Seven, eight ... Gonna stay up late (Rebekka Franck #4)

Seven,
Eight ...

Gonna
stay up late

Rebekka Franck series #4

Willow
Rose

Copyright
Willow Rose 2013

Published
by Jan Sigetty Boeje

All
rights reserved.

No part
of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission from the author.

This is
a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or
dead is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work.
Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

Cover design by
Jan Sigetty Boeje

http://sigetty.wix.com/coverart

Special thanks
to my editor Jean Pacillo

http://www.ebookeditingpro.com

Connect with
Willow Rose:

http://www.willow-rose.blogspot.com/

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I
said, hey, girl with one eye


Get
your filthy fingers out of my pie


I
said, hey, girl with one eye


I'll
cut your little heart out cause you made me cry



Girl with
one eye,
Florence and the Machin
e

She was drunk.
Too drunk to walk straight. Too drunk to find her way back to the tent. But she
wasn't alone. The festival grounds were crowded with people staggering around
too drunk to know what they were doing. That was the way it always was,
especially at this late hour on the festival's first night when people had been
drinking all day, some for days in a row, living up to all the expectations of
looking forward to seeing all the bands on stage and just drinking without a
care in the world.

Amalie loved it. It was so real, so raw and the
only time she would mingle with people that weren’t from her part of the world,
who weren’t from her class. Here on the festival grounds, on the soil that was
magically transformed every year from plain fields to this Mecca of vibrating
music and people listening to it together. All boundaries were crossed. Rich
were living in the same manner, in the same tents, as ordinary working class
people. Being from the high-society jet-set of the Danish population Amalie
always found it hilarious to mingle with people of lesser means, with the kind
of people she never associated with during her daily life of horseback riding
and golfing. The kind of people she wouldn't look at if she passed them on the
street. But here, in these surroundings all walls were torn down. There was no
rich, no poor, there was just people. People dancing, people singing, people
peeing in all corners and people drinking and smoking. All were happy and
talking to one another no matter where they came from or where they were
heading.

While looking for her own group in the sea of
tents she came across all kinds of people who, not knowing who she was, dared
to speak to her like she was an ordinary girl from an ordinary middle class
family. She found that amusing and laughed to herself just as a guy with wide
eyes and a blissful smile greeted her and told her she was gorgeous. No one
would ever dare to talk to her like that had they known who she really was. No
one talked to her like that in her daily life and she enjoyed it. It was fun. But
then again, she had always enjoyed playing with people. To Amalie people were
like dolls. Dolls you could play with and get to do what you'd like them to,
then throw them away afterwards. She was like that with her friends, the few
she allowed to get close to her.

Amalie suddenly felt dizzy and staggered into a
camp of people sitting outside of a tent smoking a bong. They all smiled and
looked up at her when she tumbled into the side of one of their tents. Then
they laughed.

She got up and laughed at herself as well.
"Sorry about that," she said.

"No problem," one of them said. His
eyes were red and bleary. "Do you want some?" he asked and pointed at
the bong.

Amalie shrugged. "Why not?" Then she
leaned over and inhaled deeply from the bong. It made her body shiver in
delight and the ground spun even faster than before.

"Best be on my way now," she said
laughing like a mad man.

"See you around," the man holding the
bong said.

"Sure," she said and staggered on. The
dizziness increased and soon she found it hard to know in what direction she
was supposed to walk. She tried hard to focus her mind on finding the right
tent but they all looked the same. For miles and miles the area continued with
nothing but tents all looked the same. It didn't help her much that it was in
July and one of those clear bright summer nights when the sun would hardly set
at all. She still couldn't spot her tent.

She was actually in a hurry to find it. Since
she was going to watch The Mew play in about half an hour. She had told her friends
that she was going to the restroom and that could usually take up to an hour
because of the long lines.

"You're not going back to go to sleep are
you? Are you caving in?" her best friend Camilla asked. She was the one
who brought Amalie to the festival. Just like Amalie she came from a rich
high-society family that didn't care for them being in such a place, but
Camilla knew how to trick their parents, making arrangements for them to go
sailing, paying off the captain of her father’s yacht to tell her parents and
Amalie's parents that they were both on the boat all four days the festival
lasted. It was the second year Amalie and Camilla had done this. No one had
ever suspected what they really had been up to.

"No. Are you kidding me? Amalie answered. "My
favorite band is coming. I'm gonna stay up very late, maybe even make it an all
nighter."

