The Last Days

Zahler groaned. "Whoa, now I get it. You want to pay this girl so she owes you, right? You want her to be your drummer, not Pearl's." He shook his head. "That is some dumb-ass logic at work, Moz. We're supposed to be a band."

"Pearl's already paying for rehearsal space."

"Which is no big deal for her. You're getting into a spending contest with a girl who lives in an apartment that has stairs. Whole other floors!"

I looked down at my tattered shoes. "It's not a contest, Zahler. It's just business."

"Business?" He laughed. "You don't know jack about business."

I looked up at him, expecting to feel the death stare, but he was just confused. I didn't understand myself, not completely, but I knew I had to get some part of this band under control. If I let Pearl decide everything and pay for everything, Zahler and I would wind up just a couple of sidekicks along for the ride. "Just don't tell her about the money, okay?"

He blinked, his dogs winding around his feet in disarray. I saw him wondering if I'd gone insane, wondering if I was going to screw this whole thing up, and knew I was right on the edge of losing him.

Which was fine, if he really thought I was that hopeless. Maybe it was better to walk away now than later.

But finally, he exhaled. "Okay. Whatever. I won't tell Pearl you're paying. I guess I can pitch in some of my dog money too."

I shook my head. "I've got it covered."

"But maybe we should warn Pearl... before we all show up for rehearsal."

I frowned. "Warn her about what?"

"Um, that our new drummer drums on paint buckets..."

9. FEAR

-  PEARL-

I took the subway to Brooklyn, so Mom wouldn't find out from Elvis.

Skittering sounds wafted up from the tracks as I waited for a train, the shuffling of tiny feet among discarded coffee cups and newspapers. The platform was empty except for me, the tunnels murmuring with echoes. The subways sounded wrong these days, almost alive, like there was something big down here. Something breathing.

I hated facing the subway on Sunday mornings, with no rush-hour crowds to protect me, but we didn't have much choice about when to rehearse. Minerva said that church was the only thing that kept Luz away till after noon.

This would all be much easier when we didn't have to sneak Minerva out of her room, but she needed to join the band now. Lying around in bed all day was never going to cure her. She had to get out of that dark room, meet some new people, and, most of all, sing her brains out.

Moz, Zahler, and I had rehearsed together four times now - we had a B section for the Big Riff and two more half-formed songs. We were better every time we played, but we needed structure: verses and choruses, a drummer too. We didn't have time to wait for Min to get completely well. The world was in too much of a hurry around us.

Except for the F train, of course. Ten minutes later, it still hadn't come, and I hoped it wasn't broken down again. The subways were having some kind of weird trouble this summer. Minor earthquakes, they said on TV - Manhattan's bedrock settling.

That was also the official explanation for the black water infecting the pipes. They said it wasn't dangerous, even if they didn't know exactly what it was - it evaporated too quickly for anyone to find out. Most people were drinking bottled water, of course. Mom was bathing in Evian. I wasn't sure I believed any of it, but in any case, I didn't have time for earthquakes today. The rehearsal space was reserved in my name, on my credit card - the others couldn't get in without me. If I was late getting up to Sixteenth Street, everything would fall apart.

I fished out my cell phone. It searched for a signal, until a tremulous 7:58 A.M. appeared. One hour to get to Brooklyn and back.

Still hovering on the screen was the last number I'd called the night before - Moz's - to remind him again about this morning.

Lonely and nervous on the empty platform, I pressed send.

"Yeah?" a croaky voice answered.

"Moz?"

"Mmm," came his annoyed grumble. "Pearl? Crap! Am I late?"

"No, it's only eight."

"Oh." He scratched his head so hard I could hear it over the cell-phone crackle. "So what's up?"

"I'm on my way out to Brooklyn to pick up Minerva. I was wondering if... you wanted to come."

"To Brooklyn?"

That's how he said it: Brooklyn? Like I wanted to drag him to Bombay.

I should have given up. For two weeks now I'd been trying to connect with Moz, but he always kept his distance. If only I hadn't messed up that first rehearsal, the one where I'd pulled the Big Riff apart. I should have gone slowly, respecting what had been conjured between us when the Strat had fallen from the sky. But instead I'd decided to dazzle him with nine kinds of brilliance. Clever, Pearl.

