Except she was stressed out. People didn’t cry hard enough that the sound carried through the walls when tears of joy were being shed. Maybe Lee couldn’t do much about the wedding, but he was at least willing to be supportive. He nudged Emma’s little finger and offered her a sympathetic look. Except Emma didn’t even see it. She glanced down sadly at their side-by-side fingers, sighed, then pulled her hand away and settled it on her lap.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE WALLS WERE not particularly thin. Lee’s family lived in a newer home, over 83% recycled composite, smallish but sturdy. Three compact bedrooms, two baths—and, according to Dad, a lot easier to clean than those sprawling Mid-Mod revivals over by Hale Creek.
Lee pressed his ear to the wall his bedroom shared with Emma’s. He hadn’t anticipated her lack of reaction in the car. But what could he expect? The last time he heard her crying, he’d done nothing. Nothing! Roman would have done…something. Lee wasn’t sure exactly what, but he couldn’t imagine Roman fretting over it with his mouth shut. Unfortunately, now that Lee was prepared to dash over to the next room with offers of hugs and condolences and a shoulder to cry on, his eager ear was met with nothing but silence.
He glanced at the clock. It was late. But Emma couldn’t possibly be asleep yet. Could she? He debated for several long minutes whether or not his presence would be a nuisance, then finally decided he’d be haunted by his inaction forever if he squandered his last chance at talking to Emma before the wedding. He crept into the hall. A sliver of light shone from beneath her closed bedroom door. Heartened by the fact that at least he wouldn’t be waking her, Lee knocked.
Emma opened the door a crack. “What?”
Lee’s mouth worked. Since when did he have a hard time figuring out what to say to his own sister? “Just…checking.”
“On what?”
“On you.” Lee almost asked if she was okay. Rude, but effectively succinct. However, he suspected that unlike Roman, he couldn’t quite carry off such a bold question without tanking the entire conversation. “In case you wanted to talk. About anything.”
“Not really. Why? Do you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“About what?”
“About tomorrow.” Lee’s voice faltered. He cleared his throat. “About everything.”
“Seriously?” Emma glanced at her clock. “Now?”
Lee’s heart sank, and he felt his face screw up.
Emma sighed and opened her door wide. “Okay, okay. Since when are you such a big, sentimental dork?”
“Since everything stopped making sense,” Lee murmured, though he suspected it was more than that, and maybe today was the first time certain puzzle pieces actually clicked together.
Normally he would have sat on Emma’s bed, but her gift from Mom was currently there, a handmade wedding quilt. It wasn’t spread reverently, as it would be on a double bed, an adult bed, but instead it was heaped in a pile at the foot of the narrow mattress. Navy and white—the wedding colors. Not turquoise. Not coral.
Their mother had sourced the fabric for months. She took her quilting as seriously as most folks took the evening news, and for her it would have been a travesty to simply purchase the material at a fabric store. She made “scrap” quilts, so in her mind, even fabric made from recycled fiber violated the spirit. Lee wasn’t quite sure how she’d managed to save the correct bits of old clothing all these years when the wedding colors had only been settled on a year and a half ago. But there was a snippet of the sundress Emma had worn to kindergarten. Lee remembered how the skirt would flare when she twirled. She spun and spun, giggling, until she took a few crooked steps and collapsed to the ground. He wished his mother had used the part of the skirt with the stubborn grass stain on it. More memories there. But he supposed if he wanted to express such strong opinions on the fabric choice, he’d need to take up quilting himself.
There was a piece of a cloth napkin Lee hadn’t seen in years. And there was a bit of ribbon Emma had won the year she’d conquered every local spelling bee (before she deemed the spelling circuit “vestigial” and dropped the whole thing just as quickly as she’d picked it up.) Most of the fabrics, though, Lee couldn’t quite place.
