Blues for Zoey (7 page)

22

The Inherent Dan
ger of Placing
an Open Flame between
Your Legs

A blue angel describes the action of farting as hard as you can while trying to light your ass-gas on fir
e. Just so we're clear on this. It also explains why the
“angel” in question is blue. Ass-gas has methane and hydrogen in it, so the resulting flame would
resemble (theoretically, and somewhat disturbingly) something you would cook with on a gas st
ove.

I say
theoretically
because truly robust blue
angels are rare. When we were kids, Calen an
d I tried many times to light our farts on fi
re. Sometimes we lied to each
other for encouragement, claiming we saw a purplish flicker, a little che
rubic spark, but more often than not
all we succeeded in doing was singeing
our fingertips when the match burned do
wn.

A
twelve-inch
blue angel? No, Calen and I were fairly certain that was impossible.

To get to Topher's room, you had to crawl under the spider's web of masking tape, the skulls, the crossbones, the
KEEP OUT
s and the
FUCK OFF
s.

His bedroom was a palace. Even crowded with a bunch of guys, you couldn't miss the king-sized bed, the massive flat-screen bolted to the wall, the separate cabinets for each of the Big Three game consoles—along with a copy of every game you could think of. To top it all off, the end of the room was dominated by a huge aquarium full of monstrous tropical fish.

When we walked in, however, we didn't notice any of it. That's because Topher was sitting on the edge of his bed, dead drunk and naked from the waist down. He had his legs splayed wide with his unit lumped on the covers, pink and greasy.

“Shit,” said Calen. “I don't need to see that!”

“He's really gonna do it,” I said.

To my surprise, Becky was standing in the corner of the room.

“Hey,
Kaz,” she said, with a slightly subdued but still
perky wave.

“I thought it was ‘guys only,' ” I said.

“You can't count Becky,” Calen reminded me. “It's not like it's anything she hasn't seen before.”

“A hundred bucks,” someone said.

“You sure you wanna do this?” asked somebody else.

“Shut up,” Topher
told the room. He held up a Zippo lighter in one hand and a r
uler in the other. He shut his eyes for a moment, and after a little
concentration, he said, “Okay, I think I got one.”

He lowered the ruler and the lighter between his legs and started trying to get a flame. The lighter sparked and sparked, and finally, after a bunch of tries, it lit up with a wavering yellow flame.

“I wouldn't do that if I were you.”

The voice came from a girl, but it wasn't Beck
y. I turned around and there was Zoey.

“You'll blow your ass off,” she said.

Topher was so startled he dropped the lighter.

“Shit-shit-shit-shit!”
He scrambled to cover his exposed crotch with a pillow. “
What the fuck
?! I said no girls!”

“Yeah, I know,” said Zoey, discreetly averting her eyes, “but I figured you wouldn't mind if I was saving your life.”

Topher looked at her like she was crazy. “What are you talking about?”

“Think about it. If you light a fart on fire, you can be sure as shit—no pun intended—that it'll burn faster than you can contract your ass muscles.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means the flame'll sear right up your asshole and burn the shit out of you. Literally.”

Topher sat there for a moment. “Really? Is that true?”

Zoey laughed at him. “There's one way to find out, but don'
t say I didn't warn you.”

“You gonna do it or what?” someone asked him. It was the guy with the eyebrow ring, from the living room floor. “If not, you owe me a hundred bucks.”

“No way,” said Topher. “I'm not paying.”

“A bet's a bet,” said Eyebrow Ring.

Topher ignored him. He glared at Zoey. “Nobody said you could come in here. I don't even know who you are.”

“You don't know who half these people are,” said Becky. “Neither do I.”

“Shut up, Becks, I wasn't talking to you.” His eyes were still on Zoey. “Who invited you?”

She shrugged. “Some guys I met.”

“
Who?
”

“I don't know their
names
. They just invited me.”

“You don't know who you came with?” Topher's eyes scanned up and down Zoey's body. “What's your name?”

“Zoey.”

“Zoey what?”

She hesitated. “I don't have to tell you that.”

“It's my fucking house. How do I know you're not, like,
a crazy person
?”

“Zamani,” she said at last. “My name is Zoey Zamani.”

