Wild Awake (4 page)

He tugs at the pipe/piece, rolling his eyes. “You’re impossible.”

“Come on. One little hoot.”

“Fine.” Lukas leans back while I take one last puff. When I surrender the pipe, he looks at me with the pseudo-exasperated fondness of a person who has been made, against his better judgment, to laugh.

“Ready to play now?”

I nod, beaming. Victory is mine. “Yup.”

Playing music with Lukas is almost as good as doing Other Things with Lukas. He’s been playing drums since he was ten, and I know my way around a keyboard, and neither of us is interested in playing drippy singer-songwriter covers like some of the other so-called musicians at our school.

And yes, when I say that jamming with Lukas is almost as good as doing Other Things with Lukas, I mean
those
Other Things. We have Done Things right here in Lukas’s basement. Steamy things. Things that make my lady-parts glow with heat just thinking about them.

What Other Things have we done, you ask?

We kissed. Once. And Lukas put his hand on my leg. And I touched his earlobe with my finger.

It happened on the blue couch, after we’d each had half a glass of wine on Lukas’s seventeenth birthday. Which was only twenty-seven days ago.

Since then I have replayed that erotic trifecta—the kiss, the hand on the leg, the finger on the ear—over and over and over again.

Lukas’s forehead was warm. That’s a weird thing that stayed with me, how warm his forehead was when it brushed mine, as if there was a little fire right inside his skull. I wanted to press against it so it burned me like a branding iron. I wanted a mark, something to prove that this rapture had really happened to me, to us. But when I leaned in to kiss him again, Lukas pulled away with a dazed or possibly dazzled expression, as if his senses were so refined he could only take one hit off the gravity bong of our mutual desire without getting completely fershnickered. So instead I took a safety pin when I got home and very carefully etched a tiny flame on my right ankle, just beside the bone.

In the slow, dreamlike days that followed, I touched the flame over and over again, thinking about him. The skull-burning intensity of that one kiss, I reasoned, was only a prelude to the intensity of Other Things still to come.

But the next time I saw Lukas, we didn’t go to Kits Beach and make out on a blanket like I’d more or less planned.

Instead, we went to Kits Beach and had a three-hour discussion about how we shouldn’t date because we’re in a band together and it would be higher and purer to Focus on Our Art than to give in to undeniable physical attraction. Actually, I think Lukas used the word
fleeting
. Fleeting physical attraction. He said he was afraid it would get in the way of our music. This all based on some crackpot theory of Lukas’s that love and music are a zero-sum game, as opposed to, say, the most explosively pleasurable combination ever invented. Like if we started dating, we’d spend all our time boning and wouldn’t practice anymore.
I just want to focus on the band right now
, said Lukas.

I nodded and tried to be mature about it.

That makes sense. Yeah, I totally think so too
.

But let’s just say I haven’t completely managed to convince myself he’s right.

After jamming, when I’m about to go home, Lukas remembers he has some tracks he wants me to listen to. I sit on his bed while he downloads them onto my iPod. I like sitting on Lukas’s bed. It smells nice and feels faintly forbidden, like touching Lukas’s earlobes now that we’re Focusing on Our Art. When Lukas hands me my iPod, the brush of his fingers practically gives me a stroke. I glance at the floor, then look up at him.

“Hey, Lukas?”

“Yeah?”

“You wanna come over to my house and watch a movie?”

By which I mean: Lukas. I have an entire
house
just sitting there. That’s four beds and two couches, three if you count the short one in the basement. That’s kitchen counters and carpeted floors. That’s twenty-five hundred square feet of red-hot lovemaking just waiting to happen. Come over and be seduced by my wanton ways.

“You mean like right now?” Lukas says.

“Uh-huh.”

I nod in what I hope isn’t
too
suggestive a manner, but just suggestive enough to trigger Lukas’s unconscious primal urges.

He stretches and yawns, casting a glance at the digital clock on his tidy IKEA desk. “I don’t know. Me and my dad are going to Zulu tomorrow morning.”

By which Lukas means: Kiri. Me and my dad are going to get up at seven a.m., go to Zulu Records right when it opens, and spend the next eight hours meticulously poring over twenty thousand dusty old used records. What could possibly be more stimulating?

