Page 47 of Torch Songs

He blinked. “You’ve got another sister?”

Maureen shook her head in disgust. “Tiffany. She’s pretty awful. Last Christmas Dad locked her out of his and Larx’s house until she could come over and not be a twat, and she spent the entire time on the phone with the grandparents, trying to get away from their awful den of gay iniquity.”

His heart ached for her. The only reason his father had kept talking to him when he’d come out was that Guthrie and Seth were friends, and Seth was gay, and by that time, Fiddler and the Crabs was making some money. The minute Seth had left for Italy and it was just Guthrie, he’d ceased to exist for Butch Woodson. If it hadn’t been for Guthrie’s uncle Jock, nobody in the family would have kept contact with himperiod.

“Family can hurt sometimes,” he said, his throat dry. He’d hated talking about this with Tad. It had felt so… sosordid. So shameful, compared to the warmth and dedication Tad and April had to each other. In light of what these people had, his relationship with his father felt like a dirty secret, something he didn’t want to contaminate their little circle of kindness.

“Mm…,” Maureen said. Then, through the trees, they could both see the ambient light of emergency klieg lights erected high up—not higher than the ginormous pine trees that surrounded them but midway—probably using the trees as mounts. “Andhere’s a place where it doesn’t. Here, turn right and you’ll see the spot we’re heading for. It’s, uh, kind of hard to miss.”

Hard to miss was right.

In the middle of that darkness, the lights—whichweresecured to a tree and powered by a generator somewhere far back—hovered like a UFO, and the mass of people looked like something out ofClose Encounters.Except on closer examination, nobody was wearing a white Tyvek suit. In fact, Guthrie saw a bunch of shivering people in T-shirts, board shorts, and in one case, a Pusheen button-down.

“Pull up to the shoulder there,” Maureen said, “butdon’tgo beyond the yellow tape.”

Guthrie frowned, seeing nothing beyond the yellow tape but more road. “What’s the yellow tape for?”

Maureen darted him a quick glance. “About twenty yards beyond the tape is the service track that Larx rolled down. According to Mandeep—he’s the geology teacher—the granite shelf that supports this hillside ends about ten feet beyond the yellow line. Everything else is on decomposed granite, scree, and tree roots, and too much weight can pull it down. It’s part of the reason we haven’t been able to get them, right? It runs all along this side of the canyon’s perimeter. So the yellow line is a guideline—nothing heavy goes beyond it.”

Guthrie frowned. “But if cell service is shit, and you can’t go beyond the yellow line, how do you talk to the guys in the canyon.”

Maureen shuddered and pointed to a weird apparatus hanging from a faraway tree. “That,” she said. “We borrowed it from the theater department. Christiana—Livvy’s little sister—hung out over the edge of the canyon and hollered.”

Guthrie thought of that, and while not particularly afraid of heights, he still felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. “Great.”

“Livvy was pissed. She would have done it, but, you know….”

“Preggers,” Guthrie said, and Maureen nodded. He put the car in park, clutched the sweatshirt Olivia had given to him in lieu of Tad’s shirt, and took a breath. “Let’s go deliver some care, right?”

“Right,” Maureen said. She flung the door open, slid out of the pickup truck, and sent out the siren song to all teenagers everywhere. “Food, people! I’ve got food, blankets, medical supplies. Everybody get their asses over here and help!”

Suddenly Guthrie was besieged. Four teenagers practicallyteleportedto the truck, hands out. Not for the food, although Guthrie wouldn’t have blamed them, but for the supplies to be handed down to the guys in the canyon.

He was surprised by a kid a few inches taller than he was, with blue eyes and dark blond hair, appearing at his elbow, saying, “Here, give me the medical bag and the eggcrate. We can use the eggcrate to wrap the med bag and make sure it gets down there intact.”

Guthrie went to do that, and the kid said, “And by the way, tell Livvy she owes me a Powerwolf sweatshirt, ’cause, you know, that one still has life in it.”

Guthrie grinned at him and looked down at the sweatshirt Livvy had pulled out for him, which had a bright neon zombie horse on the back and the band’s logo on the front. “You can have it back when this is over,” he said. “I promise, I had no idea I was trespassing.”

“Kirby,” Maureen huffed out in frustration, “you know she only did that so she’d have something to get you for Christmas. We were at a loss this year.”

Kirby grinned. “Great,” he said. “Keep it. There are some Rare Americans concert tickets I’m dying to get my hands on for February. Kellen, I’ll get you to that concert if it’s the last thing I do.”

“I owe you a car trip with CW’s greatest hits,” said the shorter, stockier young man with the black hair. “Just so you know.”

“Ugh,” said the girl who could only be Christiana, Olivia’s little sister. “You can both leave me out of your caveman bonding rituals. I’m listening to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, and you all can bite me.”

“I like me some Taylor,” said the tiny fourteen- fifteen-year-old? dodging in to take some of the load. Guthrie, trying to remember Maureen’s description of people, thought this must be the little brother of the guy in the minivan.

“Or Beyoncé or Rihanna,” Kellen was saying. “But the country western guys will melt my panties, and sometimes I’m down for that.”

Kirby burst into low dirty laughter, and Christiana rolled her eyes. While they were talking, they were also unloading the truck, and by the time Guthrie turned to take the bear-proof ice chest Olivia had packed, everybody had something, and the only thing left was the eggcrate and sleeping bags he’d saved for the back of the truck.

And his guitar, of course, which was in the lockbox.

He ventured with the youngsters to a sort of giant erector-set construction site and tried to put together what he was seeing.

“The edge of the canyon and everything about twenty yards back from it is unstable,” Maureen said as they set everything down and motioned for the workmen and a few guys who looked like teachers or search and rescue workers to come get food. “They’re building a sort of treadmill using PVC pipe and three rows of paracord. There’s the EMT basket—” She pointed to a coffin-shaped metal basket that looked like what helicopters dangled when they were lifting victims into the cockpit to whisk them to safety. “—and it’s hooked up to a winch on a flatbedthat’s parked way back on solid ground. The idea is we can drop the basket down and it will slide to them, then pull it up—” Now she pointed to pulleys suspended by trees high above the canyon’s edge. “—and pull the basket back on top of the treadmill until it’s on solid ground and we can let them out and have EMTs ready to check them over.”

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