“Zoey Zamani? Dumb name. Oh, and you owe my friend with the ring in his face a hundred bucks.”

“Excuse me?”

“It's your fault I lost the bet, so you gotta pay.”

“No way.”

“I don't care, as long as I get my hundred bucks,” said the kid with the eyebrow ring.

“You will,” said Toph, “just as soon as—”

He stopped because he had been interrupted—
by his own ass
. Topher far
ted so long and hard it sounded like he
was shitting a train. Everybody screamed. They plugged
their noses and ran.

In a second, everyone was out
in the hall and running for the kitchen. Zoey and I were pulled along with the crow
d, and, looking back through the door, I saw
Topher plop down on the bed as if all his energy had blown out, along with the monumental ass-monkey.

“Fuck,” I heard him mutter. “I was saving that
.”

The last guy out of the room slammed the door and followed everyone else towa
rd the kitchen. Someone pulled on my elbow. It was Zoe
y. Her fingers slid down my arm, and suddenly we were all alone, hand in hand.

“C'mon,” she whispered, tugging me deeper down the forbidden hall. “You gotta see this.”

23

“Claire de lune,” Pa
rt 1

She pulled me along to the end
of the hallway, to the Salon. It was a massi
ve room with hardwood floors and a ceiling punctured with skylights. Through them, we
could see the moon and the stars above us. I
n one corner was a huge, brilliantly white grand piano.

“Cool, huh?”

“You've already been in here?” I asked her.

She winked at me. “I like breaking the rules.”

“I
t's so shiny,” I said, staring at the
piano. Even though my mother used to play one of these for a living, we only ever had a second-hand upright at home, back when Dad was alive.

Zoey circled around it. “Do you play?”

I admitted I used to, when I was younger. I told her my mom had once given me lessons but I was never ve
ry good.

“Too bad it's white,” she said. “I'm a
firm believer all pianos should be black.”

“It looks good in the dark,” I suggested. “Like a ghost.”

Zoey didn't respond. She ran her
fingers over the rim. Then, silently, she raised the fallboard. “What should I play?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Toph's mad enough already.”

“I told you, I don't like rules.”

She slipped her legs over the stool.

“Wait, don't.”

She ignored me and looked up, her huge eyes catching the blue light of the moon. “I know just the thing.”

I was about to run over and stop her, but I froze. Zoey had started playing “Claire de lune.”

When I was a kid, whenever Mom
tucked me into bed she always went downstairs afterward and played this song. She
called it the perfect lullaby. It was
one of the last songs she taught me (or tried to) before Dad died. I could never play it like this. It r
eminded me of something Mom used to tell me.

“A lot of people, especially people who don
't play, think the loud pieces are the ha
rdest. The fast pieces, the ones with a lot of jumps,
lots of notes. They're hard in one wa
y, but practice will always get you there. It's the slow pieces, the quiet pieces, the sad pieces
that are really the trickiest. That's because
there's always something you can't learn. You'
ve just got to have it inside you.”

It
wasn't until then, standing in Toph's
moonlit music room, that I understood. That thing my mother talked
about—Zoey had it inside her.

“What the fuck?!”

Suddenly, the lights came on and I saw what Zoey meant about white
pianos. At the flick of a switch, it went
from a ghostly, mysterious gleam to looking like a cheap carnival ride.

“
What the fuck
are you doing in here?”

It was Topher. He was swaying in the doorway, his eyes wild (but at least he was wearing pants).

“Sorry.” Zoey shrugged, going right on playing, giving up “Claire de lune” for something random, just loose improvisation. “When I see a beautiful instrument, I just have to play it.”

“Fuck that,”
Topher said. He was holding a wineglass full of beer and he pointed it at me. “So, what, y
ou two are like—
together
?”

“I just met her,” I told him. “But you can at least be civil.”

Topher laughed. “
C
ivil
? Who says
civil
? And like you
'd know how to be civil to a girl.
Becky told me all about you. She said when it comes to money, y
ou're tight as a fish's ass.”

Zoey snorted. “How civil of you to say.”

