Alive (30 page)

This wasn’t one of the venues I’d frequented with Levi, but it felt significant that the friends of the dead boy Levi is impersonating share the same interests as the one that I
know.

I stare up at the stage. I’m surprised to find that alone, without Levi’s encouragement, I still find that the blaring music and throbbing energy turns my heart punchy with
excitement. The lead singer is a pointy-faced girl with a confrontational chin, and for a moment I’m mesmerized by the way she throws the microphone stand between her hands and stomps her
foot on the ground like she’s gunning to incite a riot.

It’s only when someone steps hard on my own toe that I’m able to cut my gaze away. “Gosh darnit!” I yell, hopping on one foot.

Henry catches me by the shoulders. “‘Gosh darnit’? Wow, a rebel on the outside and in.” He clucks his tongue, clearly teasing me.

I scowl. “I figure at this point there’s got to be somewhere in between.”

We both find ourselves looking over our shoulders, trying to make sense out of the throng of hardcore fans.

“We should split up,” I say decisively. Henry starts to open his mouth. “I’ll be fine. We’ll both be in here. It’s no big deal. Otherwise, it’s a
madhouse. We may miss him.”

Henry digs his teeth into his lip. “Fine. But meet back at the front door in twenty minutes if you haven’t found him.” With a smug look, he extends his pinky finger.
“Okay?”

I take it. “Okay.” With one final glance, I start to slip into the crowd. The drumbeat bounces around inside my lungs. Bodies slam into me. I can just make out Henry watching me go.
He holds his hand up to his ear, hooked into the universal sign of a telephone—
Call me
. I nod, and then I’m swallowed whole.

By now the band has found its momentum. At the front of the stage the guitarist thrashes his long, unkempt mane. Nimble fingers perform complicated riffs. The thrum of the guitar and the wild
beat of the drums vibrate through my hollow pit of a chest, mixing with the persistent ache to form a musical cacophony both stimulating and unsettling, like abstract art.

Each time the red lights flash overhead, a different face is illuminated, revealing expressions frozen in time. The strobe effect throws me off-kilter and I stop and start. Several times I
stumble and grab onto the nearest limb for balance.

“Sorry, sorry,” I mutter. I check the faces in the crowd, sometimes squinting to try and make out the features of Daniel James. “Do you know a guy named Daniel James?” I
ask at intervals, but invariably the people questioned shake their heads, and I can’t decipher whether they didn’t hear me or they actually don’t know the boy I’m asking
about.

I press through the heart of the crowd, where the bodies are densest. On the other side, the flailing mob begins to thin and I find concertgoers nursing their drinks or leaning in for
conversation.

I ask a couple with matching dreadlocks if they’ve seen Daniel. They’ve never heard of him. My shoulders sag. What if he didn’t come after all? A change of plans. He got
sick.

In the spot where I’m standing, I revolve slowly in place, taking in a panoramic view. It’s then that I spot a face, someone I can’t place, whom I’m sure I don’t
know, but the features are familiar.

I move closer to the spot where he’s leaned up against a wall, talking to a heavyset girl whose bulbous rear end hikes a short black skirt up to the very top of her thighs. The closer I
get, the more certain I become.

As I approach, staring blatantly, the pair stop their conversation and stare back. The girl screws up her mouth into a sneer. Her look is punk rock meets 1940s pinup. Dark eyeliner fans out into
cat eyes, and her heart-shaped lips are painted a shocking hue of cherry red.

“Can I help you?” she asks in a way that suggests she has no interest whatsoever in helping me.

“Daniel? Daniel James?” I say, ignoring her.

He straightens. In person, he’s a shadow of the boy I saw in the photograph. He has none of the brightness, eye twinkle, or toothy grin I’d seen there. Instead, he’s as
colorless as watered-down milk. If it weren’t for the haircut, I might not have been able to piece the features together to spot him, but his white hair, shaved on one side and plastered down
over his left eye on the other, is distinctive in its irregularity.

“That’s me. Dan,” he says in a voice that’s deeper than I’d expect given his skeletal frame and pale blue eyes.

