Rosemary didn’t bother to check; her mother hadn’t noticed she’d been avoiding Tina for years. She wracked her brain for others among their closest neighbors, but nobody came to mind whom she’d be comfortable asking. The more she considered it, nearby was only the first problem. Her mother was right that Tina spent all her time in hoodspace, like everyone else but Rosemary; asking to borrow something most people put on when they woke and took off when they went to bed was the second problem. It wasn’t going to happen.
She cut the remaining carrots, moved on to celery and onions. She was setting the table for dinner when the proximity alarm on the front door beeped. Her mother washed her hands, wiped them on her jeans, and pulled her phone from her pocket to check the security camera feed. “Package drone. Are you expecting anything?”
Rosemary shook her head. “I’ll go see what it is.”
She unlocked the door. The package was small and light. It was addressed to her employee ID number, not her personal ID. Inside nestled a brand-new, top-of-the-line, honest-to-goodness name-brand Hoodie™, along with all accessories. She turned it over in her hands, amazed at how little the new model weighed. No wonder people never took them off.
The packing slip had a sentence in the notes section saying, “Thank you for supporting our concert this evening.” She ran back to her room and pulled her work hood back up to check if the assignment was still available to her. It was.
“I will be able to assist,” she said, happy that the interface wouldn’t convey her excitement.
3
LUCE
The Peach
The morning sun pried my eyelids open far too early. Hewitt slept in the passenger seat, wrapped in the pink bathrobe, T-shirt over his face. JD dozed against the steering wheel. April had taken the far back row, behind me. She was already awake. “Good, you’re up. I needed to show this to somebody.”
She passed me her tablet. I rubbed sleep from my eyes with my still-smoky sleeve, wincing at the odor. Focused on the tablet. Looked up. “Every hotel?”
“Every hotel.”
“The whole city?”
“The whole state.”
I closed my eyes again. “And no bombs were found?”
“No. Not yet. The bomb squads haven’t gotten to half yet.”
“And they’re planning on getting to all? They haven’t caught someone or found something to make them think it was a hoax?”
“Are you going to read the article or not?”
“No.” I handed her back her tablet. “It stresses me out. It’s some terrible hoax. I need sleep. We all need sleep, and then we need to get ready for the show tonight.”
April and JD and I spent part of our per diem on breakfast at a diner near the hotel while Hewitt dozed in the van. The diner was packed with groggy people, some of whom I recognized from the parking lot. I dumped sugar in the weak, acidic coffee until it approximated something drinkable.
We had a noon radio spot scheduled, but we still weren’t allowed back in the hotel room, and I still stank like the podcaster’s ashtray. I scrubbed myself as clean as possible with paper towels in the diner bathroom, and tried to scrape the caked shampoo out of my hair, but it didn’t fix my clothing.
“It’s radio, Luce,” JD said when I returned to the table. “Nobody can see that you smell.”
He ducked the yellow sweetener packet I chucked at him.
I hated shopping at Superwally, resented the way they underpriced local businesses to close them, then automated the checkouts and fired cashiers, but it seemed the best option given the circumstances, so I ran across the parking lot to buy clean jeans and a tank top, hoping Hewitt would do the same when he woke. I couldn’t say that, though. The one other time I had tried to suggest he change clothes for a show, he had shown up wearing a wrestling thong.
Why did he have a wrestling thong with him? We made guesses among ourselves, but refused to ask him directly; better to look unimpressed, so as not to encourage him. He couldn’t surprise us with anything from his bag today, but if I asked him to buy something to replace the bathrobe he’d probably arrive in a union suit and bunny slippers.
When we got back to the van, I was relieved to see he’d found jeans somewhere, which he wore with the band-logo shirt he had liberated the night before. We didn’t have his guitars, anyway, so he could have sat the radio promo out, but I appreciated the effort.
The radio show was business as usual. Guitar, bass, an overturned plastic garbage can for a drum, all within a space the size of a port-a-potty. There was an old Disappear Fear song with a line about negotiating the angles of guitar necks in radio studios, which always came to my mind as we tried not to put each other’s eyes out.
“Is ‘Blood and Diamonds’ autobiographical?” the DJ asked after we played it.
“No.” Served him right for asking a yes/no question, anyhow. Everybody knew you asked open-ended questions if you wanted open-ended answers. If he had asked “What inspired that song?” I might’ve given him something. As it was, April and JD exchanged a smirking glance, and I realized I’d shut down another personal question, like they’d said the night before. It wasn’t that I set out to tell nothing; I didn’t see how it mattered.
The DJ realized his own mistake—shrugged at me in apology—and moved on. We answered questions about that night’s show, the tour in general, the album, the hit song, and even managed to turn the hotel scare into a more lighthearted anecdote. We gave away some tickets to a few lucky listeners. Watched in amazement, not for the first time, as actual callers lit up actual phone lines to get the tickets. The DJ passed me his tablet to show that people were responding on social media as well.
I still hadn’t gotten used to being in demand. After seven months of slogging, we had played seventeen sold-out or near-sold-out shows in the last twenty-two nights. It had all happened so fast. One video in the right place at the right time, a feature on SuperStream, and all of a sudden we had been bumped from opening act to feature. “Blood and Diamonds” wasn’t even my best song. It was easy to believe in the mundane details of promotion and driving and lousy food and scuzzy club bathrooms and time onstage, but the idea that people were listening was still beyond my comprehension.
They let us back into the hotel at two in the afternoon, just before I transitioned from panic to high panic. April had already started searching online for a local store where we’d be able to buy or rent Hewitt a new guitar, and I was trying not to think about having to go back out to Superwally to find makeup and something appropriate to wear onstage. Nobody from the hotel mentioned the pink room, which made me think either the bomb squad never got to our rooms or they had orders to ignore anything other than what they were looking for. Made sense. Nobody wanted to walk through hotel rooms that weren’t expecting visitors.
“Maybe we should take everything with us in case it happens again.” April flopped onto her bed and closed her eyes. She had a habit of taking her clothes out of her bag and putting them in the dresser and closet, even when we were only in town for a night. Said it made her feel less vagrant.
“That can’t happen twice in a row. Can it?” I pawed through my own chaotic bag of stage clothes, looking for what I wanted to wear. There weren’t many options. I’d spent Monday, our usual laundromat day, doing the promo for tonight’s show, and the band had spent it redecorating. The plan had been to make up for it today, but we hadn’t anticipated getting locked out of the hotel.