Last Stop This Town (21 page)

“Left! Head south!” Noah ordered.

Dylan swerved onto Lafayette Street.

Pike was fairly calm, given the circumstances, and asked simply, “Hey, what’s going on?”

“It’s a long story,” Dylan replied as he ran a red light.

Noah looked out the back window and reported, “They’re still after us!”

Dylan swerved again, this time making a left U-turn onto Dover Street.

The Cube passed the Camaro going the other way and Dylan quickly turned, hoping to lose them.

Pike looked around. “Hey! Where’s my weed?”

Noah looked back at him. “Yeah, about that…”

Dylan quickly pulled up under the Brooklyn Bridge, stopped, and turned off the lights. He left the car idling, just in case, but for all intents and purposes, they were in silent running mode.

They waited.

You could almost hear their hearts pounding.

Then, Dylan saw the Camaro driving down the perpendicular Lafayette Street and whispered, “There!”

But the Camaro kept going.

They’d lost them.

All three of them breathed a sigh of relief.

They waited another moment in silence to be sure, then Dylan turned off the ignition. He turned back to Pike. “So, we’ve been hiding in trunks and stealing cars from the Insane Clown Posse. What have you been up to?”

“Nothing,” Pike replied sadly. “Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.”

Noah looked around. “Where are we?”

Then Dylan spotted something.

“Look.”

The street sign. It read “Front Street.”

The guys looked at each other, amazed. They were looking at the alley behind Front Street, the mysterious unnamed road that didn’t appear on any Google map.

They broke out into big smiles, then Dylan grabbed the wristbands from the change holder and they got out of the car.

T
HE GUYS WALKED
up the small street lined with boarded-up buildings, empty lots, and rubble. But as they got closer to the alley, they saw more and more people, and everyone was headed in the same direction.

Toward the party.

The three of them started to feel the excitement and energy from the crowd of young people waiting in line to get in. People were chatting in this festive atmosphere, and strangers became friends as the line moved along. When the guys finally reached the front of the line, they showed the bouncer their wristbands and entered the party.

As they stepped in and the deep bass of the thumping David Guetta tune “Sexy Bitch” vibrated their teeth, they were immediately in awe of the size and scope of this party. The sheer number of people and the size of the warehouse were unlike anything they’d ever seen before. After all, this was a party that companies
sponsored
. It had a
budget
. People planned and organized it and it took a
crew
to set up.

They just stood there, stunned.

Noah was the first to snap out of it. “I’m going to go try to find Sarah.”

“Good luck, man,” Dylan said, and he meant it.

Noah knew Dylan was rooting for him. He always was.

“Thanks.”

And Noah headed out into the crowd.

Pike turned to Dylan. “Sarah’s here?”

Dylan smiled. “It’s a long story.”

Pike and Dylan went over to the bar and in no time they were both enjoying a couple of cold Smirnoff Ices, proud sponsor of Stark Raving Mad 2012.

“So where’s Walker?” Pike asked.

Dylan raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t he with you?”

“Nope, we split up at this freaky barber shop in Soho,” Pike inaccurately summarized. “Last I saw him he was chatting up some girl.” Then he added confidentially, “P.S., he didn’t do it with that hot Latina chick.”

Dylan sighed, “Poor Walker.”

Walker and Genevieve got dressed. The sex had been nice. Walker didn’t have comically premature ejaculation like in every teen comedy he’d ever seen. Maybe because he wasn’t nervous like he thought he’d be. Or maybe, the thought crossed his mind, because he actually
was
good at it. Whatever the reason, it lasted long enough for him and maybe even long enough for Genevieve.

It was weird. He’d only spent a few hours with her but there was just something about Genevieve that made Walker calm. He wasn’t anxious around her, and things he said just came out
right
. He felt like he hadn’t just met a new girl tonight, he’d met a new
him
. He liked who he was when he was with her.

