Opening Act (34 page)

He went immediately to her profile page. And the first thing that struck him was her most recent status update:

       
Only three days till my reading in Santa Barbara! Please come if you're in the area. I'd love to meet you and would greatly appreciate your support.

Beneath was a link to a bookstore, announcing that Loni Merrick (Merrick! Finally, he knew her last name) would be reading from her new self-published volume of poetry,
Venus in Retrograde
, at five in the afternoon.

The date was the day after tomorrow.

So that was why she'd accepted Bruce Banner's friendship request with no questions asked. Loni Merrick had entered the ranks of the audience whores. Just like Shay, just like every performer everywhere, she had seats to fill, and who knew, Bruce Banner might fill one of them. And with that, Shay decided that Bruce Banner would. In fact, it wasn't a decision; it was more like a sudden awareness of what had already been determined, somewhere else, by unseen forces.

He thought for a moment about the difficulties involved, but there was never for a moment anything resembling doubt. And sure enough, he came to understand that the unseen forces had been busier than he'd even dreamed. The unseen forces had laid it all out for him.

He went back upstairs, found his phone, found the contents of his pocket from where he'd emptied them when he'd undressed, and located the napkin with Jonah's number.

He sent him a text:
Hey it's Shay. I'm ready to break the chain.

CHAPTER 18

“I gotta tell ya,” said Jonah with a bit of a sneer. “When you said you were ready to break the chain, I didn't think you meant
this
.” He flicked his cigarette out the window in disgust. “Driving to goddamn
Santa Barbara
. In the middle of the afternoon. To go to a
bookstore
.” He turned to Shay. “Sure you wouldn't rather hit a crystal meth den in Compton at three a.m.?”

Shay shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I told you,” he said. “It's to see a friend. An
author
,” he added, lamely. As if any literary credentials would impress Jonah Piercon.

He was growing increasingly uncomfortable with his decision to slip away to attend Loni's reading. Jonah was proving to be much more of a borderline sociopath than he'd realized from their brief conversation at Hazzard. But what could he do? Jonah had the wheels. Too late Shay realized he could've just rented his own car, on the sly. It would've been far less trouble than managing Jonah on the road. But until now, he'd thought it would be a kick to have a friend along, a partner in crime.

Unfortunately, Jonah's idea of crime was significantly more elevated than Shay's. He said, “Well, if we're gonna be swanning around Santa Barbara with the snobs, we might as well get ourselves tight for it. Could you pass me the party mix?”

The “party mix” was a small vial of white powder with a little silver cap that had a tiny spoon affixed by a slender chain. Shay had originally guessed it to be cocaine, but Jonah's nickname for it implied that there were additional ingredients as well.

Shay had buckled to peer pressure and taken a bump when they'd first gotten into the car. Now he was fiercely regretting it. He felt as though he was having a heart attack. That might just be the effect of Jonah's driving—he seemed to think it was against the law to go under seventy-five and was blithely oblivious to anyone who might be in his blind spot when he changed lanes—but the chemicals couldn't have helped. Shay cursed himself for being such a wuss. He'd always
hated
cocaine. “Fake fun,” he called it; it made your heart beat faster so you thought you were enjoying yourself, but really, you weren't. It was all illusion.

He hated cocaine, and yet he'd taken cocaine—and not just cocaine: cocaine spiked with God knows what else. He'd refused any seconds or thirds, but of course by then it was too late. He was royally fucked up. He could only imagine how wrecked Jonah must be, though that guy's resistance was undoubtedly considerably higher. The way he went at it, it was clear he snorted this stuff for breakfast.

Shay passed the “party mix” to him but, worried about the increasing deterioration of his attention span, added, “Listen, it's not fair for you to have to drive the whole way. Why don't I take over?”

Amazingly, Jonah agreed. Probably because he was having far too much trouble unscrewing the vial's itty-bitty cap while simultaneously keeping the wheel steady. “Sure, thanks, bro,” he said, and he immediately swerved toward the shoulder—almost clipping a Dodge Dart that was sailing alongside them.

He shifted the car into park and got out. Shay sat for a while longer in the passenger seat, because he wasn't entirely sure the car had stopped moving. It
looked
like the road ahead was laying steady and flat before them, but the feeling against his face was like g-force.

Jonah knocked on the passenger window. “Change your mind, bro?”

Shay snapped to attention, opened the door, and got out. “No, no, I'm still cool.” And in fact the sudden snap of cool air against his skin made him feel a little more grounded. He shook his head vigorously, sending his hair flying, then stamped his feet against the gravel a few times—trying to shock his wits back into functioning.
Come back, come back,
he thought to himself.
Where are you, Shay, man? I need you!

When he felt reasonably fit to drive, he got back into the car, shifted into gear, and pulled back into traffic. It was helpful to have a job, something to concentrate on. And in fact, his focus seemed very, very sharp. He had to pinch himself every now and then just to keep from getting
too
focused and forgetting other, peripheral activities like, say, breathing.