It was possible he hadn’t paid enough attention, but it was more likely those scraps didn’t hold his family’s precious memories at all. There was only so much storage space in their tiny composite house, and only a few token items could have been saved. Most of the fabric would have been sourced from a specialty craft store. The skill of Taxable District trash-pickers was legendary. In the three semesters Lee’s studies had focused on the etymology of phrases, he’d done a philosophical analysis on the old idiom that Native Americans used every part of the buffalo. He had a hard time picturing what, exactly, anyone could do with a huge rotting carcass. And yet the phrase resonated with meaning. After all, a skilled trash-picker could turn a refuse pile into a viable stream of income.
Artisanal recycled materials were big business, and they were incredibly labor intensive. Scavenging scraps and rags was only the first step. The fabrics were then thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, pressed, cut into neat squares, and bundled into stacks of various weights and color schemes. Were they more costly than machine-made yardage? Of course. But quilts were a labor of love, a medium of memory, so ideally the fabric going into them would be just as special as the construction.
Lee hefted the quilt—it was heavier than it looked—and attempted to fold it. His knuckles brushed the walls on either side of the room. “How did you know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
“What your wedding colors should be?”
“Uh…I dunno. I just picked some.”
“It was that easy for you?”
“Well, sure. I like blue and white. Who doesn’t?” Maybe someone who’d choose turquoise and coral in a centerpiece that could have been programmed to glow any color at all. “Look, I know Mom and I have been getting into it lately, but we’re just stressed out. There’s the ceremony, the reception, the move. It’s like white-knuckling it while she’s trying to get to the on-ramp without hitting something. After that, it’s all highway.”
“Maybe what you need is to blow off some steam.”
“No,” Emma said. “What I need to do is finish packing.”
“At the Bonfires.”
Emma bit back a reply and studied Lee more closely. “How much did you have to drink tonight?”
“Only two vodka sours.” They hadn’t tasted anything like the drink Roman had concocted in the kitchen, either. And they’d churned in his stomach too forcibly to allow him to down any more, though he’d sorely wished he could cultivate a better buzz. “That was hours ago. I’m not drunk. I just thought it would be…fun.”
“The Bonfires…fun. What would we do for an encore—spray-paint some graffiti? Steal a car? Kill a hobo?”
“It’s not like that. There’s music.”
“You don’t even know where it is. It’s not like stopping at the mall. There’s no fixed address with a fancy sign between the McDonald’s and the Starbucks that says Bonfires.”
“I thought we’d start at Cat and Canary and go from there.” They’d been sneaking off to the used bookstore for so many years, they could get there blindfolded. So finding the Bonfires from there, how hard could it be? Big glowy thing by the river….
“What are you thinking, Lee?” Emma couldn’t have sounded more exasperated if she tried. “I practically had to bribe you to take me there—and that was during the day. This time of night? They’d skin us alive.”
“No they wouldn’t.”
“Sure they would. We don’t belong there. We’re lucky Mr. Babcock even tolerated us hanging around the bookstore as much as he did.”
What was she talking about? Lee might not know much about business—it was one of the few things he had absolutely no desire to study—but he and Emma were paying customers. “Maybe Babcock doesn’t go overboard gushing over our patronage, but i
t’s nothing personal. That’s just the way he is.”
“Promise me you won’t start going there after dark. I can’t spare the mental energy to worry about you getting mugged because I’m not there to watch out for you.”
“You’re talking like you’re done with Cat and Canary.”
“Lee,” Emma said gravely, “the wedding colors, the rehearsal dinner, the quilt…you’re a smart guy. I’d hope you can piece together what it all means. That I’m getting married.”
Getting married. Not dying. “What are you trying to say? Now you’ll never see me again?”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. I don’t need it—not from you, especially not now.”
How had his desire to comfort Emma gone so horribly wrong? If it were any other time, any other situation, he would have made for his room, closed the door, and buried his nose in a book. But while it would be simple enough to retreat, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. In the morning, his sister would embark on a whirlwind of wedding activities, and any chance of making sure she didn’t want to back out would be lost.
