The Friendship Song Page 8

  Rawnie took the gold studs out of her ears and offered them to him. Mr. Kuchwald—I guess it wasn’t really Mr. Kuchwald—shook his head. “Not enough.”

  I tried to think, like he said. There was no gold on me. I didn’t have on anything valuable, not a watch, not any jewelry except …

  I fingered my necklace. It wasn’t gold, but it was worth a chunk of gold to me. I glanced at Rawnie, and she nodded.

  “We’ve got to,” she said, and she helped me with the clasp. She took mine off me and I took hers off her. Then I handed them both to the boatman.

  “They’re not gold,” I said, “but they’re valuable.”

  He fitted the pendants together and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “a yang-yin. They certainly are. Step in.”

  Five minutes later we were on the opposite shore. The boat had left us there and gone away over the dark water again. We stood for a minute watching it go. My hand kept going to the emptiness at my neck where my friendship necklace wasn’t anymore.

  “It’s all right, Harper,” Rawnie told me. “We don’t need them. We know who we are.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I’m tired,” Rawnie said. She was not complaining, just saying it.

  “No kidding.”

  “I’m hungry too.”

  Now that we were in the maze, it no longer felt like we were outside. I didn’t remember going through a wall or a door, but I couldn’t see the sky or hear the music except as a muffled sort of thumping that seemed to come from everywhere, and there were walls to each side of us, metal ones. There was some light, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It was like being in a sewer. No, more like being lost in a mess of basement corridors in some huge new school. Except that we weren’t lost really. I knew where I was, I knew my way through the maze in Gus’s backyard. It was just that everything seemed different and so much bigger. Our footsteps echoed. So did Rawnie’s voice saying she was hungry—hungry—hungry …

  “I’m not,” I told her.

  “We’ve been in here for hours.” (Hours—hours—hours …)

  “It just feels like hours.”

  “Anyway, you’ve gotta be hungry.”

  “I’m not. I’m too starved to be just hungry.”

  “Okay, be that way. What’s that smell?”

  All of a sudden we were drowning in a drooler, a stomach-growler of a good food smell, and I didn’t even have time to think up a smart-mouth answer for Rawnie before we turned a corner and there it was.

  “A hot dog stand!”

  Wow, were they ever hot dogs. Plump, brick-red foot-longs sizzling on their grill. Not a bit like the wimpy green hot dogs at school. Though by then I was so starved I could have gobbled down anything, even school food.

  “Free hot dogs,” the person behind the counter told us politely. She had a pale face and not much hair but she did have a big beak of a nose, which she talked through. “As many as you like.” She offered us one in each hand.

  “All riiiiight!” Rawnie started to reach for one, but I grabbed her arm.

  “Listen, there’s no hot dog stand in Gus’s backyard.”

  “So what? There is now!” She pulled her arm away from me, but I got hold of the other one, because I had a funny feeling.

  “No, wait, Rawnie, don’t!” My stomach was growling maybe even louder than hers, but I never did trust anything that was free. Also, there was something about the hot dog lady—I should know her. I didn’t like her, and why did I keep thinking about school?

  “Free,” White-face urged, poking hot dogs toward us. Her pale hands had long fingernails painted black.

  “Let me go!” Rawnie squirmed away from me, but I lunged after her and got her by both arms from behind.

  “Harper, stop it!”

  “No, Rawnie, listen, it’s some sort of a trap!”

  She wasn’t listening. I found out later that the one way to make Rawnie go absolutely psycho was to grab her from behind. Always, ever since she was a little kid, it made her fight like a wildcat. Which was what she did. She elbowed me in the ribs so hard that everything went black for a second. I doubled over, and I guess my hands slipped. She twisted around and tore loose and hit me in the face with her fist. That girl really knew how to hit. I had to stagger back or I would have fallen over.

  “You don’t tell me what to do!” she screamed at me. She stood panting at me a minute, and then she turned away and headed toward the hot dogs again.

