Opening Act Read online

  “You ready now?” he asked.

  She nodded eagerly.

  He got to his feet. But the sudden head rush as he stood up, and the effects of the pot he’d smoked, combined to make him momentarily thick-witted, dulling his strategic instincts. And in that moment, he revealed his hand. “She’ll be there, you think?” he said, regretting the words as soon as they left his mouth.

  “Hm?” Zee said, as she brushed the grit from the roof off her ass. “Who? My roommate?” Suddenly she stopped brushing and looked straight at him, her mouth hanging slightly open.

  He tried to adopt a blank expression, but he was too baked to manage it. He must have looked as busted as he felt. Zee didn’t say anything; she didn’t have to. It was suddenly, blindingly clear where his real interest was—where it had been all along. She burst into tears and fled across the roof and back down into the building.

  “Oh, man,” he said.

  “This is truly amazing to me,” said Lockwood, who had swiveled around to watch the scene, so that his legs now stretched across the rooftop. “You throw away more talent in a night than I manage to attract in a year.”

  “I wasn’t…this wasn’t about…” His tongue felt too big for his mouth. He couldn’t make it say what he wanted it to. He wasn’t sure what he wanted it to.

  “I liked this one, you know,” Lockwood said. “She’s a flake, okay, fine. But she’s sweet and she’s got a lot of energy and she loves our music. And she’s got a shit job where she makes no money, but she doesn’t complain because we’re around to remind her life is worth celebrating.”

  “I’m so sorry, man. Really. I just…whoa.” Shay ran his fingers through his hair. “I can’t even figure out what just happened here.”

  Lockwood got to his feet and stood up with a grunt of effort. “What happened here,” he said, his voice a little winded, “is that you are a lightweight.”

  “I can hold my drink,” Shay protested. “And my weed.”

  Lockwood shook his head. “That isn’t what I meant.” He started across the roof.

  “Where you goin’, man?” Shay called out, feeling suddenly sad at the idea of being abandoned.

  “To rescue her,” he said, without stopping.

  And a few seconds later, Shay was alone.

  And the moon shone on, gorgeous and relentless.

  CHAPTER 5

  Shay woke up from a restless sleep with the sun slicing into his eyes. He rolled over and tried to block it out, but it diabolically insinuated itself through the crook of his arm and the folds of his blanket, to splash once more onto his face, like acid.

  “Goddammit,” he murmured, and his tongue felt like it was made of wet sand.

  He pulled the covers over his head, blocking out the evil sun. He moaned in contentment and relaxed back into semislumber. But in a matter of minutes he jolted awake again, gasping for breath; he’d run out of oxygen under there.

  He threw back the covers, angry at the cosmos for conspiring to deny him the only thing he wanted in the whole goddamn world, which was to sleep for the next several hours—to sleep indefinitely, really, until something worth not sleeping for came and shook him out of it.

  He’d stayed up too late and partied too hard. When he’d finally stumbled home and collapsed into bed, his mind had raced in too many directions, his stomach had roiled, and his legs had twitched nervously. He looked down at his legs now: numb and white, like the legs of a corpse—even his elaborate tattoos looked ashy and shriveled. One foot still wore a sock. The opposite heel was wrapped in his boxer-briefs, like a bandage. Apparently, he’d been too wrecked when he’d undressed to be able to get them all the way off. He’d gotten them down to his ankles, but then the sharp right angle of that foot must have thrown him for a loop, so he’d just given up and left things as they were.

  Of course, his morning wood was right there, staring him in the face. Didn’t seem to matter how totaled he got the night before; there was always that one bit of himself that was up and at ’em come sunrise. He wished he knew its secret.

  He made a smacking noise and probed his mouth with his tongue. His teeth felt furry. He groped around the side of the bed for a water bottle, but when he found one he knocked it over and spilled its contents all over the floor.

  “Fucking fuckety fuck pants,” he said, and then he quietly laughed, because he had no idea what that even meant.

  He lay back on the pillow, his head clanging like a chapel bell.

