Wild Awake (24 page)

Pause. “Yes.”

Pause. “Be careful.”

Static.

Pause. “I went to the marshlands.”

“What?”

Pause. “I went to the marshlands.”

“You are a friend of marshlands.”

“Yes.”

Static. I pick up one of the brightly colored bottles on the floor in front of me and inspect it.

“Which do you think is more trustworthy, Windex or Toilet Duck?”

Pause. “Windex.”

“Why?”

Pause. “You should never trust a duck.”

“Oh.”

“Especially not a toilet duck.”

I peer at the label on the bottle in my hand. “They write too much on these things.”

“People like to know how things work.”

“Hm. But why all the science? Why the diagrams about breaking down bacteria? Why not something else? Why not say Toilet Duck works by channeling the spirit of ducks? Why all the crap about chemistry?”

Radio static. I hear Skunk exhale his cigarette smoke.

“People like to think everything can be explained by chemistry.”

“Yeah, but toilets?”

Skunk laughs. I silently award myself one point for cheering him up.

“Are you burning incense?” I ask him.

Pause. “Yes.”

It’s amazing how well you can get to know a person if you actually pay attention. People are like cities: We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is a postcard glimpse of a floodlit statue or a skyline. Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn’t know were there, even the ones they wouldn’t have thought to call beautiful themselves. I decide to test my knowledge of all things Skunk.

“Are you wearing your ‘Sed Interdum’ T-shirt?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Are you wearing white socks?”

Pause. “No.”

“Are you wearing no socks?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Are you sitting on the floor?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Are you afraid of your aunt Martine?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Are you afraid she’ll kick you out if you don’t do what she wants?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Does she think you’re having a Thing?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Do you think so?”

Pause. “No.”

“Is that why you went to the marshlands?”

Pause. “Yes.”

“Will you come watch my band tonight?”

Pause.

“Skunk? Hey, Skunk?”

Pause. Static.

“Can I come over?”

Pause. Static.

“I can be there on my bike in twenty minutes.”

Static.

“Okay, I’m getting on my bike.”

“No.”

Pause. “Why not?”

Pause. “You should sleep.”

Pause. “Why?”

Pause. “It’s four thirty, Crazy Girl.”

“It’s four thirty, Crazy Boy.”

Pause. “Make you a deal. You go lie on your bed and I’ll go lie on my bed.”

“Oh, I know! We’ll fall asleep at exactly the same time, and we’ll both have a dream where we go bike riding together.”

“Yes.”

“And we’ll ride around Stanley Park in our dream, and we’ll break into a condo in our dream, and we’ll take a long steamy shower together in the finely appointed bathroom with stunning views of Burrard Inlet.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll come hear my band tonight.”

Pause. “I love you,” he says.

My body goes so bright and hot I’m surprised the cell phone doesn’t melt in my hand.

“I love you too,” I say in a rush, like in the city of myself I’ve just stumbled on a fountain.

“My mom thinks you’re having a
hypermanic episode.”

I happen to be carrying a very heavy, very expensive, very brand-new amp when Lukas says this. It starts to slip out of my hands, but my left knee shoots up to catch it before it falls.

“Urff.”

Lukas keeps walking down the Train Room’s steep, narrow stairs.

“I don’t know much about it, you should really talk to her, but—”

“Urrrh! Urrhh!”

The amp is teetering preteeterously on my rapidly tiring thigh. If Lukas doesn’t turn around and help me soon, there will be one more piece of high-tech music gear for me to fix in Skunk’s shed using only a socket wrench and a set of tire irons.

“Urrrrrrgh!”

Lukas finally turns around, sees me balancing this giant amp on my knee, and scrunches his nose.

“What are you doing with that amp? It’s going to fall and break.”

Heaven forbid Lukas come back up three steps and assist in said amp’s timely rescue. He stands there watching me struggle with it until I manage to slip a hand under the leather strap on top of the amp and lower it to rest on the stair. He scratches a zit on the side of his head.

“I’m just saying it seems like maybe you’re having some issues,” he says.

