One
very
small blessing if that’s all you’ve got when you have terminal cancer and the concert of your dreams is blown up.

Meredith got treated for shock at the scene by Call Me Steve, who was the first person Mel phoned. He showed up in an ambulance, saw to Meredith, kissed Mel really hard, then ran off to help other people.

I like him.

Our mom just cried. Genuinely, I’ll give her that, and for all of us, too, not just Meredith. “That someone could do this,” she choked out, in front of a bunch of journalists when people still thought it was a bomb, “in a place where
my
children are…”

But she hugged us. I thought she’d never stop. “You’re
sure
you’re not hurt. You’re
sure
?”

“Just a little freaked out,” Mel said. “More than a little, actually.”

And our mom hugged us again. She didn’t even yell at us for not letting her come along to the concert to be exploded herself.

Quite a few news crews ended up getting footage of Mel attacking Cynthia. So far, it’s actually
helped
my mom’s campaign. “I thought it was a terrorist attack,” Mel told the cameras, keeping a straight face that I’ll remember with joy until I die. “And suddenly here was someone identifying me as a politician’s daughter. I thought I was a target, so I protected my younger brother and sister.”

There will be no charges filed, not even for the pad Cynthia was using, which Mel, perhaps unnecessarily, broke in two by stomping on it. Cynthia blogged about it all. I don’t think anyone cared.

“Bet that was pretty awful, huh, Merde Breath?” Jared says, squeezing the life out of her, her little bare feet a metre off the ground.

“Uh-huh,” Meredith says, muffled, into his neck. “And don’t call me that.”

He sets her down, hands on her shoulders, and looks her in the eye. They just stare at each other for a minute, then she smiles. “Your hands are getting hot,” she says. “But I’m okay.”

He smiles back at her. “You sure?”

She nods. “But show me the lights anyway.”

He checks to make sure my parents aren’t watching – which is for show, as we all know they’re both out of the house or he wouldn’t even be here – then pulls his hands slightly away, casting a light down her arms from the palms of his hands. She giggles and throws her arms around his enormous legs in a last hug. She’s slept in Mel’s bed the past two nights since the explosion. I can’t blame her, and I don’t think Mel’s in any hurry to get her out either. None of us have been back to school yet, but I think today is pushing it. It’s not actually that much fun missing school when there’s so little of it left.