Opening Act Read online

  “Pampering,” said Loni without missing a beat. “This is a little cocoon. A little cradle.” She gave Zee an admiring look. “And you’re a grown-up.”

  Zee frowned. “Kinda makes me feel like I missed out on something.”

  Funny, I get the same feeling looking at you, Loni thought, but she kept it to herself. Instead, she said, “What do you feel like—for lunch, I mean? Lot of great little spots I can take you to. Italian, barbecue, Vietnamese…”

  Zee gave her a sly, smiling look. “Could we just grab a sandwich and sit out here?” Loni was momentarily taken aback by the request, and Zee must have seen this. “It’s just so beautiful and warm outside. Back home, there’s six inches of snow. I’d love to just…bask for a while.”

  Loni shrugged. “Anything you say. You’re the guest here.”

  So they grabbed a couple of chicken-salad-on-ryes at the student commissary and sat cross-legged on the lawn, Zee luxuriating in the sunlight like a cat. “This feels sooo good,” she said after she’d wolfed down her sandwich. She lay back on her elbows, then turned to Loni and said, “You don’t have it half bad here, you know.”

  Loni barked a laugh. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “You’re not shut up in an office all day. You get to come out here and be in the sunlight. And you’ve got all these students to look up to you…”

  “You mean to constantly challenge my authority. When they condescend to notice me at all.”

  “And you’ve got a guy who’s into you.”

  “No, you’ve got a guy who’s into you,” Loni said, eager to change the subject. “And I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. I mean, I knew he was a keeper, after that first time I met him when he showed up on our sofa. The guy walked you home ’cause you were upset, then stayed all night to keep watch over you.”

  Zee toyed with a few blades of grass. “God. And I was such a bitch to him.”

  “Never mind. He obviously knew you were worth waiting for.”

  Zee looked suddenly troubled. “That’s the thing. I really don’t think I am. I mean…he does. But…Loni. I don’t deserve him.”

  “Shut up. You do so.”

  “No, I really do not.” She appeared momentarily conflicted, as though struggling with something she wanted to say but couldn’t bring herself to. Finally she relaxed and said, “Oh, what the hell. Maybe being with him will make me better.” She turned her face back toward the sun. “In fact, it pretty much already has.”

  “Well, there you go,” said Loni, swallowing the last of her sandwich and crumpling the paper wrapper. She was curious to know exactly what Zee meant by that last remark but felt it would be intrusive to ask. “Anyway,” she said, popping open her Diet Coke, “I think a guy who actually buys you a plane ticket so you can go to his rock concert at the Hollywood Palladium is pretty much a dictionary definition of Excellent Boyfriend.”

  Zee gave her a big, excited grin. “That’s not all he did.”

  Loni raised her eyebrows. “No?”

  She shook her head. “He also threw in an extra ticket, so I could see the show with my best friend.”

  Loni almost asked, Who’s that? before it occurred to her. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

  “So, what do you say?”

  Loni was very touched, and the idea of escaping the hothouse air of this campus was terrifically inviting. But her natural reticence kicked in, and hard. “I don’t know, Zee. It’s really sweet of you. But you know I’m not such a big fan of those things. The crowds and the noise and everything.”

  “You need something to shake you out of your funk,” Zee said, sitting up. “Crowds and noise will do that.”

  She sighed. “And I’ve never been a big Overlords fan.”

  “No,” said Zee with a funny look in her eye. “But a big Shay Dayton fan, maybe.”

  Loni felt the color wash from her face.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Zee said. “I’m not stupid, Loni. And you’re not nearly as mysterious as you pretend to be.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “I’ve always known.” She took her own can of soda now and popped the lid. “I won’t say I’ve always liked it…”

  “Well, that’s why I never told you.”

  “I know. I get that.”

  “Also, really, except for that once, there was nothing to tell.”

  Zee shifted to her knees and scuttled over to Loni, then knelt next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Listen, Loni. ‘Once’ can be a very small word, or it can be a very big one. I think in this case, it’s Door Number Two.”

