YONI

When I got up to pee, I got a creepy feeling in the bathroom.

“Baz?” I whispered, hoping like a fool that I’d brought him here in my sleep.

But when I turned the light on, I found that crazy French girl curled up under my sink, sound asleep.

She wore the same clothes she’d had on when she broke into my dressing room at the club. She smelled a little funky.

Dried tear-tracks ran down her face.

“Grrr.” As silently as I could, I peed and flushed. Then I kicked the bottom of her shoe. “Hey. Get up. And take a shower. You stink.”

I left her blinking.

After a lot of quiet swearing, I figured out how to make coffee in the gold-plated cappuccino rig and brought two mugs back to the bedroom.

Twenty minutes later, Sophie the Stalker came out of the bathroom, clean, wearing my big white fluffy hotel bathrobe. She didn’t look chipper.

Sipping coffee in my bedroom, huddled in the fluffy robe, she explained all her little problems to me and watched me with impossibly blue eyes set in big dark circles.

“Wait, wait,” I said. “He sent you away because you’re too young?” That made sense.

“Because he’s too old,” she corrected. “He lost his friend after eighty years. He can’t face another loss like that.”

I understood what she did not. “He’s talking about death,” I said.

The kid looked at me as if she’d never heard of death.

“He’s afraid he’s never going to die,” I said. Boy, some of the things Baz had said were making more sense.

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” she said cautiously.

“Only if you don’t die, either.”

I waited while the wheels turned in her scatterbrain.

“I see. Perhaps,” the kid said slowly, “that can be arranged. If he wants me.”

That was the deal with Baz, too, wasn’t it? Did he want me? The thought of living forever without him made me violently sick to my stomach. I got up, walked to the bathroom, threw up my coffee, rinsed my mouth, and came back to the bedroom.

“Cookie,” I said, “it’s late. I have another show tomorrow. You and your sex demon will have to work out the relationship thing yourselves.”

“So you won’t help him?” she piped.

I frowned. “How?”

“You are so powerful.”

I leaned my chin on my hand and stared at the sleeping pill I hadn’t taken yet. “This power you mention. I don’t want to talk about it to you. One, because you’re a crazy stalker fan and God only knows what you’ll do with what I say, and two, because I don’t understand it and I can barely control it. Mostly I can’t. It’s still growing. That makes me less interested in trying it out, not more, do you understand that?”

“No.”

“You’re honest,” I admitted.

“I’m honest and I’m smart.” She wasn’t boasting, only reminding me. She was smart and upfront and apparently fearless, which put her on the other side of the moon from me. I had a sudden longing for a girl child of my own. Could I raise a daughter not to worry?

“Look,” I said, “let’s say a person thinks she has no power.”

“You mean me.”

The kid could shoot straight, too. “Yes, I mean you. That person assumes that she can do no harm, because she thinks she’s powerless. Therefore, she thinks, she doesn’t have to worry about the consequences of what she does.”

I looked at her. Her big blue eyes got darker. She didn’t speak.

“Then you take someone with a lot of power already—maybe it comes from ordinary things like wealth or fame. If you hand her a bunch more power, mysterious magical power that seems to grow every day, no explanation, no one to teach her about it.” Baz could have taught me. I swallowed. “She’s gonna want to use it less, not more.”

“All this is school guidance counselor philosophy,” Sophie said crisply. “My Veek is going to lose everything he loves, including me, and you talk like a Judy Blume book.”

My eyebrows went up. “Okay.”

Sophie said, “Now I will talk philosophy. Me, I know about privilege and loneliness. It must be a lot like fame and loneliness, or immortality and loneliness. You and me, we have action thrust on us. These stupid slacker demons we love!” The kid rolled her eyes, and once again I was charmed and entertained and inspired by how easily she tossed them over her knee and gave them a mental spanking. “They have had time to learn how to avoid the—the doing. Bon. Hurrah for the lessons of long life. Only, sometimes you must do. Do or die.”

A bus honked, way down on the street outside. I heard it faintly through the closed penthouse window. “It’s late. I have a show tomorrow.”

“So you will help him?”

“I don’t know how,” I repeated.

“Well, if you know that my Veek and I are listening—I promise you, we will be listening!”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Will you please do what you did last night? That strong magic for love? It was in the song, the last song. Everyone felt it for miles.”

I looked away, and back to her. “I don’t know if I can. Things have changed for me and—” and Baz “—and I may not have all the musicians I need.”

She eyed me shrewdly over the rim of her coffee mug. “He cannot resist you,” she said softly.

The kid was too damned smart.

We got a couple of hours sleep. Before she left, I gave her some of my clean clothes, a pair of jeans and the chambray shirt I’d worn that day with Baz. Maybe she would get luckier in it than I had. She rolled up the jeans cuffs and hung her climbing gear all over her hips and shoulders.

That reminded me of my flying harness.

I wondered if Baz would be there to rig me to fly tonight.

I shook off the thought. There is no Baz.

Sophie also tried to pay me for letting her stay in my room. She had been carrying a giant wad of twenties and fifties in the pocket of her stinky cargo pants. “I couldn’t check into a hotel myself,” she explained. “I had no ID.”

I refused the money.

She left by the twelfth-story window again.

I tried not to watch.

