24. 10,000 MANIACS

— ZAHLER-

The crowd was filling the main room now—a thousand people, Astor Michaels said, but it sounded like millions. Here in the backstage dressing room the noise was smoothed to a hum, like a hive of bees just waiting for someone to poke it with a stick.

The more I listened, the more they sounded like they were ready to boo somebody off the stage. Especially some lame bassist who’d only been playing for about four weeks…

I swallowed. Nobody had ever been this nervous before.

This was real. This was actual. This was happening right now.

Under the dressing room fluorescent lights was the worst place to practice, but I sat there in my chair slapping at the strings. Maybe I would get a little bit better, maybe just enough to save myself from humiliation.

Sometimes, playing my new instrument, my fingers moved more gracefully than they ever had across a guitar. Lately I’d been dreaming of the whole world expanding from guitar-size to bass-size, everything suddenly scaled just right for me and my big, fat, clumsy hands. But right now, the strings of Pearl’s bass felt an inch thick, dragging at my fingers like quicksand in a nightmare.

Moz didn’t look much happier. He was standing in one corner of the dressing room, wearing dark glasses and trembling. A sheen of sweat covered his face and bare arms.

“You look like you got the flu, Moz,” I said.

He shook his head. “Just need my cup of tea.”

“Almost ready, Mozzy.” A teapot was plugged into the wall next to where Minerva sat doing her makeup. She had some weird herbs waiting to be brewed.

“Your cup of tea?” I shook my head. Living with a girl had turned Moz totally lame. And it was all my fault, because I’d told him to call Minerva, because I’d been so mad at him for wanting me to switch instruments…

It was all the stupid bass’s fault!

Alana Ray stood right in the center of the room, staring at her own outstretched hands. Their rock-steadiness made her look incomplete, as if Moz had stolen all her twitchiness.

She’d traded her usual army jacket for this fawesome Japanese kimono over jeans. No one had told me we were supposed to dress up. I looked down at my same old unfool T-shirt. Would the crowd boo me for wearing it? They sounded really impatient now. The whole thing was starting an hour late, which Astor Michaels kept saying would make everything really intense…

But what if it just pissed them off?

Pearl was in the opposite corner from Moz, in the same dress she’d worn to Red Rat Records. She looked fawesome, I could tell, even if my brain was melting.

But she didn’t look happy. She kept swearing under her breath: “Special Guests? More like Special Retards. I can’t believe we’re going out as ‘Special Guests.’ Why don’t we just call ourselves Special Education?”

“The band going on first is called Plasmodium,” Moz said. “How much does that name suck?”

Pearl looked at him, gave Minerva a two-second glare, then said quietly, “Sounds a lot like Toxoplasma.”

“We should pick a real name soon,” Minerva said, staring at her reflection in the mirror, applying makeup with steady hands. She was wearing a long evening gown, lots of jewelry, and didn’t look nervous at all. She didn’t notice the looks Pearl had been giving her. “If we let Astor Michaels choose one, it’ll have the word plasma in it.”

“What does plasma even mean?” Moz asked.

“It can mean two things,” Alana Ray said. “Electrified gas or blood.”

“Gee,” Pearl muttered. “Which one do you think he was going for?”

The teakettle suddenly spit out a crooked screech, the sound fading into a moan as Minerva unplugged it. She poured the boiling water into her cup of herbs, and the smell of compost heap filled the room. “Here you go, Mozzy.”

An explosion of sound came from the walls, a thudding from the floor beneath us.

“Crap!” I hissed. “It’s the first band. We’re the second band. That means we’re next!”

“That is correct,” Alana Ray said.

My stomach started roiling like that time when I was little and I swallowed part of my chemistry set. We were going to face a possibly homicidal crowd in… “Half an hour.”

“Plus changeover time,” Alana Ray said.

