Read Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) for Free Online

game on his phone and the room began to hum. My ears fought to drown out the sound but it was strong. Too strong. I ignored my brother and marched into my old room.
    Which was stripped down to a stained mattress, an old sheet I think was on the bed six months ago when I left for Boston, a ton of cigarette butts, and enough aluminum beer cans to side a house.
    Which meant it looked like I expected.
    I dumped my shit by the door and stretched out on the bed. It smelled like cigarette ashes, Axe body spray and corn chips. My eyes began to count the tiny holes in the ceiling tiles above me. I was supposed to be thinking about Johnny. About Dad and prison. About getting on a plane in two days for the big show. 
    But all I could think about was a girl with purple and blue and red and orange and everything hair.
    Liam had grabbed me the other day at the hospital as I left before I did something stupid. Pulled on my arm. He wasn’t pissed, but there had been something in his eyes.
    All he’d said was, “Careful with Maggie. Google her. Last name’s Stevenson with a v. Google her name and don’t stop at the first five pages.”
    And then he’d walked away.
    Stupid me. I’d listened to him.
    Maggie Stevenson. Margaret Stevenson. First few pages I found people who weren’t her. By page five I found nothing but her. Seven years ago.
    Holy fucking shit. No kidding there was something deeper there. I had a smartphone with 4G, earbuds, and long rides with truckers. My travel reading hadn’t exactly been fun. 
    But it had been informative.
    Turns out she lived in St. Louis, too. Only Maggie lived in one of those suburbs where people like me did manual labor. We were their gardeners and roofers and remodelers and junk haulers.
    I remembered her case. Who wouldn’t? If you lived in St. Louis back then it was all over the news, the grainy security camera footage of her attack shown over and over. Then the trial a year and a half later.
    She’d testified openly, and some newspaper had posted her real name and picture, a senior high school photo that showed a smiling, brown-haired girl with dark brown eyes that sparkled. Clear skin. No piercings. No psychedelic rainbow hair. No fake blue eyes. She looked like a boring sorority chick. Like the National Honor Society do-gooder.
    She kind of looked like Amy. Nothing wrong with that, but what a difference now .
    Why was she, of all people, hitting on me ? How did someone who went through that—a gang rape, a trial, three college guys sentenced to prison until they’re in their fifties—end up propositioning me on a rooftop in Boston one spring night?
    Why me?
    Too much. Life was too much right now. Maggie. Dad’s return to prison. Johnny’s tweaking. My plane ride to L.A. tomorrow...it all swirled in me until sleep just claimed me, like wave after wave eating a sand castle on the beach until you never knew anything had been there.
    I barely registered Johnny coming into the room, standing on tiptoes, and slowly unscrewing the lightbulb from the lamp. By the time he left I was sound asleep, anywhere but here.
    Which was fine by me.
    Maggie
    The flight home was memorable only because half the passengers on the plane appeared to be watching the infamous chicken and gerbil video on their phones and laptops. That stupid video went viral like a nerdy Asian dance video of a Jedi panda on nitrous oxide, brilliantly playing the piano upside down.
    The cab brought me home. As we pulled up and I paid the driver, I looked at the house. Really looked. Nothing had changed in the five months since I’d been home for the holidays. The bushes were still neat and trimmed like a mustache around the front door. The white siding had been power-washed and the black shutters were, well...black. Red impatiens peeked out from hanging baskets along the guttered front of the house, spaced about five feet apart. Mom had stone bunnies placed strategically throughout the mulch beds alongside the concrete