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  “No, Mama.”

  “Come on, then!” Mama grabbed my hand, narrowed her eyes at the detective. “She’s free to go, right?”

  Sounding exhausted, Barker said, “She is. We will need to speak soon. With your lawyer if you prefer. I just need his name.”

  “You’ll know when I do.” With that, Mama dragged me out of the station, and I gulped warm night air greedily.

  She didn’t let my hand go until we reached our car. A 2002 silver Impala with rust on the passenger’s side and a left lean thanks to bad suspension. Inside the car she started the engine—always a rough enterprise. I rolled my window down halfway—any farther, it would free-fall into the doorframe and need to be pried up—and tried for whatever fresh air I could manage before the yelling started. Mama’s anger became formidable over small, private inconveniences. This would be a wrath of legend.

  A block away from the police station, she began, and not as I expected. “Are you okay?”

  Surprised and touched, I said, “Yes, Mama. I only found Paris. I was scared, but no one tried to hurt me. Whatever happened was over by the time I got there.”

  “You’d tell me if you were hurt or something?” She pointed with her chin. “The emergency room right up there.”

  “I’m fine.” I wasn’t. But this conversation was stranger than the circumstances that brought me to the police station in the first place. Mama asking if I needed emergency medical treatment was her emotional distance shrinking to its narrowest band. It was the equivalent of a loving and open parent sobbing through sloppy forehead kisses and loudly thanking God for my safety.

  We passed under a couple of traffic lights and tears blurred the city lights into neon streaks that were prettier than what should’ve been allowed that night. Mama said, “Hey, you hush up that crying. We don’t do that, Kya.”

  If anybody heard her say that, they might’ve thought Mama was cruel. But there was no edge in her voice, just direction. The same kind she’d given me since I was little. Only present what you want the world to see, and you don’t want them to see you weak.

  “I know she was your friend before,” Mama went on, “and I ain’t saying you shouldn’t feel nothing, but don’t forget how she went and got rich and treated you like she didn’t know you from Eve.”

  “I …” What to say? That was the extent of the story Mama knew. I never told her everything. So I mopped dampness from my cheeks with my sleeve. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re fine. We’ll figure it out.”

  I didn’t know what it she was referring to.

  She glanced over, changed the subject before I could dig. “That little girl at the police station, you pop her in the eye?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “She had it coming?”

  For a long time. “Yes, Mama.”

  “Good, then. Don’t let no one disrespect you. Ever.”

  That was our thing. Cinda Stokes and Kya Caine would not be disrespected. Paris Secord getting famous and leaving her friends behind was the ultimate disrespect in Mama’s eyes. She didn’t say it, but I couldn’t help wondering if she saw Paris getting her head busted in as … karma?

  I still took my mama’s hand and lavished in her not pulling away. As she said, we’d figure it out soon enough.

  This was it. I’d been working on this drum pattern all day.

  Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-tah! Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-tah!

  “When they say calm down, we TURN UP! When they say calm down, we TURN UP!” I mumbled the words. Lyrics? I didn’t know. That part was for later. Right now, this beat was everything!

  Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-TAH!

  That high hat accent on the end of that sequence … I liked it a lot.

  Hunched over the ancient Casio keyboard, I looped my brand-new bass line. That keyboard with its circuitry guts exposed, a bunch of red, green, blue, white wires snaking to some other plastic box thing, was janky as anything. It did the job, though. The plastic box—a something-something converter, also janky—had its own singular cable running to the USB port of a slightly less ancient Dell laptop. There, a pirated version of my FL Studio production software kept the strained hard drive whirring like a blender mixing up this hotness. Now that I got the pattern down—

  The laptop screen flickered.

  No.

  An ominous static line swept over my user interface, bottom to top, some ghost in the machine trying to squeegee away my work. With the urgency of a soldier signaling his platoon of an incoming attack, I jabbed Ctrl+S, hoping for a quick save.

  Nothing happened. Except more static. More signs of an impending crash.

