Wild Awake

am and when we’re leaving for Battle of the Bands, which is on Saturday night at nine, which is—oh God—an hour and a half ago.
    Shitshitshitshitshit .
    I mash Lukas’s name in the call log and practically pee my pants while I’m waiting for him to pick up, because the full awful truth of how badly I’ve just screwed up is dawning on me in all its horror. If we miss Battle of the Bands because of me being a huge irresponsible sloot with Bicycle Boy, I’ll never be able to look Lukas in the face again.
    Pick up, pick up, pick up , I plead to the cell phone gods, and when Lukas finally picks up, he shrieks, “WHERE ARE YOU?” and I shriek, “AT HOME COME PICK ME UP!” and a minute later Petra’s car screeches into the driveway. I scurry out with my synth under my arm and cords dangling everywhere and cram myself into the backseat without even bothering to put my gear in the back of the station wagon.
    “I’m so sorry. So sorry,” I babble while Petra bombs through a yellow light and heads for the bridge. Lukas’s dad cringes in the passenger seat. He’s a safety freak, and Petra’s driving is cause for alarm on the best of days.
    Lukas looks at me with his eyes bugged out and says, “I called you fifty-one times! My call log says fifty-one times!”
    “We were worried about you, Kiri,” says Petra, cutting off a bus that was going too slowly for her taste and merging into the left lane. “I was about to have Lukas break into your house in case you had slipped in the shower and hit your head.”
    “My phone was dead,” I blurt. “I went out of town and forgot my charger. I went to visit Denny in Victoria. I just got back, like, five minutes ago. The bus from the ferry took longer than I thought.”
    “You went to visit Denny ?” Lukas says.
    “Um. Yeah.”
    I don’t mean to lie, but the truth is suddenly too complicated to explain, especially to Lukas, especially in front of Lukas’s mom. How am I supposed to tell them I just spent the better part of forty-eight hours snarfling with Bicycle Boy? Lukas doesn’t even know about Skunk except as that sketchy guy who fixed my tire the night I biked to the Downtown Eastside. There hasn’t exactly been time to give him an update. And Petra would flip if she knew the truth. Plus, I haven’t eaten anything except omelets and toast for two days; that alone would be enough to make her call in the riot police.
    Lukas looks different tonight, and it takes me a moment to figure out why. Then I realize he’s wearing all black, like he wanted us to do so we’d look like a serious band. Then I realize I’m still wearing Skunk’s aunt’s big-butt sweatpants and Skunk’s old T-shirt with no bra. Real smooth, Kiri. Way to make a hot first impression for your band .
    “Next time you remember to tell somebody where you go,” says Petra, casting me a stern look in the rearview mirror. She’s wearing glasses with dark green frames, which make her look even more stern than usual. “I called your mother, and she said you were probably sleeping over at the house of a girlfriend. But if you were gone for any longer, I would have called the police.”
    Petra pulls up in front of the venue and lets us out. She drives away to find parking while Lukas, his dad, and I hustle the gear up the stairs. I bang my synth on the wall by accident, and the seam holding the two pieces of silver plastic together pops apart.
    “Crap.”
    “What’s going on?” barks Lukas. We stop in the middle of the stairs, staggering under our armloads of gear.
    “I think I just broke my synth.”
    “Are you kidding me?”
    “It’s not my fault. If I wasn’t carrying your cymbal, I could have—”
    “Can you fix it?” he squeals.
    “I don’t know, it looks like—”
    “Pop it back together. It doesn’t look like the electronics are damaged.”
    “I don’t think I can—”
    “Just try.”
    “God, Lukas. Chill out.”
    I feel around the edge of the synth. The top and bottom halves have completely split apart. I think a screw must have popped out when it hit the wall.
    “Let’s just go upstairs, and I’ll figure this out when I’m not carrying half a drum kit,” I say.
    Lukas stomps up the stairs. I pause to adjust the instruments I’m carrying so the edge of Lukas’s cymbal stops slicing into my arm. A few steps later, I stop again because I’m close to dropping a drumstick. By the time I get to the top of the stairs, Lukas and his dad are nowhere to be