Opening Act (27 page)

Just today, however, she'd e-mailed to say she'd be rejoining the band in Chicago, their last stop on this leg of the tour. That gave Shay less than a week to enjoy his liberty and the high times he'd been having with Paul.

Paul, God bless his crusty heart, had never once mentioned Pernita's name after she was gone. He seemed to have sensed how desperately Shay wanted to be free from even thinking about her. Maybe he even knew what Shay was going through. Certainly when they'd first met him, Pernita had thrown herself at Paul as though claiming him as a reward she'd earned in a past life. He'd managed to shrug her off gently, with complete aplomb, as though that kind of assault was something he'd grown very, very used to. There was even a look on his face, behind the twinkling eyes and pasted-on smile, that said,
Oh, yeah. One of your type. Hell if I can't handle you.

But now that the first half of the tour was winding down, Shay felt a sense of anticlimax, almost of guilt. All this time he'd been free of Pernita, and he hadn't made even a token attempt to reach out to Loni. Possibly he wouldn't have been able to; he still had no contact info for her, nothing. But in fact, he hadn't even
tried
.

He supposed he'd expected that the tour and hanging out with Strafer Nation would all be so new and so novel and so fulfilling that it would drive Loni right out of his thoughts. He had certainly given it plenty of opportunity. But it never really kicked in. Probably because touring involved—much more so than he had ever dreamed—just freaking endless hours of transit. Sitting on that bus for hours on end, with nothing going on except fidgety Pernita beside him complaining and always having to pee, or alone with the two bands who seemed only interested in sleeping or smoking or playing cards or occasionally daring Trina to do something stupid (like moon a squad car from one of the windows), Shay had had acres of time in which his mind was unoccupied and restless—a free agent.

He'd tried to use that time constructively. He'd picked up a copy of
The Complete Poems of William Blake
while he was in New York and had tried to make his way through it on the long rides. Occasionally he did hook on to some passages that made the rest of the world disappear for a while, but most of the time he was too distracted by hunger or movement or weariness or passivity. He came almost to resent having committed himself to the book. It was just so goddamn
massive
. Like, more than a thousand pages. Before they reached Chicago it might just pull his arm out of its socket.

Despite his not-quite-ringing success with William Blake, Shay felt a modicum of hope. After Chicago, the band was returning to Haver City for sixteen days, just for a stopover, no gigs. He could
rest up, check in with some OGs, and maybe get some news on what Loni was up to now. He knew Lockwood was still in contact with Zee, and even though Zee hated him, he might be able to use Lockwood to pry some intel from her.

And then there was the second leg of the tour, when Overlords would be accompanying Strafer Nation west, playing every burg from Boulder to Vegas and ending up—where else?—in Los Angeles.

Shay wasn't sure where Loni lived. He only knew it was in California. But if it was anywhere within driving distance of LA…and hell, even if it wasn't…

Well.

He'd see what he'd see. That's all he could project, from this far out. Play it by ear. Take it as it came.

The bourbon began to claim his consciousness. He shimmied out of his clothes and fell asleep as soon as his T-shirt cleared his head, even though the overhead light still shone brightly into his face.

CHAPTER 14

There was one in every classroom. Loni knew that. Of course she knew it. It's just that now, she couldn't sit back and wait for the drama to resolve. Now, it was
her
problem.

She stood before the class—composed almost entirely of women, with a few stray men who looked like they hadn't quite settled on planet Earth as a permanent residence yet—and tried to look authoritative and calm. She was neither.

“All I'm saying,” said the student—one Ferry Shagall, an extremely tall, angular, and imposing-looking girl with ebony skin and copper-colored hair, “is that if somebody on campus found a poem like this on my website or something, they'd haul me in for a psych evaluation and probably hook me up with some kind of therapist.
And
charge my parents.”

Loni sighed. “I still don't entirely see your point.”

The work under discussion was a poem by Charlotte Dacre that read:

       
So full my thoughts are of thee, that I swear

       
All else is hateful to my troubl'd soul;

       
How thou hast o'er me gain'd such vast control,

       
How charm'd my stubborn spirit is most rare.

       
Sure thou hast mingl'd philtres in my bowl!

       
Or what thine high enchanted arts declare

       
Fearless of blame—for truth I will not care,

       
So charms the witchery, whether fair or foul.

       
Yet well my love-sick mind thine arts can tell;

       
No magic potions gav'st though, save what I

       
Drank from those lustrous eyes when they did dwell

       
With dying fondess on me—or thy sigh,

       
Which sent its perfum'd poison to my brain.

       
Thus known thy spells, thou bland seducer, see—

       
Come practice them again, and oh! again;

       
Spell-bound I am—and spell-bound wish to be.

“My point,” said Ferry, as the other students in the class took advantage of the interruption to check their cell phones and send God-I'm-bored texts, “is that this woman is calling her lover a seducer and liking the idea that he may have drugged her. Am I right?”

Loni felt as though the girl was laying a trap for her. “Let's say you are.”

Ferry shook her head. “I don't want your condescension. Just tell me:
am I right?
”

Loni felt a thin film of sweat form over her brow. “That…that would be my interpretation as well. Yes.”