  Loni had to grip the ground to keep from toppling over. Zee had just said something so wise—so poetic—that she felt it really might knock her flat.

  “Come to the Palladium.” She reached for her purse, opened it, fished around for a bit, then pulled out a small envelope. “Here’s the ticket. And a parking pass. Lockwood also got you one of those. So you don’t even have to worry about where to leave your car.”

  “I just don’t know. I’m not sure I’m free.”

  “It’s not till tomorrow night,” she insisted, stuffing the envelope into Loni’s shirt pocket. “Plenty of time for you to get free.”

  Loni drew her knees up to her chest. “Byron’s out of town. At a conference. He gets back tomorrow. He’ll expect me home.”

  Zee snorted. “Just two hours ago you told me he never even notices you anymore. You said last week there was a night you got home three hours late because of car trouble, and he hadn’t even realized you weren’t there. He thought you were in bed.”

  Loni felt a slight kick of panic. “That’s another thing. My car. LA is a long drive.”

  “It’s only an hour. And you said they fixed your car good as new.”

  She grabbed her ankles and buried her face in her knees.

  “Jesus,” said Zee, rolling her eyes. “You’re hard work, you know?”

  “It’s the Shay Dayton business,” Loni admitted. “I don’t really relish the idea of reliving it.”

  “You’re not reliving it. This is Los Angeles, not Haver City, and it’s the Palladium, not Club Uncumber. And you’re almost a year older, and so is he. And you won’t even have to talk to him, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ll be in the audience. He’ll see me.”

  “You ever been on a stage? At a rock concert? What he’ll see is a big red blur.”

  Loni lay back on the lawn, her hair splashed around her head onto the grass. “This was your whole reason for coming here, wasn’t it? You didn’t just miss me and want to see my new life. You always had it up your sleeve to come and stir up things that had finally become…well, whatever the opposite of stirred is.”

  “Inert,” said Zee. “Stagnant.”

  Loni shot her a look. “You’re pretty zippy with the vocab lately. When the hell did that happen?”

  “I lived with you for five months. Look,” she said, getting up and brushing off her pants, “I have to get going. Lockwood’s taking me to dinner and I need a nap and some pool time. Just text me when you figure out whether you’re going to vegetate here in your academic compost heap or actually go out into the world you say you miss so much and risk getting your precious feelings ruffled a bit.”

  Loni glared at her. “I wish we’d sat closer to the Japanese garden. Then I could throw a rock at your head.”

  Zee dismissed this with a wave. “You throw like a girl.”

  Loni walked her to her rental car, but Zee refused to let her hug her good-bye, “because I’ll see you tomorrow. Seriously. Loni. Grow a pair.”

  Loni laughed, then, growing suddenly serious, she said, “All right. Fine. You win. Tomorrow night.”

  Zee grinned from ear to ear as she got into her car. “Text me as soon as you’ve parked. I’ll tell you where I am and how to get there.”

  “Right, I will,” she said, standing back to give her room to maneuver. “Whatever you say.”

  “Wear something hot
,” Zee tossed out the window as she pulled out of the parking space.

  “Almost everything you say,” Loni shot back as Zee sailed on out of the lot.

  As she turned back to the campus, Loni felt that something fundamental had changed. The feeling she’d had that her life was running along a single track like a locomotive toward an unknowable end was now much more expansive. She suddenly saw her life as a palette of possibilities, an array of colorful travel brochures. She had only to pick a destiny and book the trip.

  Zee drove about four blocks before her giddiness and excitement became too much to contain. She pulled over to the side of the road, took out her phone, and texted Lockwood:

  Mission accomplished. She’s coming.

  CHAPTER 22

  The initial thrill was over. The head-spinning rush of having arrived at the Hollywood Palladium to discover OVERLORDS OF LONELINESS WITH GUESTS JONAH & THE WAIL blaring from the marquee had abated. Shay felt like he owned Sunset Boulevard. Hell, that he owned Los Angeles. Or the whole freaking planet, cosmos, space-time continuum, you name it.

