“YOU BUILT all these?” Hamilton asked.

“Yup,” said Tape Deck, admiring her handiwork.

“They’re amazing,” Alice said.

“Well, let’s hold off on that until we hear them,” Johnny said.

“Always the skeptic,” said Alice. “Well, they look amazing.”

There were five enormous speakers standing in our backyard, ready for our party. Dad was away over the weekend and we had one night to throw a party and a solid twenty-four hours to make it look like the party never happened. It was Johnny’s idea. Things were weird between us. I made a lot of demands, and he promised me quite a bit if we pulled this off. Cooking. Cleaning. General good brother-ing. I would have him in my pocket for a year, which felt like a fine price to pay, considering he stole my best friend and everything.

“Well let’s give it a shot,” Johnny said, slapping one of the speakers. It was as tall as him, painted lustrous silver and had five circles with grates over them. They were sitting on a stage made out of cinder blocks and wooden sheets Hamilton and Johnny had built. The sheets were buckled slightly under the weight of the speakers.

Tape Deck held up an iPod. “I thought you’d never ask.”

She pressed a button and a wall of sound burst out of the speakers in unison. They were loud, but the sound was crisp and pure. A cello hit me in the face, then a horn, then a series of trombones. It was some classical piece. I felt like my face was in the middle of an orchestra. She could have picked any song, but she choose classical, not out of love of the music but out of love of the speakers—and she was right. I had never felt so in the center of a world of sound. It was magical.

“Turn it down!” Johnny screamed. He had a look of genuine fear in his eyes. It was the first time I’d ever heard him complain about noise. In sixteen years. Johnny pointed to our neighbor’s backyard. Ms. Slovinsky was glaring at us through the slates in our wooden fence. Her blue eyes pierced us like arrows.

“Oh boy,” I said. “I guess the concerts off.”

“What‽”

“No way,” said Alice.

“Well, it wouldn’t be terrible,” said Rosa. Johnny and Alice shot her a death stare. “Fine,” she muttered.

“Okay, so what do we do so this thing doesn’t get shut down before it starts?” Hamilton asked.

Just then Kurt and Backslash sauntered around the side of our house and took a good look at the speakers.

“Nice,” said Backslash. “Noiiiiiiice.”

“I’ve got an idea,” said Tape Deck.

 

ONE TRIP to Home Depot, later the backyard was littered with blue tarps and wooden two-by-fours, piles of drills and circular saws. Just looking at a circular saw made me cringe, so I was pretty useless. There sharp jagged teeth just made me think of lost bleeding fingers and the safety lecture Mr. Dumont had given us in seventh grade shop class, which he punctured by holding up his stump of a left pinkie.

Rosa and I were in charge of stapling the blue tarps to two-by-fours, which Alice, Johnny and Tape Deck cut to size. Tape Deck was the real mastermind behind the whole thing and turned out, in addition to being a mad genius with inventions, was also quite handy. She was kind of the coolest chick. Alice was smiling like a demon as sawdust kicked up in her face. She chopped board after board, laying them down between my dad’s old metal saw horses and slicing them with loud whirrs and hoots. Johnny wasn’t picking it up as quickly, and after a piece of wood flew up and hit him in the face, he threw his hands up in exasperation and started just feeding boards to Alice to cut.

I laughed at him while Johnny said, “Come on! I have to protect my hands. For the music.”

Two hours later, the blue monster—as Marcus had named it—was finished. It was a series of large gates, each one consisting of two support beams and one top beam. A large blue plastic tarp hung from the top beam. We had to work together to hoist them up. When upright they were about fourteen feet high, and we stuck them in the ground along the fence, so the entire backyard was covered in blue plastic. They blocked the sun and gave the backyard a cool bluish glow.

“It’s like Christo’s gates, except, you know, blue. An ecstatic accident produced by void and fire,” said Hamilton. He muttered “Maggie Nelson” after that last thing, walking around, inspecting the strength of the beams. He pretended to drunkenly attack them, seeing if they would fall, and he pulled out a small camera from his pocket and started taking pictures of the shapes they cast on the ground.

“So this will block the noise,” I asked Tape Deck.

“No, but the next thing will,” she said.

Johnny schlepped a ladder out of the basement and they coiled a long black hose across the top of the gates, so it ran the length of the whole mass. Plastic ties kept it in place. Johnny plugged it into our spigot. Water leaked down the blue tarps and onto the ground. I wasn’t sure what the point was, other than an elaborate way to water our lawn. Or maybe a really steep slip and slide.

Tape Deck signaled to Kurt, who walked up to the first gate, stuck his finger in the cascading water, and walked the length of the gates, letting water splash over his outstretched finger. As he touched it, the water slowed down to a barely perceptible drip, until finally it all stopped. The surface looked like a clear, pebbly glass. It reflected light in small twinkling bits like a diamond. I reached out to touch it and Tape Deck grabbed my hand.

“I wouldn’t do that,” she said. “Not yet.” Johnny and Tape Deck picked up handfuls of sawdust and began tossing it at the glass wall. We all joined in and soon the surface was covered in yellow sawdust. When we threw it at the wall crystals would form around it and spread out. When we were finished we had walls of dust-covered ice, which strained the gates, though they didn’t fall.

“Okay, time to try this again. Sarah, you know the neighbors. Mind sneaking on the other side of the fence?” asked Tape Deck

I said yes. Alice followed me and we made our way to the back of the fence, through the backyards of the Codys and the Gellers. We waited around but nothing happened. No noise. No anything. Alice talked about the show, but the excitement she had when she spoke to the others was gone. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Wrong? What’s wrong?” she snapped. “I can’t believe you, Sarah. You mean, uh, besides abandoning me in the forest while you went flying around town with Sam? Or ditching me every time Freedom Boy comes by? Way to have no reaction to anything I tell you. What’s up with you? You’re more frozen than Elsa these days. I tell you things and you ignore me and go off to something else. It’s so selfish.”

This rant came out of nowhere. It felt deeply unfair. Hadn’t Alice made the first cut, hooking up with Johnny? I tried to respond. “How was I supposed to react? You and my brother, Alice. That’s so weird.”

“So what?” she asked. “It took a lot for me to tell you and you just ran away. You’d rather risk killing yourself playing Hero than have a single conversation with your best friend. I’m just a convenient foil for your adventures. Maybe I should apply to the Sidekicks Alliance as the occasional companion of world-renowned Hero Sarah Robertson.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “Look, you liked this last year. That I wanted to be a Hero. Now you have your band and stuff and what am I supposed to do, twiddle my thumbs?”

Alice mumbled something. I asked her to speak up, and she repeated herself. “You have the attitude down. All you need is the card and a few accidental kills, and you could be a national celebrity!”

Before I could respond, my phone rang. It was Johnny, asking where we were. “We’ve been screaming your names,” he said. “Come back.”

We walked in silence. When we opened the back gate and walked through a break in the blue, we heard it. The classical music. It was blasting.

“Did you have this on the whole time?” Alice asked, spacing herself away from me as soon as possible. “We couldn’t hear a thing.”

“I guess that means the party, as it is, is on.” Tape Deck grinned.