âThatâs sorta true.â
âSo youâre pregnant, huh?â Wren had moved on jauntily without missing a beat. âThatâs great! What a gorgeous child youâre gonna have!â
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
âS o whatâs the book about?â Ben asked pleasantly without lifting his eyes from his sewing machine.
It already seemed like âhisâ 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 heâd no doubt brought to outboard motors and snowmobiles in his adolescence.
Michael, by contrast, was still intimidated by the Kindle in his hands.
âA bunch of high school girls,â he answered, describing Shawnaâs new best-seller. âItâs all done in text messages. So far, theyâre nasty little shits.â
âDoesnât that get old?â
âWell, yeah. Nasty little shits do.â
âI mean, the text messages.â
âOhâyouâd think so, but . . . you get used to it. It becomes its own language. The cruelty is more pronounced because everythingâs abbreviated.â
Ben just murmured, absorbed in his sewing.
âItâs creepy as hell,â Michael added, âbut itâs hard to put down.â
âThey kill one of their classmates, right?â
Michael winced and rolled his eyes. âNot. That. I. Know. Of. Betsy Ross. Thanks for the spoiler alert.â
Ben grinned, exposing the gap between his two front teeth. âSorry. Just read it in a review.â
âThatâs why I havenât read the reviews.â
âShit, fuck, piss!â
Michael checked to make sure this outburst of Touretteâs 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.
âThis fucker is supposed to be heavy-duty. The clerk told us it could handle EL wire.â
There was nothing useful Michael could add. He had only just learned about EL wireâelectroluminescent 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.
âItâs this cotton,â Ben added in a calmer tone. âIt bunches up, and the needle gets stuck.â
âYou know,â Michael offered, âI like the jacket on its own. It doesnât need anything on it. And I could wear it after Burning Man.â
Ben wasnât buying it. âYou have to be lit, baby. Itâs dangerous otherwise. Itâs pitch-black out there on the playa.â
âBut wonât all that stitching fuck it up?â
Ben looked up. âItâll fuck you up if you get run over by an art car.â
Michael had already seen enough photos of Burning Man to imagine himself being mowed down by a disco bus full of half-naked hippie chicksâreduced to a grease spot on a vast Nevada alkali flat. He could see that quite easily.
âYou donât want to be a darkwad,â Ben added.
âA what?â
âThatâs what they call people who donât light themselves.â
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 âradical self-expression,â 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