AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Misha
The kid is heavily into Johnny Baskets.
I knew the band had something of a following, but I didn’t realize they had superfans, and Tom Souter is definitely one of them. He has all their CDs, which is weird considering that no one listens to CDs, and all sorts of merch: t-shirts, cupholders, and pins. He’s gone to every show, or at least he used to, before he got sick.
The band isn’tthatbig, so I think Trine probably knows him. She must’ve seen him at a show.
I leave the guys behind in the suburbs and drive downtown, wondering what I’m going to ask her. She is drunk, she was slurring her words and giggling, and I would’ve put this off until the morning if I wasn’t so worried about Tom.
I don’t know if he’s possessed or not, but he looks terrible, and Rei seems concerned. Not call-an-ambulance concerned but I don’t know how long it’ll take for him to get there. I’m not useful at Tom’s home, Salinas can pray and Woods can monitor him, but apart from looking at his computer—which is pristine, since the kid seems to always clear his history after he browses the internet—I’m just taking up space there.
It's important that I find out more about him. Anything else. Information is always helpful. It takes a surprisingly short amount of time for me to get to Trine’s building, an apartment complex that looks like a motel, yellow paint peeling off the walls.
I sigh, killing the engine of the rental as I look up at the building, and wonder if I’m getting myself into something stupid. I shake it off. How I feel about this doesn’t matter. How much I’m dreading seeing Trine after I upset her isn’t actually important here—there’s a kid’s life at stake here, and that matters far more than my own feelings.
Still, it takes me a few seconds to gather my courage to leave the car. It’s around three o’clock in the afternoon and it’s incredibly hot outside, the sun blazing in the sky. I think about that because I’m dragging my feet until I get to the shaded hallway that leads to the door to Trine’s apartment.
It can’t be that hard. It’s just aconversation.
I knock on the door to apartment A65, one at the bottom floor, and I can hear footsteps approaching me. I resist the urge to lean against the wall, crossing my arms over my chest instead, and wait.
Someone I don’t know answers the door. He groans when he sets his gaze on me. "I didn’t think you’d show up."
"Who the hell are you?" I ask.
"I’m her friend," he growls. "And I have my eye on you."
I believe him. I could probably take this guy in a fight—especially right now, since it doesn’t look like he’s sober at all, and he might not have the reflexes he has when he’s not drunk. But I have no doubt he’s there to defend Trine, and I’m not supposed to hurt her feelings again. She must’ve talked to him about it.
When I look past him, I see a girl with bright pink hair pinned up in a messy bun, glaring at me pretty severely. So it wasn’t just him, and I feel a little self-conscious.
There’s nothing quite like a woman’s friends to remind you that you are a huge dick, I guess.
Trine walks up to me. She smells like coconut and beer, and I wonder if that’s her shampoo. Around us, the smell of weed wafts from the living room.
I don’t care about that. I’m focused on her, on the way her dark brows frame her pretty face, on the strands of hair in front of her ears.
She has her hair up in a ponytail, and her brown eyes are half-closed as she looks at me. "I didn’t think you’d show up," she says softly. It seems like she’s sobered up a little since we spoke. Unlike the last time I saw her, she’s not wearing denim and dark colors. Instead, she’s wearing an oversize pastel pink shirt over a pair of shorts. She’s barefoot, and I can see a tattoo coiling around her calf, something abstract and beautiful that stops just below her knee.
"I told you I’d show up," I say.
"Right," she replies, narrowing her eyes. "How can I help you?"
My gaze darts toward her friends, but if she wants to have this conversation here, then I guess I’m happy to do that. She seems to know what I’m getting at because she shakes her head, her hand on mine. She seems to realize that this crosses a line because she pulls her hand away as if she’s just been burned. "Let’s have this conversation in my bedroom," she says, dropping her voice to a whisper.
Her friends are watching us closely. She must notice that too because she turns to them, a smile on her face. "I’ll keep the door open," she says.
"Good," the guy who opened the door says, cracking his knuckles.
There’s something deeply endearing about these kids acting like I’m going to hurt Trine, since I certainly won’t. But I understand that this isn’t a joke to them, so I’m not going to smile, no matter how much I want to.
Trine doesn’t give me time to do anything, anyway. She wraps her fingers around my wrist and pulls me further into the tiny apartment, until we walk into her bedroom.
It’s not big. There’s a single bed pressed against the furthest side of the room, where the window is. There are a bunch of band posters on the wall opposite of the door, where she has an electric keyboard and her bass set up, a tiny tube amp in the space between the bed and her instruments.
Between the bottom of the bed and the wall next to the door, there’s a small desk with a laptop and a lamp on it, books stacked below it next to shelves that were never hammered into the wall.
"You like it? It’s only twelve hundred a month," she says, heavy irony in her voice.