“Fine.” Ferry sat back and extended her arms wide. “Why are we studying this poem, Ms. Merrick? What's our takeaway supposed to be? Everywhere I go on this campus I'm being exhorted to be rational, to take control, to be empowered, and yadda yadda yadda. Then I get to classes like this one,
and I'm served up works like this—reveling in subjugation, powerlessness, abandonment of personal authority. Talking about
‘perfum'd poison,'
for God's sake.”

“This is poetry,” Loni said, “not rules for living. That's not the way we
use
poetry.”

“Then how
do
we use it?”

Loni felt her face flush. “There's…there's no single use for poetry. It's a whole palette of responses, of ways that it…that it impacts our lives…”
Oh, my God,
Loni thought.
I just used “impact” as a verb. This girl is really rattling me.

“And it's not
just
poetry,” Ferry said. “In my Women's Studies class, we've been reading Simone de Beauvoir. You're familiar with her, I take it?”

“Yes, of course,” said Loni, though her familiarity was only slight.

“Well, all right, then. The way that woman
tore
through life. Rebellion, abortion, female lovers, constantly hurling herself against the authorities of the day. If I lived life the way she did, I'd be booted from this campus in a New York minute, and my parents would disown me into the bargain. But here we are in our safe little classrooms, having her parceled out to us in antiseptic one-hour segments and being quizzed on it later.” She shook her head. “Maybe I'm not cut out for university life. Maybe university life
isn't
life.” She looked up at Loni. “Do you see what I'm getting at here?”

“No,” said Loni, having to hold on to the desk to keep from falling over.

“There's no
risk
here,” she said. “This is, like, the place risk comes to
die
. People like de Beauvoir
roared
across the world stage. They took chances, they defied convention, they
lived
. And we here—here on this campus, in this classroom—we run along after them, collecting the rubble they left behind and fetishizing it.
Why?
What is the purpose of that, if it's not to inspire us to do the same goddamn thing, throw out the rule books and light out for parts unknown?” She gestured widely, taking in the whole of her surroundings. “Where is
poetry
on this campus, Ms. Merrick?
Where?
”

Loni's throat had gone dry. She tried clearing it, but only succeeded in closing it tight.

The trouble was, she agreed with Ferry. She'd just never allowed herself to confront the issue before. She'd been smart enough to steer clear of it, for her own sake. She'd always worshiped the great visionaries and nonconformists—Blake, for Christ's sake!—but she herself had always kept to the safest, most brightly lit, most well-trodden path. She'd never taken a risk in her life.

Well…only once. When she'd thrown everything away because of Shay Dayton. And then, at the first sign that that might have been more dangerous than she'd thought, she'd come scampering back to the herd, to the security of the pack. And to the protection of her mentor. She felt a sudden welling up of shame.

But she had a job to do. So she summoned up all her resources and said, “Literature isn't supposed to be
useful
, Ferry. It can be, but ultimately its only real purpose is to illuminate shades of the human experience, to show us ways of being we otherwise might not have known or even suspected.”

“As a substitute for actually experiencing them, or
being
them?” she asked. “Because, let me tell you, there's not a whole lot of love for varieties of human experience around this place. It's pretty much lockstep or locked-out, as far as I can tell. Which makes this worship of historic and literary rebels flat-out hypocrisy.”

“We don't
worship
them,” Loni said, trying not to let anger edge into her voice. “We
listen
to them. It's all a conversation. They speak directly to us, right off the page. They always will.”

Ferry slouched in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, if they speak directly to us, then why do we need
you
?”

Loni felt almost faint. She'd gotten some flak from this girl before, but never on this level. Possibly there was some atmospheric thing going on that was making her more contentious today than usual. “We're here as your guides,” Loni said, in the most evenly measured tones as she could manage. “We're here to help you navigate…well, for instance, Charlotte Dacre's vocabulary and imagery. To clarify what it is she's done, what's
behind
what she's done.”

Ferry narrowed her eyes. “You're
priests
, is the point. Right? Because, if you really meant what you said—that literature is a conversation, and poets speak directly to us—then there's no need for any intermediaries. You're here because…well, basically, you
do
worship these people. You
do
fetishize them. Because of some lack in your own confidence or abilities or whatever, you put yourselves between us and them—you
insert
yourselves into the conversation as intermediaries, and from that you draw some kind of sad, reflected glory.”

Loni rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Oh, for God's sake. You're asking me now to justify the whole existence of academia.”

“
Can
you? At least, with respect to the arts? Because if poets speak directly do us, why
do
we need you? Listen, do you think Charlotte Dacre, when she wrote this poem, was like, ‘Okay, it's finished, now I'll turn it over to my vestal virgins so that they can spoon-feed it line by line to the rest of humanity and tell them exactly how it ought to go down'? Because frankly, I have to doubt it.”

Loni shook her head. “You can't know what Charlotte Dacre meant.”

“And you can?” She sat up and put her hands on the desk and laughed. “How can you possibly? How can you tell me
you
can understand a woman who lived her life like a lit match and I can't? What gives
you
insight into that kind of mind and not me?”

“You're confusing passion with poetry. That's only part of it. Poetry is also a discipline; it's work. It's
hard
work. It's not just fire, it's…” She searched for an appropriate analogy. “It's nailing fire to a page. So that it burns forever.” Oh, hell. That wasn't right. It was a mixed metaphor, for one thing. Loni cringed at her own ineptitude.