  My ribs hurt and my head hurt clear down to my knees and I was so shaking mad at her that I nearly let her do it. It still scares me, remembering the way I felt for a second. But something else took over. My heart made my feet get moving, and I ran and tackled Rawnie before she got far. This time I didn’t mess around. I knocked her flat on the ground and sat on top of her. She struggled and tried to throw me off, but I outweighed her.

  “Damn it, Harper, get off me! You big moose, I hate you!”

  I knew she didn’t mean it, and I wasn’t listening anyway. I was staring up at the hot dog lady, trying to know for sure who she was. She hadn’t moved, which was weird. She was still standing behind her counter with her arms stretched out like black wings. “Free,” she crooned. She looked at me.

  “Go away, Aly,” I told her.

  When Rawnie heard that, she stopped fighting me, went stiff instead, and turned her head to look. But I didn’t have time to say anything to her before the hot dog nearest to us changed and started to wiggle out of its bun. It was a fat night crawler, falling toward us.

  “Ew!” You better believe I got off Rawnie fast. She grabbed my hand and scrambled up.

  The whole hot dog stand was melting, and the hot dogs were turning into worms, and they were crawling on the ground, or floor, whatever it was, and the woman was saying, “Scree!” instead of “Free.” She was a vulture, mostly, a black buzzard with a six-foot wing-spread and road-kill breath. Her bald head had spiralperm blond bangs that curled down over her beak. She pecked at the nearest worm to gobble it and grabbed another with one of her scaly clawed feet.

  Rawnie made a retching noise, then turned and ran. I ran after her. “Wait up,” I panted. My ribs still hurt, and I never could run as fast as she did anyway.

  Once we were around a corner she stopped and waited for me. When I caught up to her I felt so dizzy I had to lean against the wall with my eyes closed while I caught my breath.

  Rawnie said, “Harper, you all right?”

  I nodded.

  “Jeez, I gave you a black eye.” Her voice sounded shaky. “God, Harper, I’m really sorry.”

  “You don’t ever have to tell me you’re sorry for anything.” The words just came out, I didn’t have to think about them, and they were true. I opened my eyes to look at her, and she looked back and swallowed hard and nodded.

  I got myself moving, and we kept walking.

  “How did you know it was Alabaster?” Rawnie asked after a while.

  “I dunno. I mean, it wasn’t her exactly.”

  “Okay, so we’re not exactly in Gus’s backyard either. But how did you know it was sort of her?”

  “I just guessed.” There were about three ways of looking at anything in this shadowland, so maybe if I went back and looked at the vulture again it wouldn’t be Aly. Not that I was going back. I told Rawnie, “Mostly, I just don’t think we should eat anything.”

  She shivered. “I’d rather die than take food from her.”

  “No matter who offers it. Even if we’re both starving, we shouldn’t take any.”

  I couldn’t have explained why, because I didn’t know the reason. It was just a feeling I had, like I’d been in this sort of place once before with a harp in my hand. Like I knew some of the rules.

  Rawnie didn’t ask me why, though. She just looked at me and said, “Okay. I won’t forget again.”

  “Huh?” It was not as if I’d told her before. “Forget what?”

  “Who my friend is.”

  We kept walking. Running away
from the Aly Bowman buzzard had got us all turned around, and neither of us knew anymore which direction we were heading.

  I was plodding more than walking. “You okay, Harper?” Rawnie asked me after a while.

  My eye hurt and made my head throb. Also my ribs hurt. But I said, “I’m just dead tired. I wish we would find Nico soon.”

  Rawnie slowed down and pointed up ahead. “Look,” she said. “Light.”

  And there they were, the stage lights, all colors, and we could hear the music again, so strong and beautiful that I didn’t care anymore if I was tired and hurting and hungry. I looked at Rawnie and smiled.

  A couple minutes later we came out of the maze. We were in the circle at its center, where rows of seats faced a stage with a big red drum riser on it. Behind the big red platform was a wall with a huge circle design that kept turning, turning, white and black and black and white. The music was like the circle, it just went around and around, and kept coming.