Jonah sat next to him, happily spooning up powder into his nostrils and emitting raspy little grunts of pleasure. Yeah, this was definitely not an ideal situation. And yet, any doubts Shay had had about undertaking it had been obliterated the day before, when the only media coverage from his party at Hazzard had been about Jonah and the Wail and its bad-boy mastermind who'd bolted after their first set. Wendii Frontiac's segment on the party—which ran for an epic thirty-seven seconds, a small eternity in television—had been
all
about Jonah, the unpredictable boy-genius. In fact, Wendii even showed some footage of the Wail singing forlornly alone, backed by only the upright bass, which had happened
after Wendii had already left
. How she got those clips, Shay couldn't imagine, but given the intensity of her ambition, body bags might have been involved. He wouldn't put it past her.

As for Shay, who was the whole reason Wendii had been there at all, he only appeared on-screen once, and that was to say how great Jonah and the Wail sounded—a quote Wendii had only because he'd slipped it in right before she told her cameraman to cut. He'd barely made it into the segment that was supposed to have been all about him.

So in the end, Jonah had been right: the way to rock stardom wasn't by letting yourself become a performing seal for someone like Halbert or Pernita. The way to rock stardom was to do your own goddamn thing whenever you goddamn felt like it. Even Loni had known that. When he'd first met her in Baby's kitchen, she'd told him real rock musicians don't care about the market or publicity. They cared about their passion, about their art.

Well, all right, then. Loni was Shay's passion. That much had become clear. His mom had been right when she'd told him to see if all those women on the tour could make him forget her. They hadn't. He knew now that she was the real deal, she was the one. She was his passion, and he was absolutely goddamn following it.

He just wished he could be surer of it all turning out okay. Jonah, in the next seat, was well into an endless rant about the treatment of dairy hens, which so roused him to anger that at one point he punched the dashboard several times and came away with bleeding knuckles.

As for Shay, he kept thinking about the event scheduled for that night, dinner with Pernita and Halbert and a couple of record-label suits who it was vitally important for Shay to impress…or so Pernita insisted. Drinks were at seven. Loni's reading was at five. Presuming it lasted a half hour, Shay could conceivably make the ninety-minute drive back to LA in time for cocktails.

But wasn't the whole idea that he shouldn't
care
about the freakin' dinner and the asshole record-label execs? Wasn't that the whole point of everything he'd learned from Jonah?

Well, yes, it was. Except Shay had a sinking feeling that maybe to pull that off you had to be that way from the get-go. He had to doubt whether—having been so visibly Pernita Hasque's dress-up doll
for show-and-tell all this time—he could suddenly go rogue with any conviction. But what did he care? He was on the open road, in his new friend's rented Mustang GT, and with Loni at the end of the line.

He settled back to enjoy the ride.

And then…there she was.

He thought at first she might be a mirage, an image reflected onto the window by the vibrant, shining picture of her in his mind. So he cupped his hands around his eyes and peered past the glass, into the bookstore.

And yes, it was her. Beautifully, unmistakably, irresistibly her.

And she was already reading.

He muttered a few profanities under his breath. He'd wanted to hear every syllable she uttered. But once they'd reached Santa Barbara it had taken them forever to find a parking space. They eventually settled on an illegal spot (“Let the rental company pay the ticket,” Jonah had said. “Better yet, let Halbert Hasque!”), and then they'd wandered another agonizing chunk of time trying to find the bookstore. Shay had committed the address to memory, but then he'd gone and addled his memory with Jonah's heinous “party mix.” It was really a miracle they'd found it at all, especially with Jonah insisting on stopping every twenty yards to point all around him and say, “No, seriously,
look
—isn't it
exactly
like being in a Ron Howard movie?”

But at long last, here they were.

And here
she
was.

Shay took a deep breath and tried to compose himself. His heart was still hammering like a woodpecker on a tree trunk, but he was pretty sure it was mostly from seeing Loni. Even so, he knew he must be a hell of a lot twitchier and more wild-eyed than usual. He didn't want her to see him this way. The thing to do was to slip into the bookstore and take a place at the back, where she wouldn't spot him. It was a pretty good-size crowd. About forty people filled all the chairs and spilled over into standing room near the door. It would be easy to sneak in unnoticed, especially given how intently she seemed to be reading, eyes burning into the slender volume in her hands.

Jonah was dithering a few paces behind him. Shay waved him over and then entered the shop. The door gave a little jingle, but Loni was too much in-the-zone to hear it and look up. He took a place sandwiched between a few other patrons, and Jonah followed, excusing himself more audibly than he needed to. A woman turned and shushed him. “We're not interested in hearing what
you
have to say,” she sternly whispered.

“Then stop breathing,” he whispered back.

Sweet creeping Christ on a moped,
Shay thought.
Just get me through this.

When they'd finally settled in, Shay turned his attention to Loni—Loni! That was actually
Loni
in the
same room
as him! Seated on a stool next to a table with a pitcher of water for her to drink with her own actual human mouth!—and tried to focus on the verses she was reading aloud.

       
The dampening of sinews, the heady stew of leaves,

       
The aroma of corruption in the repining of pine,

       
Fallen so long and time, measured out in moss,

       
Slows and stills, and gives rise to wonder whether

       
A forest no longer upright—a forest uprooted—

       
Is a forest yet; and am I—undone—

       
Yet myself, no longer standing tall