“Okay what’s up everybody!” Parth said. The room quieted. The bandage on his chest was huge and thick, almost gleaming white against his brown skin. “We are Crystal Lake Counselors! This song is about how this guy at my girlfriend’s job turned out to be a serial killer and he stabbed me in the chest and then my totally badass girlfriend who kicks ass stabbed him in the throat and saved my life and legally I’m not supposed to talk about this so the song’s called ‘Ongoing Investigation!’ Goes like this.”
Four drumstick clicks and the band splashed in. Guitar like a screeching power drill, then silence. I GOT STABBED IN THE CHEST. Then the band back in.
It was the first show since that night. Two weeks passed. Crystal Lake Counselors was playing with Gradient Purple and White Men With Katanas. What a bill, Mara had told Parth.
“Everyone wants to play with the stabbed guy,” Parth had said. Alewives had even called the show BACK FROM THE DEAD and included on the flyer a hand drawing of Parth playing bass and yelling into a microphone with a knife sticking out of his chest.
Mara shook and swayed and thrashed with Melissa, letting the music wash over her. In the crowd, Mara noticed people from the WaveRace97 show. Some were even singing along to Crystal Lake Counselors’ songs. She saw Ether, dancing in front of Gareth’s guitar amp.
Melissa had parlayed the whole incident into a medical marijuana card. To help with the anxiety, you know, I have PTSD, she’d tell anyone, whether they asked or not. Actually we have PTSD, because it was her coworker, and that’s all I’m allowed to say about an ongoing investigation.
Mara had been letting herself partake whenever Melissa offered. She did have bad dreams, actually, she did flinch every time she saw a knife, thank you, and the weed was helping.
Plus, she never knew that music could sound this good.
A hand on her arm. Amparo, decked out again, tonight in a Dead Milkmen shirt that looked like it’d spent the last two decades in a cardboard box under the Christmas decorations. She carried a real sadness with her. It was the way her muscled arms seem to finally be sagging, the split second earlier that her smile faded, the way her eyes would settle unfocused on a corner if there was a lull in conversation. Still, the proud way that she pointed at her Dead Milkmen shirt and then to the BACK FROM THE DEAD flyer showed that her grief included jokes.
“Diego wasn’t old enough to drink,” she said. “But I might have insider auntie information that he liked Modelo Dark, too. My nephew had good taste.”
“She just wants an excuse for double fisting,” Martín said from behind Amparo, dad-smiling in a sensible polo.
Mara hugged them both. It had been two weeks since she’d seen them, her last words being I’m sorry, I don’t think I can work here anymore. Both had an eager we get it on their lips. Amparo got a little teary.
“No need to come in for a two weeks’ notice or whatever,” Martín had said. “But we’ll still pay you like you are. I’m sorry I can’t offer more.”
Two weeks’ of free money was fine with Mara. She didn’t hold anything against them. Tommy had been right about something: the people at Olly’s were good people. Honest people.
Killers walked amongst honest people all the time, though.
The music felt more urgent, more alive, more joyous even in its anger. Each song felt like it was soundtracking a reunion after a yearslong separation. The guys were playing their asses off, Parth’s voice soaring and commanding. There was an energy there that wasn’t unlike the first time Mara and Parth had hooked up—a release, an overflowing.
Mara danced with her friends.
When Crystal Lake Counselors finished, Mara went to the bar to get a rum and pineapple for Melissa and Topo Chico for herself. Ears not quite ringing, heart rate coming down, she basked in the show’s afterglow. Her back thanked her for sitting down.
“You have a tab?” the bartender asked. “Your name’s Mara, right?”
“Hey, good memory,” Mara said.
“Shaun. I’ve seen you around a bunch. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah, I, uh. Like music.”
“Hell yeah, dude.”
Shaun turned to do something at the register, gathered a few empty bottles, and took an order. As he made Mara’s order in front of her, she felt a tug, some pull from the universe. The same way she attacked Tommy without realizing it, her brain didn’t tell her mouth to speak.
“Hey Shaun are you guys hiring?”
Shaun looked up. Set the pineapple can down on the bar mat.
“Like, for whatever. I have serving experience, cash handling experience, I’m plugged into the music scene, like, my old boss is right over there, you could talk to him if you wanted, I don’t know, I’m sorry.”
Shaun laughed. “Hey, cool. Tell you what, we have a few openings coming up. People going back to school in the fall. Can you come by tomorrow around three to talk?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “Have a good rest of the night.”
Drinks in hand, she turned to go, when her eye caught the front window. Tommy was standing there. His stupid knife bag in hand. His throat was bloody. The blood ran down his shirt.
Tommy waved at Mara.
Mara looked back to the stage. They were still tearing down/setting up between bands. The lead singer mic stood alone, angled towards where Parth’s lips would be. Mara thought about how completely fucking punk rock it was to play a shirtless set with your stab wound bandage shining above your heart and under your bass strap.
She looked back at the window and Tommy was gone. Probably slunk off to Hell, tail between his legs, that loser coward.
Somehow, she hadn’t thought much about the fact that she had ended Tommy’s life. Her True Crime interest had disappeared entirely. It left her with a nagging inclination that she had been chosen to play a part, that she had been charged with stopping this one monster.
Now she could go back to trying to make rent and take care of her mom, twin eternal struggles that couldn’t be stabbed in the throat.
One night at Melissa’s apartment—in the hazy fog of plenty of weed smoked, instrumental trip hop lazing through speakers, and some takeout pad Thai—Melissa laid out her theory that people sometimes get pushed in certain directions, like they have to go on a quest or complete a task or fulfill some promise that was made before they were even born, and that humans don’t have control over or even knowledge of when these assignments are handed out, but there are these invisible forces out there, and sometimes they needed things done, and she didn’t want to call these invisible forces gods, like that, but humans served these invisible forces, you know, whether we knew it or not.
Mouth full of noodles, Mara considered it. “Why not,” she had said, and fell back into music.
Then and now, for some reason, she didn’t feel responsible that Tommy wasn’t alive. She took a sip of cold and sharp sparkling water. Looked back at the window. Tommy had been there, looking as real and present as Shaun or Melissa or Parth, but deader than dead could be. Mara figured she’d be seeing him for a while. Probably forever.
Parth surviving, Tommy dying, her mom slowly dying—Mara felt like she had the same amount of control over all of it. She couldn’t strum a chord, she could only dance.
The noise of Gradient Purple plugging in and tuning strings and soundchecking individual drums started up. The growl and scratch of Deja’s guitar, testing levels with different pedals. Floor-shaking bass.
Mara would always know how to dance.
Killing wasn’t something that Mara needed to add to her toolbox.