  We said, Hey, Daddy, we’re not about to die

  ’Cause living is the truth and death is a lie.

  So rock it, rock it, just rock it on by,

  Big wheel turns and the stars keep burning.

  It was like they were playing just for themselves, or us. We could have any seat we wanted, front row if we wanted, because there was nobody in the audience. Everybody was onstage.

  We didn’t sit down, though, but just stood staring.

  “This is so intense,” Rawnie whispered. “They are so hot.”

  “Hot as Neon Shadow.”

  “Hotter!”

  Some of them were on the riser with the drummer and his congas and cymbals and things, they were up there playing wild fills and fast runs like guitar gods on a mountaintop, and some of them were all around the red—I knew it was the red car—on keyboard and sax and tambourines, and they were all young, they were all rocking, they were all beautiful one way or another. But it wasn’t so much their faces or the way they moved or the way they were dressed that made me want to scream and faint and turn inside out. Or even the way they sang, though they were singing like fire. It was just that they were so alive.

  I blurted at Rawnie or whatever would listen, “These are dead dudes? These can’t be dead people.”

  They weren’t ghosts or anything like that. They looked as solid as I was. Yet they weren’t quite real, I knew that. They were too perfect. The lead singer, the one at the center mike, he had a face like a bad angel. He was like a baby-faced desperado, an outlaw throwing his body at the world, but there was something about him that made me think of an orphan at the same time, like I wanted to take him and cuddle him and calm him down and make him smile.

  “They’re dead, all right,” Rawnie said softly. “Because there’s Elvis, and he’s young again.”

  “Oh, my God.” Now I understood why people had cried when he died. “That’s Elvis?”

  “Yepper.”

  “Oh, my God. Who are these other guys, then? Who’s the one in glasses?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Buddy Holly,” said a quiet voice behind us. “Hornrims and a Stratocaster. There’s never been anybody quite like him.”

  The band roared, “Rock it! Rock it! Rock it on by.…”

  Already—even before I turned around—I knew. And there he stood, right next to me. Nico Torres.

  “Because living is the truth and death is a lie.”

  But it wasn’t all of Nico, really. He was half made of air. I could see through him. The rest of him was still unconscious in a hospital bed.

  “Nico!” Rawnie and I both screeched.

  “You know me?” His face was a lot like Rawnie’s, dark and beautiful and real quiet whenever he was not singing. It hardly moved even when we screamed at him. I could tell he was surprised, though. “Who are you guys? So far nobody knows me here.”

  “We’re not from here!” Rawnie had to do the explaining, because I was having trouble getting my mouth coordinated enough to talk. “We came to find you and take you back with us.”

  “Why?” He hardly even seemed interested. His eyes were on the band, and he said, “My God, look at Hendrix bend those strings.”

  “Because we love you,” Rawnie said. “We think you’re the greatest.”

  He didn’t even smile, just said, “I’m not. These guys are the greatest. Hendrix taught the whole world how to turn on the juice. So did Elvis, he took rock music out of its little black box and turned it loose. And Morrison, look at him grooving with his shirt off, he was half-crazy, he died young and stupid, but he knew how to rock and he knew how to sing. Still does. And Lennon—he wrote songs people can’t forget.”

  My voice was starting to work again. “Nico,” I said, “you’ve got to come back with us.”

  “Why?” His eyes focused on me, and they were deep, like brown water, and not happy. “Give me one good reason.”

  “To be alive!”

  “Tell me something, what is so great about being alive? I thought I had a friend, and now that I’m in trouble all he can think about is cashing in. He left me on my own, I’ve always been all alone and I’ll always be all alone, but here at least I could be in the ultimate band.”

  He was as ultimate as any of them, so drop-dead good-looking I could hardly bear to stand next to him and talk to him, but at the same time I started to understand something else about him. Underneath all the rock star stuff, he was just a kid, not much older than me. Not that much different than the boys at my school. He was feeling sorry for himself. Probably he got pimples every once in a while too, and hated them. Which didn’t make me stop liking him. In fact I think it made me like him more. But in a different way than before.