  Apparently it had been a good party. If and when he could manage to remember any of it, he was sure this assessment would be borne out.

  His phone interrupted his attempts to pluck strands of memory from the fuzz of his brain. He searched the covers for his phone, and by the time he found it, his bed was in complete disarray. He sat in the middle of it, naked but for his T-shirt and sock, with the underwear wrapped around his foot. “H’lo?” he croaked into the phone.

  “Wow,” said a velvety voice. “Must’ve been some throwdown.”

  He ran his hand through his hair. His fingers almost snagged in its unkempt mass. “Must’a.” He wiped the sand from his eyes. “Morning, P’nita.”

  The woman laughed. “You’re still in bed, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he lied.

  “It’s all right. As long as you’re alone.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You are alone, aren’t you?”

  He lay back on the pillows, scratching his stomach with his free hand. “Let me check.”

  “Don’t bother, I can check for you.” A small pause. “I’m downstairs.”

  He went completely still. “What?”

  “I’m in front of your building. I have coffee and cinnamon rolls. Let me in, please.”

  He was blasted into full wakefulness. He somehow managed to get onto his feet, straighten out his boxer-briefs, pull on a pair of jeans that was lying on the floor outside the bathroom, and drink a full half-quart of water within a ninety-second span. Then he padded over to his front door and buzzed Pernita in.

  He gave his apartment a quick scan, as he wasn’t 100 percent sure there wasn’t some girl there, flouncing around in a towel, having just used his shower and now puttering around, waiting for her hair to dry or something. But no, he remembered now. He hadn’t scored last night. He’d tried. But she got away. Got away early.

  The memories were just filtering back when Pernita appeared at the top of the stairs, and he quietly cursed her under his breath. This was just such a typical move of hers. So…proprietary. She acted like she owned him. They’d been very clear, at the outset of this…this thing they had together, that there were no expectations, no obligations, no anything. It was just for fun. Nothing more. Shay had thought he’d won the lottery: a hot babe who thought about sex just like a guy did.

  Except…she didn’t.

  In fact, she thought about sex in the worst way possible, as a bait and switch. She’d said what she had to say to get Shay where she wanted him, and ever since, she’d been taking over his life by degrees. Relentlessly encroaching on every square inch of it.

  He fought back with the only weapons at his command: rudeness, brusqueness, silence. He never said please or thank you, never complimented her, never called her by anything but her name (no “honey” or “babe” or “sugar”—God, no). If she was aware of this tactic (and she probably was), she chose to serenely ignore it and to sail on into his harbor as if she were the queen of it. Which she almost was, by this point.

  Whenever Shay had had too much and was close to shutting the whole thing down, she seemed able to detect it with a kind of sixth sense or something. She would avert the danger simply by bringing into their conversation the one word that would instantly reset him to zero:

  “Daddy.”

  This morning she looked like she always did—crisp, burnished, sparkling. She could’ve just walked out of a salon or a spa or both. Her leather jacket was so supple it might have been her own skin. Her jeans were so
distressed Shay wondered how they stayed on—he’d thrown out jeans in better condition than those—so of course they probably cost her six hundred bucks.

  She breezed past him into the apartment—she never waited for an invitation—pausing only to give him a quick smooch, then glided into his kitchen and set down the carton and the bag she’d been carrying. “I don’t suppose you have any clean plates,” she said, glancing at the pileup in his sink. “Never mind, I’ll use paper towels.”

  Shay happened to know for a fact that he had no paper towels either, but he was content to let her root around in his kitchen for a while, looking for some. He sat down at his rickety kitchen table and yawned, while Pernita clattered and thunked through his drawers and cabinets. He was in mid-yawn—his jaw stretched as far as it would go—when it hit him.

  Loni.

  That was her name. The one who had gotten away.

  The one who had pretended not to know who he was. How goddamn lame was that?…Adorably lame. He’d wanted to kiss her right then.

  But no, she’d been in full emotional armor. She was having exactly zero of Shay Dayton and all his…Shay Dayton-ness. And she was ready to tell him so, too.

