The Carnival at Bray Read Free Page B

the lights went out. When they came on again, in a blinding burst of white, the opening chords of “Rocket” began like an explosion in the middle of Maggie’s chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to contain it.
    â€œHey! Mags!” Kevin was kneeling down in front of her in the hazy flashing light. “Get up here!” She climbed onto her uncle’s shoulders and he stood up, squeezing her legs to his chest. Only one hour earlier, she had been sitting on Nanny Ei’s couch, her life dribbling unremarkably along, Vicks VapoRub slathered across her wheezy chest and a mug of boiled milk and onions untouched beside her. The explosion of music that had started in her chest was now expanding outward and outward, encompassing the entire room, the entire city, the entire world.
    â€œHow’s the view?” Kevin shouted, lurching closer to the stage while she clutched at his soaking hair to balance herself. Everything around her was shiny with the patina of smoke andsweat, and a hundred feet in front of her were the Smashing Pumpkins.
    The show was chaos—moshing, shattered bottles, and music so loud that it didn’t even feel like music but just a thumping in her chest, a wailing guitar, and Billy Corgan, who screamed until his throat sounded blood-gargled. After an hour, Maggie lost Uncle Kevin and stumbled through the crowd, fighting the urge not to panic, and then she found him in a corner making out with a blond woman whose shirt was all cut up so that Maggie could see not just the woman’s cleavage but the cleavage
under
her boobs—she had not known this was possible. He pulled away from the woman, wrapped Maggie in a sweaty hug, and took her up to the bar and bought her a pop. She drank it, fighting the feeling of exhaustion and fever that had descended on her brain and sinuses, and when it was over and the lights were turned on to reveal a shiny-eyed crowd wafting animal smells and trembling down from whatever high they’d been on, the music had latched hold of her. She felt half-crazed, elated, having forever transcended the world of high school, where she was noteworthy only for her ability to diagram sentences faster and more accurately than anyone else in Mr. Blackwell’s English class. One thing was for sure: she would never diagram another sentence, at least not willingly, for as long as she lived.
    Kevin put one arm around Maggie and the other around the blond woman and, together with Taco and Rockhead and Jeremy, they tumbled out into the city and found AG BULLT, adorned with two parking tickets that Uncle Kevin tore from the windshield and dropped down the sewer, and they piled into the car where Maggie was placed on the blonde’s warm, pulsing lap, and they went to someone’s fourth-floor apartment of milk crate bookshelves and more music. Maggie pretended to fall asleep so that Kevin would carry her off to bed, which he did, except she suspected the bed was actually a dog bed—at least it smelled likeone—and then she really did fall asleep. She woke up once in the middle of the night, feverish, and saw the shadows of two people moving up and down—Uncle Kevin and the blonde—and the blonde was moving on top of him and he was holding her breasts in each of his hands like Christmas ornaments. Maggie knew what they were doing but it didn’t look so frightening or clinical as when she learned about it during those awful movies in health class. And it didn’t look as disgusting as the porno she’d seen at Katie Grant’s house, which was all spread legs and shaved bodies and smirking plastic faces. This looked—nice, or something. Real. She didn’t know. She fell back asleep.
    In the very early morning, Uncle Kevin shook her gently awake.
    â€œYou want some breakfast?” His breath was thick and beery.
    She nodded sleepily, and he helped her up from the dog bed. He leaned over and kissed the blonde on the