Gluttony

Kane didn’t know it, but he was right yet again.

Reed wished he hadn’t let her leave. The music still sucked, Fish and Hale still bugged-nothing was different without her there.

Except him, and not for the better.

He let Fish and Hale take off, and then he wandered off, half hoping he would find her, knowing it was unlikely. There were too many people, a crowd of strangers crushing past him. And she wasn’t answering her cell.

Eventually Reed headed back to the practice room, knowing she would show up eventually. And for a second, when he opened the door and saw a figure inside cleaning things up, he thought he wouldn’t have to wait.

Then he took in the dark dreads, the tattoo, the wicked smile. “Hey, Star la,” he said, leaning in the doorway. “Thanks again for the space.”

“You remembered.” She turned to face him, and caught him staring at the pale purple snake tattoo that twisted around her waist and climbed upward, disappearing beneath the tight black shirt.

“Tough to forget a name like that,” Reed told her, his face growing a little warm. Did she realize that they didn’t make girls like her back home? That if someone had asked him, last year, to describe his ideal woman, she would have looked like the front-woman of some rock funk punk band, moved like someone born onstage, spoke like music was pounding in her brain, and smiled like she knew a secret that was too good not to spill and too dangerous not to keep?

He’d thought girls like that only existed in magazines and wannabe rock star fantasies. But here she was, in the tattoo-covered, multipierced flesh.

It didn’t matter what he’d wanted a year ago, he reminded himself. He’d been a kid, and now… a lot had changed.

But it didn’t stop him from staring at her as if she were some mythical creature he’d brought to life with the power of his mind. Maybe anything was possible. Dragons. Giants. Centaurs.

And Star las.

“I was looking for you, actually,” Star la said.

“Yeah?” Had his voice just cracked? She was surely only a year or two older than him; but he suddenly felt like he was thirteen again, covered in zits and begging his father for a real guitar.

“I just downloaded this new song and I thought you might like it,” she said.

“Why?” Shit, that was rude. “I mean, what made you think that I’d…?”

“I was standing outside listening to you guys practice. Does that bother you?” she asked defiantly.

Only because they sucked. “Whatever. What did you think?” Bad idea, he told himself. This girl was obviously totally into the music scene here-and here was about as far as you could get from home, where the Blind Monkeys were the only rock band in thirty miles, which meant they played every gig from birthday parties to funerals, despite their general level of suckitude. Star la, clearly, would have higher standards.

She laughed. “I thought you might like this song I just downloaded. So… wanna hear it?” She pulled an iPod Nano out of her pocket-exactly the model he’d been craving but couldn’t afford, not when all his extra cash went to fixing the van and helping his dad with the never-ending stack of bills.

Reed nodded, not wanting to risk another humiliating falsetto moment. He reached out for the iPod, but instead she just gave him one earbud and stuck the other in her own ear. Tethered together, they sat down on the floor, backs pressed against the wall, legs pulled up to their chests, and arms just barely touching. She pressed play.

A scorching chord blasted through the buds. A sharp, syncopated beat charged after it, overlain by a twangy acoustic guitar solo-and then, without warning, the band plugged in. And the song took off. Reed closed his eyes, letting the music storm through him, banging his head lightly back against the wall in time with the drums, his fingers flickering as if plucking and strumming invisible strings.

Everything disappeared but the music-and then the music stopped.

The first thing he registered, as the song came to an end: He and Star la had leaned in toward each other, their cheeks and temples pressing together as they lost themselves in sound.

The second thing: Beth’s face in the doorway.

She just looked lost.

Chapter 5

“We’re going to die.” Harper gripped the bar until her knuckles turned white. One loose screw was all it would take to send her plummeting. She looked down-despite every instinct in her body screaming not to. The people were the size of pinheads. She wondered which one she would land on. “We are so going to die.”

“It’s just a ride,” Adam pointed out, stretching back in the roller-coaster seat as if it were a lounge chair and grinning up at the sky. (The clouds seemed-to Harper, at least-unnaturally close.) “Enjoy it.”

“I was enjoying standing flat on the ground,” Harper snapped, as the car continued its slow, terrifying creep up the track. They were tilted back at nearly a right angle, and the ascent seemed to last forever. Which would have been okay with Harper, except for one little problem: What goes up, must come down. Fast. “I was enjoying the view from nine hundred feet up without feeling the asinine desire to get on a roller coaster that some idiot thought it would be neat to build on top of a building.” She closed her eyes.

“You’re the one who wanted to suck up to the girl at the controls,” Adam pointed out.

“How are we supposed to suck up to her from here?” Harper shot back. “How are we supposed to enjoy a concert when we’re splattered on the ground a thousand feet down?”

“Why do you always have to look on the dark side of everything?” Adam complained.

“Why do you have to act like everything’s a game? Some things aren’t fun.”

“I’m having fun,” Adam countered.

“And that’s all that counts?” Harper asked.

“You’re going to lecture me about being self-centered?”

“I’m-” Harper’s next words flew out of her mouth and her mind as the cars rolled over the peak of the incline and…

“Aaaaaaaaaah!” she shrieked as they whipped through the air, the wind slicing her cheeks and her head pressed back flat against the seat. They zoomed down the track, up a hill, around a loop, the sky beneath her and the ground above, her hair flying everywhere and her stomach knocking around, banging her intestines, crushing her lungs. She kept her eyes squeezed shut and screamed and screamed, waiting for the nightmare to end until, with a heart-stopping jolt, it did.

Harper took a deep breath, then another. “Are we alive?” she whispered, her eyes still shut tight.