  A spitfire.

  And hot.

  Pernita screamed and jumped back a few paces. Then she looked at Shay and said, in a very firm tone, “After breakfast, I’m taking you out to buy some roach motels.”

  “I won’t use them,” he said. “They’re not humane.”

  “Well, no wonder you have a roach issue.”

  “I bought a thing,” he said, gesturing with his thumb. “It’s plugged in over there. It’s supposed to drive them out with sonic waves that are inaudible to human ears.”

  She rolled her eyes in exasperation, then said, “Audio electronics are not the answer to all life’s problems.”

  He pretended to look shocked and said, “You take that back!”

  She laughed, then left the kitchen in disgust and said, “Never mind, we’ll just eat out of the box.”

  He didn’t want to face her across the breakfast table. That was too disturbingly domestic. Fortunately, his laptop was right there, so he flipped it open. By the time Pernita was seated, it was between them—a shield, a barrier, a partition.

  She opened the box of cinnamon rolls and very carefully took one out. It was a difficult maneuver, given her spectacularly manicured nails, which were approximately the length of the cockroaches she’d just disrespected. “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  “Facebook,” he said. It was true. The news feed page had been the first thing to pop up.

  That jogged his memory, too. The night before, at the party—the girl who wouldn’t leave him alone. He’d checked her Facebook page. Why was that—?

  Oh, right! He’d been trying to find Loni. Because she was the girl’s roommate.

  But—what had the girl said? Zee, that was her name. What had Zee said? Loni was on Facebook under the name of an English poet.

  “Anything new to report?” Pernita asked, biting gingerly into the cinnamon roll.

  “Nah,” he said, not looking up at her. He opened up Wikipedia and typed ENGLISH poets.

  “You should try these,” she said, licking some icing from her lips. “They’re totally exquiz.”

  He winced. “Exquiz” was one of the expressions she used that threatened to trigger his sniper gene. “In a minute,” he said. “Ready for some coffee, though.”

  She obediently fetched a steaming Styrofoam cup from the bag and slid it over to him. “My friend Maesha posted the sweetest video this morning,” she said. “Kitten playing with an armadillo. You should see it. Maesha Vance. Go to her page.”

  “I’m not friends with her,” he said, irritated that the search resulted in a list of English-language poets. Of which there were about twelve million.

  “You don’t need to be. She shares everything with everyone. Total social-media exhibitionist. Maesha Vance. M-A-E-S-H-A.”

  “I don’t want to see a kitten playing with an aardvark,” he said, trying BRITISH POETS.

  “Armadillo,” she said.

  “Arma-anything.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Well. Sommmmeone’s obviously found his inner snark this morning. Hungover much?” She slid the cup closer to him. “Coffee’s getting cold.”

  There was no Wikipedia list of British poets. What the hell! He tried ENGLISH LITERATURE and got a page with a wall of text that went on for ten miles.

  He closed the laptop and took a slurp of coffee. It surged through him like lightning, and he felt immediately better.

  Pernita smiled at him. “There we go. Little color back in your cheeks.”

  He hated when she was right. He shoved aside the laptop and took another chug from the coffee. It was definitely revivifying. In fact, he could feel his brain cells start to wake up and percolate.

  “I’ve told you about Maesha before, I’m sure,” she said, going in for her second cinnamon bun. “She’s the one who’s been screwing Rob Kerringer.”

  “Who’s Rob Kerringer?”

  She put her hands on the table, as if his ignorance had sapped her of the strength to lift the cinnamon bun. “Rob Kerringer,” she said with more insistency, as if this would make a difference.

  “Who is Rob Kerringer?” he repeated, imitating her.

  “I can’t believe you don’t know who Rob Kerringer is,” she said, raising the bun to her lips again.

  “I can’t help what you can’t believe.” British poets, British poets, he thought. What did he know about British poets? Just Shakespeare, really. Shakespeare and John Lennon. Did John Lennon count?

