Opening Act Read online

  She took a sip of her beer. Bitter, flat, and warm, it was like drinking used bathwater. She headed back to her little hiding place by the video game to watch in peace.

  Shay Dayton raised a hand to still the crowd. Loni thought he was kidding himself, but it worked like a charm. Then he said, “Thanks for coming out tonight.” An explosion of enthusiastic hoots followed. He gestured again for them to be silent—he seemed to have a kind of natural authority. “As you know, this is our last regular Haver City gig. In a couple of days we’ll be off on our first national tour, opening for the legendary Strafer Nation.” The applause that followed was so thunderous that Loni felt it resonate in her teeth. “And after we’ve conquered America, who knows? Europe, Asia, Australia—the universe.” He blurted out a movie-mad-scientist laugh, and it was kind of lame, yet everyone howled at it. “But no matter how far we go, we’ll always come back here—for you. You made us, and we won’t ever forget that. Our hearts will always be here, in this city, in this community, in this room right now, in this time we’re sharing at exactly this moment.”

  Loni almost couldn’t hear these last few phrases because the roar in the room had swelled, seeming to push the very walls back. And while it was still at its height, Shay Dayton turned and signaled the band, and they launched into their first tune.

  It was a song Loni recognized from having heard Zee play it constantly over the past two weeks; it was the opening tune on Grief Bacon. She didn’t know its title, but the words had been drilled into her head. Which actually turned out to be a good thing, because between the crowd’s continued noise and the club’s crappy sound system, she wouldn’t have been able to make them out otherwise. But they came to her, playing in her head as Shay sang them on the stage, leaning into the mic stand, pivoting it like a rocket launcher.

  Born on a Friday, torn away, borne away

  Abandoned on a Saturday, battered, scattered, latter-day

  Undone on a Sunday, and still I knew that one day

  I’d waken on a weekday

  And find you.

  He sang with tremendous conviction, investing the words with a meaning Loni wasn’t sure they entirely supported. But it was obviously working for the Underlings. As he stepped closer to the platform, several girls—possibly Zee among them, Loni couldn’t tell—outstretched their arms, as if ready and willing to grab him by the waist if he got too close. It was obviously all theatre. Any one of them, if she wanted to, could easily have hopped up on the stage and been right there with him—but they held back out of a kind of tacit agreement, preferring the suggestion of erotic hysteria to actually giving in to it.

  There was probably a book to be written there, Loni thought. A scholarly study of the ways in which rock concerts—once celebrations of anything-goes anarchy—had become ritualized over the years. But the thought of any academic pursuit immediately brought Byron back to mind. She’d hoped the noise of the band and the press of the crowd would help banish him from her thoughts, but the conversation they’d just had was still vivid in her mind—and heavy in her heart.

  She was angry, of course. Very angry. She didn’t like being jerked around the way Byron was obviously trying to do with her. At the same time, she had to admit, she was being a little provocative. He’d been her mentor, her champion, her confidante, and her advocate. What must it feel like for him now to be reduced to begging her to make up her mind about coming west with him? Her insistence on taking all the time to decide he allowed her was basically saying she needed to convince herself he was worth it. He would almost have to find it insulting.

  And yet…why didn’t she want to follow him? She’d as much as admitted she had no certain future here, and Byron was obviously on his way up in academia. It would benefit her enormously if he brought her with him. Yet she resisted.

  Possibly this was simply a matter of sheer bloody-mindedness. She’d never liked being told what to do, never liked being pushed in any direction, even resented anyone having expectations of her. She knew this was childish and she had to outgrow it. And to a large extent, she thought she had.

  But if not that, what could it be? What was it about Byron’s generous offer that made her put on the brakes? She really did owe him a lot. And he was very sweet to her, to be so supportive and to give her so much room. Why couldn’t she repay that with unconditional trust? Or just simple loyalty?