  Then had come the hard, unglamorous work of loading in, setting up, and running the line check—during which Shay had tried to not look overwhelmed at talking to a sound engineer he couldn’t see, from a stage overlooking a dance floor that could hold three thousand people. He did his best, in fact, to act as though this sort of thing was old hat to him, that he went through it all the time. But in the silences, when the engineer was adjusting his levels, Shay could almost hear his knees knock.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait. Most of the band wandered off to grab something to eat. Shay stayed on site, just in case anything else came up that needed attention or an opinion or a decision. He hunkered down in the greenroom, along with Lockwood and Marcia, aka the Wail, who sat in a far corner on a plush chair, her knees pulled up to her chin, reading a large leather-bound book—essentially throwing up a wall between herself and the two Overlords.

  Lockwood, self-contained as ever, ate steadily from a bag of Doritos and washed it down with a Red Bull. Shay couldn’t manage that degree of serenity—or any degree at all. He occupied himself by furiously skimming the Internet on his smartphone. He found a Buzzfeed page containing videos of teenagers’ failed jumps from rooftops into swimming pools, which was usually the kind of thing that could keep him happily occupied for twenty minutes. Now, he was restless after five.

  He almost wished Pernita hadn’t gone out for a late lunch with her father. Having her around, pestering him, annoying him, being her usual controlling, abrasive self, would at least have given him a focus for all the anxious energy he was feeling. As it was, he had nowhere to direct it but back into himself. He was a rattling, twitching bag of nerves. Every so often he went out and looked at the house, trying to imagine it filled to the rafters with screaming fans. That was a bit much to hope for, but who knew? The interest generated by the car crash a few months before had faded, as such things always did, but maybe it had left enough of a residual impression to get people to mark today’s date in their calendars.

  He wryly laughed at the idea that he was now counting on that incident to bring in some bodies. Up till now, he’d treated the whole thing as an enormous embarrassment. When Halbert had floated the idea that after his opening set, Jonah would tell the audience to “Stay put for Overlords of Loneliness, featuring Shay Dayton, the man who saved my life,” both Jonah and Shay had responded with absolutely fucking not. It was easy to take the high road when you were at some swanky bar with a couple of whiskeys in you. Now, on the Palladium stage looking out at the echoing vacuum he was expected to fill, Shay thought he might agree to screw the family dog onstage if it brought in one or two undecideds.

  He returned to the greenroom and told Lockwood, “Now I know why Ozzy Osbourne bit off a bat’s head onstage.”

  But Lockwood wasn’t listening; he was staring at his phone, grinning. “Hm?” he said. “Sorry?”

  “Nothing,” Shay said, resuming his seat on the couch and putting his feet up on the coffee table. “What’s got you so feline-faced? Text from the missus?”

  “Yeah,” he said, putting the phone back in his vest pocket. “She’s on her way.” He reached in the bag for another handful of Doritos. “Says she’s bringing a friend.”

  “God bless her skinny white ass. Tell her to bring a couple more.”

  “I think one is sufficient,” Lockwood said with a kind of weird lilt in his voice. “Provided it’s the right one.” He popped the Doritos into his mouth.

  Shay blinked. It wasn’t like Lockwood to get all coy. He assumed it must be the pressure getting to him. Of course, being Lockwood, he wouldn’t get all edgy and frantic, the way Shay did. It figured he’d go the opposite direction and turn twee. Shay slumped back against the cushions. He felt the urge to say something valedictory, something to mark how far Overlords had come, how incredible it was that they’d made this journey together. But he was also wary of coming off sounding like some self-important asshat.

  So all he said was, “Check out where we are, man.”

  Lockwood grinned and said, “Check it out.”

  They stared dopily at each other, until Marcia noisily turned a page in her book. Then Shay snapped out of it, checked the time, and got up to change into his stage clothes.

