The Friendship Song Read Online Free Page A

but I felt a sort of heartbeat behind it, a dark rapid pounding rhythm I heard more with my feet than with my ears.
    â€œDrums?” I whispered to Rawnie. Whispering seemed like the thing to do at the time.
    She just nodded. Maybe her voice wasn’t working. I could see her shaking. The aisle was getting too narrow for both of us to go at once, and Rawnie slowed down and signaled me with her hand to go ahead. I didn’t want to do it, but I knew it wasn’t fair to make her go first when I was the one who’d had the bright idea to do this. So I went.
    The aisle took a turn, and the next thing I knew, I was heading straight toward the music and looking straight at something big and bright red, and I stopped where I was. I lifted my hand to point, and I wanted to tell Rawnie to look, but before I could say anything a voice yelled, “Yo!”
    I wanted to either run or faint, but I just stood there. Rawnie crammed herself up next to me, and we both stared, and there was Gus, smiling all over her pink face at both of us.
    â€œYo, Groover!” she called. “Who’s your friend?” She didn’t look the least bit mad or anything. Not that we were doing anything wrong, but for some reason I felt—I don’t know. Like we were trespassing or party-crashing or something. Like we were breaking and entering and somebody might call the cops. I just felt really creepy about being there, and I was glad Gus wasn’t anywhere near us where she could get her big hands on us.
    I wondered what she was doing. There was no way I could tell, because she was on the other side of the big red—car, it was a car sitting up on concrete blocks. A huge car, bright and slick, like red red lipstick. In fact, an absolutely humongous red car with majorly large fins, and Gus was looking at Rawnie and me over a sheet of plywood laid across its seats, over the top of where the roof should have been, so I realized it was a convertible.
    I think Gus knew who Rawnie was all the time, because she just kept talking. “Isn’t she a beauty?” I thought at first she meant Rawnie, but then the direction she pointed that schnoz of hers told me she meant the car. “She’s a nineteen fifty-nine Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. The jerk I got her from kept her under a tarp and made her rust.” Gus made that sound like a punishable crime, then let it go. “But I’ll take care of her. Isn’t she something?”
    I guess she was, because I’d never seen a car that big, and the shape of the fins and taillights made it look rocket-powered. But I wasn’t interested in talking about a junker car right then. I said, “Gus, did you hear something? Like some kind of weird music?”
    â€œWell, I’ll be.” She glanced from me to Rawnie, who just stood there looking back at her. Gus seemed kind of surprised. “Yeah, I did hear something,” she said after a minute, “but it’s gone now.”
    She was right about that. It was.
    â€œYou guys want to help me put another coat of paint on this baby?” Gus asked.
    If she’d been working on the car for long, that sort of explained the lights. There were four big lights set up around it, strange-looking ones not on poles but in six-sided metal buildings made of tall pillars with funky metal flowers at the top. These things were standing in just about the place where we had seen weird lights in all colors. But these light bulbs were plain white, and they were bright, not dim like the ones we had seen.
    Rawnie was looking at them too, and she took a couple of steps forward and asked Gus, “What kind of lights are those?”
    â€œNice, aren’t they? Art deco. They’re off an old bridge.” Which didn’t exactly answer the question, somehow, but at that point my father walked in.
    I say “in” because the car and the lights were in sort of a clearing in the middle of the backyard and