The Friendship Song (11 page)

“Because living is the truth and death is a lie.”

But it wasn't all of Nico, really. He was half made of air. I could see through him. The rest of him was still unconscious in a hospital bed.

“Nico!” Rawnie and I both screeched.

“You know me?” His face was a lot like Rawnie's, dark and beautiful and real quiet whenever he was not singing. It hardly moved even when we screamed at him. I could tell he was surprised, though. “Who are you guys? So far nobody knows me here.”

“We're not from here!” Rawnie had to do the explaining, because I was having trouble getting my mouth coordinated enough to talk. “We came to find you and take you back with us.”

“Why?” He hardly even seemed interested. His eyes were on the band, and he said, “My God, look at Hendrix bend those strings.”

“Because we love you,” Rawnie said. “We think you're the greatest.”

He didn't even smile, just said, “I'm not. These guys are the greatest. Hendrix taught the whole world how to turn on the juice. So did Elvis, he took rock music out of its little black box and turned it loose. And Morrison, look at him grooving with his shirt off, he was half-crazy, he died young and stupid, but he knew how to rock and he knew how to sing. Still does. And Lennon—he wrote songs people can't forget.”

My voice was starting to work again. “Nico,” I said, “you've got to come back with us.”

“Why?” His eyes focused on me, and they were deep, like brown water, and not happy. “Give me one good reason.”

“To be alive!”

“Tell me something, what is so great about being alive? I thought I had a friend, and now that I'm in trouble all he can think about is cashing in. He left me on my own, I've always been all alone and I'll always be all alone, but here at least I could be in the ultimate band.”

He was as ultimate as any of them, so drop-dead good-looking I could hardly bear to stand next to him and talk to him, but at the same time I started to understand something else about him. Underneath all the rock star stuff, he was just a kid, not much older than me. Not that much different than the boys at my school. He was feeling sorry for himself. Probably he got pimples every once in a while too, and hated them. Which didn't make me stop liking him. In fact I think it made me like him more. But in a different way than before.

“Somebody's been beating on you too,” he said to me, looking at my shiner.

“Not really. Nico, being alive is—is—”

“To dance,” Rawnie said. “To sing.”

“I can do that here. Janis Joplin was here a while ago. You should have heard her sing.”

“To make your own songs.”

He sat down in one of the metal chairs as if to say he wasn't moving. “I can do that here too. Del Shannon's already written a dozen good ones since he's been here.”

This wasn't working. “Look,” I said, sitting down next to him, “I know it was rough, what Ty did to you. And I know probably we don't really understand, we're just a couple of sixth-grade girls, but—”

“Just?” He looked at me, and the way he did it made me stop talking, because there was something warm and bright starting in his eyes. “What do you mean, just girls? Don't you know girls are the most awesome thing there is? You've got such a mystery about you. Sometimes I think girls know more about life the day they're born than guys ever learn.”

Rawnie sat down on the other side of Nico, and I guess we were both staring at him, and he actually smiled.

“You two, you're girlfriends, right?” he said. We both nodded. “Okay, right there you got something most guys never get. I thought I had it with Ty.…” He lost his smile. “Thing is, guys don't know how to be friends, not really. We don't really talk with each other. There's a lot of stuff we never say, afraid we'll look like sissies or something. We're always competing with each other. Look at them.” He pointed his chin at the rockers on stage. “Elvis is hogging the mike again, and they're all just waiting for a chance to get it away from him. Sometimes they act real buddy-buddy, but they'd walk over each other to get what they want.”

I looked at the rock stars on stage. They were all singing together, all dancing and stomping to the music. They looked wonderful to me, like a team, a gang, pals. Were they really alone inside themselves? Each one wanting to be the one at the mike?

Maybe they were. Nico was a guy, he should know what it was really like.

I said half to myself, “I always thought it was better to be a boy.”

“God, no. A guy has to always be trying to prove something. Look at the way jocks act. Hugging each other on the field, giving each other hell in the locker room.”

“Nico,” Rawnie said softly, “don't give up on Ty.”

“I don't want to give up, but I got to, girl. He gave up on me.”