  Halbert and Pernita returned shortly after the doors opened, by which time Shay had sweat through his stage shirt, which enraged Pernita. She made him sit with his arms outstretched so that the shirt would dry, then lurked about with the attitude that she was the longest-suffering human being who ever walked the earth. Halbert kept going down to check the house, and every time he returned, Shay asked what the crowd was like, and he’d say, “Respectable,” which was no fucking answer at all. Baby and Jimmy filtered back in, as casually as though this were just an everyday gig at some dive in Haver City, and got changed.

  A wooden box arrived with three bottles of Woodford Reserve, and a note reading, Break every fucking leg you’ve got, signed by Paul Di Santangelo. Halbert immediately confiscated the booze, telling them sternly, “Afterward.”

  Shay sweat through his shirt again, but Pernita didn’t notice.

  It was twenty minutes to showtime when Marcia closed her book, got up wordlessly, and went to change. It was then that everyone seemed to notice that Jonah and Trina weren’t back yet.

  “They went off together,” said Baby drowsily, as he played a hand of cards with Jimmy.

  Shay felt his head lift off his shoulders in alarm. “Did no one think what a bad combination that was?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “What were we supposed to do? Citizen’s arrest?”

  Halbert, working his phone, looked like he might kill somebody as he strode off.

  Pernita smoked cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.

  At seven minutes to showtime, Jonah led Trina in. She was purple in the face and choking.

  “What the hell happened?” asked Shay, rushing to her.

  Jonah cocked his head. “Dunno. She was okay, mostly, till I bet her she couldn’t fit an entire twelve-pack of peanut butter cups in her mouth.”

  “Why the hell would you do that?” Shay said, pounding Trina on the back.

  Jonah looked at him as though it was the stupidest of stupid questions. “To see if she could,” he answered.

  “Ssshwwha nncaahwme Knnh Dhrrdunnuh,” garbled Trina.

  “No one calls you Kid Daredevil,” Shay screamed.

  Marcia, now in her black shroud of a dress, stepped forward, suddenly transformed into the Wail. “Let me,” she said, shoving Shay aside. “I’m trained in the Heimlich.”

  Jonah ambled off to get changed, as though nothing at all were out of the ordinary.

  By this time Halbert had come back in and observed what was happening. He looked at Pernita and said, “We’ve got a bass sub standing by, don’t we?”

  “Yes, Daddy. In case Jonah bailed.”

  “Well, he can do as well for this one,”
he said, nodding toward Trina, and he put his phone to his ear to notify one of his assistants.

  The Wail grappled her wiry arms around Trina’s midsection and squeezed. Trina groaned.

  “The sub plays an upright bass,” said Pernita, “not a bass guitar.”

  “I’m sure he knows how,” Halbert said. “Just give him Tina’s when he gets here.”

  “Trina’s,” Shay corrected him. “And shouldn’t we be calling a medic or something, instead of worrying about a sub?”

  “Hello, Jerry?” Halbert said into the phone, ignoring Shay. “Where’s our bass sub?”

  The Wail gave Trina another superhuman squeeze, and a fist-size mass of chocolatey peanut matter shot from Trina’s mouth.

  And landed on the front of Shay’s shirt.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Pernita. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Me?” said Shay in disbelief, shaking the glop off of him and onto the floor.

  The Wail released Trina, smoothed out her gown, and stepped toward the door, just as Jonah emerged in his lounge-lizard jacket and spats.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Mm-hm,” she said.

  He gave her a little kiss, and then they headed out to the stage.

  Halbert was barking into his phone. “Have the sub stand by, Jerry—but it looks like it may not be urgent after all.” Then he tucked his phone back in his suit coat and turned to follow Jonah and the Wail.

  “Hey,” called Trina after him, as she pulled herself back together after her ordeal. “Hey, you. Thurston Howell the Third.”

  Halbert turned around and looked at her in disbelief. “Are you talking to me?”

  “Yeah,” she said, after quickly wiping her lips on the back of her hand. “For the record? You ever send anyone to touch my ax, I’ll break all ten of his fingers. Then his face. Then you.”

  He looked at her in amazement. “Are you threatening me, little girl?”

  “You want that?” she said, working herself up into a fury. “You want me to threaten you? Is that it? Go ahead, then—dare me.”