 In reality she wasn't going to the
restroom, she was going back for more colored pills that she had gotten from a
guy earlier in the day. She had met him at a concert in one of the smaller
tents where the lesser known artists played for smaller crowds. He stared at
her from afar with a strange smile. He was handsome; she thought and smiled
back shyly to the much older blond guy with slick hair and peculiar eyes, smoking
a cigarette. She lowered her eyes and continued to dance to the music with her
girlfriend feeling his eyes following her every move. She liked that. Him
devouring her with his look. When she opened her eyes again he was gone. After
the concert when she walked towards the restrooms he crept up behind her.

"Boo!"

She jumped, startled. Quicker than she could
manage to turn her head, he was in front of her with a whooshing sound.

"Looking for fun, are we?" he asked
with a whispering, almost hissing voice. His eyes stared wildly at her and her
body. It made her feel warm. He was flickering his fingers in front of her
face. At that time Amalie had been drinking since the same morning and yes, he
was so right, she was indeed looking to have some fun. Lots of fun. She was
determined to do all the things she had never been allowed to do. Do it before
it was too late. Before she was all grown up and supposed to live the life
determined for her since her birth. Before her birth, actually.

The man put his face very close to hers. She
smiled and reached out to touch his soft, smooth skin. But it was like her
fingers went straight through him. Either that or he was just moving really
fast. Maybe she was just reacting slowly because she was drunk, she thought.
Suddenly he was behind her. Whispering in her ear.

"I have fun in my pocket," he said.
"Do you want to see? Do you? Do you want to see?"

Knowing how her father would be angry if he knew
where she was and what she was really doing, she smiled at the prospect of really
pissing him off. She nodded her head and felt the man put something in her
pocket.

When she turned with the intent to pay him, he
was gone. She looked for him while taking out the pills. Then she had decided
to save them for tonight's big concert.

After several wrong turns and stumbling over a number
of cords holding the tents, Amalie finally found her own tent. She crawled in
and sat on her air mattress in the dark. She pulled out her backpack and found
the colored pills in the side pocket. Then she found a half-empty beer bottle
and flushed a pink one down with it. She enjoyed the taste of a common beer,
like the ones ordinary people drank. Ah, she thought to herself while waiting
for the pill to do its job. Ah, to finally be like normal people.

She looked up as she heard the whooshing sound
of the wind. It was getting windier. She found a sweater in her backpack that
she brought just in case. When she looked up she spotted a light outside the
tent. A circle of light, like the beam of a flashlight was being shone towards
her tent. It wasn't moving at all. Fingers appeared in the circle. Amalie
tilted her head. Was it the drugs or was someone making shadow animals on the
tent cloth? Amalie smiled when the fingers made a rabbit, she chuckled when
they made what looked like a goat, and she even laughed out loud when they made
a dog and pretended it was barking. But when they shaped a small devil with
pointy ears, Amalie laughed no more.

"Did you
get
a good one of him on stage?" I asked Sune. He
stared at the display on the camera and showed me. I nodded my acknowledgement.
It was an excellent picture of the guitarist my article was about. It was
beautifully composed with the lights and colors on the huge stage. Orange
stage, the biggest stage at the festival.

We were at the Roskilde festival, an event that
every year attracted some of the world's biggest bands and around eighty-five
thousand people from all over the world. It was one of the six biggest annual
music festivals in Europe. It was a huge event for a small country like Denmark
and naturally it was documented in all the media, and since it was within our
area - also by my small newspaper,
The
Zeeland Times
.

Sune and I didn't stay in the muddy campsite
with poor sanitary conditions like all the paying visitors. As members of the
press we had access to the secluded area of the festival where the press and
musicians were treated more humanely. Sune and I saw this as an opportunity to
spend some quality time together while working, with the added possibility of
listening to some great music and meeting exciting people, like the guitarist
we were doing a piece on.

"Happy?" Sune asked while I clicked
through the photos.

Very," I said with a big smile. "It
looks great."

Sune smiled back, and then he leaned down and
kissed me. I enjoyed being alone with him for once. We hadn't had much time
together lately, with work, taking care of my dad and the kids coming between
us.

It wasn't that we didn't see each other. We
actually saw a lot of each other every day. We had moved in together in Sune's
small apartment and worked together on the paper, but still it was like there
wasn't really time to be a couple, to be romantic. The kids were constantly
there and if not, then it was something else.

