Wild Awake

that guy at the back, from the radio station?”
    His smile is a jar full of fireflies.
    “Crazy Girl,” he says. “All I saw was you.”
    I stand on the sidewalk waving, blowing kisses, and turning a lopsided cartwheel as Skunk drives away. The Train Room is spilling out people, who roll away into the night in twos and threes. I feel like how Sukey must have felt on the night of her art show, a feather in her hair. The moon is up. The sky is clear. The world feels big and bright and possible.
    “Yo, Kiri.”
    I spin around on Sukey’s silver heels and smile at Denny, who has just come out of the Train Room with an envelope full of money from selling our CDs.
    “Denny!” I skip over and pluck the envelope out of his hands. “Are you hungry? Do you think there’s a place we could get Mongolian food this time of night?”
    “I just got off the phone with Mom and Dad,” he says.
    I shimmy around him distractedly, dancing to the music in my head. “I’m sure it was fascinating. Hey, you have ID, right? Can we buy champagne?”
    Denny stares at me. “You do realize they’re coming back tomorrow morning.”
    I stop dancing and stare back at him, stunned. As the news sinks in, I start to babble. “What? Why? They’re not coming home for a week. I still have a week!”
    “Don’t you check your email? They changed their tickets, like, four days ago.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “I handed you the phone when they called about it, didn’t I? It’s not my fault you wouldn’t talk to them.”
    I remember the day I filled the phone with sine waves, and my nerves thrum with foreboding. “What’s going on? Why’d they cancel?”
    Denny plays with his cell phone, flipping it open and snapping it shut. “Mom has this weird flu,” he says.
    I cross my arms. “So? How is flying home any better than being sick on the cruise ship?”
    Flip, snap. Denny gazes after a bus driving past. “And Dad has some business crisis he needs to deal with.”
    “You’re kidding me. They’re on freaking vacation.”
    “And—”
    There’s something about that last And that makes me think the first two reasons are fake, and the real reason is something I don’t want to hear. I narrow my eyes.
    “And what, Denny?”
    Flip, snap, flip, snap . I swear I’m going to break that thing in two.
    “And what, Denny?”
    He still won’t look at me. He’s watching that bus like he’s never seen one before. “And, so, remember last Saturday when you stayed out all night, then came home all cracked out and started practicing piano?”
    I blaze with indignation. “But I explained—”
    “Yeah, well, Lukas’s mom called them and said you were having a nervous breakdown.” Flip, snap . “And, um, I sort of sent them this email the other day, back when you were still really—”
    “Still really what?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Still what? What did you tell them?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Uh-huh. And they decided to cut their whole trip short and—”
    The bus turns a corner. Denny finally looks me in the eye. “I swear I didn’t tell them to come home. They were thinking about changing their tickets anyway because of Dad’s work thing.”
    The moon, whose radiance was so lovely a moment ago, glares down at me now like a searchlight. The city is nothing but right angles and dead ends; I can feel it contracting around me, shutting off my escapes.
    “Yeah, right. You’ve been trying to ruin my life ever since you came home from Victoria. You’ve always hated my music, and now that I’m finally starting to get somewhere, you’ll do anything to stop me.”
    Denny throws up his hands in disbelief. “Listen to yourself. Would you listen to yourself? You sound just like Sukey. ‘You’re not really trying to help me, you’re just standing in the way of my art.’”
    “Sukey was right !” I scream.
    “Sukey had a problem !” shouts Denny. “It’s not about your music. Your music’s great. It’s amazing. Nobody’s trying to take that away from you. But Christ, Kiri, you’ve been so high-strung—you say you’re not on anything, but I know you are; I just know it. I was afraid to go back to Victoria in case—”
    “Is that what you told Mom and Dad?” I shriek. “You told them I was on some kind of drugged-out rampage? Thanks, Denny. Way to be a liar.”
    He ignores me. “—in case there really is something wrong, because even though you’re shrill and unreasonable and completely insane, you’re