“Maybe he doesn't see it that way. Maybe he thinks he's doing what he has to do.”

“Sure, he thinks he's got to, but that doesn't help me.” Nico took a breath and tried to explain. “The thing is, maybe he's got his own agenda, maybe it's important to him to be a star without me. But where does that leave me? What about the way I feel?”

I said, “You mean that you really liked him, and you thought you'd always be together.”

Nico didn't answer me for a minute. He was looking at me as if something was a little off-key. Then he said, “Do you know, ‘The Friendship Song'?”

I had to smile. Rawnie was looking at me and smiling too. Did we know “The Friendship Song”? Jeez. But all we said was, “Uh-huh.”

Nico said, “I love that song.”

“So do we,” I told him.

“Not just like it's a happenin' song. I mean I really love it.”

“So do we.”

“Do you really know what I'm saying?”

I thought I did. In fact, I knew all along. “You're saying you
meant
it when you sang it.”

“Yeah. Yes. I really did, I really believed it. I sang it with my heart hanging out.” He gave us a look that was partly angry but mostly hurt. Way bad hurt. There were tears in his eyes. “Well, so much for that, huh? Now what?”

So much for Rawnie and Harper, Rescuers, Inc. There wasn't a thing we could do or say. We didn't have an answer for him.

CHAPTER TEN

The ultimate band kept playing while the lights flashed all the colors in the world and the big circle behind the drum stand kept turning around and around. For a long time Nico and Rawnie and I sat in the music like sitting in the sun, talking. Nico was like Rawnie and me, he had this feeling of the way things should be, the way people should be good to each other. We talked about a lot of things. But we couldn't talk him into coming back with us.

“Look, I'll think about it,” was the best answer we got from him. “It's the least I can do, when you two kids came in here after me—”

He stopped talking and looked at us with a strange, worried shadow starting in his eyes.

“What?” Rawnie asked him.

“Jeez,” he said softly, “now I know I'm far gone. Here I sit just thinking about myself, and what about you two? How are you going to get back?”

Rawnie groaned. I rolled my eyes. “Through the maze again, I guess,” I said.

“I don't want to think about it,” Rawnie said. “And I'm so hungry.”

Nico exclaimed, “You didn't eat anything in here, did you?”

“No.”

“Good. Don't! If you eat anything, you can't leave.”

Rawnie looked at me like she wanted to say something that didn't need saying. And I just wanted to change the subject anyway. I said, “I wonder what day it is.”

“Isn't it still the same night?” Rawnie looked startled.

“How should I know? It feels like we've been in here a week.”

“You can't go out the way you came in,” Nico said. “The boatman won't take you.” He was keeping his voice very quiet, but I could tell he was scared. As if it was his fault we were in there. It wasn't. He couldn't help it if we came in after him. But he cared about us. That was the kind of person he was.

He was right too. That boatman was just the kind of person who wouldn't take us back across the creek. Now I was scared. “Oh, my God,” I said to Rawnie, and the way she was looking at me didn't help.

We all three sat like spare tires for a minute.

“How do you get in and out?” I asked Nico.

“I fly.”

Forget it. That wouldn't work for Rawnie and me. We sat some more.

“We sort of got in by letting the music take us,” Rawnie said, not sounding too sure of herself. “Maybe we can get out by not letting it have us anymore?”

“Put your hands over your ears,” Nico told us, “and think about going home.”

“What about you?”

“Forget me. Do it.”

I tried it and knew right away it wasn't going to work. I could still hear the music. Or what I mean is, the music was still in me, right down to my bones, the way there was always music in Rawnie's feet. I could feel it like I could feel my heartbeat. And deep down I didn't want to make it stop. It would be like dying if I made it stop. I needed to have it with me always.

“Think about summertime coming,” Nico was saying. “Think about, oh, I don't know, things you like to eat. Petting a cat, walking a dog. Hanging out with people you really like.” His voice was starting to quiver. “Brothers, sisters, father, mother. People who love you.”

I wanted all that, but I wanted the music too.

“Nico,” said Rawnie very gently, “come with us.”