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We just won Battle of the Bands, for chrissakes, which means that next Saturday we get to headline our very own show. We just did our Invincible Gods of Time and Space thing where our minds meld together and the force of our collective vibrations could shatter the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. An indie photographer with chunky glasses took our photo for an obscure music zine. Straight-edge Alex and Nikky Sharp even gave us high fives. A nerd from CiTR-FM asked if we had a demo. That’s how hot we were. Hotter than the freaking sun.

“What?” I shriek. “But I’m fine. I’m acting totally normal.”

I know that flipping out will only prove Lukas right, but the thing is, I tried really hard to keep it together tonight. I’ve been alert and lucid, polite and serious and humble and helpful and friendly and kind. It felt like things were finally good again. Why is he wrecking it now?

Lukas raises a hand as if to fend me off. “My mom’s a social worker, Kiri. If she thinks you’re hypermanic, you probably are.”

I stare at Lukas. Sandy yellow hair. Tight T-shirt. Black jeans. Standing three steps below me on the stairs going down to the street after Battle of the Bands, Final Showdown Edition. This is the Lukas whose earlobe I touched on his birthday. The Lukas in whose basement I played music every afternoon after school. The Lukas at whose kitchen table I sat drawing album cover after potential album cover for the
Bucket of Skulls
Snake Eats Kitten
Sonic Drift
debut EP. The Lukas in whom I used to take such irrational delight, just because he was a Lukas and I was a me.

Who the hell is Lukas, anyway?

I am carrying a four-foot-long synth, a tangle of cords, and an amp that weighs more than I do. Lukas is carrying a pair of drumsticks and a green sweater. His parents have gone down ahead of us carrying his drum kit and stool.

“Would you take something? This is kind of a lot to carry.”

Lukas gazes up at me skeptically. “I’m carrying this sweater.”

“Never mind.”

“I guess I could tie the sweater around my waist.”

The thing is, Lukas is serious. He seriously has to consider the fact that he is carrying his sweater, and seriously has to arrive at the conclusion that, okay, maybe he could make a slight adjustment to his sweater-carrying configuration and give me a hand with the amp. It is slowly dawning on me: This is just how Lukas is. He will never know how to turn off a smoke detector. He will never be able to start watching a movie half an hour later than he planned. He will never look at me close enough to see more than a postcard. He won’t even try.

Lukas ties his sweater around his waist.

“Hand me those cords,” he says.

“Hypermanic meaning what?”

Suddenly, carrying the cords and the amp and the synth myself is of utmost importance. I snatch the cords out of his reach.

“I don’t know,” says Lukas. “It might have been some other word. She said you’re a monomaniac.”

“A monomaniac.”

Lukas looks away. “Or something.”

“Your mom said this?”

Nod.

I silently strike Petra off my list of People I Would Take a Bullet For. A monomaniac.
Moi
.

“She’s been worried about you ever since the last time you came over for dinner.”

“What happened the last time I came over for dinner?”

“You spent half an hour talking about some secret technique you have for learning piano pieces.”

“It’s not a
secret
, it’s a scientifically proven method for—”

“Kiri—”

“If she’s so worried about me, why hasn’t she said something? Why is she down there waiting in the car while you tell me you all secretly think I’m a monomaniac?”

“Because—”

Lukas presses his lips together several times as if crushing the false starts of sentences he decides not to say. I glare down at him, wielding our expensive new amp like a wrecking ball. Finally:

“She said you might listen if it came from your best friend.”

A hot, hollow bomb of humiliation and outrage explodes in my chest. Our eyes meet briefly and we both look away. He stomps up the stairs and tries to grapple the amp out of my hands. “Let me carry that stuff.”

“No.”

“Come on, let me carry it.”

We struggle for a moment, coming dangerously close to falling down the stairs, amp, synth, and all. Finally, I shove all the equipment into Lukas’s arms.

“Fine. Take it. And you know what? You can tell your parents I’ll get my own ride home.”

“Come on, we’ll give you a ride.”

“No.”

“My mom won’t leave without—”

“Denny can pick me up.”

Lukas looks dubious, but at least he quits arguing. He casts me a wounded glance and makes his way down the stairs. I stick my hands on my hips and shout after him in my most monomaniacal voice.

“Great bands don’t psychoanalyze!”

