Read Online Orfe by Cynthia Voigt - Free Book Online Page B

said. “I know you got your start, your real start, vomiting all over the stage.” I don’t know why I thought Orfe and the Graces had to go on that tour. Even at that time I knew that the group—if they became anything—would become music history. But I wanted them to do that tour, and maybe I do know why.
    â€œYou’re not going to be able to talk me into it,” Orfe said.
    â€œI told him that.”
    â€œDid you, really?”
    I hadn’t. I had been breathless, excited, bamboozled. I’d been a jerk letting him snow me with his big-name band.
    â€œGood,” Orfe said. “Now you can say all the nasty things you want to say, which if you’d refused right away you wouldn’t have thought of. Isn’t that right?”
    â€œI’m sorry, Orfe,” I said, meaning sorry for not being better than I am.
    â€œYou realize what it means, this offer?” Orfe asked.
    I realized. All of us realized. There was good reason to feel high on ourselves.
    *  *  *  *  *
    I walked before Orfe and Yuri at their wedding, and the Graces followed behind. The wedding was held in the park. Vows were exchanged and the guests celebrated the occasion with food and drink, song and dance. That was the first time I heard the Graces play without Orfe, heard Orfe’s songs performed without her voice. I remember listening to the Graces doing one of Yuri’s Dreams, and my then-new boyfriend Michael had his arm around me, keeping me gently close—the song made you want to go somewhere private and make generous love, but you didn’t because you wanted to stay to hear the song. You wanted to stay for the whole wedding. That’s the kind of wedding Orfe and Yuri had. Until almost the end it was everything a wedding is supposed to be. It was almost the perfect wedding.
    When Yuri wandered off with the people from the house, and we figured out where he must have gone, and Orfe went off after him and came back without him, everything changed. After that, aftersorrow, there was only the last dance Orfe and the Graces played together. And after that there were only the Graces. Who, starting from their first album, for which they kept Orfe’s name, Yuri’s Dreams, have moved right into the spotlight. The Graces are music history.

THREE
    While Jack and the rest of the Jackets accepted applause and admiration, Orfe sat on the edge of the platform. She wasn’t sitting exactly; she was more wrapped around her own stomach, to comfort it; she was mostly waiting. For the room, and her head, to clear enough so she could get out of there.
    She sensed more than saw his approach and heard him begin whatever he’d planned to say, “I’m Smiley’s friend—”
    Her head snapped up and she was answering, before she thought, “If you’re his friend, you ought to tell him he’s drugging the talent out of his hands. Out of his arms. Shooting down the drummer he could be if he wasn’t shooting up.”
    The taste of her own vomit was still in her mouth, she told me.
    Then she saw who she was talking to. Saw his dark, curly hair, the broad forehead and almost pointed chin, the dark eyes looking into hers. Saw the skin, pale under a sheen of sweat. Saw his hands jammed into his jeans, clenched. Saw what he had done to himself, was doing.
    It took a couple of seconds for his response to sink in, as if his words fell into her ears and got temporarily lost in the auricular tubes so it took them a while to get to her brain. “Smiley doesn’t shoot.”
    â€œYou know what I mean,” she said, still trying to take him all in, not paying much attention to what she was saying. Feeling bad enough to weep, looking at him, feeling joy.
    â€œYeah,” he said. “I do. I know exactly what you mean. I really hear you.” He knew, he told me, that she couldn’t understand what he was hoping she had just given him,