Walker pulled his shirt back on and turned to her with a big dumb smile on his face. “That was…”

Genevieve smiled. She was pretty content herself and didn’t want Walker to ruin the moment. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Come on.”

She took him by the hand to head back down to the party but he stopped her.

“Wait. Can’t we just stay up here for a while?”

She looked at him gazing off into the distance. The city lights
were
pretty amazing.

She smiled again and wrapped her arms around him.

The Camaro slowly cruised down the nearly-abandoned John Street.

Suddenly, Sal saw something. “What’s going on over there?”

It was some young people walking where only homeless people or serial killers dared to tread. The Camaro closely followed the trail of kids. They were all walking toward a small intersecting street.

“Hey, wait a second,” Anthony said, trying to jog his memory. “The one kid said something about a party…”

Sal stopped the car. Anthony looked up and barely made out the sign on the unlit street.

“… on Front Street!”

The brothers looked at each other and broke out in big smiles.

Noah walked around, looking for Sarah. But there
were
over a thousand people in the crowd.

Noah was desperate. He called out, “Sarah! Sarah!” but his voice could barely be heard a few feet away, let alone by the other eleven hundred party-goers.

Noah looked around. It was hopeless.

In actuality, Sarah was only sixty or sixty-five feet away, dancing with Kim Striker, but a sea of people separated her from Noah. And from the way she was dancing, it looked like she was pretty into her date for the evening.

Pike wanted to check out the party and agreed to meet Dylan back at the bar in twenty minutes. He wandered around until he came to an area where people were covering themselves in paint and rubbing themselves on a huge canvas on the ground, like finger painting but with their whole bodies. After the party, the canvas was to be auctioned off for charity, but the goopy, sticky kids on the canvas couldn’t have cared less. It was just incredibly fun. Pike was immediately in love with the idea, and even let out a spontaneous, “Wicked.”

He grabbed a can of yellow paint and poured it over his head. One girl on the canvas saw this and laughed, but Pike didn’t care. He plopped down onto a blank part of the canvas and started making “snow angels.”

“I’m a bird! A pretty yellow bird!” Pike shouted out with glee.

Pike stood up to check out his work. Not bad. But it needed some red.

Pike went over, grabbed a can of red paint, and poured it on his crotch. He plopped down, facing the canvas this time, and started to hump the pretty yellow bird. A dude nearby saw this and cheered him on, “That’s right, fuck the shit out of it, man!”

Pike laughed then stopped suddenly. Something was happening. He looked down.

His dick was getting hard. Realizing the irony, Pike screamed out, “Fuck!”

Depressed once again, he got up and went under the port-o-shower that was set up to wash off the paint (which thankfully was washable). He dried off his hair with a towel from a nearby stand and started back to find Dylan at the bar. But the party was much more crowded the closer he got to the bar and Pike soon found himself shoulder to shoulder with a ton of people. He bumped into one Asian dude on his cell phone.

“Sorry, man.”

He looked up, making eye contact for a second.

It was the busboy.

“My cell phone!” Pike gasped.

The busboy ran.

Pike chased after him. They ran through the crowd, pushing people over, knocking others out of the way, and generally making a scene until the busboy broke free of the bottleneck and made a dash for the back loading dock. Pike booked after him, and after only a couple of seconds, he caught up to the busboy, grabbing the kid by his collar and throwing him up against the wall.

“Give it up,” Pike demanded.

The busboy held out Pike’s phone with his finger on a button.

“Stop or I’ll hit send,” he threatened.

Pike raised an eyebrow. “Wait, you speak English?”

“Of course I speak English, asshole.”

Pike shook his head, annoyed. He repeated, “Give me my phone.”

The busboy threatened once more, “I am sending a jpeg of a bag of weed to your mom as we speak.”

Pike was confused. He’d deduced how the guy had found the picture of the pot on his phone, but asked, “How do you know my mom’s number?!”

“Speed dial one, ‘Mom,’” he explained, then added, “Aw, that’s so nice you put your mom on speed dial one.”