six percent of them manage to live five years. Not what you’d call cheery news. ‘So far I haven’t even managed to re-program my iPhone’s text message alert so it doesn’t scare innocent bystanders.’
‘I can do that for you,’ Dinah says. ‘Easy-peasy. I have Crazy Frog on mine.’
‘Tell me about the website first.’
‘There was a tweet, okay? Someone at school told me about it. It got picked up on lots of social media sites. Facebook … Pinterest … Google Plus … you know the ones I’m talking about.’
Hodges doesn’t, but nods.
‘I can’t remember the tweet exactly, but pretty close. Because they can only be a hundred and forty characters long. You know that, right?’
‘Sure,’ Hodges says, although he barely grasps what a tweet is. His left hand is trying to sneak its way to the pain in his side. He makes it stay put.
‘This one said something like …’ Dinah closes her eyes. It’s rather theatrical, but of course she just did come from a Drama Club rehearsal. ‘“Bad news, some nut got the ’Round Here concert canceled. Want some good news? Maybe even a free gift? Go to badconcert.”’ She opens her eyes. ‘That’s probably not exact, but you get the idea.’
‘I do, yeah.’ He jots the website name in his notebook. ‘So you went there …’
‘Sure. Lots of kids went there. It was kind of funny, too. There was a Vine of ’Round Here singing their big song from a few of years ago, “Kisses on the Midway,” it was called, and after about twenty seconds there’s an explosion sound and this quacky voice saying, “Oh damn, show canceled.”’
‘I don’t think that’s so funny,’ Angie says. ‘You all could have been killed.’
‘There must have been more to it than that,’ Hodges says.
‘Sure. It said that there were like two thousand kids there, a lot of them at their first concert, and they got screwed out of the experience of a lifetime. Although, um, screwed wasn’t the word they used.’
‘I think we can fill in that blank, dear one,’ Carl says.
‘And then it said that ’Round Here’s corporate sponsor had received a whole bunch of Zappit game consoles, and they wanted to give them away. To, you know, kind of make up for the concert.’
‘Even though that was almost six years ago?’ Angie looks incredulous.
‘Yeah. Kind of weird, when you think of it.’
‘But you didn’t,’ Carl said. ‘Think of it.’
Dinah shrugs, looking petulant. ‘I did, but it seemed okay.’
‘Famous last words,’ her father says.
‘So you just … what?’ Hodges asks. ‘Emailed in your name and address and got that’ – he points to the Zappit – ‘in the mail?’
‘There was a little more to it than that,’ Dinah says. ‘You had to, like, be able to prove you were actually there. So I went to see Barb’s mom. You know, Tanya.’
‘Why?’
‘For the pictures. I think I have mine somewhere, but I couldn’t find them.’
‘Her room,’ Angie says, and this time she’s the one with the eye-roll.
Hodges’s side has picked up a slow, steady throb. ‘What pictures, Dinah?’
‘Okay, it was Tanya – she doesn’t mind if we call her that – who took us to the concert, see? There was Barb, me, Hilda Carver, and Betsy.’
‘Betsy would be …?’
‘Betsy DeWitt,’ Angie says. ‘The deal was, the moms drew straws to see who would take the girls. Tanya lost. She took Ginny Carver’s van, because it was the biggest.’
Hodges nods his understanding.
‘So anyway, when we got there,’ Dinah says, ‘Tanya took pictures of us. We had to have pictures. Sounds stupid, I guess, but we were just little kids. I’m into Mendoza Line and Raveonettes now, but back then ’Round Here was a really big deal to us. Especially Cam, the lead singer. Tanya used our phones. Or maybe she used her own, I can’t exactly remember. But she made sure we all had copies, only I couldn’t find mine.’
‘You had to send a picture to the website as proof of attendance.’
‘Right, by email. I was afraid the pics would only show us standing in front of Mrs Carver’s van and that wouldn’t be enough, but there were two that showed the Mingo Auditorium in the background, with all the people lined up. I thought even that might not be good enough, because it didn’t show the sign with the band’s name on it, but it was, and I got the Zappit in the mail just a week later. It came in a big padded envelope.’
‘Was there a return address?’
‘Uh-huh. I