Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,93

High. I trade ironies with all the hipsters at the corner table. I breeze past Motorcycle Man, cool and distant as a rare white bird, and he stares after me, sulking, his long hands laced in front of him. I swing by the merch table to explain the situation to Denny, but it’s too crowded with people buying CDs.

The room is packed and restless. Everyone’s ready for the show. I do my best to entertain the crowd while they wait, keeping up a constant stream of banter as I hurry around setting up the amp and microphones and running a long and elaborate sound check. I make jokes and puns and dark insinuations, and when the stage is set up and Skunk still hasn’t come, I play through my classical repertoire on my synth, Bach and Beethoven rendered in warbling square waves with a heavy, stonerrific delay.

People clap, but I know what they’re thinking: Where’s Phil? Where’s Phil? Where’s Phil?

I finish playing my last classical piece and bend down to adjust the buckle on my shoe. While I’m down there, rubbing my ankle and desperately plotting my next move, I hear a low roar. It starts at the back of the room and sweeps forward like a wave. When I look up, every head in the crowd has turned to look at the door, where Skunk, Philippe, Bicycle Boy, my brontosaurus of love has just appeared with his apple-green bass in his hand.

It takes him a long time to make it all the way to the stage because so many people want to touch him, talk to him, fold his big wounded body into their arms like a best friend come back from the dead. At first I think they’re asking for his autograph. I expect the cameras to start flashing at any moment.

But no. These people touching Skunk’s shoulders, his arms, are welcoming him back. It was just a thing, their faces seem to say. Just an awful thing and we’re so, so glad you’re okay.

Finally he makes it to the stage. When he plugs in his bass, the crowd cheers. Before we start to play, he leans over and whispers, “Thanks, Crazy Girl.”

I whisper back, “The Way cannot be cut, knotted, dimmed or stilled.”

It’s from the note I left on the windshield.

Our favorite line from the Tao.

We play one song, two songs, three songs, five. The crowd goes silent and hushed. People put down their drinks and sit cross-legged on the floor, staring up at us like kindergarteners at story time. My hands float over the keys and my voice melds and tangles with Skunk’s, singing the ancient riddles we wrote down in my basement, the ones that came to me in my waking and Skunk in his sleep. There’s a golden force field thrumming between us, a space the universe has rushed in to fill. Up on that stage, I feel more exposed than I ever have before, like I’m climbing a rock face with only a strand of dental floss for a harness. I gaze at the assembled faces.

And I realize that Skunk is the bravest person I know.

As soon as the concert is over, Skunk has to go straight home. Aunt Martine has promised terrible things if he isn’t back by midnight. She will torture his bicycle. She will put an alarm on his sliding glass door. She will murder his radios one by one.

We lean against his van and kiss like avalanche survivors until his phone starts beeping and beeping, and it’s his fifteen-minute warning alarm going off like a bird with its nest on fire.

“I’d better go,” says Skunk, but his big brown Skunk-eyes are shining like birthday candles.

“Oh, Bicycle Boy,” I say. “Oh, Phil. Oh, Skunk. Did you see their faces? Did you hear them clap? There must have been a hundred people in there, and I think some of them were in bands. Did you see that guy at the back, from the radio station?”

His smile is a jar full of fireflies.

“Crazy Girl,” he says. “All I saw was you.”

I stand on the sidewalk waving, blowing kisses, and turning a lopsided cartwheel as Skunk drives away. The Train Room is spilling out people, who roll away into the night in twos and threes. I feel like how Sukey must have felt on the night of her art show, a feather in her hair. The moon is up. The sky is clear. The world feels big and bright and possible.

“Yo, Kiri.”

I spin