It was July. Four months had passed since our
disastrous winter vacation in Arnakke and Denmark was showing itself from its
most attractive angle. The forest was in bloom and even if it did occasionally
rain now and then, the weather was behaving nicely for the festival and kept
the ground from turning into a pile of mud like it usually did.

The sun peeked out every now and then and warmed
our faces and made it all just really nice. Along with the great music and the
wonderful vibe from the happy, almost ecstatic people all over the festival
grounds, it was an assignment we both really enjoyed.

Peter had taken Julie the four days we were
gone. She was on her summer break and I gave him permission to take her with
him to Aarhus where he lived in our old house from back when we were still
together. He had been back in our lives all spring now and it seemed to be
going well. He had been in therapy and I was beginning to see a huge change in
him. The anger issues were gone, or at least I didn't see them anymore, and
neither did Julie. He seemed to have that part under control. So I slowly
allowed him to come back into our lives little by little, and I enjoyed seeing
how happy Julie was to spend some time with her dad. I never asked about his
business, if he still worked as a mercenary for so-called "security"
companies operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I figured he still did since
he never told me otherwise. I still didn't care much for it and hoped he would
never talk to Julie about it. So in the beginning I allowed him to stay in
Karrebaeksminde at a hotel and take Julie out on weekends, later she was
allowed to stay in his hotel room with him the entire weekend. Julie was
ecstatic naturally to finally have her father back in her life and I didn't
mind to occasionally have a weekend of my own. The problem was that Sune didn't
have any possibility of someone taking Tobias out of the apartment, so it
wasn't that we had time to ourselves even if Julie was out of the house.

But we managed okay, I thought to myself as I
kissed him back. Living together had made everything a lot easier. If only I
wasn't so guilt-ridden about leaving Dad. He hadn't been feeling well lately,
if it was due to the exposure to radiation four months ago or if it was just
him getting older and missing us in the house, I didn't know. Maybe it was all
of it. We tried to visit several times a week, but it was getting increasingly
difficult to find time in our busy schedules. Julie had gotten really serious
about horseback riding and went there three times a week, and I, well I had my
job and my editor had begun demanding more and more from me. The newspaper had
expanded and I had been promoted to cover more than just Karrebaekminde-stuff.
I traveled all over Zeeland now and did stories. It was great for me career-wise,
but left me with less time on my hands. Dad was the one who suffered because of
it. He would never say it to my face, but he was disappointed that I chose to
move out of his house. I knew it, I could tell on his face. I knew he had
enjoyed having us in the house, especially after Mom died, but I had a life to
live too. Julie would occasionally spend the night at his house and let him
spoil her rotten, but she too was growing older and getting a life of her own.
She had made a lot of new friends who were also into horses and riding and
along with Tobias they could spend hours and hours on the riding school.

"Where did you go?" Sune asked and
kissed my nose.

I chuckled. "I'm sorry. I was just thinking
about Dad. I hope he's alright alone in that big house. I won't be able to
visit him until Tuesday."

"He'll be alright," Sune said.

A couple of young guys staggered drunk past us,
yelling happily. Sune greeted them with a friendly nod. "Don't do this
again," he said.

"Do what?"

"Don't turn what is supposed to be a great
couple of days for us into a guilt-trip so you can't enjoy us finally being
alone together."

I bent my head in shame. "You're right. I
always do that, don't I?"

"Over thinking everything, yes," he
said and removed a lock of hair from my face.

"I'm sorry. I'll stop right away."

Sune chuckled and kissed my forehead. He knew as
well as I, that I wasn't capable of leaving it alone after the thought first
entered my mind. But I was determined to not let it destroy my trip with Sune.
"I can't do anything about it anyway, right?" I continued.
"Well, maybe I could call him and ask if he's alright." I looked up
at Sune. "Later," I said. "I'll call him later."

Sune smiled, and then kissed my lips.
"Wonderful. 'Cause we have a schedule. There are a lot of smaller bands
that I really want to see, but I have two big ones that I am not going to miss.
Björk is on in half an hour and Saturday night is the big night."

"Springsteen?"

Sune nodded eagerly. "The Boss himself.
I’ve been looking forward to this for months. Nothing's going to keep me away.
I don't care if the world comes to an end; I'm watching him on stage."

"Well we better hope the world stands a
little longer, then," I said and patted his stomach. "Let's grab
something to eat first, and then head over to see the eccentric
Icelander."