I stomp back up to the Train Room, pushing through the swinging doors into the dark, still-crowded venue. I go all the way to the back and hide in the sound booth. After a minute, I see Petra and Lukas come in through the doors. They split up and look around. When they can’t find me, they meet up again and have a short, stressed-out conference, then turn around and go back out.

Ten seconds later my cell phone starts ringing, but I turn it off and shove it back into my purse. I’ve had enough of Lukas’s hysteria for one night. Before we went on, he was worried the new amp wouldn’t work. Then he said his shoulders hurt and he might have strained a muscle. Then he kept checking his dad’s phone obsessively to see what time it was. Then I developed an alarming case of monomania.

Also, Skunk never showed up.

I walk up to the refreshment booth and ask for a ginger ale. The guy working the booth recognizes me from our set and lets me have it for free. He has a red beard and alarmingly straight shoulders, like someone squared them off with a ruler. He shovels ice into a plastic cup, squirts in the ginger ale with a flourish, fits a lime wedge over the edge of the cup, and slides it across the counter to me.

“You guys rocked. It’s on the house.”

“Why, thank you. Did you know I have monomania?”

“Is that like mononucleosis?”

“It’s much worse.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. It’s the rarest form of monomania in the world. It’s the kind of monomania only gotten by famous musicians.”

“Wow.”

“Jimi Hendrix had it.”

Amused sparkle of eyes. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, now you do. Thanks for the ginger ale.”

“Good luck with the monomania.”

“Oh yes.” I take my drink and slink my way to a vacant stool. My silver shoes flash like knives. I alight on the stool and bring my glass to my lips. When I take a sip, I let the ginger ale swim around in my mouth for a second, fizzing, before it goes down.

Someone pokes my arm, and when I look it’s this kid from school holding a curved aluminum flask.

“Top up?” he says, and I hand him my cup. Something clear and alcoholic glugs out of the flask. He winks, hands it back, and disappears.

I cross one leg over the other and eye the other people in the Train Room. I take another sip of my new and improved ginger ale. I am grooming myself for my new life as a monomaniac. In my new life as a monomaniac, I sip cocktails and brazenly fang the crowd. In my new life as a monomaniac, I wield the silver scissors of my own Way.

I think about Lukas and feel a stab of betrayal so sharp it makes me gasp.

The next sip of doctored ginger ale blossoms hotly in my throat like a flaming flower.

I feel like I should have a top hat and a monocle. A monocle for the monomaniac. A monocle and a motorcycle. I would go monocling around Stanley Park in the dark most monomaniacally. Where’s a good top hat when you need one?

I know I should try to stop this—this, this whatever it is—but part of me doesn’t want to and part of me doesn’t think I can. I feel like a tire rolling down a hill, heavy and fast and completely indestructible, and if there was ever a point when I could have slowed down, that point is teensy-tiny far behind me now.

All these kids I don’t know keep coming up to me to say hey and give me props on Sonic Drift: music nerds who want to know what kind of synth I’m rocking, clusters of tank-topped ninth-grade girls who want to know if Lukas is single.

It’s like I have become magnetically attractive, sitting here on my stool, fixing the room with a savage glare. I inform each one of my admirers that I am a monomaniac. Most of them look impressed. There are fist pumps and high fives. A girl and a guy in full Native American sun dance regalia slip me another drink. It appears I am very amusing. Amusing or perhaps amazing. A college kid in a World War II flight suit asks for my opinion on microtonality. I squeeze my lime into my cup. “Between you and me, microtonality is about to hit the mainstream in a big way.”

Sage nod.

“Fascinating.”

A red-lipped girl in an eighteenth-century nurse’s uniform asks me where I got my silver shoes. I tell her I am a monomaniac whose shoes belonged to a murder victim.

More people gather around to hear me talk about my murder shoes, and soon I’m telling them the story of how Sukey was strangled to death by a Russian pimp. I don’t tell them the truth. Sukey’s life is too precious to be handed around like that. As a registered monomaniac, it’s my job to control what stays in the rare books collection and what passes into general circulation. I am the Librarian of Life Experiences. I am the Curator of Truth. I walk my disciples around the fantastical gallery of my imagination, and they ooh and aah and nod as if they knew. I could almost do this as a career. I should make business cards: Kiri Byrd, Monomaniac-at-Large. It would be huge.