Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,57

apologize now. I hear Lukas count to four and then it’s on.

The moment we start playing, the last two hours of panic and lateness and getting yelled at by Lukas fade away, and I’m left in a golden dimension of sound. The synth possesses me. The purple stage lights are hot on my skin. Knowing we’re screwed just makes us play better. There’s no way we can win, therefore we have nothing to lose. I blitz up and down the keys, launching chords like bombs and deploying sixteenth notes like heavy artillery. At the end of the song, the last chord I play sends the synth flying. It sails through the air and explodes when it lands, people dodging the synth-shrapnel left and right. You can tell it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to them, this synth-bomb. The crowd goes wild. I fall to my knees and yell, “Good night, beautiful people!”

I could listen to them cheering forever.

chapter twenty-six

While we’re packing up our gear, Blackbeard comes up and tells us the judges want us to play in the finals next week.

Lukas practically faints with happiness, and I dance around him, singing, “We did it! We did it!” until I’m hoarse. The car ride home is victorious. Petra pulls into an all-night diner, and we order garlic fries and watch the video Lukas’s dad took on his phone again and again. “It is incredible how you kids play,” Petra says, and she sounds so genuinely incredulous I sort of fall in love with her.

After Lukas and his parents drop me off at my house, I’m too wired to go to sleep. I can’t stop marveling over the coincidences, the way every little thing slid into place. If I hadn’t gone for that bike ride on Thursday night, I wouldn’t have run into Skunk at midnight mass. If I hadn’t run into Skunk, I wouldn’t have made us late for Battle of the Bands. If we hadn’t been late, we wouldn’t have played like we did, raw and driven and wild. If I hadn’t banged my synth against the wall, it wouldn’t have exploded so spectacularily. If my synth hadn’t exploded, the crowd wouldn’t have gone wild, and we wouldn’t have been chosen to move on to the next round. Every disaster, every whim, every seemingly random decision came together to make this night happen. There are no mistakes, I realize—just detours whose significance only become clear when you see the whole picture at once.

Even though it has started to rain again, I decide to celebrate my official launch into musical stardom by taking my bike on a personal midnight mass. I want to go back to Stanley Park and visit the totem poles and cross the Lions Gate Bridge again and turn around and look at the city lights from the North Shore, but this time I want it to be just me, like a pilgrimage, a victory lap, a way of saying, Hello, Universe! Thank you for all the mystical wonders that have been sprouting up in my life, like Skunk and finding Sukey and Battle of the Bands and Om Shanti Om and also Hare Krishna, O Universe, Amen.

First thing I do is change out of the sweatpants and put on clothes that are more befitting of the occasion—gold tights and green boots and a stretchy black dress that makes me feel like Catwoman. I don’t bother with a raincoat. I want to be wet. I want to be kissed by all two million raindrops in the sky. My hair is a mess. I brush it and sweep it into a towering updo. Now my neck is bare. I shiver.

Good.

I hunt around my room for my iPod so I can have the right music, then stand in the kitchen mixing orange juice and brandy and vodka and Perrier because the Universe demands a ritual dram. I pour it into a pink frosty mug I find in the freezer door. I declare a toast to the Universe and drink the ice-cold witches’ brew standing right there in the kitchen in my boots. I mix another one. But once I’ve drunk the second drink, I still don’t feel ready to go, and the words drunk and drink start a little war in my head, drink-drunk-drank, then morph into raindrops that plink and plunk like a toy piano.

It comes to me in a flash. The shoes! Sukey’s silver shoes. I wrestle off the boots, scamper upstairs, grab the shoes, and sit