Wild Awake

down ahead of us carrying his drum kit and stool.
    “Would you take something? This is kind of a lot to carry.”
    Lukas gazes up at me skeptically. “I’m carrying this sweater.”
    “Never mind.”
    “I guess I could tie the sweater around my waist.”
    The thing is, Lukas is serious. He seriously has to consider the fact that he is carrying his sweater, and seriously has to arrive at the conclusion that, okay, maybe he could make a slight adjustment to his sweater-carrying configuration and give me a hand with the amp. It is slowly dawning on me: This is just how Lukas is. He will never know how to turn off a smoke detector. He will never be able to start watching a movie half an hour later than he planned. He will never look at me close enough to see more than a postcard. He won’t even try.
    Lukas ties his sweater around his waist.
    “Hand me those cords,” he says.
    “Hypermanic meaning what?”
    Suddenly, carrying the cords and the amp and the synth myself is of utmost importance. I snatch the cords out of his reach.
    “I don’t know,” says Lukas. “It might have been some other word. She said you’re a monomaniac.”
    “A monomaniac.”
    Lukas looks away. “Or something.”
    “Your mom said this?”
    Nod.
    I silently strike Petra off my list of People I Would Take a Bullet For. A monomaniac. Moi .
    “She’s been worried about you ever since the last time you came over for dinner.”
    “What happened the last time I came over for dinner?”
    “You spent half an hour talking about some secret technique you have for learning piano pieces.”
    “It’s not a secret , it’s a scientifically proven method for—”
    “Kiri—”
    “If she’s so worried about me, why hasn’t she said something? Why is she down there waiting in the car while you tell me you all secretly think I’m a monomaniac?”
    “Because—”
    Lukas presses his lips together several times as if crushing the false starts of sentences he decides not to say. I glare down at him, wielding our expensive new amp like a wrecking ball. Finally:
    “She said you might listen if it came from your best friend.”
    A hot, hollow bomb of humiliation and outrage explodes in my chest. Our eyes meet briefly and we both look away. He stomps up the stairs and tries to grapple the amp out of my hands. “Let me carry that stuff.”
    “No.”
    “Come on, let me carry it.”
    We struggle for a moment, coming dangerously close to falling down the stairs, amp, synth, and all. Finally, I shove all the equipment into Lukas’s arms.
    “Fine. Take it. And you know what? You can tell your parents I’ll get my own ride home.”
    “Come on, we’ll give you a ride.”
    “No.”
    “My mom won’t leave without—”
    “Denny can pick me up.”
    Lukas looks dubious, but at least he quits arguing. He casts me a wounded glance and makes his way down the stairs. I stick my hands on my hips and shout after him in my most monomaniacal voice.
    “Great bands don’t psychoanalyze!”
    I stomp back up to the Train Room, pushing through the swinging doors into the dark, still-crowded venue. I go all the way to the back and hide in the sound booth. After a minute, I see Petra and Lukas come in through the doors. They split up and look around. When they can’t find me, they meet up again and have a short, stressed-out conference, then turn around and go back out.
    Ten seconds later my cell phone starts ringing, but I turn it off and shove it back into my purse. I’ve had enough of Lukas’s hysteria for one night. Before we went on, he was worried the new amp wouldn’t work. Then he said his shoulders hurt and he might have strained a muscle. Then he kept checking his dad’s phone obsessively to see what time it was. Then I developed an alarming case of monomania.
    Also, Skunk never showed up.
    I walk up to the refreshment booth and ask for a ginger ale. The guy working the booth recognizes me from our set and lets me have it for free. He has a red beard and alarmingly straight shoulders, like someone squared them off with a ruler. He shovels ice into a plastic cup, squirts in the ginger ale with a flourish, fits a lime wedge over the edge of the cup, and slides it across the counter to me.
    “You guys rocked. It’s on the house.”
    “Why, thank you. Did you know I have monomania?”
    “Is that like mononucleosis?”
    “It’s much worse.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Don’t be. It’s the rarest form of monomania in the world.