  There was something, though…something just below the surface that she didn’t want to think about, and as she stood in the semidarkness, her head blasted by sonics and her body jostled by revelers, she felt, oddly, that she was close to letting it come out…plunging through the blocks and distractions she’d placed in its way, to realize…to realize…

  “Loni!”

  She snapped out of her introspection to find Zee descending on her, just as the last chords of the tune were ringing out—a signal for the crowd to raise their arms in ecstasy.

  “Can you believe we’re here?” Zee cried, clutching her arm in glee. “This is history we’re seeing! History right on this stage!”

  Loni wasn’t quite willing to go that far, though she was impressed by the way a room filled with dyed-in-the-wool hipsters had been persuaded to drop their attitude of world-weary ennui long enough to leap about like overstimulated five-year-olds. “Tell me about the band,” Loni asked.

  Zee was only too happy to oblige. “Shay Dayton you know, of course,” she said, “though this is the first time you’ve seen him in the flesh, right? Man, I envy you. I remember my first time. Like seeing Jesus.”

  Loni resisted the urge to point out that no one either of them knew had ever seen Jesus, and said, “Go on.”

  Zee nodded her head toward the lead guitarist, who was beaming an incandescent smile at the crowd now, no longer seeming to need to hide behind his instrument. “That’s Baby Cleveland,” she said. “And that’s not a nickname, either. It’s his real, honest-to-God birth-certificate name. And that,” she said, pointing out the rhythm guitarist, “is Trina Kutsch. She used to be in an all-female band called the Beneluxe Countries, but she quit because she said they played like ‘girls.’ She’s pretty badass. Actually, she scares me a little.” Loni shot her an amused look, and she added, “In a good way.”

  Then she cocked her head toward the keyboard player, who was taking an awkward bow. “Jimmy Dancer. Kind of a quiet, intense guy. But man, when he plays, he’s like a wizard or something. And of course,” she continued, and her voice suddenly got a weird little vibe in it, like she was having to try hard to keep up her energy, “you’ve heard me mention the drummer. Lockwood Mott.”

  Yes, of course Loni had. Lockwood Mott, with whom Zee had shamelessly flirted as part of her long-range plan to meet and seduce Shay Dayton. Loni gave him an extra degree of scrutiny. He was a big, genial-looking, dark-eyed guy whose hair was longer than it should be, which in Loni’s experience was the telltale sign of the career single guy.

  “He looks very nice,” said Loni.

  “Oh, he’s sweet,” said Zee, with maybe too self-conscious a note of casualness. She was obviously feeling some guilt about leading him on and was putting up a defense of breezy dismissal. But Loni had known Zee a long time and could tell it wasn’t really working.

  She was about to press the issue when the band began its second tune, and Zee squealed with delight and hurried back to the stage. She must have coerced a fellow Underling into holding her spot. The new number was a very rhythmic, funk-type tune, but once again the lyrics seemed to be more the product of attitudes and posturing than of any real poetic impulse.

  Hammer’s hard but needs a nail

  Woman’s soft but she’s not frail

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? Each line on its own, while not exactly revelatory, at least made sense. But they didn’t belong together. They were talking about two separate things. Loni imagined the songwriters just stringing together whatever sounded good and working with the meter. She’d known poets who did the same thing.
/>   There was one line, however, that gave her a jolt.

  The one who gets the bruises

  Ain’t the only one who loses.

  That just catapulted her right back to Byron and the angry words they’d exchanged over the phone. She wondered if he was now obsessing over them, just as she was. It would be harder for him not to. He was probably at home, alone, with nothing to distract him, while Loni had this uproarious concert.

  Not that the distraction was doing her much good.

  She looked up at Shay Dayton, whose hips ground seductively to the beat of the music and whose hair hung in his face till he came to a pause in the phrasing and could toss it back, revealing his soulful blue eyes again. The women were driven to shrieks of ecstasy by his every gesture. Loni herself was completely immune. She wished she weren’t; she wished she could see whatever these other women were seeing. It would be so…therapeutic to lose herself in the pantherlike stalking of some lean, shaggy-maned rock idol. But to her it all seemed a bit ridiculous, a kind of pseudo-pagan charade. Shay Dayton might have the looks, and the moves, and the sexual magnetism, but to what end? What was he for, exactly?