Eight A.M. was probably not the best time to break my losing streak, but for two seconds I'd imagined that maybe this morning - the morning we became a real band - might be different.

I kept talking, trying to make it sound fun. "Yeah. I didn't explain this before, but it's kind of a ninja mission, getting her out of there."

"Kind of a what?"

"Kind of tricky. Her parents have this thing about..." Insanity? Abduction? "Well, let's just say I could use your help."

I hadn't said much about Min to anyone yet, except what a lateral singer she was. It wouldn't hurt if Moz got used to her weirdness before she met the rest of them. And it would be nice just having someone beside me on the way out there, even if he only waited outside while I snuck in to get her.

"Look, uh, Pearl..." he said. "I just woke up."

"I sort of figured that. But I'm at the F station down from your house. You could get here in five minutes."

Silence crackled in my ear; a breeze stirred newspapers on the tracks.

I sighed. "Look, it's no big deal. Sorry to wake you up."

"That's okay. My alarm's about to go off anyway. See you at nine."

"Yeah. You're going to love Minerva. And a drummer! It's going to be fawesome, huh?"

"Sure. Totally."

I felt like I was supposed to say more, something to get him revved up for our first real rehearsal. "Don't forget your Strat."

"It's not mine. But yeah, see you soon." Click.

I slipped the phone back into my pocket, letting another sigh slip through my teeth. I'd let him take the Stratocaster home after the second rehearsal, but that hadn't changed anything between us. I was still Boss Pearl.

The newspapers stirred on the tracks again, one rolling over restlessly. I felt the platform rumbling under my feet, and my stomach tightened. As the sound steadily grew into a roar, it pushed all the thoughts from my head, thundering across me as if something huge was about to burst from the tunnel, overpowering all my plans.

But it was just the F train pulling in.

In the past two weeks, Minerva's block had gotten worse. The garbage had been massed into a few huge, leaking mountains. Like how you deal with snow: push it into piles, then wait for the sun to make it go away.

Except garbage doesn't melt, and snow doesn't smell bad.

It was more than weird. Mom always bitched about this or that neighborhood going to seed, but I'd figured that took decades, longer than I'd been alive anyway. Until this summer, New York had always looked pretty much the same to me. But this part of Brooklyn seem to change every time I saw it, like someone dying of a disease before my eyes.

Luz always talked about "the sickness" like it wasn't just Minerva but the whole city - maybe the whole world - that was afflicted, all of it a prelude to the big struggle. Only she never said what the struggle was actually about. Good versus evil? Angels versus demons? Crazy versus sane?

Crazy Versus Sane. Now there was a band name that fit us like a glove.

The early morning shadows stretched down the block, sunlight spattering the asphalt through the leaves, dancing with the breeze. I crept past the garbage mountains, trying not to listen to the things inside them and wishing I didn't have the Taj Mahal of hearing. No people were on the street, not even any dogs. Just the occasional red flash of cats' eyes watching me from overgrown front yards.

The front-door key was where Min had told me her mom kept it, under an iron boot-wipe by the door. It was covered with grime and stained my fingertips a red-brown rusty color when I tried to wipe it off. But it fit smoothly into the lock, the bolt sliding across with a soft click.

The door swung open onto a silent audience of skulls.

I took slow, careful steps into the darkness, listening for any noise from the wooden planks underfoot. According to Minerva, her parents were deep sleepers - her little brother, Max, was the one we had to worry about. I just hoped Min was awake and dressed, not surfing some nightmare that would make her scream when I opened her door.

I took the stairs slowly, my soft-soled fencing shoes pressing on the edges of the steps, not in the creaky middles. As a little kid, I'd once gotten up at midnight and pushed down every key of our baby grand from top to bottom, pressing so delicately that the hammers never struck the strings, making not a whisper of sound the whole way. Once you've managed that, you can pretty much do anything without waking the grown-ups.