I groan and dig my fingers into my eye sockets in a gesture of despair. “Maybe another night this week, though,” says Lukas. “Have you seen
Zardoz
?”

“No.”

“Oh, man. You’re going to freak out. I’ll get the DVD back from my cousin and we can watch it on Friday.”

I smile all the way home. Lukas is coming over to watch a movie.

As my grandpa Bob used to say: If that ain’t a date, I’ll eat my hat.

That night, I can’t stop thinking
about my failed attempt to meet Doug Fieldgrass on Columbia Street. I wonder who he is, and how he knew Sukey. I wonder why it took him five years to call. Lukas was probably right: It’s some kind of scam, and I was stupid to even go. But there’s a crazy little hope-squirrel running around inside my head, chattering,
What if it’s real?
What if it’s important?
and it won’t shut up no matter what I do.

I turn on some music and curl up on my bed with my Sukey Box, sifting through the photographs and trinkets I’ve looked at so many times I hardly see them anymore. Even though there’s nobody home, I feel self-conscious sitting there with the door open. I hop up and close it guiltily, as if Mom or Dad is about to walk down the hall and catch me in my self-indulgence. I gaze at the picture of Sukey and me at my insect-themed seventh birthday party, wearing pipe-cleaner antennas and paper wings, and sniff the cigarette I stole from her purse one time but was too chicken to smoke, the paper gone soft and limp from so much handling. Usually I find these objects comforting, but tonight they frustrate me. Whatever that Doug guy has, I want it.

As I sort through the box, I rack my brain for ideas, theories, anything that could explain the phone call without arriving at
scam
. I think back to my disastrous bike ride, the broken glass and lost address. What I really should have done is asked him to drop off Sukey’s things at our house—but then he’d know where I live, and what if he really is a sketchball?

I’m just about to pile the photographs back into the box when I spot it: the glossy five-by-seven card announcing an art opening:
6:00 p.m. at razzle!dazzle!space, e. pender @ columbia, feat. new works by sukey byrd and leon klemmer
. My eyes skid over the words
e. pender @ columbia
like a scratched record.

Holy crap.

I read the card again. Of course. That’s why I recognized Columbia Street. How could I have been so stupid? I was just a block away when that creep on the bicycle scared me away. Hell. Sukey’s friend was probably there waiting for me that whole time.

The art show was our first time seeing Sukey in almost two months. Mom and Dad had kicked her out of the house the day she turned eighteen, which suited Sukey just fine, because she’d been threatening to go live at her boyfriend Leon’s art collective—Dad called it a loser collective—anyway. We got there late. Dad spent half an hour looking for a parking garage because he didn’t want to park the Nissan on the street. Then we had to walk six blocks, and Dad kept barking at Denny and me to walk faster because there were homeless people on East Pender who were presumably planning to eat us for dinner if we showed the slightest sign of slowing down.

The place was hard to find, just a dirty white industrial-looking door in the side of a brick building. There was nothing to mark it as an art gallery from the outside, no plate-glass window with paintings on display, not even a street number. Sukey had given Dad directions over the phone, but he still seemed mad as he stood in the rain, fighting with the metal doorknob for a good thirty seconds before noticing the buzzer on the wall.

Inside, the room was dim, crowded, aswirl with people who all seemed perfectly at ease in such a covert location, who looked like they went to art shows behind unmarked doors all the time. I spied a table set up against one wall with trays of cheese and crackers and dozens of upside-down plastic wine glasses with their feet in the air. I cheered.

“I’m getting crackers!”

I started toward the table, but Dad grabbed my arm.

“Why not?” I wailed. I was ten years old, but still reverted to four and a half when I was upset.

His nails pinched my skin.

“No.”

I stayed, tears of frustration hot in my eyes. Minutes crept by.

Men in shiny shirts helped themselves to cheese and crackers. Women with laughs like tropical monkeys sauntered past arm in arm. We stood there in silence, damp and grubby from the rain, like janitorial equipment someone had forgotten to put away. Sukey was nowhere in sight.

Denny pulled out his Game Boy and disappeared into the little green screen. Mom hummed tunelessly, playing with the straps on her purse. Dad stared grimly into the middle distance, his hand still clamped on my shoulder. They didn’t take off their coats. I watched, limp with despair, as the party went on without us.

