Page 1 of Dead Rockstar

One

Oh, you think your life is complicated? Try falling in love with a dead rock star. One you've brought back – totally on accident - from the dead.

I mean, a good man is hard to find, right? Sometimes you've gotta get a little creative.

Let me start over.

My name is Stormy Spooner. I’m a lifelong atheist, a vegan, a librarian - and I’m a necromancer.

How did I get into this mess? I wear glasses, for fuck’s sake. I’d like to say that your guess is as good as mine, but it was my own fault.

You wouldn’t be the first to tell me that it’s impossible to be a necromancer and an atheist. As my best friend, Sloan, loves to tell me, “You don’t even, like, believe in anything. How can you practice magic if you don’t believe in it?”

And once I would have agreed. I didn't believe in magic, and I sure as hell didn't practice it. What I did was more of a pathetic, drunken fumbling that accidentally hit the mark. It was supposed to be a joke.

When I announced to Sloan, between sips of our dark-mint-and-mocha iced coffees, that sweltering, humid summer day, that I was going to become a necromancer and raise the dead – well, one dead, specifically – I was just kidding around. I have a dark, twisted sense of humor. It gets me into trouble a lot. But this time, it got me some dead guy with pretty green eyes and hair so black it absorbs the light.

Oh, come on. Haven’t you ever had a crush on a dead guy? You know you have. Jim Morrison, maybe? Jimi Hendrix? James Dean?

All the hot dead guys have names that start with J, seems like. Except for my dead guy. The guy whose green eyes stared down at me from the posters on my wall all throughout my lusty teenage years, the guy whose voice ignited a million fantasies, the guy whose death at the maddeningly-young age of 38 had haunted me for years. The guy who had faded into an enigma, just another dead rock star in a sea of dead rock stars. Pick your poison, they’re a dime a dozen. My dead guy was never really famous, not the kind of famous that John Lennon was (another “J”), or Madonna or Prince. He was a blip, a cult-favorite, a moment in time. More people these days haven't heard of him than have. My dead guy is what you call “obscure” (and why Sloan loves to joke that I'm a hipster). My dead guy, the enigmatic, dark and mildly terrifying Philip Deville, former lead singer and bassist (and sometime harmonica player) of the Bloomer Demons, is my favorite musician of all time and the orchestrator of my sexuality. I can’t put too fine a point on it, really. He was the guy. My dead guy.

Well, until he wasn’t. Dead, I mean.

You’re going to have to just trust me on this, and I’ll tell you the story, but let’s just get it out of the way right out of the gate. There's no hiding the dude; he did his best, it's just not in his essence to be hidden, and honestly? What's the point? My dead guy is no longer dead. He’s very much alive – or undead, which I think he’d prefer, because it has that gothic sort of feel to it, and that’s what gets him all hot and bothered, and that's how I like him.

Believe it or don’t, but I raised the dead. I’m a necromancer. And unfortunately, because of a certain hot, (un)dead rock star, I'm going to have to do it again.

I remember the moment when the thought first came to me. I was guzzling my mint-mocha whatever on my lunch break, enjoying the sweet iciness on my tongue, letting it flow down my throat until I felt the first pangs of brain-freeze in my temple.

“I’m going to become a necromancer,” I announced. Sloan, my best friend since childhood, was sitting across from me at the Jitter Bug, our favorite coffee shop and the place where we usually met on our breaks, which we always took together. It was the only place in town that made a reasonable knock-off of a Frappuccino that's vegan.

“Well, that’s fucking stupid,” she replied without missing a beat.

“Why?” I demanded.

“For starters, genius, you’re an atheist. A smug atheist. It’s all you talk about, Sagan and Hawking and shit and how religion is the opiate of the masses. Necromancy is magic. How many times have you told me you don't believe in anything remotely spiritual or paranormal?”

“It's all about intention,” I countered. She, as a relapsed Christian – her term –couldn’t be more knowledgeable on this subject than me. I’m a tad haughty about my intellect. It’s a librarian thing.

“But how can you have the intention if you don't believe in it?” she argued, and I sniffed. “Not to mention it’s utter hock-and-booey.”

“Hock and what?”

“Hock-and-booey.” She smirked at me from beneath her perfectly coiffed blonde bangs. Sloan is your usual nightmare – long blonde hair, blue eyes, her parents loved her enough to get her braces, blah blah blah. All of that and her ass is absolutely huge. She has the gall to complain about it, too. Meanwhile, I'm sitting on my pancake bottom, hating her.

“Ok, you were either going for cock-and-bull or boo-hockey and you didn’t land on either.”

“Fuck you,” she said, popping a chocolate covered espresso bean in her mouth. Caffeine junkies, the both of us. We lived at the Jitter Bug year-round. We'd decided back in college, while in the midst of the 90s Friends craze, that we needed our own Central Perk. While the shenanigans of Phoebe and Chandler had become dated and cheesy, Sloan and I had retained our love for coffee and snark at our favorite artsy table. People write song lyrics on it in sharpie and that's the kind of overly sincere kitsch that I can appreciate, especially since we’re right on the outskirts of bumfuck, aka Brunswick, Georgia, where creativity goes to die.

I decided to change tactics. “If you could bring one dead celebrity back to earth for one night,” I asked her, scooping a dollop of chocolate-tinted coconut cream on my spoon and plopping it on my tongue, “who would it be and why?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Mister Rogers,” she said, taking a somehow prim sip of her drink. “He likes me just the way I am. And I bet he gives the best hugs.”

“I was thinking more along the line of dead rock stars, you girl scout.” I spooned up more cream. “Like one you'd want to fuck.”

“Oh. Hard pass, then,” she said, pulling out her chap-stick and running it over her lips. She did that about fifty times a day. Chap-stick addiction is a real thing and it’s weird.

“Come on, you're a slut. You must have one.”

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