“Give me a break and just get yourselves home, okay?” His voice was stretched tight as a drumhead.

“We don't know how,” she said.

“Yes, we do,” I told her. I had gone kind of fuzzy because I was so tired and hungry, or I would have thought of it before. “The other way. By the pigeon coop.”

“Yeah!” She understood. “The back way! But where is it?”

“I see what you mean,” Nico said. “There ought to be a stage door.”

He got up and headed toward where he thought it might be. Rawnie and I trailed along behind him. “Jeez,” I muttered, surprised at how tired and old I felt.

Nico walked up onstage, and so did we, and Elvis kept jumping around and singing “Rock it, rock it,” but Buddy Holly stopped banging out the beat on his old Stratocaster and looked at us.

“Hey,” he said. “People. Kids. Girls.”

“Quite so, that's what they are,” said Lennon. He was standing there playing a big mouthful of shiny metal, a harmonica. He smiled at us around the edges of it, then kept playing, and I was glad. I wanted the music never to end.

“They need to go home,” Nico said. “They're not dead.”

“They ought to see the manager,” Buddy Holly said. He was dressed in a white nerd shirt and black nerd slacks, not like any rock star I had ever dreamed of. The only halfway cool thing he had on was a belt with a big silver lonesome-cowboy buckle. Actually it was kind of old-fashioned-looking, and I never was much for cowboy stuff. But I liked him anyway. He seemed nice. Not just smiley nice, but nice all the way to his bones.

“What about you, kid?” he said to Nico. “Made up your mind yet?”

“No,” Nico said.

“Listen, y'all go back, then. Take it from me, never die young. It's not worth it. Being a dead rock legend sucks.”

I saw Nico's eyes go wide. But all he said was, “Where do we find the manager?”

“Where do you think?” somebody else shouted over. It was Hendrix, and he sounded mad that we were interrupting things. “Backstage!”

See, the strange thing was, even though I knew we were in Gus's backyard, it was like we were in a stadium or an arena. There were walls. And I looked to the right and I looked to the left, but I didn't see any doors in them.

“How do we get there?” Nico asked.

Nobody answered him. Maybe nobody heard, because the band was swinging into “Born to Be Wild,” Buddy Holly was hitting the strings hard, John Lennon was swaying to the beat, drums were pounding, the lights were flashing blue and purple and bloodred, and I laughed out loud, because suddenly I saw. I grabbed Nico with one hand, Rawnie with the other.

“Step in,” I told them. “Step into the circle.”

Right in front of us, big, was the backdrop with the circle that kept turning. And I had been thinking its black-and-white design was yang and yin, but watching the colors hit it all at once, I saw it in a different way. With the lights on it, it was the hex sign from the pigeon coop. And if things could come through it to make the band play, maybe we could go through it the other way.

“Come on,” I urged. “It's the hex.”

Something strange was happening. The music was dwindling away like into the distance, and light was coming from somewhere, everything was getting bright. The circle blazed like fire. “What's happening?” Rawnie exclaimed, holding me back.

“Night's ending,” Nico said. “Gig's nearly over. Get going, you two.” He pulled his hand out of mine.

“Nico, come with us!”

“I don't
know
what to do! Stop thinking about me and just go!” One hand on each of us between the shoulder blades, he gave us a shove that should have sent us slamming off the stage and into the wall behind it.

But the stage did not end when it should have. We fell into the slowly spinning circle, I fell into yang and Rawnie fell into yin, or it might have been the other way around, it didn't matter. Then we weren't falling anymore, we were floating or drifting or spinning, backstage, behind everything, the two of us.

And then we were face to face with the manager of eternity's band.

“Harper,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

He knew me. And I felt like I should know him, but I wasn't sure who he was, and I couldn't think, because he was so—he was hot, like the sun. His face was young and handsome and almost golden; it seemed to shine. His hair was long and thick and flowed back from his face like a lion's mane and formed a circle in the sky. His eyes—they were so bright I couldn't look at his face after the first glimpse, and I felt Rawnie's hand tighten on mine like she needed something to hang on to.