The Great Big One Page 9

  “They do that in France?” Griff said.

  “Not always,” she whispered. She looked at him. Lips close enough to kiss. Hungry eyes. Eyes like move, like kiss me. Griff looked over his shoulder, and there was no one there.

  “Just us,” Charity said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She smiled. Stood up.

  “Best practice ever,” she said. She walked to the door and turned off the light.

  “Hey!” he said.

  “Au revoir,” she said. And laughed. And left.

  SEVENTEEN

  CHARITY CAME TO BAND PRACTICE THE NEXT NIGHT, RISKING A lifetime at Christian boarding school. She showed up late, wearing a hoodie. Charity checked the door to the Rat’s Nest, checked the clock, looked very nervous until she noticed what Thomas was wearing. She laughed.

  “What’s up with your shirt, Thomas?”

  It was the first time Griff had seen him out of camo in nine months. No paracord. Thomas wore a fitted white T-shirt with a crude depiction of four people with large heads standing in the ocean beneath a swollen moon. The shirt was hand-drawn in black marker. Giant, scrawled letters:

  THE BAND

  “I made it,” Thomas said. “The Band has left me no choice. They have no web presence.”

  “I keep telling you the Band is already a band,” Leo said.

  “Oh, who cares,” Thomas said. “Now that we’re all here, come on over.”

  Thomas had caught the obsession like a virus. His workbench had transformed from a Prepper Operations Hub to a Missing Persons Command Center—and the missing person was the Band. He led them to a glowing computer tower. On one monitor, a spreadsheet where he’d entered and indexed song lyrics, alternate song lyrics, potential titles. A tab for Persistent Mysteries: How many people in the Band? What genre of music? When and where did they play?

  “Amazing,” Charity said. “What a mess.”

  “Oh no. Are those salt and vinegar?” Griff asked, nodding toward crumbs on the floor.

  “Not yet,” Thomas said. “Charity, you don’t have to clean. It’s embarrassing.”

  “It helps when I’m nervous.”

  She knelt beneath the table, picked up some chip fragments, set them on the table. She made a clicking sound. Neapolitan appeared in her hands. Furry, cute. Giant tail.

  She stood with the rat, then screamed.

  From deeper in the Rat’s Nest, a bright blue pulse reacted to the sound.

  “Oh my god,” she said, looking at her bare foot. “You have more than one.”

  “Rats? Oh yeah,” Thomas said. “Redundancy measures. That’s Pestilence. Got Death. Got Famine. Haven’t seen War for days.”

  “I stand in awe,” she said. “Have you found anything on the Band?”

  “No. And we didn’t hear them last night,” Griff said.

  Griff looked for his brother, notably absent from the conversation. Slouched in the Big Blue Chair. On his phone.

  “I mean, just look at this,” Thomas said.

  He searched more lyrics. In quotes, out of quotes. Words they’d agreed on.

  The rain swirls down, you thirst for the sun—

  When you part the curtains, the sun rises still—

  “Still nothing,” Charity said. “Amazing.”

  “It was cute, but not cute now,” Thomas said. “I’m losing my mind on this.”

  “At least you’re not into the salt and vinegars,” Griff said.

  “Are we practicing?” Leo hollered.

  Again, a blue glow pulsed, throwing stark shadows.

  “Did you all see that blue light?” Charity asked. “Or am I losing my mind?”

  “C’mon over,” Thomas said. He led them deeper into the Rat’s Nest. Past the curtained-off practice space to where wooden storage shelves slouched beneath boxes and tubs. The sawdust and urine smell of rodents. On a small workbench, cluttered stacks of transmitters. Mason jars, and a stack of thin steel lids.

  In the center, an Early Alert Response System globe. But different.

  “Systems update,” Thomas said. He clapped his hands. The bauble glowed blue.

  “Whoa!” Charity said.

  “Sound-sensitive. You can see low-frequency vibrations. If we get these tuned up, we can kiss SubWatch goodbye. And all this lighthouse-repurposing shit. We’ll see anything coming. We can light up the whole coast.”

  “Genius,” Griff said.

  “Working on tone distinction too,” Thomas said.

  He whistled. High-pitch. The light got brighter.

