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Samantha
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THE NEXT FRIDAY night, she and Jamie had the house all to themselves. Brace was out with Zev and Maddox. Dad was out with his golfing buddies. And Mom was out with Anita Funk-Abel.
The two had cranked the stereo for an hour, dancing around the rec room. Chuck Norris howled until they stopped to play foosball. Now Jamie lay on Samantha’s bed, cramming her face with Goldfish crackers and Twizzlers, slurping pineapple Crush from a can, playing Nintendo—all forbidden fruit in the Heathrow household.
Samantha sat at her desk, checking her Warcraft auctions, but she couldn’t hold out any longer and snuck a peek at Lucy’s blog.
The charade was crumbing; Sojourn had failed and Lucy was set to jump back on the girl train at some lesbian bar in Minneapolis. And while that should be grounds for celebration, Lucy’s thoughts about Mom were disturbing on too many levels. There was also the matter of Sojourn’s corruption and her grandparents’ link to it.
A niggling little bug had been buzzing around in the back of her mind, growing in annoyance since the last Civil Diss protest at the capitol. Lucy’s sudden desire to break Sojourn rules had brought it to the forefront. Where were the Simian Avengers these days? Why didn’t they show up at the capitol, when there were no other SA protests going on that week?
“Something wonky is going on.” Samantha got up from her computer.
“Eh, she’s finally going out and letting her hair down,” Jamie said, furiously punching buttons on Samantha’s old Nintendo Game Boy as the Tetris blocks fell faster and faster. “I think that crash really woke your mom up.”
“No, I’m talking about Lucy.” Samantha walked down the hall to the rec room.
“Well, her too for that matter,” Jamie called after her. “Sure wish we could go.”
“Soon, young Padawan. Soon.” Samantha flipped through her parents’ old record albums. Dad was particular about his, even though he wouldn’t dare put them under a needle anymore and had repurchased most of them on iTunes. The entire shelf was alphabetized except for Mom’s slight stack, which was relegated to the end and tilted in the opposite direction. Her music was a decade newer and of questionable quality in Dad’s opinion. The Go Gos, George Michael, The Cure, Prince, plus all Lucy Veebee’s bands: The Hypnogogs, Lucy & the Leapers, and CDs of Cake for Horses.
Samantha turned to the back of a seven-inch dance mix of the Leapers song “Urgent Wishbone” which had been in a hair color commercial in the late nineties. In the photo, Lucy’s band stood around arbitrarily in an abandoned lot, trying to look like thugs. Lucy’s young face was smooth, her eyes underlined with heavy black kohl. The sneering blonde drummer was leaning her back against Lucy, drumsticks a spinning blur in her hands.
That sneer though.
Samantha shuffled through the albums. Though the other band members changed, that same blonde was on every album and CD cover with Lucy. She looked too familiar. Tammy Tom-Tom, read the liner notes. Could they be more than friends?
Samantha walked back into her bedroom and opened a new window on her iMac.
There were a few old Leapers videos circulating on YouTube, “Urgent Wishbone” the most popular. She hit “play” and the band sprung to life, clothed in black on a white backdrop. Lucy rocked on her heels to the beat and layered a slippy groove beneath the blonde’s balls-out percussion and the guitarist’s screeching. The copper-haired singer commanded the center of the monitor and shrieked random insults.
“I love this one,” Jamie offered, jutting her head back and forth.
Samantha muttered, “Mmm,” her eyes fixated on the screen.
Throughout most of the song, pixilated Lucy hid behind her brunette mop and worked diligently at her bass. But near the crashing end she began to strut around. She slinked up to the camera and grinned with a shameless intensity that Samantha only saw after the Grace Lutheran choir had set the church on fire with the Requiem.
Then the camera zoomed in on the drummer.
Samantha recognized that look of fury. “Oh boy.”
Jamie sat upright. “Wut?”
“She’s the ape.” Samantha poked the blonde woman’s face on the monitor. “She’s the lady who got arrested at that rally last winter.”
She scrubbed the video back to Lucy staring into the camera. Samantha closed her eyes and overlaid the image with those twinkling black eyes in the other gorilla costume, the one who came up to boogie with her. Samantha raised her fingertips to her lips, softly tapping. “Oh man. Oh man.”
“What is it? Sam?”