  “Rob Kerringer is the tech billionaire,” Pernita continued. “He’s the one who invented Sited. You know, the app that lets you insert yourself into any photo you’re taking, while you’re taking it?” She bit off a mouthful of the gooey bun, then said, her voice thick with chewing, “I cannot believe you don’t know this.”

  “I’ve never heard of Sited,” he said. “That’s a stupid app. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Well, Daddy doesn’t think so. He’s one of Rob’s investors.” She smiled victoriously at him, as though playing a trump card. Which, of course, she was.

  Shay shrugged and said nothing. He was thinking back to his chat with Loni in the kitchen, when she’d berated him for his terrible lyrics. She’d mentioned a poet then, hadn’t she? Someone Shay had surprised her by knowing. How did that happen? He didn’t know anybody.

  “That’s how I met Maesha,” Pernita continued, licking the frosting from her fingers. Either she was oblivious to Shay’s complete lack of interest in this subject, or she just didn’t care. “Launch party for the app. You’ll be doing lots of those, you know. Whether you like it or not.”

  He shrugged again. “If I have to.”

  William Blake! That was it. Loni had mentioned William Blake. Suddenly Shay was certain that this was her Facebook name. He would have bet money on it. He knew enough from his college psychology classes—and from his own, unsystematic studies of human nature—that the things people mention to you within the first ten minutes of meeting them are inevitably the things most important to them. Hell, how long after meeting someone new did Shay mention the band? Like, nanoseconds.

  “You do have to,” Pernita said, looking around for something to wipe her fingers on. “Don’t worry, you don’t need to say much. You can just stand there and smolder. Be the sexy, mysterious front man. It’s good for your image. Far better than if you talked.”

  And then there was the shocked way Loni reacted when Shay had tossed off those Blake lines, like he had the poet’s whole output right there on his personal hard drive. She didn’t need to know that the only way he knew those lines was because Bono recited them in U2’s “Beautiful Ghost.”

  “No, you just leave all the talking to me,” Pernita said. She reached down to the floor, picked up a discarded T-shirt that had been lying there for God only knew how long, and wiped the frosting f
rom her fingers onto it. “I’ll do all the talking for you.”

  Shay snapped out of his private thoughts. “You?” He was shocked that Pernita was picturing herself as part of Overlords of Loneliness’s parties and press junkets.

  She nodded and took a sip of her own coffee. When she finished she licked her lips and said, “Problem with that?”

  “Well…yeah. You’re not part of the band, is all. If the band has a spokesman, it should be a band member.”

  She smiled at him, as if amused by his childishness. “Okay,” she said. “You’ll do it yourself, then?”

  He frowned. He knew he had it in him. He could represent Overlords of Loneliness. But—he hated admitting it again—Pernita was right; he was better off as the sexy, silent front man. His awareness of his strengths was sufficient to convince him of that. He’d have far more impact as an image—an icon—than as a personality.

  He shook his head.

  “Lockwood, then?” Pernita said, cocking her head. “Lovely, genial, easygoing Lockwood? He’s your choice?”

  Of course he wasn’t. Lockwood was too sweet-natured for the job. He lacked the killer instinct to make people pay attention to what he was saying.

  “Baby, then? Or Jimmy?”

  Baby was a featherweight, and Jimmy came off as a sociopath. Shay folded his arms in frustration.

  “Trina, then! It’s settled.”

  For a moment he felt like his chair was collapsing under him. Was there any greater recipe for disaster than letting Trina speak for the band? She had all the tact and finesse of a T. rex.

  Pernita winked. “Me, then? It’s settled? Honestly, honey, it’s a bargain when you think about it. Most bands have to hire a PR firm and shell out thousands to get someone to message for them. You don’t have to do that. I told you, when I convinced Daddy to take you on, you were getting the complete package. Not just the most successful band manager in the music business, but a team. Meaning, moi. I’ve just graduated with a master’s in Communications with a special focus on entertainment. I’m fresh, I’m young, I’m hot, and I’m smart as a whip. I mean,” she concluded, looking at him with deliberate boldness, “where would you be without me?”