  “The Amazing Thomas,” Charity said. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

  “Dance on beat,” he said.

  “Hey!” Leo said. “Bandmates?”

  They dragged slowly toward practice. Hard to leave the glowing bauble and spreadsheets and dead-end search results. Two bright musical passions surged in Griff. The first, they’d all found together, touching skin in the ocean. The other happened in an unlikely practice room with fluorescent lights and a plinking upright where he and Charity had somehow opened the door to God. Now Leo had his binder. Wanted them to sing about star-crossed lovers:

  Feeling star-crossed, feeling star-crossed

  The song meandered. Bodies anchored to the room, lashed to instruments. Leo scribbled notes, asked them to try different sections. Everyone’s mind seemed elsewhere—even Leo’s. After an hour, there was a moment of just Thomas looping them together, stitching the tunes together with his sound system. He looked over the group and said:

  “Where are you guys?”

  “Right here,” Leo said. “I feel like no one’s trying. This is super serious.”

  Leo was looking at him. Griff felt his brother’s icy fingertips, prying at his Wall of Modest Secrets. And Griff had accumulated certain red-circle treasures behind the wall. Hugs. Secret practices. A tongue in the ear, and he was nervous but giggly, because Thomas was playing Leo’s voice back on the loop pedal.

  “Super serious. Suuuuuuper seeeeeerious. This is super serious, super serious—”

  “Stop!” Leo said. Leo’s voice, the way it had been before he’d upended Robbie Anderson’s desk in homeroom, for flicking his ear. The room braced for something.

  Only Charity seemed unmoved.

  “Why is it so serious?” she asked.

  “Because I got us a gig,” Leo said. “A big one.”

  Leo had their attention again—but now Leo was leaving. Out through the tapestries, footsteps clipping along the floor, clomping up the steps.

  Thomas played the loop again.

  Super serious.

  “Stop, Thomas,” Charity said, pulling on her hoodie.

  “We only have a song and a half,” Thomas said. “You think we really have a gig?”

  “If we don’t,” Griff said, “we will.”

  EIGHTEEN

  BY NEXT WEEK, EVERYONE AT SCHOOL KNEW ABOUT THE GIG.

  They’d be playing at the Urchin, of all places—a squat and sprawling windowless bar on South Jetty, tucked behind dock-sale fish shops like a scabby mollusk. Its marquee had read NO SHOW TONIGHT so long Griff wondered if they’d have to pry the salt-encrusted letters off with a crowbar—and what was the name of their band, anyway?

  “Lionized,” Leo said at the lunch table.

  He’d drawn out a poster, enhanced with Thomas’s newfound Sharpie design skills. A wild lion with octopus tentacles, clinging to the end of a dock.

  “Solid,” Charity said. “Retro cool. I mean, I could see this hanging in LA.”

  She was sitting next to Leo. Charity and his brother had obviously gotten chummy while Griff had been standing in line for a cafeteria cheeseburger. He stared at the thin piece of colorless meat between waxy bread—and it might be for this poor lunch choice that he lost Charity Simms forever. The Cheeseburger to End It All.

  “So,” Leo said, “we’ll work on some vocal arrangements—over the computer if you’re grounded—”

  Charity nodded.

  With
the sudden gig, talk of finding the Band receded. Thomas was the only constant reminder—wearing an endless rotation of new T-shirts. This one, a swollen moon above a crooked lighthouse—swimmy words: THE BAND.

  “We have two songs, Leo,” Thomas said.

  “We can do covers,” Leo said. “We have almost a month.”

  “Okay,” Thomas said. “A month, okay.”

  “Let’s be bold, people,” Charity said.

  “You know it,” Leo said. They high-fived. That look he’d seen before, excitement in her eyes. A squirmy, sizzling feeling in his stomach. He hated this. Charity’s eyes following Leo. Just look at me, just look at me once, please, and Griff walked to the garbage can and dumped his cheeseburger inside and went to study hall early.

  He sat at the same table and did not work on the puzzle. It was a stupid puzzle. Exhausting. He wanted to give up. Die maybe.