The house creaked and settled around me, like a huge old instrument in need of tuning. I passed the blenderized-reality crucifixes, her parents' room, my slow, trembling steps carrying me silently to Min's door. Staring at the heavy sliding bolt that locked her in, I suddenly wished I didn't have to touch the scrollwork symbols carved into the bolt: cat's eyes and centipedes, worms with eyes and spindly legs, and, of course, more skulls.

I swallowed as my fingertips grasped the cool metal, then slid the bolt slowly across. I opened the door and slipped inside.

Minerva was still under the covers, still asleep.

"Min!" I hissed.

A cold hand fell on the back of my neck.

10. THE MUSIC

-  MINERVA-

Pearl was shiny, glistening, smelling of fear. There was lightning in her eyes - like Zombie when you rub his fur the wrong way hard.

She made sputtering noises, so I put a finger to my lips. "Shhh, Pearl. Mustn't wake Maxwell."

"Jesus, Min!" she hissed. "You scared the crap out of me!"

I giggled. I'd been giggling for half an hour, waiting in that corner to make her jump. That was the first thing being sick taught me: it's fun to scare people.

"Look!" I pointed at the Min-shaped bundle in my bed. "It works like magic."

"Yeah, nine kinds of supernatural." As her breathing slowed, Pearl's eyes swept up and down me, still flashing. I was dressed in cocktail black and dark glasses, more Saturday night than Sunday morning, but it felt fantastic to be in real clothes after months of pajamas. The dress squeezed me tight, shaping my body, embracing me. My four thickest necklaces lay tangled against my breasts, and my nails were painted black.

I shook my head, making my earrings tinkle.

"Cute," she whispered. "You look like an Egyptian princess crossed with a twelve-year-old goth."

I stuck my tongue out at her and snapped for Zombie. He scampered over and jumped into my arms. "Let's go. I want to make music."

Pearl glared at him, still pissy. "You can't bring a cat to rehearsal, Min!"

"I know, silly." I giggled softly, stroking Zombie's head. "He's just going out to play."

She frowned. "But Luz says he's not supposed to go out."

"We can't leave poor Zombie in here. He'll be all lonely." I stared into his eyes and pouted. "What if he starts scratching on my door and yowling? Could wake up Daddy."

Pearl pushed her glasses up her nose, which she does when she's being bossy. "Luz will freak if she sees him outside."

"Luz is mean to Zombie," I said, pulling him closer to kiss his little triangular cat-forehead.

"She'll be even meaner to me if she figures out I took you into Manhattan."

"She won't. It'll be okay, Pearl. We'll bring him in when we get back. He'll come when his mommy calls." I smiled.

Her breath caught. My teeth had gotten pointy lately. Certain things kept happening, no matter what Luz did to stop them.

"I just don't see how Zombie escaped that whole throwing-things-away bit," Pearl muttered. "You got rid of your boyfriend, your band, your fexcellent German stereo, and me - but not your stupid cat?"

"Not stupid." I turned Zombie around and looked into his eyes. He knew things. Big things.

Pearl was being pissy at her phone now. "Crap. It's past eight-thirty. I don't suppose there are any taxis around here on Sunday morning?"

"No taxis ever." I frowned. "Daddy says they won't bring him home from work anymore."

Pearl swore under her breath, closing her eyes. "I'm going to have to call Elvis, or we'll be late." She looked at me, all serious. "Can you try to act normal in front of him?"

"Of course, Pearl. No need to get all shiny."

"Are you sure you're ready for this?"

I smiled my pointy smile and turned to face my desk. "Watch this..."

I leaned across to blow out the candle, and smoke poured up, sandalwood turning instantly to the smell of ashes. Reaching out with my free hand, I tugged at one corner of the fabric draped across the mirror, and velvet flowed down onto the desk like water.

"Minerva!" Pearl hissed.

There was my face, trapped inside the mirror frame, but it didn't make me scream. I didn't faint or suddenly want to throw Zombie out the window.

Luz had put the beast inside me to sleep, and everything was easier now.

My skin was pale and flawless, glowing softly in the candlelight. Two months uncut, my dark hair flowed raggedly around my features. Cheeks, chin, brow - everything was sharper and finer now, as if my flesh had tightened. When I pulled off my sunglasses, my eyes were radiant and wide, stuck in an expression of bewilderment and wonder.

