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“That’s sorta true.”
    â€œSo you’re pregnant, huh?” Wren had moved on jauntily without missing a beat. “That’s great! What a gorgeous child you’re gonna have!”
    Further elaboration would have been much too intimate with this stranger, so Shawna just widened her eyes in mute appreciation.
    There were times when she seriously wanted to clobber the old man.

Chapter 4
    DARKWAD
    â€œS o what’s the book about?” Ben asked pleasantly without lifting his eyes from his sewing machine.
    It already seemed like “his” machine, Michael realized, though they had bought it only yesterday at Serramonte Mall, and Ben had never sewn so much as a trouser hem in all his forty years. But that had not stopped him from leaping into the mysteries of bobbins and threaders with the same bravado he’d no doubt brought to outboard motors and snowmobiles in his adolescence.
    Michael, by contrast, was still intimidated by the Kindle in his hands.
    â€œA bunch of high school girls,” he answered, describing Shawna’s new best-seller. “It’s all done in text messages. So far, they’re nasty little shits.”
    â€œDoesn’t that get old?”
    â€œWell, yeah. Nasty little shits do.”
    â€œI mean, the text messages.”
    â€œOh—you’d think so, but . . . you get used to it. It becomes its own language. The cruelty is more pronounced because everything’s abbreviated.”
    Ben just murmured, absorbed in his sewing.
    â€œIt’s creepy as hell,” Michael added, “but it’s hard to put down.”
    â€œThey kill one of their classmates, right?”
    Michael winced and rolled his eyes. “Not. That. I. Know. Of. Betsy Ross. Thanks for the spoiler alert.”
    Ben grinned, exposing the gap between his two front teeth. “Sorry. Just read it in a review.”
    â€œThat’s why I haven’t read the reviews.”
    â€œShit, fuck, piss!”
    Michael checked to make sure this outburst of Tourette’s had not been directed at him. Ben, to his relief, was addressing his sewing machine, thereby validating the possessory pronoun. He and Mr. Singer were having their first fight.
    â€œThis fucker is supposed to be heavy-duty. The clerk told us it could handle EL wire.”
    There was nothing useful Michael could add. He had only just learned about EL wire—electroluminescent wire, the magic plastic filament that made clothing and bicycles dazzle like Christmas trees. Ben was sewing a coil of it on the back of a patchwork jacket they had bought at a Tibetan shop in the Castro.
    â€œIt’s this cotton,” Ben added in a calmer tone. “It bunches up, and the needle gets stuck.”
    â€œYou know,” Michael offered, “I like the jacket on its own. It doesn’t need anything on it. And I could wear it after Burning Man.”
    Ben wasn’t buying it. “You have to be lit, baby. It’s dangerous otherwise. It’s pitch-black out there on the playa.”
    â€œBut won’t all that stitching fuck it up?”
    Ben looked up. “It’ll fuck you up if you get run over by an art car.”
    Michael had already seen enough photos of Burning Man to imagine himself being mowed down by a disco bus full of half-naked hippie chicks—reduced to a grease spot on a vast Nevada alkali flat. He could see that quite easily.
    â€œYou don’t want to be a darkwad,” Ben added.
    â€œA what?”
    â€œThat’s what they call people who don’t light themselves.”
    Michael cringed inwardly. Darkwad. They had names for their miscreants, just like at summer camp or on Survivor . This temporary city of liberated souls, for all its “radical self-expression,” had rules out the ass. Some of them made sense, like Leaving No Trace (cleaning up after yourself) and Decommodification (not selling things to each other), but Michael sensed a