“Coming,” she gasps. “Coming, I’m—” She straightens up, gets control, and quickly loses it again.
“Jesus Christ.”
I walk back to her and crouch. Before she can protest, I haul her over my shoulder. She kicks her legs in the air and keeps laughing into my back.
I slap her ass once. “Quiet.”
That only makes it worse because she snorts.
The smell of weed leads me to a small circle of festival people sitting on blankets.
One of them is holding a blunt.
I stop in front of them. “What did you give her?”
Piper is still over my shoulder. In the last thirty seconds, she’s stopped laughing and started examining the back of my shirt with focused concentration.
From somewhere in the circle, a man with a beaded necklace says, “Oh, it’s violin girl.”
Jesus, how much could she have told them?
“Relax,” the guy with the blunt says. “It’s just a joint. She choked on half of it.” He offers it to me. “Want some?”
I glare at him. “No.”
A woman across the circle watches me with slow interest. “Join us,” she says.
Piper wiggles, so I put her down, but she stumbles two steps to the left before steadying.
She turns to face the circle with her arms out. “My friends,” she announces. “This is Griffin.”
“They’re not your friends,” I whisper. “This is a cult.”
She rolls her eyes. “You think everything here is a cult.” She pats my chest. “Live a little.”
I sit because if I don’t sit, she’s going to wander into the fire pit. I pull her down in front of me so she’s trapped between my legs.
Containment strategy.
The circle closes around us.
Someone lights another joint. Someone else pulls out a guitar, then hands Piper a glow stick. She immediately tries to wear it as a bracelet. It snaps, spraying green liquid everywhere.
She stares at it. “I trusted you,” she whispers to the glow stick.
A guy beside me asks what I do for work. Turns out he’s also an engineer, and I’ve never felt such relief speaking to another adult in my life. We spend fifteen minutes discussing bridge structures while Piper watches a girl braid her own hair like it’s the most fascinating thing ever invented.
Then the woman across from us leans forward. “I’m psychic.”
Of course she is.
She studies me like I’m a museum exhibit. “Your energy is loud tonight.”
Good God.
She closes her eyes. “I’m sensing a soulmate connection.” She points at herself when her eyes open. “That’s me.”
Piper, who has been in a conversation of her own with the person to her right about the acoustics of the folk stage, goes very still.
