Wild Awake

game, as opposed to, say, the most explosively pleasurable combination ever invented. Like if we started dating, we’d spend all our time boning and wouldn’t practice anymore. I just want to focus on the band right now , said Lukas.
    I nodded and tried to be mature about it.
    That makes sense. Yeah, I totally think so too .
    But let’s just say I haven’t completely managed to convince myself he’s right.
    After jamming, when I’m about to go home, Lukas remembers he has some tracks he wants me to listen to. I sit on his bed while he downloads them onto my iPod. I like sitting on Lukas’s bed. It smells nice and feels faintly forbidden, like touching Lukas’s earlobes now that we’re Focusing on Our Art. When Lukas hands me my iPod, the brush of his fingers practically gives me a stroke. I glance at the floor, then look up at him.
    “Hey, Lukas?”
    “Yeah?”
    “You wanna come over to my house and watch a movie?”
    By which I mean: Lukas. I have an entire house just sitting there. That’s four beds and two couches, three if you count the short one in the basement. That’s kitchen counters and carpeted floors. That’s twenty-five hundred square feet of red-hot lovemaking just waiting to happen. Come over and be seduced by my wanton ways.
    “You mean like right now?” Lukas says.
    “Uh-huh.”
    I nod in what I hope isn’t too suggestive a manner, but just suggestive enough to trigger Lukas’s unconscious primal urges.
    He stretches and yawns, casting a glance at the digital clock on his tidy IKEA desk. “I don’t know. Me and my dad are going to Zulu tomorrow morning.”
    By which Lukas means: Kiri. Me and my dad are going to get up at seven a.m., go to Zulu Records right when it opens, and spend the next eight hours meticulously poring over twenty thousand dusty old used records. What could possibly be more stimulating?
    I groan and dig my fingers into my eye sockets in a gesture of despair. “Maybe another night this week, though,” says Lukas. “Have you seen Zardoz ?”
    “No.”
    “Oh, man. You’re going to freak out. I’ll get the DVD back from my cousin and we can watch it on Friday.”
    I smile all the way home. Lukas is coming over to watch a movie.
    As my grandpa Bob used to say: If that ain’t a date, I’ll eat my hat.

chapter six
    That night, I can’t stop thinking about my failed attempt to meet Doug Fieldgrass on Columbia Street. I wonder who he is, and how he knew Sukey. I wonder why it took him five years to call. Lukas was probably right: It’s some kind of scam, and I was stupid to even go. But there’s a crazy little hope-squirrel running around inside my head, chattering, What if it’s real? What if it’s important? and it won’t shut up no matter what I do.
    I turn on some music and curl up on my bed with my Sukey Box, sifting through the photographs and trinkets I’ve looked at so many times I hardly see them anymore. Even though there’s nobody home, I feel self-conscious sitting there with the door open. I hop up and close it guiltily, as if Mom or Dad is about to walk down the hall and catch me in my self-indulgence. I gaze at the picture of Sukey and me at my insect-themed seventh birthday party, wearing pipe-cleaner antennas and paper wings, and sniff the cigarette I stole from her purse one time but was too chicken to smoke, the paper gone soft and limp from so much handling. Usually I find these objects comforting, but tonight they frustrate me. Whatever that Doug guy has, I want it.
    As I sort through the box, I rack my brain for ideas, theories, anything that could explain the phone call without arriving at scam . I think back to my disastrous bike ride, the broken glass and lost address. What I really should have done is asked him to drop off Sukey’s things at our house—but then he’d know where I live, and what if he really is a sketchball?
    I’m just about to pile the photographs back into the box when I spot it: the glossy five-by-seven card announcing an art opening: 6:00 p.m. at razzle!dazzle!space, e. pender @ columbia, feat. new works by sukey byrd and leon klemmer . My eyes skid over the words e. pender @ columbia like a scratched record.
    Holy crap.
    I read the card again. Of course. That’s why I recognized Columbia Street. How could I have been so stupid? I was just a block away when that creep on the bicycle scared me away. Hell. Sukey’s friend was probably there waiting for me that whole time.
    The art show was our first