Surprisingly, Bradley had nothing new to tell them by the next time they reconvened. "Nothing's around," he shrugged, brandishing his EMF reader as proof. "I mean," he amended. "There's stuff around, but nothing specific or trackable. Just lay low for a while, I guess."
Evan just shrugged, but Dylan looked hopeful. "Does this mean we get a day off?"
Georgie perked up at that, but Bradley folded his arms and regarded them all sternly. "Go to school," he said. "I've been picking up the calls from the attendance office, but soon they're gonna start emailing."
In the background, Georgie folded his arms and grumbled. "I knew they'd call."
Henrietta rolled her eyes to the ceiling, but sighed in assent. "Alright," she said. "Alright. We'll go."
The next day, when Henrietta came by bright and early to pick him up, Dylan almost wishes that another ghost would come hurtling from the snowy roadside and flip the car over as they sped off towards the school. He hadn't done any homework in what felt like ever, and there was pretty much no way his teacher weren't going to start in with that whole old and tired detention and/or referral routine. Not to mention the fact that he wasn't sure that any of them would have enough energy to keep up their usual snarling antagonism towards anyone besides each other.
No ghost attacks were forthcoming however, and eventually they were forced to split up into their respective classes.
Once Dylan was alone, he was somewhat ashamed to find himself jumping at small noises and constantly snapping his head around to look at disturbances he'd seen out of the corner of his eye, constantly worried that the next ghost had somehow tailed them to school and was waiting until they were all separated to pounce on them.
It was even more of a relief than usual once the lunch bell rang, and Dylan hurried out of the classroom before the teacher could call him back to discuss his abysmal test scores, or whatever.
As he was making his way over to their usual lunch spot, Dylan caught sight of Evan's back a few feet in front of him through the mass exodus of students. Dylan hurried to catch up with him. It was good to see someone who understood what the fuck was happening, unlike their hideously oblivious classmates, and Dylan couldn't help but reach up to slip his hand into Evan's as they walked, no matter how gay it was.
"Hey," he said, trying to sound casual.
"Hey," said Evan back, but his tone was carefully neutral, and he tensed up the second Dylan grabbed his hand. He endured it for a few more seconds, and then as they were about to reach the back of the school, he disentangled his hand in an elaborate pretense of smoothing down his hair.
Dylan, who would not be deterred so easily, just folded his arms and stared at him. Evan looked guiltily away.
"My arm's bugging me," he said. It was an obvious lie, but Dylan didn't say anything, too busy battling down his vague and ridiculous feelings of hurt.
"Yeah," he said instead. "Sorry."
They walked the rest of the way in silence, and once they got to their spot Evan sat as far away from Dylan as he could get.
That just seemed slightly gratuitous, and as Evan carried on about the shitty day he'd had talking to all his shitty teachers and dealing with all the shitty people, Dylan started to feel somewhat more annoyed than confused.
By the time lunch was over, he'd talked himself into a kind of a rage, and even Georgie was noticing.
"What's up?" he asked curiously, pushing himself up from where he'd been leaning against Henrietta's side, thumbing through Ike's English notes.
"Nothing," Dylan snapped, unable to resist sending a peevish look in Evan's direction. "I just want to get this shit over with, you know?"
"It's stressing us all out," Henrietta agreed, even as she gave him a look that suggested she understood that, bizarrely, ghost hunting wasn't the real problem.
Before they could force him to submit to any further questioning, however, the bell rang to signify the end of lunch, and Dylan left quickly to endure the rest of his school day.
One good thing that had come of Evan's brush-off was that it was something to concentrate on other than the idea that ghosts could be following him around, ready to reveal themselves at any moment. Dylan spent most of history moodily carving an ankh into the center of his desk and wondering when it became such a crime to hold hands with your maybe sort of halfway-boyfriend every once in a while.
Eventually, school ended, and he was forced to meet up with Evan once more at Henrietta's car. They were the first two to arrive, and Dylan leaned against the hood and refused to look over while Evan hovered around with a vaguely apologetic expression on his face, looking for all the world like he was going to say sorry but not actually doing it before Henrietta came over with Georgie.
Henrietta drove them all back to her place, instead of their respective houses, to see if Bradley had any spiritual activity updates.
It turned out that he did, meeting them at the door and still waving around his stupid-looking EMF thing.
"I've got a reading on the next one," he said grimly. "I don't know why it took so long to show itself, so be careful, I guess. Here's the address," he said, passing it over to Henrietta, who squinted at it carefully and then shrugged.
"Just some place in Breckenridge."
Georgie scoffed. "Who's cool in Breckenridge?"
Dylan paused to consider. "There is that one kid. The one we met at the Skinny Puppy gig, remember?"
"Yeah," said Evan, but what are the odds—"
Before he could go any further, Georgie silenced him with a look.
"What are the odds of any of this?" Henrietta asked, and then motioned for Dylan to go on.
He just shrugged. "I remember there was a kid from Breckenridge who was pretty hardcore. I think she went backstage."