Then Sukey appeared in a short purple dress and silver heels that made her legs stretch almost all the way to the ceiling. Her long black hair was swept into an attractively messy high ponytail into which she’d stuck brown and orange feathers. The feathers gave her an exotic look, like the trickster raven in the
Northwest Myths and Legends
book I was reading for school. Best of all, you could see her new tattoo—the silhouette of a bird on her right arm, just above her elbow.

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Dad.

“Hey, guys!” she said, throwing her arms wide to embrace us all at once. When Sukey was in one of her good moods, she acted like everyone in the world was her best friend—even though her last face-to-face interaction with Mom and Dad had consisted of a screaming match after she’d gotten caught stealing champagne from the grocery store near our house for the second time in a week.

She winked at us. “Hey, Kiri. Den-Den. Have you guys looked around yet?”

“Well, we had a quick look,” tittered Mom, which was so blatant a lie I twisted around, eyes wide with outrage, to glare at her.

“We can’t stay for too long,” said Dad. “I’ve got a conference call at eight.”

Sukey’s face flashed with something sharp and fierce, and for a terrible moment I thought they were about to have one of their fights. Leon’s friends from the art collective had organized the show, and even at ten I had a vague sense that maybe that was why Mom and Dad were acting so weird. Leon was helping Sukey become a famous artist, but Mom thought he was too old for her and Dad said he was a Cradle-Robbing Junkie and that if Sukey thought he was going to help her become an artist, she needed to get her head checked.

Sukey and Dad stared each other down. Across the room, I could hear the monkey-women hooting and chortling with mirth. Dad’s jaw was clenched, and Sukey’s eyes had narrowed to smoldering points of black. But just when it seemed like things were about to get really nasty, she broke eye contact with Dad and smiled at me and Denny instead.

“Kiri, Den-Den, did you see there’s pink lemonade?”

The mention of pink lemonade was almost more than I could stand. My face crumpled. “Dad said we couldn’t have any.”

I fought back the tears that were stabbing at the corners of my eyes. Beside me, Denny stared into his Game Boy screen and Mom kept up her wheedling hum.

“Oh, honey,” said Sukey. “Come with me.”

Without so much as a second glance at Dad, she took my grubby hand in her soft, vanilla-scented one and led me on a personal tour of the gallery. Our first stop was the snack table, where she poured me a cup of lemonade, rose-pink and thick with sugar, the kind that leaves sour flecks of lemon pulp on the back of your throat after you swallow. I remember the clear plastic cup and the square paper napkin I used to hold my Ritz crackers, salty and oily to the lemonade’s sweet. We took our snacks and made a slow circle around the crowded room, stopping in front of each of Sukey’s paintings. Every five seconds, another one of her friends would tap her on the shoulder and she’d spin around, beaming, to greet them.

“Hey, Neale,” she’d say—or Wanda, or Feather, or Björn. “This is my little sister, Kiri.” Their kindness, when they smiled at me, was mixed with bafflement, as if they could hardly believe that such a rare and dangerous creature as Sukey was related to such a plain and pudgy one as me.

When we said hi to Leon, he plucked the yellow flower he was wearing out of his buttonhole and slid it behind my ear. Leon was half Japanese, half German, and for a Cradle-Robbing Junkie he looked awfully dashing in his suit.

“Her name was Ki-ri, she was a showgirl,” he sang, twirling me around like a ballerina while Sukey clapped her hands and laughed and laughed. When he was finished twirling me, he twirled Sukey, then dipped her like a tango dancer and kissed her on the lips. I looked on in awe and jealousy. The rules that applied to everyone else didn’t apply to Sukey: She laughed and cried and yelled and danced without checking Dad’s face first to see which one she was allowed to do. It was like she didn’t even know you were supposed to.

Sukey’s friends reminded me of the acrobats in Cirque du Soleil, which Dad’s business partner, Sydney, had given us tickets to see—like at any moment they were about to swing from the ceiling, leap from the table, walk on their hands. They smelled like fizzy drinks and twitched a little, like mice. I’d never met adults like that before and hardly believed they existed.

“Kiri’s a fabulous musician,” Sukey told them. “You should hear the songs she plays on her keyboard.”