The Last Days

I skidded to a halt, looking straight up.

“Over here!” someone shouted.

I glanced down for a split second: a girl my age, with short black hair and red-framed glasses, yanking something big and flat from under the clutter, sending silverware scattering in all directions.

“Watch out,” I said, pointing up toward where the Strat was untangling itself. “It’s about to fall.”

“I know! Take the other side!”

I glanced back down at her, frowning. The girl was holding two corners of a blanket she’d rescued from the pile. She unfurled its plaid expanse toward me with a flick, as if we were making a bed. I grabbed for the other corners, finally understanding.

We stepped back from each other, pulling the blanket taut, looking up again. Above us, the guitar spun faster and faster, like a kid unwinding on a swing set.

“Be careful,” I said. “That’s a nineteen seventy-three… Um, what I mean is, it’s really valuable.”

“With gold pickups?” she snorted. “Nineteen seventy-five, maybe.”

I looked down at her.

“Incoming!” she yelled.

The guitar slipped free, still spi

But there was no awful thud; the Stratocaster hadn’t struck pavement.

“We saved it!” Her brown eyes were glowing.

I looked down at the guitar, safely swaddled in plaid. “Whoa. We did.”

Then the fire escape rang out again. Both of us flinched as we looked up. But it wasn’t more stuff falling—it was a pair of human figures, six stories above, descending toward the crazy woman’s window. They weren’t climbing down the metal stairs, though—they were practically flying, swinging from handhold to handhold, graceful as headlight shadows slipping across a ceiling.

I watched them, awestruck, until the girl next to me shouted two terrifying words:

“Toaster oven!”

It was tumbling out the window directly over our heads, glass door hanging open, scattering crumbs…

We bundled the Stratocaster into its blanket and ran.

2. TAJ MAHAL

— PEARL-

“You know what the weird thing was?”

The cute guy frowned, still wide-eyed and panting. “The weird thing? I can’t think of anything that wasn’t weird about that.”

I smiled, holding out both palms, weighing the weirdness. It was all relative, these days. You had to take your normal where you found it. People went crazy all the time; it was how they went crazy that mattered.

We’d taken the Strat and run around the corner—around a couple of corners, actually—until I’d led the guy to my street without saying so. My building was right across from us, but I wasn’t sure I wanted him knowing where I lived—even if he was the sort of boy to consider catching a Fender Stratocaster with his bare hands. And I certainly didn’t want my mom coming home late and finding me out on the front steps huddled with some random cute guy and a secondhand plaid bedspread. She might get the wrong idea. In fact, she would make a point of getting the wrong idea.

The stoop we sat on was darkened by scaffolding, protected from the streetlights, invisible. The Strat lay between us, still wrapped in its bedspread, partly to protect it and partly because the guy looked guilty, like he thought someone was going to chase us down and make us give it back.

Like who? Not that crazy woman: she was gone by now. I’d seen angels coming to collect her. That’s what happens when you lose it these days: real-life angels, just like Luz had told me about, though I hadn’t quite believed her until tonight.

But I didn’t want to sound crazy myself, so I said, “Here’s what was weird. That was girl’s stuff she was tossing. The clothes coming out the window: dresses and skirts. Her stuff.”

He frowned again. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because there’s no story that way.” I paused and pushed my glasses up my nose, which makes people focus on my eyes, which are dark brown and, frankly, fabulous. “I could understand if she was throwing all her boyfriend’s crap out the window, because he cheated on her or something. That’s more or less nonweird: people do that on TV. But you wouldn’t throw your own stuff out like that, would you?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” He thought about it for a few seconds, frowning at someone laughing as she walked past, hands full of CDs in spiderweb-cracked cases. I thought he was about to tell me we should give back the guitar, but instead he said, “Girls have girlfriends too, you know. And roommates who don’t pay the rent.”

“Hmm,” I said. I’d sort of thought the guy was thick, because he’d taken forever to understand my brilliant guitar-saving plan (the way firefighters used to save jumpers). But this answer demonstrated lateral thinking.

Cute and lateral. And he knew a Strat when he saw one.

“Maybe a girlfriend,” I admitted. “But your roommate’s stuff?” I’d never really had a roommate except my mom, which doesn’t count. “Wouldn’t you sell their crap on eBay?”

He laughed, dark eyes sparkling in the shadows. Then he got all serious again. “Probably. But you’re right: I think it was hers. She was throwing her whole life away.”

“But why?” I asked softly.

“I don’t know, but right before she threw the Strat out she was holding it the right way. The way you really hold a guitar.” He put his hands in air-guitar position, his left fingers playing delicate scales along an imaginary neck.

“Not like some model in a video,” I murmured. “That drives me crazy.”

“Yeah.” He paused, then shrugged. “So it was her guitar. And she looked sad up there, not angry. Like someone losing everything she had.”

Whoa. This guy was totally lateral, like he knew something he wasn’t saying. “Wait. You’re just guessing, right?”

“Yeah.” He opened his hands and looked down at his palms. “Just looked that way to me.”

“Well, then…” I put my hand on the plaid bundle between us. “If she wanted to throw it out, it’s not like we stole it.”

He stared at me.

“What?” I said. “You want to take it back and toss it on the pile?”

He shook his head. “No. Someone else would take it. And they’d carry it around unprotected, pretend they were playing it.” He shuddered.

“Exactly!” I smiled. “What’s your name anyway?”

“Moz.”

I must have made an uncomprehending expression.

“Short for ‘Mosquito,’” the guy said.

“Oh, of course.” He was kind of small, like I am. Have you ever noticed that small people are cuter? Like dolls. “My name’s Pearl. Not short for anything, despite its shortness.”

Moz pulled his serious face. “So, Pearl, don’t you think she might want her guitar back after she…” His voice drifted off.

“Comes back from wherever they lock her up?”

He nodded, and I wondered if he knew I didn’t mean the generic “they” who lock crazy people up, but the two angels we’d seen on the fire escape. Did he understand what was happening to the world? Most people seemed to know even less than I did—all they saw were the garbage piling up and the extra rats, didn’t even notice the rumbling underfoot. But this guy talked like he could sense things, at least.

“We could find out who she is,” he said. “Maybe ask someone in her building.”

“And hang on to it for her?”

“Yeah. I mean, if it was just some crappy guitar it wouldn’t matter, but this…” His eyes got sparkly again, like the thought of a homeless Strat was going to make him cry.

And right then I had my brain-flash: the realization that had been screaming for my attention since I’d seen Moz ru