  No, no, no.

  “Kya!”

  She sprawled on Grandma’s couch, gripping a coding book from the library at the ten-and-two position like she was driving it. She lowered the top edge, peered at me with her eyebrows raised.

  “Yo, it’s happening again,” I said.

  She heavy sighed, pawed for her favorite bookmark (because of course she had a favorite bookmark—no judgment, it was signed by Jacqueline Woodson), then gently wedged it into place because dog-earing pages was a sin in her particular smarty-art cult. All that care and attention to detail gave me palpitations because she wasn’t caring for the details of my whole day’s work.

  “Kya! My beat.”

  She didn’t move any faster, laying the book next to her glass of water. Swung her feet to the floor, where her thick socks likely offered more cushion and warmth than the thin, worn carpet. This chick had the nerve to yawn and cat-stretch. Hello, am I disturbing you?

  “Look—”

  She held up a halting hand. “Yell at me, and I will not save the day.”

  “But …” More screen flickers. I traced a finger across the track pad, and the cursor responded on a delay, jerking in squirrel leaps. “The last time this happened, we didn’t move fast enough and …”

  The screen froze. I rubbed my finger across the track pad as if scratching an electronic itch, and the cursor remained fixed. No delay, just still, a drawing of a cursor. I slammed my fist into the folding card table that was my music studio. “Can I yell at you now? You’re too late.”

  “Hold the power button for a hard reboot.”

  “What’s it matter now? It’s gone.”

  “Just do it.”

  I did. Waited through all the you-didn’t-shut-down-properly-last-time garbage, and a thousand years later I was able to reopen FL Studio, expecting—

  It was there. Oh … Crap! It was there. “How did you do this, tech witch?”

  She scowled. “I know you think it’s empowering for us to call each other things like that. I don’t, though. So stop. Also, I changed your autosave settings. New changes get uploaded to a free cloud account immediately.”

  The file I thought I’d lost forever was right there. I tapped my space bar.

  Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-tah! Bom-bom-ba-ba-ba-tah!

  I flung myself on her, coiling her in my arms, while she screamed and squirmed and laughed. She was way longer than me, a living stick figure. I had girth on my side, my body swallowing her. We sank deep into couch cushions that were older than us.

  “If you suffocate me,” she shouted through laughs, “I can’t fix my equipment.”

  “My equipment.”

  “I’ll accept payment at any time.”

  “Girls.” My grandma, reeking of Lipton Iced Tea and Bengay. “Have you lost your minds? Shut up all that racket. I’m trying to watch my stories.”

  “Sorry, Miss Elsie,” Kya said, sounding way more respectful than her trifling tail really was.

  “My bad, Grandma.”

  We positioned ourselves on the couch like proper young women, and when Grandma went back to watching TV rich folks cheat, and steal, and kill their long-lost twin uncles on those dumb soap operas, I got back to work, while Kya resumed her reading. That’s how we were, sisters, despite what our birth certificates said. The loud one and the quiet one. That’s how we’d always be. Maybe one day w
e’d write a song about it.

  This song first, though.

  I would still be attending Cooke High, apparently. It was 5:00 a.m. on Thursday, and minds were made up.

  For the entire weekend, and half the week after Kya and I found ParSec, there’d been a raging debate in the Fallon home. Listening through the walls, I found Dad fell firmly on the “No! She’s not going back there!” side of the argument.

  Mom, logical to the point of robot, explained, “There’s too little time left in the school year. It makes more sense if she finished, then we enroll her somewhere else over the summer.”

  Nobody bothered to ask me.

  Aside from my consent on the school thing, there were other items missing from the lingering Parental Kombat match—at least the parts I remembered when I wasn’t crying hysterically:

  Any sort of reconciliation around my best friend being brutally killed

  The reporters harassing Security-Guy Greg at the gatehouse of our community

  My inevitable conversation with Detective Barker

  ParSec’s funeral

  Her funeral.

