Now Em knew he’d left to play music.
Crow strummed his guitar, licking his lips in concentration before opening his mouth to sing a verse. His longish black hair (it used to be bleached blond; this was better) often fell into his gold-green eyes, which always seemed just the slightest bit squinted—like he was still waking up, or like he had just gotten high.
Technically there were four guys in Crow’s band, the Slump: Crow, who sang lead vocals and played rhythm guitar; Jake, the drummer; Patrick, the bassist; and Mike, who played lead guitar. They couldn’t afford new instruments, but there was no question about their abilities. Other local musicians hung around the roomy old warehouse in South Portland, which Crow and the band rented for a cheap monthly rate. There was one guy who played the xylophone and another famous for his “found instruments”—a paintbrush on a metal tray, a wrench scraping against a birdcage.
Em couldn’t believe this whole other world existed. And she really couldn’t believe how cool it all was.
“Yo, Em, you want any of this?” From her perch on a ratty couch, Drea held up a Styrofoam cup of microwaved ramen noodles. Little-known fact that Em had learned recently: In Ascension, Maine, where Em and Drea lived, alternative types apparently subsisted on papery noodles in way-salty broth.
She made a face and waved her hand. “No thanks. Not hungry.”
The room was starting to warm up—it was freezing when Em and Drea had first arrived—and Em started shedding layers. She unwound a thick burgundy pashmina from around her neck, shaking out the waves of her long, dark brown hair. As she stood up to take off her coat, she tugged at the belt loops on her jeans to hitch them up—they kept getting looser.
Her opinions of Crow and guitar solos weren’t the only things that had shifted over the past few weeks. In fact, thanks to Drea, Em was seeing a whole new side of Ascension and its surroundings—and not just the green chai tea at the Dungeon, a hippie café downtown and a much preferable alternative to the watered-down Crappuccino next to the old mall. She was getting to know Ascension’s “dyed-hair freaks.” That’s what she and Gabby used to call them, anyway. She didn’t like thinking about that side of herself. Especially not since Drea had recently dyed her hair purple.
These days she felt like she was straddling two worlds, often more comfortable amid Drea’s friends and their loud music than at the Ascension parties.
Crow’s gravelly voice hit the notes of a chorus—“And my voice,” he growled to the beat, “it’s white noise.”
Em pulled out her journal and wrote down some of Crow’s lyrics. They really were good. Em had recently started bringing her journal with her everywhere. She’d kept one sporadically in the past, but these days it was like she couldn’t keep her pen off the paper. Now that everything had changed—now that she’d changed—writing was the only way to keep her grip on reality . . . or what was left of it. It was the beginning of March; the showdown with the Furies had happened more than a month ago. She’d only recently begun to emerge from the practically comatose state she’d been in for weeks.
The royal-blue notebook was full of poems about love and regret. The snow. The cold. Her best friend, Gabby. And, of course, the Furies, who sought to punish wrongdoers for their sins. Em was a victim of their intractable wrath; the three beautiful-yet-hideous girls had exacted revenge on her because she’d spit in the face of love and trust by hooking up with Gabby’s boyfriend. Now she was swallowing the bitter consequences. The worst part was that the guy, Zach, hadn’t even been worth it. Nowhere close.
Well, no. The worst part was what had happened with JD Fount, her quirky neighbor, her childhood friend, and the boy she loved. The Furies had tried to kill him to teach her a lesson about lost love. She’d done what she had to in order to save him. But that included promising never to tell him, or anyone else, the truth about what had happened that night at the new mall, the Behemoth. And keeping those secrets put an impossible barrier between them. How could she apologize to JD without explaining what had really happened—and risk losing him all over again?
She wrote short entries in the journal every night, venting the uncontrollable feelings of sadness and hostility that seemed, sometimes, about to consume her. Writing eased her insomnia a bit, although it couldn’t cure it. She cursed her pale skin, which made the dark circles under her eyes even more prominent.
Em blinked a few times, trying to snap back to attention. She wondered if Drea would want to go home soon—it was Sunday night, after all, and Em still had a chemistry lab to finish before third period tomorrow.