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boys tried to impress each other. “He likes to talk big,” Tess said. “He’s not a bad guy, really. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
    Butch drove one of those pickups on huge wheels, Tess noted, the kind with lollipop lights and a roll bar. Instead of taking her straight to hear the CD he took her to Canadawa first and bought her a burger and fries to go at the Hot’N’Now. Then he headed out via twisty hill-country back roads, driving so fast it was hard to eat. But finally he and Tess got to his house.
    Tess hadn’t realized till then that Butch was rich, at least by her standards. In a fancy development, the house was big as a barn and shiny as a Cadillac. Butch’s father wasn’t home. Sure, Tess realized, most fathers weren’t home much, not like Daddy was always home for her, but what was it like walking every day into that big barn of an empty house? Who was he supposed to talk to, the cleaning service? Butch’s kid sister was home, but when she saw him coming in with a girl she went to her room and stayed there.
    Butch took Tess by the hand. “In here,” he said, tugging her down a long hallway toward his bedroom.
    When they got into his room he led her to the bed. Tess felt funny sitting on Butch’s bed, but there was nowhere else to sit. No desk or chair, though a whole wall of the room was taken up by a monster piece of furniture holding TV and VCR and a sound system with three-foot speakers and piles of videos and CDs. No wonder he had the Crux CD—he probably bought every CD that came out. Butch didn’t need a job at the IGA. Big house, big stereo, DAT deck, he had plenty of money. Tess wondered why he bothered to work at all. Maybe just so he had people to talk to and something to do.
    He closed the door and put on the Crux CD and turned it up loud enough so she could hear it with her whole body.
    Right from the first note Tess was gone. It didn’t matter that she was sitting on Butch’s bed, or that he sat down next to her and slid closer to her and started talking to her; she nodded and smiled and didn’t hear a word he said. All she heard was Crux, the messages in his words and his salt-and-sugar voice and the red-and-blue rhythms of his guitar—nobody else played guitar like he did, and the music mags she read during breaks at the IGA were full of stupid articles by experts trying to figure out how he did it. His chords, his finger-picking—the whole sound of his music was different and shivery and awesome; she could have listened to him all night and day. She was drumming along with Crux, tapping out rhythms on her knees, kicking the floor, pounding on the edge of the mattress as the tempo rose. Most of the time she didn’t even notice that Butch was there.
    Tess wanted—something she didn’t have the words to name, but she felt it when she looked at the cover of the Crux CD, a lonesome four-rayed star floating in a midnight sky that was the huge pupil of an indigo eye. She wanted—she wanted to fly or something. She wanted more than just stupid dreams, but that was all she had, dreams. One magazine at the store had had a contest for artists to come up with pictures of what they thought the secret star looked like, and some of the pictures were as if the artists knew her dreams of him. One woman painted him crucified on a guitar. Another woman showed him as a constellation dancing along with all the old Greek stuff that was supposed to be up in the sky, gods and swans and sheep and lions and bulls. Some man painted him riding a palomino horse bareback through a sunset city, blond hair blending with the horse’s wild mane and the evening star rising in the tawny sky. Each artist made him look different, yet he was always perfect, always angel-beautiful, always guitar-god mountaintop take-my-breath-away—transcendent, that was the word—like his songs.
    Tess wanted—hope? A life? Him?