"Awesome," said Georgie. "Let's call her, then, set up a gig, and we're ready to go. Just like last time."
"Just one problem," Dylan added gloomily. "She thinks our band sucks." She'd posted on a local music forum about a month ago, talking about what posers they were. Harsh words, but Dylan could hardly deny them, seeing as the Manic Episodes' primary audience was a bunch of faggy vampire kids and hipsters.
Henrietta scowled. "Then she doesn't know shitty-but-promising music when she hears it," she said. "So how do we get into her house?"
Dylan shrugged. "I dunno."
"Maybe we could disguise ourselves as another band," Georgie suggested. "An actually cool one."
Evan rolled his eyes. "How would that even work?"
"It'd have to," said Georgie grimly. "Or else she won't live to insult any more shitty-but-promising bands."
"I think we should do it," Dylan put in, not because the plan wasn't ridiculous, but because he was pretty interested at the moment in doing whatever it was that Evan didn't want to do.
"Alright," said Evan, defeated. "Alright."
A few days, well-placed flyers, and tactical phone calls later, they'd managed to convince the Breckenridge kid that a friend of a friend of a friend's cool band from Arizona needed somewhere to put on a house show, and her house was the best possible candidate for the job. Against all odds, she agreed, and so the Manic Episodes were reborn as Adolescent Antisocial Behavior, given a halfassed quasi-punk makeover, and set out for Breckenridge with instruments in tow.
The whole drive, Dylan was torn between imagining the myriad of things that could go wrong with this plan, and doing his best to physically communicate his displeasure with Evan. On the one hand, the Breckenridge kid might recognize them and kick them out before they could get anything done, or the ghost could seriously fuck up someone in the audience, seeing as it would more than likely consist of people who were actually cool this time instead of lame conformist faggy vampire kids.
On the other hand, Evan looked way obnoxious just sitting there strapped into his seat, going over lyrics and biting his thumbnail. It was practically Dylan's civic duty to sigh as loudly as possible whenever Evan so much as glanced his way, and noisily readjust himself in his own seat when it looked like Evan might be concentrating too hard on something. With any luck he'd fudge the lyrics or something in the middle of the set, and they could kick him out of the band and replace him with the Breckenridge girl, who in this fantasy scenario suddenly loved them, and—
Before he could finish his daydream, Henrietta pulled into the driveway of the right house and slid the door open, glancing into the backseat to make sure they were ready. What she saw seemed to satisfy her, but Dylan was definitely not feeling very prepared.
He forced himself to get out and help lug up equipment, however, purposefully holding his bass up higher than he needed to after ringing the doorbell to her house, just in case she recognized them through the gratuitous safety pins and patched jackets.
She didn't, however, waving them inside and then out through the back door, where her patio was strewn with Christmas lights, Chinese lanterns, and a few people smoking cigarettes and standing around disinterestedly, wrapped up in coats.
Dylan looked around nervously. They'd never really played outside before, and he wondered if it would have any kind of effect on what they were really trying to do. He noticed Evan standing around and wearing a similar expression and immediately switched his own to a scowl that radiated annoyance, attempting to discourage him from coming over to talk. He made no move to, however. Dylan wasn't sure why, but that pissed him off even more.
Soon Georgie finished setting up his kit. The four of them stood there, ready to start, and Dylan noted a subtle shift in atmosphere as the people milling around them paused for a few seconds to check them out, seeing if they were any good before restarting their idle conversations.
Evan, who looked kind of seasick, introduced them.
"We're The Ma—Adolescent Antisocial Behavior."
They got a few looks like, 'so what?' and Dylan just flicked his bangs out of his eyes, concentrated on getting the timing right after Georgie counted them in, tried not to pay attention to the carefully-arranged candles still burning on the top of Henrietta's keyboard.
The chick whose house they were at wandered by with a beer in her hand, wrinkling her nose as she heard the beginning of their first song.
"They sound like that one band," Dylan heard her say, but he forced himself not to listen to the rest. Some of the people there actually seemed to like it, nodding their heads in time and humming along to the more accessible melodies, which were pretty much none of them. Dylan would take what he could get, however.
It was almost starting to feel like just another show with a decent audience. Dylan hardly felt the chill of the night as it began to settle in, and a few people actually cheered as they finished their first song. If it wasn't for Henrietta hastily whispering words copied down in a notebook as she passed a finger back and forth through the flame of a candle, he could almost pretend it was a regular gig.
Eventually, however, her summoning efforts paid off. The air got so cold that it was impossible to ignore, colder than any night chill could ever make it.
Dylan noticed a girl in the front, the only one who wasn't talking to anyone. She had long tangles of hair and hollow-looking eyes. Dylan knew before it happened that it would be her this time, that she was where the cold was coming from and she would be where the ghost would come from, too. Not for the first time, he wondered if she'd ever been a real person, and shuddered to think of the answer either way.