  She supposed the same could be asked of the type of men she did find attractive—the thin, bespectacled brainiacs, whose laserlike focus and relentless pursuit of even the most theoretical argument could be exhausting, if not irritating, to most people Loni knew. But she was thrilled whenever one of them respected her enough to speak to her on his level. She felt ennobled by the way they challenged her. She was pretty sure that she, herself, didn’t have a first-rate brain, but because of her exposure to so many contentious intellectuals, she was no slouch in the smarts department. And she knew it. And she liked it. And she wanted a guy who liked her for it, too.

  But most of those guys either distrusted her—apparently unwilling to believe someone who looked as hot as she did could really be interested in them, and must therefore be subtly mocking them—or dismissed her—apparently unwilling to believe someone who looked as hot as she did could really understand a thing they said, and must therefore be pretending.

  It was too bad, because it’s not like those guys got a lot of female attention. Loni thought again of Byron, who’d been more or less single for as long as she’d known him. Since he never mentioned any exes, he had probably never had a significant relationship. She pictured him at home now, watching some documentary on the Sundance channel and eating microwave popcorn in the dark. In a way, it was too bad he was as old as he was. Just a couple of years younger, and he’d have been the perfect guy for her. She respected his mind, and he respected—and molded—hers.

  This train of thought, which was just getting back on the tracks she’d laid earlier, was interrupted by the end of the second song and the beginning of a third. Loni’s beer was gone, and the thin plastic cup felt like the shell of a dead insect in her hand. She wanted to be rid of it, even if just to replace it with a new drink, but the room had gotten more crowded. She wasn’t certain she’d still find her place open when she got back to it.

  And then something stopped her—arrested her. This new tune was a ballad, and Shay Dayton had taken the mic from the stand and now held it in both hands before his face, his fingers interlaced, like he was in prayer. And his singing…his singing was wonderful. He had such a beautiful, creamy tone in his mid-range. It was criminal that he sang so often at the top of his register, like some keening banshee.

  But, again, the lyrics came up short.

  Fireflies glow brightest when the darkest hour is here

  Your memory is whitest in my blackest days, my dear

  Sustain me in my trials while I climb up from despair

  Give me hope that when I reach the end I’ll find you waiting there

  Loni had better work than that in her junior high school journals. In spite of the sheer splendor of his voice, she was embarrassed for Shay Dayton. But he clearly wasn’t embarrassed for himself. In fact, the further he got into the tune, the more shamelessly he played to the crowd. This was a man who was very much aware of his power over his audience and had no reservations about milking it. The pleasure Loni had found in his voice receded as his swagger—his self-infatuation—became increasingly apparent.

  And the more he acted out, the more wild the response he got from Zee and her pack of crazed Shay devotees. In fact, one of them did in fact get up on the stage now—then immediately compensated for such boldness by shying away from Shay, as though suddenly afraid of him. Again with the phony ritual, Loni thought in disgust. And when Shay sauntered over to the girl, grabbed her by the waist, and grinded into her, staring intensely into her eyes, during the band’s instrumental passage, before passing her—near swooning—back down to the crowd, Loni couldn’t take it anymore.

  She left her dark little corner and went out to get another beer. Something warm, bitter, and cloying would be a relief after Shay Dayton’s ambrosia overload.

  As the show went on, Loni was so over the whole scene that she’d began to feel apologetic about the way she’d left things with Byron. She could not relate to this crowd on any level, and the singer’s over-the-top, cringe-worthy theatrics just made her long for a nice, bracing talk with a man who actually spoke his mind (and had a mind to speak of). Whatever Byron might be guilty of, he’d always been straight with her. She always knew where she stood with him.