  “Somebody’s been beating on you too,” he said to me, looking at my shiner.

  “Not really. Nico, being alive is—is—”

  “To dance,” Rawnie said. “To sing.”

  “I can do that here. Janis Joplin was here a while ago. You should have heard her sing.”

  “To make your own songs.”

  He sat down in one of the metal chairs as if to say he wasn’t moving. “I can do that here too. Del Shannon’s already written a dozen good ones since he’s been here.”

  This wasn’t working. “Look,” I said, sitting down next to him, “I know it was rough, what Ty did to you. And I know probably we don’t really understand, we’re just a couple of sixth-grade girls, but—”

  “Just?” He looked at me, and the way he did it made me stop talking, because there was something warm and bright starting in his eyes. “What do you mean, just girls? Don’t you know girls are the most awesome thing there is? You’ve got such a mystery about you. Sometimes I think girls know more about life the day they’re born than guys ever learn.”

  Rawnie sat down on the other side of Nico, and I guess we were both staring at him, and he actually smiled.

  “You two, you’re girlfriends, right?” he said. We both nodded. “Okay, right there you got something most guys never get. I thought I had it with Ty.…” He lost his smile. “Thing is, guys don’t know how to be friends, not really. We don’t really talk with each other. There’s a lot of stuff we never say, afraid we’ll look like sissies or something. We’re always competing with each other. Look at them.” He pointed his chin at the rockers on stage. “Elvis is hogging the mike again, and they’re all just waiting for a chance to get it away from him. Sometimes they act real buddy-buddy, but they’d walk over each other to get what they want.”

  I looked at the rock stars on stage. They were all singing together, all dancing and stomping to the music. They looked wonderful to me, like a team, a gang, pals. Were they really alone inside themselves? Each one wanting to be the one at the mike?

  Maybe they were. Nico was a guy, he should know what it was really like.

  I said half to myself, “I always thought it was better to be a boy.”

  “God, no. A guy has to always be trying to prove something. Look at the way jocks act. Hug
ging each other on the field, giving each other hell in the locker room.”

  “Nico,” Rawnie said softly, “don’t give up on Ty.”

  “I don’t want to give up, but I got to, girl. He gave up on me.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t see it that way. Maybe he thinks he’s doing what he has to do.”

  “Sure, he thinks he’s got to, but that doesn’t help me.” Nico took a breath and tried to explain. “The thing is, maybe he’s got his own agenda, maybe it’s important to him to be a star without me. But where does that leave me? What about the way I feel?”

  I said, “You mean that you really liked him, and you thought you’d always be together.”

  Nico didn’t answer me for a minute. He was looking at me as if something was a little off-key. Then he said, “Do you know, ‘The Friendship Song’?”

  I had to smile. Rawnie was looking at me and smiling too. Did we know “The Friendship Song”? Jeez. But all we said was, “Uh-huh.”

  Nico said, “I love that song.”

  “So do we,” I told him.

  “Not just like it’s a happenin’ song. I mean I really love it.”

  “So do we.”

  “Do you really know what I’m saying?”

  I thought I did. In fact, I knew all along. “You’re saying you meant it when you sang it.”

  “Yeah. Yes. I really did, I really believed it. I sang it with my heart hanging out.” He gave us a look that was partly angry but mostly hurt. Way bad hurt. There were tears in his eyes. “Well, so much for that, huh? Now what?”

  So much for Rawnie and Harper, Rescuers, Inc. There wasn’t a thing we could do or say. We didn’t have an answer for him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The ultimate band kept playing while the lights flashed all the colors in the world and the big circle behind the drum stand kept turning around and around. For a long time Nico and Rawnie and I sat in the music like sitting in the sun, talking. Nico was like Rawnie and me, he had this feeling of the way things should be, the way people should be good to each other. We talked about a lot of things. But we couldn’t talk him into coming back with us.