Instead I went to the bathroom to throw up again.

o0o

I dreaded going to the theater for my last big show of the tour. I was stressed out. My period was due, and I’d had no sleep.

And I had to fly again.

In spite of his trying to blow off the recording session, I couldn’t see Baz skipping work. Yet when I got there, he was nowhere in sight.

This threw me into such a tizzy, I could barely listen when people talked to me. I had to lock myself in the dressing room bathroom and breathe a lot. I even brought a paper bag to put over my head. My dresser knocked on the door every thirty seconds, because the first costume was a pain in the butt to fit.

The thing was, I didn’t want to fly without Baz. He’d totally spoiled me with his comforting, easy-going vibe. The thought that I’d become dependent on him in just a few days infuriated me.

I’d show him. I would rewrite the playlists and put the flying number way up front. That way, if and when he showed up for work, the slack bastard would discover I’d flown without him.

So there.

The prospect scared me, but I had an idea that anger might see me through.

Then I thought, Yoni, you’re in charge.

You. Don’t. Have. To. Fly.

This was pure irresponsible cowardice. I’d never let myself chicken out on anything. I could almost hear Uncle Chester denouncing cowardice and driving me to do things that scared the crap out of me. Press conferences. Flying numbers.

Screw ’em. You’re the boss. Don’t fly.

That was the voice of the evil slacker lurking in my head.

I noticed that I was breathing normally. I took the paper bag off my head.

Londa pounded on the door. “Yoni, we have to get you dressed!”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” I opened the door to let her in, and waved my dressing-room guard over. “Hey, Dave, will you tell them to have Max come in here with the playlist?”

Time passed.

I started the show.

We did the flying number second in the first half of the show, sans flying.

The boys set up the audience monitors in the wings for me, but I ignored them. It wasn’t likely I would get anybody horny tonight. I felt like crap. I knew my energy was miserable, and I didn’t give a damn. The whole world deserved to be miserable after what I’d been through. I was just barely aware enough to be shocked at myself, but I couldn’t stop hurting. Screw being a grownup.

At intermission I did something else irresponsible. I told the stage manager to add ten minutes to the break and sent everybody out of my dressing room for the first five minutes.

I placed one of the dressing room chairs, a padded one much nicer than the Cubby Bear folding chairs, in the middle of the dressing room.

Then I tortured it. I pulled my edges in until I was bursting with mana, cranky mana, self-pitying, agonized, desperate, rageful mana. Then I let it loose on the chair.

I didn’t quite set it on fire. But it was a piece of twisted metal slag and melted foam cushion when I calmed down at last.

Now I was restless. My mood was swinging up in a scary, irrational way. I’d blown off the flying. Baz would be proud. He really missed something by not showing up tonight. Then I plunged into grief because he wasn’t there.

To remind myself why I was done with Baz, I dug that horrible photo out of my music case—Cousin Joe had kindly slipped multiple copies into my purse, my jacket pocket, and my music case—and I examined it closely.

Oh, who was I kidding? I wanted to look at the picture of me and Baz, kissing. I wanted to remember a moment when life had been better. When it was still good.

While I was peering at the photo, a grainy black-and-white job taken in late afternoon with dim light filtering between the closed drapes, I noticed that the thin lines of light from the covered windows criss-crossed with other lines.

Wait. That didn’t look right.

I narrowed my eyes. The crossing lines radiated from a different central point—a lamp maybe.

But I knew we had not kissed standing in that tiny downstairs hotel room.

No. I peered at the photo. The criss-cross streaks gleamed even brighter than the light from the window. Stripes of light spread across the ceiling, the wall, the bar front, even the cappuccino machine.

That wasn’t the room Baz had taken me to.

That was my own suite.

This photo had been taken by a camera hidden in my own suite.

A camera placed there by my own family.

Who had then accused Baz of taking it.

So they could get rid of him.

Get him out of my life.

Get me to stop canceling press conferences and kissing stagehands who used to be musicians.

A corrosive horror scoured my insides.

I well remembered how, in the past, I had tried to date boys. Somehow they’d never lasted.

Granted, Baz wasn’t the kind of guy you brought home to mother. But how many other guys who caught my eye had I sent away, because they’d turned out to be creeps or drug users? Sometimes they simply vanished one day, to be glimpsed from afar a month later, driving a shiny new SUV with chrome wheels.

Janis and Amy, Marilyn and Whitney, did this happen to you too?

Did they have family who watched over them like this?

I sat there motionless and silent, waiting until rage had stopped making me dizzy.

Then I picked up my cell and texted the three of them—my aunt and uncle and Cousin Joe. I know what you did. We’ll talk about it after the show. I was willing to absolve Verlette of conspiracy. She was too dumb.

But what would I say to them after the show? I was nauseated. They hadn’t just taken the photo. They’d lied about it, loudly and elaborately and self-righteously. They’d accused Baz of horrible things.

Then the next wave of ugliness hit me. Why had Baz gone along with the frame-up?

I wished I could throw up.

I didn’t dare. Not in makeup, not with the curtain going up in minutes.

I’d been betrayed by so many trusted people, I couldn’t even get angry.

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach by everyone I loved.

I found my phone on my makeup table and called Max again.

“Sorry, but we’re gonna have to rewrite the playlist again.”