“I’m…” I hesitate. “Veronica Leeds.” I cringe at the use of this fake identity again. It hasn’t exactly worked in my favor in the past.

The girl beside him curls in closer like a cat kneading her way into a beloved owner’s lap.

“This is Raven,” he says, nodding in her direction, as though I’d asked. I wish Raven would get lost, but I get the sense that she’s staked her claim for the night and
that extracting her would take jaws of steel and a tranquilizer gun.

“I was hoping I could ask you a few questions, Dan.”

“Depends who you are. You a cop?”

I roll my eyes. “Do I look like a cop? I’m seventeen.”

“Whatever.

“Right, yeah, whatever.” I consider taking out my phone and calling Henry, but worry that Dan and his goth girl are set to dart like frightened animals.

I take a deep breath. “Do you know a guy named Levi Zin?”

A slick-looking tongue slides over Dan’s lips. “Why should I tell you?”

“You don’t exactly look like you’re busy.” He shrugs. I exhale hard. “Fine.” I pull my wallet out of my purse and hand him twenty dollars.

He grins. “Yeah, I
knew
him. Why?” There’s an uproar from the crowd. I glance back to see that the female lead singer dove offstage and is now crowd-surfing.

Returning my attention to Dan, I make a decision not to volunteer any more information than necessary. “So he, um, passed away?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light, as if I’m
merely curious. For his part, Dan doesn’t seem to be the brightest specimen, or maybe he’s just too drugged out to process beyond surface level.

Two pale eyebrows crawl inward at the top of his nose. “You really don’t know? Levi kicked the can. He’s six feet under. Worm food.” He takes a sip from his plastic cup,
eyes already heading from glassy to totally vacant.

“You have a gift for imagery,” I say curtly. “Okay, so he’s dead. Did anyone take a particular interest in him either before or after his death?”

“What does
that
mean?” Raven takes a break from swirling her finger around Dan’s ear to interject.

I raise my eyebrows.

“I’m not sure,” Dan says. “Not really. I was friends with him. We played in a band together sometimes, but I wouldn’t say many people were super close to Levi.
Nobody was even that shocked.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know—I guess he was in trouble a lot.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Dan slouches against the wall. “I’m not so sure I should keep telling you unless…” He nods at my purse.

I narrow my eyes at him, but in a war between who can be more patient, Dan would most certainly win. I look in the crevices of my wallet and hold up a ten.

He scratches his eyebrow. “It’s not as much.”

“It’s all I have.” I hold it close. “Take it or leave it.”

He tries to make a grab for it. “Take it.”

“Not so fast.” I hold it tightly in my grip. “After.”

He glares at me but continues. “Like typical stuff. Skipping school. Drinking. I don’t know. He thought he was destined to be some kind of rock god. Kurt Cobain. Andrew Wood. Layne
Staley. Live fast, die hard, only-the-good-die-young type of thing. You know what I’m saying?”

Unfortunately, I know exactly what he’s saying. My veins feel icy. Dan’s friend sounds exactly like the Levi I know. Where’s Henry? I do a quick sweep to see if I can spot him.
No such luck. “But you were with him when he died?”

Raven glares at me. “You don’t have to answer her question, you know.”

I wave the ten and he shrugs her off. Clearly, Raven’s not meant to become a permanent fixture. He continues, stroking the gelled strand of hair over his eye. “Yeah. I’ve
already told all this to the police, though.”

“But I’m not the police.”

“Right…Yeah, sorry…I don’t know, it was like…” He squeezes his eyelids over pinpoint pupils and shakes his head before reopening them. “It was terrible.
Even for someone like Levi, who…I don’t know how to say this, but just seemed sort of destined for bad things. Levi was drunk and wasn’t paying attention, but still, that wire
came out of nowhere. We were going so fast. When the boat crashed it sounded like an explosion. Like, I don’t know, like something out of Abu Dhabi. The wire just grazed my arm, but even
still, it nearly cut it off.” Dan rolls up the sleeve of his shirt and holds out his forearm for me to examine. A fresh scar runs from the knobby bone of his wrist to his elbow. He shudders
visibly, then replaces the sleeve. “Levi must have gotten knocked out and drowned, because when they fished him out of the waterway and pushed on his chest—” As human brains are
inclined to do, mine is filling in the blanks, illustrating this story with the Levi I knew, my Levi. “You know the way they do in movies—seawater shot out of him like a
fountain.” I swallow. This wasn’t my Levi, I remind myself. This was someone else, someone I’ve never met. The flashing red of the lights and the persistent thump of the bass feel
trippy and wrong. Disorienting.