Zombie purred softly in my arms.

"Still pretty," I whispered. And something more than pretty now.

I hadn't told Luz yet that I could do this: look at my own reflection. It would make her too happy, like she was winning. Luz wanted to strip away my new senses, file down my pointy teeth, turn me back into the boring old Minerva.

But Pearl was going to help me stop that from happening - Pearl and her music. I slipped my glasses back on and, Zombie's weight shifting in my other arm, lifted the notebooks from the desk. Inside them were secrets, ancient words I'd heard in the worst of my fever. Singing the old mysteries would keep me the way I was: not crazy anymore, but so much more than boring.

Halfway cured was best.

Pearl was talking on her phone, wheedling Elvis until he promised not to mention this little trip to her mom.

When she hung up I pouted. "But I wanted to go on the subway." Luz had told me never, ever to go down in the earth again. But I could feel it calling me, rumbling underfoot. It wanted me.

"There's no time for a train," shiny Pearl whispered, opening the door. "Come on. And try to be quiet on the stairs."

Stairs, I thought happily. Finally, I was headed down, out of this attic prison and down toward the earth. I wanted to go down into basements, into tunnels and chasms and excavations. I wanted to sing my way down to the things waiting there for me.

"Ah, la musica," I whispered. "Here I come."

11. SOUND DIMENSION

-  ALANA RAY-

I got there early, just to watch.

I'd been to the Warehouse plenty of times. It's an old factory building in Chelsea, hollowed out and loaded up with rehearsal spaces, foam spread across the walls to kill the echoes, forty-eight power plugs in every room. There's a recording studio in the basement - sixty dollars an hour, one dollar a minute - but it's full of junk and strictly for the kids.

I watched the place fill up, random guitar chops and drumbeats filtering out, bouncing up and down the block. Sixteenth is a narrow street, about thirty-five feet from wall to wall, so it takes a tenth of a second for sound to cross over and jump back. At 150 beats per minute, that's a sixteenth-note lag.

I clapped my hands and listened to the echo, then drummed softly on my jeans in tempo as I watched.

From the stoop of the empty FedEx office down the block, I could catalog all the faces going in, concentrating so I'd remember the new people I was meeting upstairs. I always try to see people before they see me, same way as animals want to be upwind, not down.

At the school I went to, where we all had special needs, some of the other kids couldn't recognize faces very well. They learned to identify people by their posture or their walk, which seemed like a good idea to me. I can understand faces just fine, but I don't trust people till I've seen the way they move.

A long gray limousine slid up in front of the Warehouse. A big Jamaican guy in a gray uniform got out and glanced up and down the block, making sure it was safe. But he didn't see me.

The bulge of a shoulder holster creased his jacket. Times Square was getting more like that every day, armed guards appearing at the entrances of the big stores. More policemen too.

Satisfied, the driver opened the limo's door for two girls.

They looked about the same age as the boys who'd hired me nearly two weeks ago, seventeen or eighteen, but I figured these limo-girls couldn't possibly know them. Those dog-walking boys didn't have limo money - not even taxi money.

Also, the boys hadn't been druggies, and one of these girls definitely had a problem. Skin pale as an oyster, she unfolded from the limousine and stood there holding on to the door, shaky from the ride. Though her long arms were thin and wiry, her muscles were almost as defined as mine.

What kind of junkie works out? I wondered as she made her way around the car to the entrance of the Warehouse. Her movements were slow and pointy, articulated in the wrong spots. I couldn't take my eyes off her: it was like watching a stick insect walk along a branch.

A minute later the two dog-boys showed up, and it turned out they did know one another - or at least the boys knew the other girl, the little one with eyeglasses. She introduced them to the junkie girl; then they all went inside except the boy who'd hired me. He waited outside, like he'd said he would.

His name was Moz: M-o-z. I remembered that because I'd written it down.

I watched him wait, doing a nervous little dance, never putting his guitar case down. His fingers ran through practice patterns, flickering against his thigh, and I matched his tempo for a while on my knees.