This choice: Drop Casey from the band. • Go Back...Chapter #25Burning a Bandmate by: Seuzz   You're on your phone—slouching in the front row of the school auditorium, slung so low that you're almost lying on your back, with your legs stretched out and your heels resting precariously on the lip of the stage—when Casey comes bustling in. He's dressed in dark jeans and a dark sweatshirt, against which the gold chain he's wearing about his neck stands out brightly.
"Hey man," he says, sounding breathless. "You get my text about meeting up at Pho'enix after school?"
"Yeah," you drawl.
"Well, you gonna make it? Why didn't you reply?"
"'Cos I didn't fucking know I had to."
"Well, I wanted to know if you were coming out!" Casey seems to vibrate in place, like he always does when he's annoyed. "Are you?"
You shrug and turn back to your phone. When Casey doesn't say anything, you add, "Sure."
"Well, God!" Casey explodes. "Try not to get too excited!"
"Whatever. Just gonna be you and the other guys deciding." You keep your eyes glued on the screen of your phone.
Out of the corner of your eye you see Casey make a face. Then he starts, and grins brightly. "Hey Amy!" he calls.
"Hey. You guest-teaching us today?"
You glance up from under your brow as Amy Bautista—a skinny junior with short brown hair—comes shimmering up. You didn't know that Casey knows Amy, but it doesn't surprise you. Casey knows almost everyone at Eastman—which is one of the reasons you almost decided to possess him and keep him in the band.
Casey covers his laugh with one hand.
"Oh my God!" he exclaims. "What kind of exercises does Mrs. Torrance got you doing?"
"We did a bunch of tongue twisters yesterday. This guy"—Amy knees you in the calf, and your feet fall to the floor with a thud—"was all 'fluff flud fluck fuck'." She smirks at you.
Casey throws his head back and laughs again. He can afford to. He's in the advanced acting classes, while you're burning an elective here in the Intro class.
"Yeah," he chortles, "I keep trying to picture Eli up on stage, you know, acting." A glint of light malice comes into his eye as he grins down at you. "He'd be perfect casting as a floor lamp." You say nothing.
He and Amy chatter briefly, then he hurries out. Amy tilts her head and fixes you with a gleaming eye.
"So in the band," she asks, "whose cock is Casey sucking?"
You blink, and her lips press together again into a tiny smirk when you say nothing. "Betcha it's Mars," she says.
You blink again. "How come?"
"'Cos he's an obvious closet case. How come he hasn't got a girl? And all that machismo." Her smirk widens. "I bet ten minutes after you guys break to go home, Casey's back and going all down on him. Right there in the middle of his drum kit."
You shake your head.
"He'd have to get in line," you say. "'Cos I'm going down on Mars every day after practice."
Amy's face falls.
"You think you're so funny," she sneers, and stalks away.
* * * * *
Mr. Katz keeps you after class last period, to growl at you for missing your presentation yesterday, and to inform you that you'll be getting at best a D on the written portion as punishment. You shrug him off, which you can tell burns him up, but you don't give a fuck. Benji doesn't talk to you and you don't talk to him. You figure he's still pissed at you for skipping English yesterday, leaving him to do the presentation all alone, while you're pissed at him for talking about your blackout.
Not that you'll let things cool to the point where you aren't friends anymore. You'll have possessed him long before things reach that point. Or you'll possess him after they've reached that point, and you'll repair the damage that way.
You loiter behind the gym after class, taking a smoke and waiting for the parking lot to clear out a little. And when you see how little it has unpacked itself, you saunter over to the chain link fence that separates the practice fields from the parking lot and slouch with another cigarette. You jerk your chin at a couple of girls who come out to get in their cars, but they only acknowledge you—when they acknowledge you at all—with tiny, knowing smiles.
Along about three-fifty you get a text from Casey, demanding to know where you are. You lever yourself to your feet, tap out a quick lol on my way, and slide across the lot for your car. But even after you're behind the wheel, you sit for a few minutes without moving. Eli hates any kind of "meeting," and you feel weighed down by his vast reluctance to attend this one, even though you've got plans for it.
You are thinking through those plans in a very loud internal voice, and so are pleased to see Zachary Dillon's car in the parking lot of Pho'enix when you finally arrive there ten minutes later.
