Vexley Vane

September 2002, Costa Mesa, California It was Thursday, and the tickets were still on the table. They had been there a week. Nobody had put them away and nobody had picked them up; only the fan moved the top one, as it had a week ago. Vex sat down next to them twice and got up twice. Cayde counted them once, as if there might be fewer by now. Roxy didn't touch them. Nobody said yes. Nova opened the notebook. She didn't turn the page; it was on the right one, at the six hundred. She worked...

August 2002, Costa Mesa, California By the beginning of August all four of them had jobs. They didn't decide it. They didn't sit down at the coffee table, nobody took out a sheet of paper, there was no fourth column that somebody finally wrote down. It happened in a week, separately, and by the time they noticed, it had already happened, the way you wake up one morning and find you've caught a cold. Vex started at the record store, the one where they'd greeted him by name in the spring. One...

July 2002, Costa Mesa, California They packed up in ten minutes. That was the new thing. Until now, packing up had meant the instruments going down the stairs and the drums fitting into the trunk on the umpteenth try, with Roxy sitting on a couple of cases. Now there was a cardboard box as well, forty-one shirts inside, neatly folded, the name on the front, and a shoebox with forty-three CDs, and on top of the two boxes, Nova's notebook. Roxy went in the bleach shirt. Nova remarked quietly...