“I’m serious. Let’s go to the District. Tonight. Now.”
Emma took two corners of the quilt from Lee, backed to the far end of the room, and gave it a shake. The elaborate white and navy checkerboard pattern bowed. She brought her corners together, and Lee did too. Then she walked up to meet him, bringing their ends together. “I’m impressed that you’re feeling so adventurous—and, I dunno, maybe if you’d brought it up a few weekends ago, you could’ve talked me into it. But I’m not going out tonight. I have an incredibly long day tomorrow, and everyone will be taking pictures. I need some sleep.”
Lee struggled to find some convincing argument to counter with, but could only come up with, “Please.”
“Some other time. Next month, maybe, once I’m back from the honeymoon and all settled in. We’ll plan it.”
Next month would be too late. Anytime after the ceremony and the vows and the paperwork would be too damn late. “Aren’t you sick of planning? Haven’t you had enough of doing what’s expected of you? Of playing out this role that someone—or some thing—determined for you without ever once checking with you to see if it was something you actually wanted?”
Emma yanked the quilt from his hands, gave it three more hasty, crooked folds, then slammed it onto her bed. Lee might have been the one who’d had an article on metaphor published in Historical Words Journal, but Emma knew him well enough to understand he wasn’t really talking about going out with him tonight. “You’re nearly thirty, Lee. You don’t need your little sister to take you to the Bonfires. If you’re so caught up in the idea of going to the District right this very second, go there yourself.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CAT AND Canary bookstore looked vastly different at Midnight than it did on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The lights were out. The doors were covered by a metal security grating. And through the window, the used books with all their different colors and shapes and sizes, with their dog-eared pages and velvety, worn corners—this daytime treasure trove—looked more like a teetering pile of junk. But Lee had been sneaking off to Cat and Canary so long, he could find it in the dark. Literally. If there were any doubt, he could make out the hand-painted logo on the glass, with graffiti etched into the cat. A few crooked whiskers, and a squiggle on its haunches that was probably a gang symbol. Next to that was the series of faded stickers that ran down the side of the pane, odd little childish things. Shining suns, apples and lollipops, all of them with cherubic smiling faces.
Lee wasn’t sure why graffiti hadn’t quite caught on in the Benefit Sector neighborhoods where he spent the majority of his time. Maybe the perfect composite surfaces were impervious to any attempts to mark them. He’d never known a Boomer past Kindergarten age to cover things with stickers, either. But here in the District, everything was simultaneously decaying and adorned. Stickers and graffiti were part of the landscape—along with determined flowering weeds stretching up through the cracks in the old sidewalks, paint peeling to reveal numerous colors and iterations, and jumbles of handbills pasted ten layers deep, advertising various activist groups and social causes.
The word Bonfires caught his eye from one of the handbills on the stump of an old utility pole, and he searched for an address. But, no, there wasn’t one. Just a photo of a band called Weeping Bubo looking tattooed, hairy and angry. Although there was a date listed—three weeks ago—apparently there was no need to say what time Weeping Bubo would take the stage. Or, for that matter, where the Bonfires even were.
Apparently, if Lee weren’t a Benefit Boomer, he would simply know.
Confusion threatened to overwhelm him. It wasn’t only that he didn’t know where the Bonfires were. (How hard could they be to find?) It was that nothing else made sense anymore. How was it that instead of being relieved that he was offering support, Emma was angry? And how could Roman’s kiss have lingered on his lips despite the grease-coating they’d gotten from that obscene squab?
Lee shut his eyes, took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He knew where the river was. And so he struck off in that direction.
One of the many ways in which Lee worried he’d stick out like the proverbial sore thumb was the fact that he was on foot. But District streets were nothing like the Benefit Sector. They’d been laid out in an era when there was no traffic algorithm and people manually drove their cars everywhere, crashing into each other and mowing down pedestrians. There were a few modern automobile tracks that led to the highway here, but nowhere near as numerous as in Lee’s neighborhood. More people rode bicycles—and more people walked. Even this late at night. No one noticed the fact that he was on foot. No one cared.
