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By Root 537 0

The Vengeful Virgins. He closed his eyes and let the screeching and thumping work its way into his muscles like a medically disproved balm. He imagined his parents, hiding in some basement in North Dakota, listening to these same songs, sending some strange clue as to their disappearance out into the world, traveling from city to city, until Annie and Buster discovered its existence. Or was this clue even meant for Annie and Buster? Was it their parents’ own joke, some way to continue their work in anonymity? And perhaps, worst of all, something that Buster had forced out of his mind since he’d heard the song, these two boys were a replacement for Annie and Buster, the new children that Caleb and Camille Fang would use to restore their name to prominence. They had tired of Annie and Buster, their failures, the simple fact that they were no longer children, and now they had Lucas and Linus. And, as a show of this new partnership, they had given the boys a song that had once belonged only to the Fangs, knowing that they would be able to send it out farther into the world than Annie and Buster could have ever imagined.

Buster turned off the music, sat in the dark silence of his parents’ house. He sucked on an ice cube, rubbed the curve of the ice against the back of his teeth. He concentrated until it seemed that his body temperature had adjusted to the cold ice in his mouth. His arms and legs were numb, nothing but his heart pumping blood to the extremities that he refused to utilize. Thirty minutes passed and then Buster suddenly came back to life, lifting off the sofa, his feet taking him back to his computer. He erased the last few pages of the novel, a mistake of imagination, and began anew. It was the only thing he could control, the world he had made, and he made it bend to his will, feeling the satisfaction of saying something was a certain way and having no one tell him differently.

There would be redemption, the twins escaping the pit, disavowing their intended future, finding a new world to call their own. And, unfortunately, it would mean that nothing would change beyond them, that children would still be enslaved to fight each other in the pit, to smash their hands into tiny pieces of grit and then live with the repercussions for years after. But what could the two children do? Better to leave it behind than try to fix what was already broken. Had this not been what Annie had been trying to tell Buster for weeks now regarding their own parents? Was he agreeing with her only for the purposes of his novel, or was this a universal truth? He typed out the scene, reread it, and realized that it was the only possibility that made any sense. When he finally pushed away from his computer, it was one in the morning and he was not in the least bit tired. He knocked on Annie’s door and found her wide awake, simply staring at the wall. “My body won’t let me do anything but think about them,” she said. “It’s so fucking ridiculous.”

Buster grabbed a videotape, the first thing he could find, and the two of them, their hands trembling, watched a Buster Keaton movie where Keaton was slammed, flipped, and thrown through walls. And each time something disastrous happened, Annie and Buster watched with amazement as Keaton, his face impassive as stone, merely righted himself and kept moving along.

The next afternoon, still without sleep, Buster sat in the car with Annie in the passenger seat, engine silenced, windows rolled down, parked in front of a pay phone at a gas station in Nashville. Earlier in the day, Buster had called the club in St. Louis where The Vengeful Virgins would be performing and talked to the owner, informing him that he, Will Powell, was a reporter from Spin magazine with an interest in talking to Lucas and Linus. Buster made it clear that there was the distinct possibility of a cover story if the boys would offer him an exclusive interview. The owner said he would pass the information along to the boys when they arrived at the club, and now Buster and Annie waited in the car, Chick-O-Stick wrappers littering