  After school, Charity was with Leo again, and Thomas, bouncing around on the front steps of the school. Desecrating the sacred place where Griff and Charity had once done their soft, slow dance in autumn light. Ruined.

  “Hey, Griff!” Leo said. “C’mere. You down to go this afternoon?”

  Griff now entered every conversation late, a page behind.

  “For what?”

  “The Urchin, baby,” Thomas said.

  Of course. Leo did not incubate and hatch and slowly grow a plan, he unleashed it upon the landscape of your life with the power of a terrible lizard that devoured your daily plans and ate the horizon for dessert.

  “Oh boy,” Charity said. “A bar.”

  “C’mon,” Leo said, bumping her shoulder like a caveman. “Show some student leadership.”

  Miraculously, Charity agreed to come.

  When they approached the ThunderChicken, Griff was suddenly grateful. Months ago, Leo had claimed Eternal Shotgun like a birthright. There was a spark of recognition in his brother’s eyes just before the back doors clapped shut, safely confining Charity and Griff to a single leather bench seat.

  “Purr, my sweet chicken of war,” Thomas said, patting the steering wheel.

  “You could fit a thousand people back here,” Charity said, fanning herself out.

  “The ceiling sags,” Thomas said, pushing up on the fabric. “You have to ride crouched down like this. Low-ride it.”

  He slouched. Griff and Charity did too. Smiled at each other.

  “Hey,” she said in a soft voice.

  Griff pictured himself, pouncing like a cartoon jungle cat, gliding across the smooth interior. They erupt in a backseat tumble of clouds, emerge with lipstick smears. Griff fastened his seat belt. Windows down, they went whooshing out of the sun-dappled parking lot, Thomas put on Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and the coastal highway seemed to rise in front of them. Runway for A Brand-New Something. Breakers beat the shoreline, and when Charity’s voice twirled with Nina Simone’s in the whip of the wind down a coastal highway the feeling just crystallized.

  They were a band. Griff smiled. The biggest smile in a month.

  Thomas turned onto the South Jetty—

  “Do people actually have legitimate businesses out here?” Charity asked.

  Griff laughed. “You’ve never come out here for fish? Anything?”

  “This is no-man’s-land,” Charity said.

  The jetty was a wide, crumbling concrete peninsula of shipping containers, a research shack from the university on wooden pilings, and a lawless parking lot that tapered to a clutch of weathered dock-sale fish shops and the Urchin. On the marquee:

  NO SHOW TONIGHT

  A complete dive. Neon pinks, blues, yellows burned in hollowed-out sections of cinder block, boarded up or painted over. They walked from their distant parking space. The cars—a Buick, a Crown Victoria, three pickups—slouched in the lot. The front door claimed NO MINORS. Black marker said (MINORS BETWEEN 11–7 ONLY). A lottery sign crossed its fingers.

  “I should’ve used the bathroom at school,” Charity said.

  CLANK. A sour bell as Leo opened the door. The bar exhaled beer breath.

  A bank of video lottery machines splashed light in the corners, and a long central bar wrapped around the liquor like an engine belt. Three men on barstools. Two rotated toward them as if attached to the same mechanical arm. Cowboy hat. One in camo. Staring.

  Griff heard Charity’s breath catch.

  She looked back toward the door.

  Rab, the owner, came toward them from the end of the bar. Griff knew him from downtown and a few random conversations with their father. Rab the Rambler. He had the weathered, sunburned face of a man too long at sea and walked with a forward lean as if angled against a perpetual headwind. He gave them a warm smile.

  “Hello, Leo,” he said. He pointed at Griff, Leo, Griff.

  “Me,” Leo said.

  “And you are?”

  “Charity,” she said.

  “A pleasure,” he said.

  Thomas was already examining the P.A. Leo and Rab talked about the show. The others checked out the stage. Elevated 5 feet. Black curtains. Behind them, a greenroom packed with old instruments, theater props. Burlap sacks. The clinging smell of cigarette smoke, beer. The lingering ghosts of a thousand performances. Behind a heap of clothing and a full-length mirror was a piano.

  “All right,” Charity said. She leaned over a squat table, tapped the keys. “Is it in tune?”

  “No piano is ever in tune,” Griff said. “But this one’s close enough.”