* * * * *
Casey is in excited mid-speech when you come sauntering in, and he doesn't even pause for breath as you drop into the booth next to Dylan and bump him over to give yourself room. You slump with your hands tucked into your hoodie pockets, and give Mars—seated opposite you, next to Casey—only a brief but meaningful glance before turning your attention to he who is for the moment still your front man.
"—so he's all, 'We want a scene'," he is saying, and he's sculpting the air with his hands as though trying to give shape to the moment, "and I'm, like— Oh get this, I'm so fucking proud of myself!" He laughs, once, like the bark of a seal. "And I say, 'You are the scene, man! Like, Legends is the scene to be seen at!'" He throws his head to laugh at the ceiling, and accidentally kicks you in the shin.
Nobody else laughs, though. Dylan shifts next to you, and says, "He's talking about this guy he met out at Legends." His voice is even deeper and more resonant than Eli's.
"Brian Cook," Casey quickly explains. "Which you'd know if you'd been out here on time," he adds in a sneer. You roll your eyes. "His dad owns Legends, and I met him at this party up on campus last night, and he—"
"You already told us all that," Mars interrupts. His dark eyes glitter as he glances between you and Casey.
"Well, so, I told him that Legends is already the scene in town," Casey continues after shooting Mars a quick, spiteful glance. "But then I said that's how come he wanted us to play there. 'Cos we're also 'the scene'. I told him about how we played at the Warehouse—"
He glances again at Mars, and with quiet loathing he adds, "Though I didn't tell him how long ago that was. And how, you know, if he wanted the floor at his place packed, like packed, he needed to get us out there."
He relaxes into his seat with a grin and a shrug. "Oh!" he adds with another quick laugh. "I emailed him a link to our YouTube page, to our last time playing out at the Warehouse. God!" He covers his face with one hand as he laughs again. "Brian's gotta be, like, twenty-five or even thirty! I wonder if it even looks the same as last time he was out there. Bet it gives him a nostalgia boner just to look at it!" He giggles.
Then, when no one says anything, he leans forward, all teeth and shining eyes.
"This is it, guys!" he says. "We nail this, we go into rotation there, this'll be it! No more basement gigs or backyard sets! This is it!"
Then he falls back again, an exhausted grin stretched over his face.
You slide down an inch in your seat. As Dylan stirs to say something, you flick a pulse at Mars, and he jumps in first.
"Yeah, but explain something first to me, Casey," he says in a tight voice. "Are you running things now?"
Casey looks startled. "What?" Dylan looks startled as well.
"I asked, who the fuck put you in charge of getting us gigs?"
"What are you—? Don't you want this, Mars?" Casey looks baffled.
"What I want, and what I don't— And what I don't want is you deciding where we're gonna play, and—"
Everyone else starts talking at once. "I'm not deciding, I was just talking to—" says Casey, and Dylan says, "C'mon, man, it's not like—" and Mars, his voice softening with fury, says, "You act like this is your fucking career and the rest of us are just—"
And you slide out of the booth and saunter off the restroom, where you lock yourself in a stall and vomit yourself out of Eli's body. You are tucked inside the front pockets of Eli's hoodie when the door opens and Mars comes in.
"You get rid of Casey?" Eli asks him.
"Yeah, he stomped off mad. Dylan's mad too, though. What are we going to do about him?"
"This." Eli slides his hand into the pocket, and you slither out and wrap yourself around his forearm. "We'll follow him out to his car and make him one of us," Eli says as he shows you to Mars. "Then he'll tell Casey he's fucked up for the last time, and he's gone."
"Cool. And Zachary?"
You twitch, pulsing out another order.
Mars nods. "Let's do that now, then."
Eli tucks you back into his hoodie pocket. You see nothing, and only feel a light sway as he follows Mars back out.
Then, muffled, you hear Mars voice. "Hey man, how you doing?"
"I'm okay," comes a voice you recognize as having once been your own. "You guys okay over there?"
"We just fired our front man. You interested in the job?"
"Front man for Suburban Howl?" Zachary doesn't sound surprised. "Hell yeah. Singing or playing?"
"Both. Dylan'll show you how to add your voice to ours."
Then, after a fractional pause, he adds, "After we've added his voice to us."  You have the following choice:  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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