بخش 05 - فصل 35

35 Thanks to the emcee’s introduction, Brady has relaxed a bit. The carnival crap he saw being offloaded during his reconnaissance trip is either offstage or suspended overhead.

The band’s first four or five songs are just warm-ups. Pretty soon the set will roll in either from the sides or drop down from overhead, because the band’s main job, the reason they’re here, is to sell their latest helping of audio shit. When the kids–many of them attending their first pop concert–see those bright blinking lights and the Ferris

wheel and the beachy backdrop, they’re going to go out of their teenybop minds. It’s then, right then, that he’ll push the toggle-switch on Thing Two, and ride into the darkness on a golden bubble of all that happiness. The lead singer, the one with all the hair, is finishing a syrupy ballad on his knees. He holds the last note, head

bowed, emoting his faggy ass off. He’s a lousy singer and probably already overdue for a fatal drug overdose, but when he raises his head and blares, “How ya feelin out there?” the audience goes predictably batshit. Brady looks around, as he has every few seconds– checking his perimeter, just as Hodges said he would–and

his eyes fix on a little black girl sitting a couple of rows up to his right. Do I know her? “Who are you looking for?” the pretty girl with the stick legs shouts over the intro to the next song. He can barely hear her. She’s grinning at him, and Brady thinks how ridiculous it is for a girl with stick legs to grin at anything.

The world has fucked her royally, up the ying-yang and out the wazoo, and how does that deserve even a small smile, let alone such a cheekstretching moony grin? He thinks, She’s probably stoned. “Friend of mine!” Brady shouts back. Thinking, As if I had any. As if.