  “I’m going to check the circuit breaker,” Thomas said.

  It was just Griff and Charity. Griff leaned over, snaked his hand through a gap, and played the opening part of Stravinsky. Charity laughed. She was looking at him. A long, steady look.

  “What?” Griff asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. She smiled like she was keeping a secret.

  A few minutes later, Leo and Rab shook hands and the bell was clanging them back out the door. The breeze blew hard. Sunlight, diffuse behind gauzy clouds. Charity took a deep breath and spread her arms.

  “Free!” she said. “My god, I’m free.”

  “What did you think?” Leo asked.

  “Terrifying,” Charity said. “Exciting.”

  “A few weeks,” Leo said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  As they walked to the ThunderChicken, Leo got tight and close-talking with Charity. Talking about future rehearsals, where they could stand. Never mind he and Leo hadn’t practiced piano in days. When they finally reached the car, Leo said:

  “Go on, Griff. You can take shotgun.”

  They were already climbing in back.

  Like Rhiannon on the beach. A single car ride could derail everything. So Griff hesitated, then opened the door and climbed in on the other side of the backseat, so Charity was between them.

  “Hi,” Charity said.

  “What are you doing?” Leo asked.

  Griff didn’t know what he was doing.

  “Okay, weirdos,” Thomas said. He adjusted the rearview mirror. “I’m not going to chaperone your creepy twin love triangle around. The Chicken has standards.”

  The three of them looked at one another.

  “We’re already back here,” Griff said.

  Griff had never done anything like this. His breath caught in his throat.

  Charity was giving him a curious look. He probably looked deranged.

  “Not moving,” Thomas said, shifting to park.

  “Guys,” Charity said. “I have to go home. I’ll just climb up front.”

  “Thomas,” Leo said. “Just drive. You can play whatever music you want.”

  “All year,” Thomas said without missing a beat.

  “All year?!” Leo countered. “This week.”

  “Month.”

  “Until Christmas.”

  Everyone remained silent.

  “Fine,” Leo said.

  “Well then, lovebirds. We begin our drive home with a twelve-hour tribute to Bon Scott—”
r />   “Oh god,” Leo said.

  “—late lead singer of AC/DC, beginning with High Voltage and the Lock Up Your Daughters Tour—”

  Charity nudged closer to him. Almost right up against his shoulder. Worth it.

  NINETEEN

  AFTER THEY LANDED THE GIG, EVERYTHING INTENSIFIED. DRIZZLY days blurred together like wet paint. Whereas September had been a rushing river of endless forks and channels, October somehow hardened to asphalt—inflexible and fixed, tapering the way a road sinks into a forest—no choice but forward.

  A busy week. School, homework, bunker meetings, preparing for the winter piano concert. The family together only for dinner. Mom cooking alone most nights, their father on the couch with a glass of wine. Then the bottle, too. Instead of knitting together like flesh and bone, the cracks from the false alarm seemed to widen gradually like the spiderweb fracture in a windshield. Freezing, thawing, and expanding to strange new patterns.

  Six no-circle days.

  Charity at student government instead of study hall. Still grounded, no phone. In a week, he’d only seen her on a screen—twice in his bedroom, practicing harmonies with Leo. After seeing her on screen, she felt somehow less real. When he found her at their table during sixth period the following Wednesday, he was as shocked as he’d been the first day of school.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “Is it you?”

  “Are you still real?” Griff said.

  She gave him a hug. Nice, but brief. She felt like a stranger.

  “Did Michaelson save our puzzle?” she asked.

  “I asked him to,” Griff said. “Do you have time?”

  “No,” she said. “You?”

  “Nope.”

  “Great,” Charity said. “It’s better if we’re both irresponsible.”

  They moved a few stacks of books. Two boxes of blank paper. The puzzle was right there where they’d left it. He watched her fingers move.

  He’d start with her fingers. Study them until they were real. Thawing her from memory. Slender, quick fingers pushing edges, testing, worrying them with touch the way the mind nudges a question—good, strong, thinking movements, and who could command such fingers? A mystery he followed to her wrists—slender and the long sleek path of an arm, building to the climax of an elbow—