  Finally, after three increasingly rapturous encores, the band retired from the stage and the lights went up. The gaggle of girls at the front of the stage stampeded out of the ballroom. One poor guy, walking with a cane, was actually knocked over.

  Zee, however, was not among the exiting herd. Instead she made her way over to where Loni waited by the disabled arcade game.

  “What’s with them?” Loni asked, cocking her head in the direction of the herd of girls.

  “They’re on their way to the load-out door, at the back of the club,” Zee explained, “so they can see the band when they come out.”

  “But not you?”

  Zee waggled her eyebrows. “Bigger prospects for me. After-party, remember?”

  Loni frowned. “Listen, I think I should go. I had kind of a fallout with Byron. I don’t want to leave it there tonight. I should go and see him.”

  Zee grabbed her by the wrist. “Oh, no. You promised to come with me.”

  “I know. But this is…I don’t know. I think my future’s on the line.”

  “So’s mine,” Zee said. “One future at a time, here.”

  “But it’s already pretty late, and I—”

  Zee tightened her grip enough that Loni actually winced in pain.

  “Listen,” she said, almost seething, “you have all the time in the world to talk to Byron. He’s not going up in a puff of smoke. But I have exactly one small window of time to get to that after-party and meet Shay Dayton. After that, the opportunity is gone, and it will never come again.”

  “I didn’t say it would,” Loni said, trying to withdraw her hand. “But you don’t need me for that.”

  “I do need you for that,” she insisted. “I’m not walking into that party alone. Think of how that would look.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve walked into plenty of parties on my own.”

  “I’ll look like I’m on the prowl,” Zee said, making a face.

  “But you are on the prowl.”

  Zee squeezed her again. Loni yelped. “I don’t want to look like it. I’m there because of Lockwood Mott. If I walk in alone, it’ll seem like I’ve come there just for him. If we’re together, it muddies the waters. Gives me room to maneuver.”

  “So you can maneuver yourself into the path of Mr. I’m-Too-Sexy-for-My-Pants Shay Dayton.”

  Zee looked momentarily stunned at Loni’s quasi-blasphemy—as if the idea of any woman not losing her mind over Shay Dayton were beyond her ability to conceive. But then a sly grin crept over her face. She was obviously realizing that Loni’s disdain for the front man made her exactly the ri
ght friend to show up with.

  “Byron can wait,” she said. “He’s waited this long. You’re coming with me. Now.”

  As Zee dragged her out of the ballroom, along with the last few stragglers from the show, Loni said, “What do you mean, ‘He’s waited this long’?”

  “Nothing,” Zee said, emerging into the open air. “Look for a cab. We’ll go have a drink first, to give the party time to get going before we make our entrance. There’s one—taxiiiii!”

  CHAPTER 3

  “This is it?” Loni asked, after a swift, desperate look at the departing cab’s taillights. “You’re sure?”

  Zee checked the address on her phone—or rather rechecked it, as she had every thirty-five seconds on the ride over. “I’m sure,” she said, sounding not sure at all. “This is exactly what he gave me.”

  They looked up at the building in front of them. It wasn’t tall—just a five-story walk-up—but it compensated for its compactness with its ominous exterior. It was grimy and gray, its windows either boarded over or blacked out by tattered curtains.

  “We’re actually supposed to walk in there?” Loni said, looking now at the dim, cluttered lobby beyond the front door. A drooping houseplant sat just inside, looking as though it were gasping for its last breath. “We’re supposed to just walk in there and go up those stairs and knock on a door because some guy—”

  “Not ‘some guy’! Lockwood Mott! The drummer for Overlords of Loneliness!”

  “—because Lockwood Mott, the drummer for Overlords of Loneliness, told you there was an after-party here,” Loni went on, undeterred. “Did he mention what kind of after-party, exactly? I mean, is it just for the fans, or are serial killers welcome?”