I can’t help asking. “What did he look like?”

Dan trains his insipid, waterlogged eyes on me more intently. “Who did you say you were again?”

Onstage, the lead singer belts a violent scream that sends the crowd into another roar. Light flashes across Dan’s face. I smell sweat and skunked beer.

“I’m a friend of the family.”

For a split second, Dan’s eyes become unfocused, glazed over. He clears his throat. “Black hair like hers.” He points to Raven, who purrs at being noticed. “Tall. I think
I have a picture of him on my phone.” Something thick and sticky globs at the back of my throat. Daniel fishes in his pocket and clicks through a few screens before turning the phone toward
me.

I take the phone in my hands and hold it close to my face to study. Suddenly, my chest cramps. I feel my heart being smashed into a box too small for it. Strangling. Wheezing. Sputtering for
blood.

The phone slips from my hands and cracks on the concrete floor.

“What the hell!” Dan yells, diving to retrieve it.

I clutch my chest, world spinning rapidly out of control like a kaleidoscope. Red lights flashing. Music pounding. I catch Raven’s arm to keep from plummeting to the ground. The pain in my
heart threatens to buckle my knees.

“Get off of me. What’s wrong with you, you freak?”

Heart still crushed to the point I can’t breathe, I find the wall and prop myself against it. I shut my eyes, listening to the frantic notes of an electric guitar, which sound tinny and
distant. The image of Levi’s beautiful, unforgettable face feels like it’s been tattooed under my eyelids.

It’s him.

My alarm goes off at too-early o’clock. Thoughts bubble to the surface, sleepy and muddled. Black hair. Tan skin. Shattered glass.
Him
.

But at the same time…not him. Dozy eyes, unfocused. A look that I’m not used to. Smile directed away from the camera. What had he been looking at? I don’t know. I don’t
know anything, I realize. My alarm chirps again. Repetitive. Irritating. I roll over and slap my hand over all of the buttons until it shuts up. My mouth tastes foul.

Henry had to see it to believe it himself and for this, he had to wrestle the phone free from my new friend Dan and pay up another twenty. But once he laid eyes on the photograph, I watched as a
curtain like an oncoming storm spread over his features.
Him
.

Painful knots still fill my chest.
There’s got to be a logical explanation,
he said.
We’ll figure this out
. Will we? It hurts to move; hurts to breathe. I’m
beginning to the think the well of logical explanations has run dry.

There’s knocking at the door. “Stella! Are you up?”

The effort it’d take to lift my head feels insurmountable. “Define up,” I yell back to Mom.

“Stella Cross! We cannot be late!” Even through the door I can tell she has a serious case of the
I-mean-it
’s.

I groan loud enough for Mom to hear it through the door. We never go to church and I have no idea why Elsie should need to be christened anyhow. I’m sure her soul will be perfectly safe,
holy water or no.

“I can’t hear movement!” Mom jiggles the locked door.

“Okay, okay.” I shove the blankets down to my ankles and crawl out of bed like a zombie from its grave. “I’m up.”

One day. Just get through this one day. I say this as a promise to myself. Besides, I have no other plan at the moment, so I’m not sure there’s another choice.

On the other side of the door, I find Mom busy fastening a pair of earrings, her entire head of hair rolled up in hot curlers. “I ironed a dress for you. It’s hanging in the laundry
room. And can you do something with that hair?”

I scrunch the stringy black mop in between my fingers. To my mom’s credit, she hadn’t made a big deal when I’d chopped it off. I’m sure she wrote it in her Stella files.
Probably under the heading
POST
-
SURGERY REBELLION
, but she let it go. So I’ll try for her because I can tell that she’s entered the crazy
zone, the mode usually reserved for cleaning the house before we have company. When we used to have company, that is.