  A thousand little needles pricked the back of my eyes, a familiar sensation by then. Tears were natural, being crushed was expected. “Purging the pain from your heart,” Mom said, “is like getting the poison out of a snakebite.”

  I didn’t know if those two things were alike at all. Mom was a doctor, who said things with authority and didn’t like second opinions. I agreed because it was easier. Yes! Purge-crying! Though, this time, I blinked those tears away.

  If I was going back to Cooke High in T-minus two hours, I couldn’t lose a second on sobs. I had arrangements to make. Protections to put in place.

  My only way to do that hinged on a crap laptop still running Windows 8.

  The night I came home from the police station, Mom, in her infinite wisdom, took all my electronics—phone, tablet, smartwatch, and MacBook. “You heal by resting.”

  She didn’t get that being unplugged was the opposite of restful. I couldn’t relax knowing the interwebz were buzzing with articles, and blogs, and tweets, and snaps, and everything else about ParSec’s death and music. The first night, I barely slept. Mostly because when I closed my eyes, I saw her. When my eyelids popped open, and I groped for my phone to get a little bit of comfort from our followers … it wasn’t there. I begged Mom for my watch at least, but she just shook her head.

  By Monday, I couldn’t take it. I attempted sneaking into Dad’s office while my parents were at work and logging on to his computer as a guest. No go. Suzanne, our housekeeper, only half-focused on her sweeping, mopping, and dusting, took on the extra title of Prison Guard for a temporary pay bump. She was to keep an eye on me during this “trying time.”

  My room became a cell where my captors only allowed access to sports news, MSNBC, and Charmed reruns on my wall-mounted TV. Desperate, I dug through a big Tupperware bin at the back of my closet filled with things that mostly embarrassed me now. Dolls, canisters of hard, cracked Play-Doh, and … an old computer from like two laptops ago.

  Usually, Dad removed the hard drives and took them to the tech guys at his office for recycling. This one had slipped his grasp. The power cord was with it, and when I booted it, I had to sit through an hour and a half of updates, fearing I’d never see the desktop. Behold, miracles do happen. Shortly after Suzanne allowed me a ration of chicken salad and sweet tea, I had a functioning portal to the internet.

  It was stupidly, ridiculously slow. I mean, frustrating to the point I wanted to toss it across the room. Once my desired webpage loaded, it became slightly less miserable.

  Until I actually saw the page.

  I hit Twitter first, which was, ugh. Using the native site, it took a minute for me to orient, but once I did, and got a look at the thousands of mentions I’d missed, my heart ached with a deep pain I’d been anticipating.

  As I’d suspected, given the tragedy, and in my absence, #ParSecNation was in turmoil.

  Custom Shoes for Ya! @SneakerHead1213

  Mad love to a VA original gone too soon. #TURNUP #RIPParSec #ParSecNation

  Shyla the Don @757BoomBap

  In tears right now. Rocking her SoundCloud all night long. She did it for the culture. #RIPParSec #ParSecNation

  Lost Without Her @PSLover

  I bet the party in heaven is LIT right now. Best believe whoever did this gonna burn tho.

  #BoomBoomClick #RIPParSec #ParSecNation

  James Flames Is the Name @LukeSkyRimmer

  Why the good die so young? #RIPParSec #ParSecNation

  And so on.

  From the time I saw the first glut of comments, to the time Dad got home with a grocery-store rotisserie chicken and sides from the deli, I scrolled and read and—despite apprehension churning in the pit of my stomach—responded.

  Regardless of where we’d left things the last time #ParSecNation heard from me, I was needed.

  I thought carefully about what my first post to the hashtag in weeks would be. Typed things, deleted them, retyped with slightly different words. In the last year, I’d picked up some books on public relations and branding to better assist in DJ ParSec’s meteoric rise, and I kept slipping back to the quick-tip bullets they provided. One of my favorites came to mind.

  • Be Bold. Let the World Know What You Believe In!