Before long, he made out something that didn’t sound much like a song, though the distinct squall of an electric guitar carried over the top of the muted rumble. The river was in sight. The sound guided him until the glow of the fire came into view. Other people were heading that way, too, but they didn’t look like the vicious mob he’d seen on the news. They just looked like people.
Which wasn’t to say he’d ever mistake one of them for a Benefit Boomer. Only that they weren’t currently pounding one another with loose bricks or scraps of lumber. The scattering of people became a freeform crowd, and Lee realized he was part of it, everyone strolling in the direction of the river, and the music, and the big glowy thing. His heart pounded, but not entirely with fear. While the Bonfires felt nothing at all like the violent newscasts, joining the Taxable District crowd was the most thrilling thing he’d ever done…aside from kissing Roman.
As the ground angled down toward the riverbank, the view of the band and the fire was blocked by a tangled stand of weed trees. Lee allowed himself to flow with the crowd. There was a well-worn footpath he would have totally missed in the dark. But it was easy enough to focus on the couple in front of him, a twenty-something man and woman holding hands, and allow his feet to find the path without the help of his experience or his eyes.
He shuffled through the trees, not sure what he would find on the other side, and not caring. Whatever the experience turned out to be, it was already leaps and bounds better than the rehearsal dinner. And then the path turned, and the landscape blossomed with sound and fire.
The sound resolved itself into a beat. On a makeshift stage, three guitar players lunged in time, swinging their long, tangled hair in great, synchronized swoops while the drummer flailed. In counterpoint, the massive fire in front of them leapt randomly, too wild to be contained by something as contrived as rhythm. The crowd had formed a ragged circle around the fire, mostly men, surging around it clockwise in broad, lurching steps. Some of them shoved and jostled at one another as they went, but in person, the shoving looked more playful than violent. When one of the guys lost his footing, three others scooped him up and dragged him back into the flow. A row of spectators stood firm in front of the band, facing the stage, bobbing their heads and swinging their hair. But most of t
he crowd allowed themselves to be carried around the fire by the current.
Not everyone got close enough to be pulled into the tide—close enough to feel their eardrums ache from the roar of the amplifiers, or be singed by a wayward ember. Farther from the stage, some people watched the band, swaying slightly or nodding their heads to the rhythm. Some weren’t even paying attention to the show, and talked in clusters instead, gesticulating and laughing.
And some couples at the very fringe of the gathering were kissing.
When Lee stopped to stare, the crowd he’d been part of simply flowed around him, a lot like the men circling the fire. It wasn’t the fear of being physically hurt that was holding him back, it was the fear that he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to fit in. But it wasn’t as if he’d find Roman by hiding in the trees. He steeled himself, and he pressed on.
Even if Roman was in that churn of bodies around the fire, Lee suspected it would be pretty tough to find him even by jumping in. But occasionally someone would stagger out from the fray, sweaty and winded. So finding Roman was just a matter of patience.
While he was waiting for more guys to tumble out of the circle, he could also scan the groups of people who were just hanging out. Unfortunately, without a flashlight, he had to get really close to see them. And getting close enough to make out the partiers’ features also exposed him. He approached a cluster of men and woman who were talking and laughing. They fell silent and stared.
“Sorry,” he said, though they couldn’t have heard it over the band, and veered away. He skirted the next group more cautiously. It was surprising how many District guys had the same raw-boned, angular build as Roman. Lee tried focusing on the hair, but soon realized that Roman could have spiked up his sleek black hair for the occasion, or he could be wearing a hat. Plus, unless he was wearing something that looked exactly like his catering uniform, the chance of picking him out by silhouette alone wasn’t just slim, it was infinitesimal.
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