Topher's face flushed red and he stormed
over to the piano, slamming down the fallboard—
WHAM!
Zoey only
just
managed to pull her fingers out of the way. H
e could have broken every bone in her hands. Hell, he would have lopped off her fingers.

All I could think of to say was,
“Toph! Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa!”

“Shut up, Kaz! Take your slumdog girlfriend and—”

Before he could finish, Zoey screamed at him. “YOU FUCKER!”

She slapped the bottom of his wineglass. B
eer and foam went everywhere. It sprayed on
the wall, the floor—even inside the piano.

“Fffffuck!”
Topher shoved Zoey so hard she fell off the stool. He raised a fist in the air like he was going to hit her.

Which is when I (finally) stepped in. I grabbed his arm and he spun around, fists flying, and even though he was kacked up to the eyeballs, he still hit the mark.

Getting punched in the face comes with a very distinct sensation. First, all the pain shoots through your nose. I
t feels like your sinuses are wired to a car
battery. Your eyes gush like you'
re sobbing (not the coolest thing that can happen to
you at a party), and then the pain goes
bang
through your whole head and it's so bad it leaks into your legs, which of course morph into noodles.

My
only salvation was the fact that Toph was ext
remely drunk when he hit me. The punch was on target
but clumsy. For a second, I actually thought I might be okay, but when I took my hands away from
my face, the room
really
started to spin—because it wasn't just tears and snot making my hands all slim
y. It was blood.

Toph had given me one Big
Daddy of a nosebleed. The awful redness dribbled through my fingers and turned the puddle of Toph's beer a vomitus pink.

The
second I saw the red in my hands, all
my most important organs floated away, drifting up through the skylights like lost balloons. Just as I collapsed
on Toph's polished hardwood floor, all I
could think was
I hope to shit I'm about
to leave a big fucking stain
.

24

Th
e
Wisdo
m
o
f
V
omit

I felt like Shain Cope sounded … like the end of the world.

I woke up on Toph's front lawn. Calen and—here's a surprise—Devon Whitney were standing over me. They picked me up and, sagging between them like a damp laundry line, my shirt spattered with B-L-O-O-D (I was careful
not
to look down), I let them march-slash-drag me out to the car. Halfway there, my stomach voiced its sincere opposition to being moved. A searing mash of beer, bile, and barbecue potato chips spewed out of me.

Devon nearly dropped me. “
Disgusting!
”

Calen, however, saw
the wisdom of my vomit. “Yep, get it all out now
.
One drop
in my car and you're walking home.”

I heard voices behind me. It was Alana and—another surprise—Christina
Muñoz. They were tagging along half a block behind us. I could hear Christina gushing about “the best
reality show they've ever made.
” She was talking about
Big Daddy
.

When they heard the cough and splatter of my puke, they came running up to us.

“Are you okay?” Alana asked me.

“No, but my stomach feels better.”

Christina winced at my shirt, which
now had a tasty new layer of abstract
painting on it, courtesy of my gag reflex. “Sorry
I got mad at you before,” she said. “You have to admit, though, t
hat wasn't the best music. Like, not for a party. Maybe not for anything.” She giggled loudly.
“Anyway, Topher is
such
an asshole. But seriously
, are you okay?”

I wondered if she always jumped around like that from sentence to sentence. “I'll be fine,” I told her. “I just need to get home and take a shower.”

“Your girlfriend is crazy, by the way,” said Devon.

“My who? She's not my—wait, where is she?”

“No one knows,” said Calen. “After y
ou passed out, she wanted to stick around, but Topher wasn't having it.”

Devon laughed. “I
t took, like,
five guys
just to get her
out of the house.” He shook his head, recalling
what I'd missed. “And I thought
my
girl was fierce.”

Calen explained h
ow supremely pissed Topher had been, how he said he was going to call the police, although he never did. H
e only wanted to scare off Zoey, who
was screaming and kicking up a riot.

“Yeah,” Devon repeated himself. “Your girl was
fierce
.”

“She's not my girl.”

“She is kind of hot,” said Calen. “You got her number, right?”

“Oh, no! I didn't. I don't know anything about her.”

“Not even her name?”

“Zoey,” I said. “Zoey Zamani.”

Alana smiled at me. “Cool name.”