I shut my eyes and listened. The crowd wasn’t booing yet. Maybe they weren’t such a nasty bunch after all. But Plasmodium sounded tight, not like they’d been forced to switch instruments, say, in the last month or so…

“Listen to that,” I said. “Their bass player is way faster than me. Everyone’s going to think I suck.”

“You don’t suck, Zahler,” Moz said. “And he sounds too fast to me.”

“Be dead by tomorrow at that speed,” Pearl said, staring down at her fingernails.

“Dead?” I said. “What do you mean?” Did people ever die on stage? I wondered. Like from heart attacks? Or the audience killing them because they sucked?

“Relax, Zahler.” Moz was sipping his tea now, still trembling, Minerva mopping at the sheen of sweat across his face with a towel. “You’ve got half an hour to get yourself together.”

Great. I was being told to chill out by a guy who looked like he was dying of Ebola fever. Maybe Moz was about to collapse, and then we could do this whole Special Guest thing after he recovered—and I got some more practice in.

Alana Ray was still staring at her hands. She’d hardly moved the whole time, like some kind of kung-fu Zen master contemplating destiny. I was thinking how maybe I should have worn something Japanese—then I’d at least look fool. Well, actually, I already looked fool. In the usual sense of the word.

“Time is a strange thing, Zahler,” Alana Ray said. “If you focus your mind, thirty minutes can seem like five hours.”

But it didn’t. It seemed like five seconds.

Then Astor Michaels came in and said that it was showtime.

A thousand of them waited out there, all just looking at us.

Random shouts filtered up from the audience—they weren’t heckling us exactly, just bored and ready for another band to start. We didn’t have any fans yet—the few friends Moz and I had invited were too young to get in. The sight of the unfriendly crowd made me realize one big thing missing from my rock-star dreams:

In all my fantasies about being famous, I was already famous, so I never had to get famous. I never had to walk out in front of a crowd for the first time, unknown and defenseless. In my dreams, this awful night had already happened.

I looked over at Moz, but he was staring down at his feet and still trembling, like he was having a seizure. Behind her paint buckets, Alana Ray’s eyes were shut, and Pearl was peering down at her keyboards, flicking switches as fast as she could, like she was about to take off in a spaceship. Nobody looked back at me, like they were all suddenly embarrassed to be in the same band.

It’s not my fault! I wanted to shout. I never wanted to play the bass!

Minerva was the only one who looked happy to be onstage. She was already leaning over her mike stand, talking to a bunch of tattooed guys down in front, flirting with them, flicking at their grasping hands with spike-heeled black boots. Even through her dark glasses you could see that her eyes were scary-wide and glowing, sucking energy from the crowd before she’d sung a single note.

Pearl gave me a low E, and I took a deep breath and tuned up. The sound boomed out from my bass like a foghorn, rumbling through the club. A few howls from the audience answered the noise, as if I’d interrupted someone’s conversation and they were pissed.

The guys flirting with Minerva had big muscles and tattoos on their shaved heads. I’d read the night before about a big riot in Europe, a whole crowd at some soccer game going crazy all at once, attacking one another. Hundreds had died, and nobody knew why.

What if that happened here, right now? The whole crowd turning into deadly maniacs? I knew exactly who everyone would choose to kill first.

The half-assed bass player in the lame T-shirt. That’s who.

When we were all tuned up, the stage lights lowered. Total darkness, like I’d suddenly gone blind from freaking out. More impatient shouts filtered up from the crowd, and someone yelled, “You suck!” which people laughed at, because we hadn’t even started yet.

We were so dead.

I swallowed, waiting to begin…

“Zahler!” Pearl hissed.

Oh, right. We were doing the Big Riff first. I was supposed to start.

My fingers groped for the strings, and I heard the amps squeak with the sweat on my fingers. I tried to remember what to play.

And I couldn’t.

No, this wasn’t happening…

I’d been playing this riff for six years, and yet it had somehow disappeared from my brain, from my fingers, from my whole body.

I stood there in silence, waiting to die.