Soon, however, there was no time for thinking. It ripped and tore its way out of her body, same as the last concert but different than from the movie theater. Maybe it had to camouflage itself in public places, or something. Or maybe it was just doing it out of some kind of sick sense of fun, just to hear the screams of the people around it. Dylan couldn't guess exactly how self-aware it was. All he knew was that it was their job to take care of it.
Henrietta's weird candle-finger thing seemed to have paid off, because it stopped short of their makeshift stage without trying anything, loosing a terrible screeching roar that resounded throughout all of their minds.
For a moment, Dylan was relieved that it wasn't trying to hurt them. Relief quickly turned to horror, however, as he saw it pick up a younger-looking boy who was cowering in a corner.
"Holy shit," the boy whimpered. In a moment, his head was smacking hard against concrete, and he was unconscious.
Georgie turned to Henrietta in horror. "It's actually hurting people!" he called out, sounding distressed.
"Let's hurry up and get rid of it while it's distracted, then!" Henrietta yelled back frantically, over the din of fleeing concertgoers. "You all know what to do."
Henrietta and Georgie closed their eyes, and Dylan could immediately sense the energy building up from each of them. He screwed his own eyes shut and did his best to summon his own energy, but every time he felt on the verge of something, his eyes kept cracking open before he realized what they were doing, and glancing over to Evan.
Against his will, Dylan could feel the surge of negative emotions he'd been feeling at his earlier rejection being brought to the forefront of his mind. He felt the horrible, violating feeling of the spirit inside his mind, rummaging through, and then he felt the even more sickening presence of its satisfaction.
He struggled for a moment to put it all together, but soon enough he realized the truth of it. New Agey as it sounded, the spirit seemed to literally be feeding off of his negative energy. Past caring about their dumb fight, or a lack of public hand-holding, Dylan opened his eyes all the way as another kid screamed and focused all of his energy on catching Evan's eye, attempting to communicate with a single look just what exactly was going on.
Remarkably, Evan actually seemed to understand. He fought his way over through the treacherously snarled Christmas lights, finally taking Dylan's hand in his own. If it weren't for the evil spirit raging all around them and delivering what appeared to be an awful lot of concussions, it would have been romantic.
"I'm sorry," Evan was saying frantically, voice small over the din going on around them. Georgie and Henrietta were both yelling at them, not understanding why they were pausing for a heart to heart now of all times. "I was just thinking about how I didn't want us to be like all those Britney-Justin wannabes at our school, and all of a sudden I just got so freaked out, I still don't get why—"
Dylan cut him off with a squeeze to his hand and a rare smile.
"Yeah, okay, apology accepted," he said. For some reason, he felt all of his irrational angers and annoyances of the past few days melting away at once. "Now, can we please get down to it?"
"What he said," Georgie half-shouted, hurling one drumstick at the spirit as it lifted a girl high into the air and then dumped her prone body back down on the grass. It turned when Georgie hit it, apparently deciding that it'd had enough of the small-time.
Dylan felt much better now, however, and he found it infinitely easier to reach inside himself for the stores of energy he knew he had now that Evan was close by and didn't weirdly hate him for some reason.
The telltale build was coming up, and when Evan shouted Dylan knew that it was time, letting go and watching with no small measure of satisfaction as the spirit was suffused and then slammed apart and then sent off to oblivion, all thanks to them.
The audience members who hadn't been hurt came back one by one, awed, or angry or, once again, asking for them to play at parties. Most of them couldn't believe what they'd seen, even though it had taken place right in front of them.
The highlight of the night, however, came when the girl who had been dumped down on the grass had woken up and come over to them, rubbing a lump on her head but otherwise looking incredibly enthusiastic.
"You guys were awesome," she said, looking them from face to face.
"Thanks," Henrietta said, smiling magnanimously.
"Listen," said the girl. "My dad's talent coordinator for this dive bar in Denver, would you guys mind if I told him to book you? Your performance was amazing," she said dreamily, still rubbing the lump. "So intense, you know? Really visceral."
Dylan just kept looking at her, hardly daring to believe it.
"Seriously?" asked Georgie.
"Oh, yeah," she answered blithely. "Give me one of your phone numbers and I'll be in touch, yeah?"
Still looking slightly dazed, Henrietta wrote out her phone number on the girl's arm in purple Sharpie. She bounced off, probably to look for attention for her head trauma.
"Let's hope she doesn't forget about this once she's been treated for a concussion," Henrietta said in a low voice. "Now let's get out of here before someone calls the cops."
They managed to make their escape fairly quickly. On the ride back, Dylan sat next to Evan. They didn't hold hands, but they were much closer together than they strictly had to be. Dylan would take it.
Idly, he wondered why he'd gotten so angry about the whole thing in the first place, and why Evan had been so dead set against it from the start. It just didn't seem like them, really. Dylan shuddered as he remembered the ghost feeding off of his negative energy, and wondered with a profound sense of revulsion if it could have possibly been the ghost's doing, if it could have hidden itself until it could create the conflict between him and Evan, and then thrive off of the bad energy between them.
The whole thing left him feeling nauseous, and he did his best to put it out of his mind.