The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

invited him to the orgy,” Patrick says. “We try to raise these kids on nonviolence, but you’ve heard the kind of things Hargrave says about us.”

“Said,” Avi corrects. He’s trying to insinuate himself into the conversation, but it isn’t his place. He feels like a kid listening to adults argue, and he remembers the first time he met any of them. Sarah reprimanding Patrick to let the grown-ups talk. Patrick looks more mature than he did that day. He seems assured where once he came off as arrogant. Avi’s sliding down the opposite slope of age, into decrepitude. Rather than a kid shushed by parents, he’s the elderly father, ignored as his children decide whether to send him to a home.

“You don’t get to talk that way without consequences,” Patrick says. “A kid like Darren, who hurt people for kicks, figures out a way to do one bit of good in his life, putting his shitty personality to use. Some of us get to be peaceful protesters because others are willing to do this.”

“Come take a look at the patio before you decide this is one bit of good,” says Louis. Patrick shrugs and heads toward the sliding glass door. “You coming?” Louis asks Avi.

Avi has spent much of his career describing the horrors done to bodies by bombs, but something about Owen Curry’s ability undoes his strength. The smooth slice taken out of the church haunts him. The thought of seeing the same thing done to a human body is more than he can stand.

“Feed it to the press pool,” he tells Louis, starting back down the stairs. “I’m done with this guy.”

“But I thought Owen Curry was your baby,” Louis says. “Your special little monster.”

Avi opens his mouth to argue, but it’s true. He feels an ownership over Owen Curry, the hole Avi fell through to land in this world. There was a tinge of pride when Louis told him Owen Curry was the one who killed Hargrave, as if Owen was landing the punch Avi threw at Hargrave years ago. My monster, Avi thinks. My boy.

There were clusters even before they were identifiable to the public as such. From beach houses on Oceanside Way to crumbling apartment buildings in East Oakland, Resonants had quietly clumped together to create spaces they could return to at the end of a day in secret and drop the cloaks in which they’d draped themselves. Since Public Day, there had been a debate about whether this was a good thing. Blanket yes or no answers whitewashed differences within the larger community or populace or however one wanted to define Resonants as a group. Some of those enclaves were created for safety, some for comfort. One person’s intentional community was another’s ghetto. Some groups rose together; others fell.

North Avenue in Chicago’s posh Wicker Park neighborhood was a Resonant community built out of affinity and privilege. Since the nineties, it had been quietly populated by hip young Resonants of some financial means who wanted to keep to themselves. When Hayden Cohen used the money from an album advance to open a Resonants-only nightclub and recording studio at the fulcrum of the street, North Avenue became the first Resonant community, other than the Bishop Academy, that everyone knew about. There were news coverage, think pieces, plans for a unity concert in Wicker Park proper languishing in perpetual permit limbo. There was a constant stream of tourists and sightseers, pointing and gawking at the residents of the street like animals on safari. But there was also the feeling of a burgeoning neighborhood, a by-us, for-us sense of solidarity.

Carrie and Miquel, along with a handful of their classmates, found apartments within a four-block span of Hayden’s bar. Bryce said it was self-ghettoization, and when he couldn’t convince Waylon of this, he rented a one-bedroom in the Ukrainian Village. It meant they weren’t all as neatly coupled off as they could be. But it felt like a start.

Hayden named the bar Vibration, and the goal was for it to be CBGB and Studio 54 rolled into one. Chic but legitimate. Posh but punk. At the same time, Hayden’s career was taking off. They had a new band and tour dates, and they didn’t want to be bothered with the effort necessary to make Vibration big. They hired Waylon to run the place, and he did his best.

Part of that meant drugs. Waylon dealt pot and mushrooms to supplement the receipts and to provide a value-add to Vibration’s customers. Hayden never explicitly endorsed or forbade selling drugs through the bar, but whenever they were in town, they took the opportunity to regale Waylon with lists of drugs that ran hot and cold through the discos of midseventies New York, buoying before ultimately drowning the scene. Coke and Quaaludes. Angel Dust and alkyl nitrates. Waylon hooked up with a transmuter named Hong Wu from out in Cicero who’d been fired from Dow Chemical when his employers found out he was a Resonant. Hong produced immaculate synthetic drugs out of base materials. By the end of Vibration’s first summer, it was an emporium for designer drugs, abetted by the fact that cops never came down North Avenue. They parked at the corners on Ashland and Western, daring the residents of the street to come out into the regular world. Most didn’t. North Avenue was a world in itself, another iteration of the Bishop Academy or the Hive.

Waylon brought Carrie into the operation that spring. She was temping at the time, moving unnoticed through the offices and steno pools of Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. The widening circle of jobs threatened to land her back in Deerfield, an hour’s train ride away, so she limited herself to gigs she could bike to. It meant a lot of days off. Miquel was struggling to get an in-home counseling business off the ground, and between the two of them, they were barely making rent.