“Is there another show happening somewhere else or something?” Edie asked.
Rose looked out over the crowd with the same confusion but shrugged it off. “Maybe there is, but I’m happy with staying here. Wherever the people are is not where I want to be.”
The opener sounded weak, so they went to see if they could find some cotton candy because they were wearing a matching pastel bikini set, Rose in blue and Edie in pink.
When they returned to the stage, sans cotton candy, Edie saw Cassidy standing in the wings, staring out into the crowd, pale as a sheet. The expression on her face was one of such deep horror that Edie herself began searching the crowd in the direction Cassidy was looking to figure out what it was she potentially needed to be running from. Nothing seemed out of place, though, and no one else acted like anything at all interesting was happening in that direction.
Edie turned back to Rose to say something, but Rose wasn’t by her side anymore. Instead, there was a three-foot gap between her and a white girl in a holographic dress and boots. She looked all around behind her, thinking maybe Rose stepped away to get a picture or something, but she couldn’t see her friend, who normally towered over most crowds.
“Rose?” she called out, but the overpowering force of the music blasting from hanging speakers swallowed her words. In front of her, she scanned the backs of heads, trying to find Rose’s dark, natural curls, but she didn’t see anyone who even looked remotely similar.
Where the hell could she have even gone?
She crossed her arms and tried pretending she hadn’t just been left alone without warning. Rose probably just went to the bathroom or something and she’d be back soon. When the music didn’t start up within a moment or two, Edie checked her phone for a message or a notification of some sort, but there was nothing happening that she wasn’t already in the middle of. The houselights went down, and the crowd screamed and hollered in anticipation. Music blasted from the speakers, and Edie clapped and cheered with everyone else. A man in a bunny suit ran out with the microphone and started to sing and Edie sang along, but after four songs she couldn’t help but look around, trying to see if Rose returned and couldn’t find her. She checked her phone again, but there was still nothing.
Maybe Rose learned there really is another show happening somewhere else.
If that were the case, though, why would she have left right before this show, and why wouldn’t she have said anything to Edie? It didn’t make sense, but she continued to wait. What else was there to do? Rose would come back and have some sort of explanation.
When the bunny man threw his bunny head into the crowd and the houselights came back up and Rose was still nowhere to be found, Edie couldn’t contain her panic any longer.
“Rose?” she called out again. The fear in her voice earned her the concerned look of crowd members, but they quickly returned their attention to their friends and phones. Edie stomped off, retracing the steps they took before. Rose wasn’t in any of the food vendor lines, and she wasn’t in line for the bathroom, where everyone under the unforgiving fluorescents looked like they hadn’t slept in years.
Edie called Rose’s name into the wide expanse of the beach, where she hardly even saw her own feet as they became buried in the still-warm sand. Someone in the dark called Rose’s name back to her, and she heard the malicious sound of giggling.
“Where the fuck did she go?” Edie asked out loud when she was back on one of the paved walking paths. She still had no messages on her phone, but even so, she checked her apps to make sure Rose wasn’t trying to get ahold of her some weird way in a random direct message. Nothing.
Edie was nearly on the verge of tears when she looked up and saw a figure heading back toward the stage area, seemingly having come from the villas or the tents.
“Rose!” Edie cried. The figure didn’t turn, but it was undoubtedly Rose in the matching blue bikini set. Edie forced herself not to run after Rose but hustled as quickly as she could across the sandy grass. Rose turned a corner around a hut, and it was only a moment later that Edie turned the same corner, but Rose wasn’t there. Instead, Rose was impossibly far away, like she sprinted around the corner out of Edie’s sight.
“Rose!” Edie called out again, but Rose was even further away now than before, forcing Edie to abandon her reservations and run after her friend. “Rose!” she screamed. Rose didn’t turn around, and instead, she continued casually walking through the gates of the stage area. Edie picked up the pace, not wanting to lose her. She managed to close the distance between them until they were only a few yards apart before Rose disappeared behind the merch counter. Edie continued running through the gate and should have run directly into her, but again, found that the distance between them nearly quadrupled.
“Rose!” she shouted again, with so much force that her voice cracked.
Everyone in the nearby vicinity turned. “Is someone fucking dying?” someone shouted.
Edie continued to run toward Rose. She could still see her hair bouncing in step above the crowd and stayed completely focused on it as she ran through groups and almost barreled through a mostly naked person who stepped backwards at the wrong moment.
“Hey!” they shouted angrily, but Edie didn’t stop or slow down. It looked like Rose was trying to get as close as possible to the stage, and so Edie dove into the wall of bodies and followed her.
“Rose! Where are you going?” she called out when they were so close Edie could almost reach out and grab Rose’s hand as she weaved her way through people. The crowd around them was loud, but right at that moment, the house music shut off. In the quieted air, even above the murmur of the crowd, Edie could be clearly heard. Rose finally stopped and turned her head. Her afro, big and perfectly round, swiveled like a globe on her neck, but when Rose turned completely to Edie again, she had no face; it was just more hair. Still, Rose paused, all the hair where her face should be pointed straight at Edie as though looking at her through the curls, but the neck continued to slowly, impossibly turn beyond 180 degrees, and all the way around while her body faced away from Edie. The thing that wasn’t Rose continued to weave through the crowd.
Cassidyremainedinthewings as the Rico Pinqueens prepped to play their set. The last rays of light cast long shadows on the island, and although the bulbs above the crowd were on, they weren’t providing anything useful just yet.
From her vantage point on the stage, Cassidy kept looking for Apricot and Daisy in the crowd. She turned her phone on between sets but had yet to hear from Apricot. She wondered if her friends were in on some sort of joke together. It wasn’t a funny joke, but better than the alternative …
There was shouting from the back, and the people began moving as a unit one direction and another. A low booing started back there and spread to the front, and the undulating movement of people seemed to follow the sound. Even the stage hands coiling cables and checking battery packs turned to see what was going on, since it was unusual for people to boo between sets. The crowd continued to spread in the middle, despite their protest, and a tall, white woman emerged at the barrier in front of security. She gestured wildly at the stage, and the guys in neon shook their heads.
Unaware of the drama unfolding in the front row, Ama and the band walked out from the wings. Cassidy clapped and smiled as they were greeted by screams and whistles from the crowd but was fixated on the group of security guards now surrounding the spot where the woman stood.
The band broke into their first song, and two of the security guards reached into the crowd and pulled the woman out to the aisle between the barrier and the stage. They started to escort her stage right to return to the audience, but the woman made a dash for the stage and kicked one of the guards in the face on her way up. The rest of them were too slow to catch her. Ama hadn’t noticed and was taken completely by surprise when the woman ran across the stage to her. The woman raised her fist up, like she meant to slam into Ama with a running punch, and Ama stepped backwards to avoid it mid-lyric. The rest of the band came to a cacophonous stop, and behind Cassidy, stage hands rushed out of the wings to get her.
Someone with a headphone asked, “is that Cherish fucking King?”
Cherish ripped the microphone off the mic stand. “Bradley!” she shouted into the mic, probably redlining the sound system. The crowd booed her again. Drew and Terry created a cage around her with the necks of their guitars.
“Bradley!” she shouted again, not nearly as loud. “Where the fuck are you?”