  Made perfect sense. It’s what ParSec would’ve wanted. So I posted:

  Fuse Is Heartbroken @FuseZilla14

  When they say calm down, we TURN UP! @DJParSec wouldn’t want tears. She’d want jamz! Stream her latest now! #RIPParSec #ParSecNation

  The likes, retweets, and replies came fast and furious, a significant uptick after every painstakingly slow browser refresh. A lot of the responses were positive, @DJParSec fans from all over the world mirroring my sentiment. A lot of responses weren’t.

  More than I expected, if I was being honest.

  I Spit Hot Fire @MicLord007

  What kind of super groupie fronts like she still on the team when @DJParSec been said bounce? Disrespect! @FuseZilla14 #ParSecNation

  Randy B @RandalltheBarbarian

  Somebody trying to get their follows up. You so thirsty. @FuseZilla14 #supergroupie #ParSecNation

  Lost Without Her @PSLover

  Sooooo shady! @DJParSec already showed them receipts on you. Now you all like, pour one out for the homie? Watch ur back! #ParSecNation

  One out of every four replies was something nasty. What slid into my DMs that first night—and ever since—ranged from obnoxious to terrifying. It didn’t help that the dude who snapped a pic of me and Kya fighting at the police station posted the photo to a ParSec Nation forum, so it was now making the rounds, allowing the internet to be the internet, with strangers drawing all sorts of conclusions about my standing with ParSec in her last days.

  The Trash Monster @TrollHunter99

  You’re Fuse, right? If I hooked jumper cables to a car battery and clamped them on to your fingers and toes … would you blow? #ParSecNation

  I blocked as many as I could until I was forced to hide the laptop and eat dinner with my parents. When they released me back to my room, there were too many messages to block. All flashing #ParSecNation or a variation of the hashtag that I kinda hated, even though it’d popped up way before … all this. #DarkNation

  That bugged me almost as much as the threats. ParSec’s music was party music, and ParSec Nation was a fun, enthusiastic fandom—by design (mine). Why incorporate “Dark”? That wasn’t the brand ParSec and I created. It was disrespectful, if you asked me.

  This snowballed Tuesday and Wednesday, and I couldn’t look away. More than a few of those unfriendly Twitter accounts belonged to fellow Cooke High classmates.

  Mom called from the hall, “Are you getting dressed? Ticktock.”

  “I am.” I wasn’t. A speedy shower and hasty wardrobe solutions weren’t the issue.

  The Nation—both the light and dark variety—needed to understand that if t
here was a ParSec “frenemy” to blame here, it wasn’t me. I’d hoped this would blow over like most online beef did, but #ParSecNation was loyal. Loyal, and mistaken. Some guidance was in order.

  Kya Caine didn’t appear to have a Twitter account—which was, I don’t know, quaint. So I just led with her initials.

  Fuse Is Heartbroken @FuseZilla14

  THREAD! 1/? #ParSecNation Some disturbing things about the #MadScientist we all know as KC have come to my attention …

  Paris was the fourth Cooke High student to die this year. My fourth friend. And it’s been so different this time.

  Early this year, three boys—Phillip, Simon, and Jim—were riding together when Jim lost control of his car on Route 58. They weren’t popular boys, making up the vast majority of our after-school coding club known as the Smart Ones. The club’s shining achievement was an app called SoundChek that did okay numbers on Apple and Android platforms, pulling down an average of eight hundred bucks in ad click revenue monthly into the club’s joint checking account. Money we planned to invest in tech stock, to one day finance college or a fortune-finding trip to Silicon Valley to become tech billionaires like our idols, who average people knew mostly as brand names. Airbnb, and Lyft, and Snap.

  When my fellow “Tech-Necks” (a term coined by Simon, our branding-minded member) were killed, the principal told everyone in a PA announcement, saying each boy’s full name to stone-faced reactions from nearly everyone in my homeroom. Me included.

  It was only upon their tragic deaths that their classmates notified they existed at all.