Anna Schumacher - End Times

“What?” she whispered, her throat sandpaper-dry.

“You know you’re really hot, right?” Doug’s voice was gruff and low. He pulled her into his chest, so she could feel the heat from his body and smell the alcohol sweat on his shirt, and pressed himself against her. A bitter bubble of nausea rose from her stomach.

“You’re my cousin’s boyfriend!” she hissed. She raised her other arm to push him away, but he caught it easily. His nose was almost touching hers, and she could see the dark caverns between his teeth as his lips spread in a hungry smile.

“She doesn’t have to know.” Hands still clamped like steel around her wrists, he raised her arms so they were wrapped around his shoulders in a gross parody of an embrace. “I know you want me, too. I could tell from the moment I saw you. It’s okay.”

His lips puckered, zeroing in on hers, and bile surged in her stomach. The smell of beer, the unwanted touch of a body she found repulsive: It was too much like all the times Jim had pressed into her in the kitchen, trapping her against the counter while her mom stared stubbornly at the TV or slept in the other room. She twisted and squirmed against the memory and his grip until finally, just as the first flake of skin from his chapped lips brushed hers, she brought her knee up hard and fast.

“Guuuuuuh!” Doug cried, stumbling back. His hands released her wrists and flew to his crotch as he doubled over, groaning.

Daphne’s heart pounded in her ears. Her arms had broken out in goose bumps so hard they hurt, and her wrists were red and tender from Doug’s tugging. She was shaking, but she managed to turn to Doug, who had staggered back like a wounded animal, still clutching his groin and moaning.

“Don’t. You. Ever. Touch. Me. Again.” She spat each word like a bullet, clear and silver and aimed straight at his head.

He looked up at her, eyes cloudy with confusion and anger.

“You frigid bitch . . .” he began.

Daphne didn’t stay to hear the rest. She turned, still trembling, and ran back to the parking lot, back to Janie and the noise and the light.

OWEN pushed his way through the crowd gathered at the gate of the Radical Roots festival, wondering how he was going to identify a girl whose face he’d never seen. In the sea of tie-dye and patchwork, his dark hair and clothes stood out like a storm cloud obscuring a rainbow.

The sun had sunk beneath the mountains, and the sky was a deep lavender as he let the throngs of people pull him along, past stalls hawking hemp energy bars and devil sticks and batik sarongs. Fragments of conversation ( hitched a ride in Boise . . . Sparklegirl kind of had a freak-out . . . String Cheese Incident was off the chain . . . ) drifted in and out of his ears.

It was the kind of scene his younger sister Cass would probably enjoy: The walls of her room were covered in posters of obscure bands, and she was the only one in her eighth-grade class who wore plum-colored lipstick to school every day. But he’d always preferred the company of machines to the crush of humanity. It was why he spent hours alone in the garage tinkering with his bike, or practicing by himself at the track long after his friends had packed up and gone home.

The merch stalls dead-ended at the peak of a gentle hill, which sloped down to an amphitheater draped in a psychedelic backdrop glowing under a black light. Neon fairies perched in fluorescent trees, and butterflies with human faces hovered over garish pink flowers. A giant statue of a mushroom hunkered at the side of the stage, where Ariel Crow and the Fine Feathered Family were about to go on.

The lead singer took his place at the mic and picked up a guitar, flashing a smile that was half gold teeth. Behind him, a parade of musicians clad in neon patchwork and fishnet, with dreadlocks like gnarled tree branches growing from their heads, carried tambourines and banjos onto the stage. Owen craned his neck, trying to get a look at them through the sea of people, but none of their faces sparked recognition. If Luna was among them, she was good at hiding in plain sight.

“I’m Ariel Crow, and this is the Fine Feathered Family,” the lead singer said in a voice like worn, scarred leather. “We’re here to play a couple songs for you—”

His words drowned in a tidal wave of cheers. The shuffling zombies who had surrounded Owen at the gate sprang to life, teeth bared with delight, arms waving like tentacles in the air.

Ariel Crow struck a note on his guitar, and the crowd began to dance, keeping time with the Fine Feathered Family’s raucous, squawking vocals. Owen stood still among them, focused on the one thing he’d come for: finding Luna. The rambling jam-band tune did nothing for him; he liked his music strong and fast, with a driving beat.

Midway through the band’s first song, a trapdoor opened in the top of the mushroom statue and a girl appeared, brandishing a hula hoop that shimmered with LED lights, giving off a rainbow of colors. Her neon patchwork bikini glowed under the ultraviolet lights, and her hair stood out in a riot of dreadlocks, some wrapped in neon yarn so she looked like a modern-day Medusa with a nest of vipers writhing on her head. She eased the trapdoor shut with her toes and stood with her arms stretched to the sky, the hoop framing a body that was all ropy muscle and coiled feline energy, the stage lights dancing on the glitter that dusted her limbs.

The breath left Owen’s lungs in a sudden, painful rush, like he had been kicked in the chest.

It was her. Luna.

Ariel Crow let out a wail, and Luna whipped the hoop over her head and spun it onto her body, twitching her hips and tossing her head and laughing into the stage lights.

It was unmistakably her, the flashes of a face from his dreams now pieced together into a whole. Even from way up on the hill, he could trace her features with his eyes: her sharp cheekbones and the arrowhead of her chin, the taut muscles in her legs and a giant tattoo of a tree that sprouted from her lower back and grew into an ancient, wizened wonder with branches snaking down her arms. But mostly, he recognized her eyes. They slanted toward her forehead and blazed with a cold seafoam green, like the tail of a mermaid trapped and frozen under layers of ice.

He recognized those eyes from more than just his dreams. He saw them whenever he looked in the mirror, and they gleamed coldly back at him when he caught his reflection in the window of a passing car. They were his eyes, too.

He watched her, transfixed, for the rest of the Fine Feathered Family’s set. She could do a million and one things with the hoop, rotating it around her waist and shoulders and knees, snaking it across her body and tossing it nearly into the rafters before catching it with a flourish behind her back. He saw his own punished and triumphant body in the way she moved, knew that she was driven by the same relentless energy that pushed him to make something impossible look easy. They may have expressed the burning drive within them in different ways—she with a hula hoop, he with a dirt bike—but the engine powering them through life was the same. They were unlike everyone around them. They were cut from the same cloth.

Atop the mushroom, in the luminous circle of her hoop, Luna seemed barely human—more like an animal forced into a human body by a spell in a fairy tale, like at any moment she could sprout fur or fangs or feathers and go bounding away into the darkness. And maybe it was just Owen’s imagination, but it seemed like she was watching him, too.

As Ariel Crow introduced the band’s encore, Owen started pushing his way through the crowd. Sweat and incense and sticky-sweet pot smoke clung to him as he pressed past bare limbs and snarls of dry hair and steamy puffs of breath mouthing the words to the Fine Feathered Family’s final song.