Killer Summer. Lynda Curnyn

by next week, he’d be forced to take on another project. He was sorry, he said. He had to eat, he said.

      Fuck you, Lance. The truth is your ass could stand to lose a little weight. Hell, his whole life could stand to lose a little weight. I’d warned him when he agreed to work with me on the Web site for the label that the financing might be tricky. That there might be some belt tightening and that he needed to be prepared to face lean times until we got this thing up and running. “No problem, dude,” he’d said. “I’m with you all the way, dude. Revelation Records is going to be a revelation.” Now he was fucking bailing in the name of grocery money. Where was the integrity there?

      And he wasn’t the only one. The other non-spam e-mail I got was from Bernadine. I didn’t even have to open it (I did anyway) to know what it said. She didn’t want us to hurt each other anymore, she said. Trying to keep the relationship going long distance was tearing us apart, she said. She loved me, she said.

      Yeah, love. If love means bailing out on your boyfriend the second you get a better offer, well, good riddance, Bern.

      I almost deleted the message right off, except that I always liked Bern’s e-mails. Even the breakup ones. I had a small collection of them—sixteen in total—that I kept in a little file on my hard drive. Clicking on my mouse, I added the latest one to the folder.

      Till next time you get horny and call me at three in the morning, Bern. I’ll have the Astroglide ready.

      Not even the thought of phone sex with Bern made me feel any better.

      I lay back on my bed, picking up the remote for my stereo—complete with fifty-disc changer, a parting gift from Bern—and hit CD #47, which I knew was Metallica since I had been playing it ever since I got back from the beach almost two weeks ago. Yeah, you could say it was an act of regression. I’m not a metalhead anymore. Hadn’t been since I was a pimple-faced teen. Nowadays I despise metalheads in general for their drooling love for the kind of clashing guitar riffs any twelve-year-old could replicate on a six string with only mild manual dexterity and a lot of hair spray. But even I’ll admit that every once in a while, a man needs a few pounding chords to get by. Besides, I thought, adjusting the volume higher as the song began, maybe I’d get my roommate out of bed and get my hands on my bong. Might as well smoke. Nothing else going on today. Or tomorrow, for that matter.

      I was just rolling into the second guitar solo, even went as far as raising my hands to air-guitar to it, when I came out of my headbang long enough to realize Doug was standing in my doorway, dressed in a pair of boxer shorts and blinking sleep out of his eyes.

      He looked pretty annoyed. Fuck him. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t even have a place to live.

      Though truth be told, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have been able to afford this place after Bern moved out.

      “Dude, bring it down a notch.”

      “Sorry, man, were you sleeping?”

      “Well, I was, but between you and the fucking door buzzer—”

      “Door buzzer?”

      “Yeah, dude, didn’t you even hear it?”

      “Well, who was it?”

      “Fucking FedEx. And the worst part of it was, they had the wrong buzzer. Some sort of package for Revelation?”

      “Dude!” I sat up, stared at him. “I’m Revelation.”

      Doug blinked at me. “What?”

      “The label, man,” I said, shrugging jeans over my boxers and sliding into my sneakers.

      “I thought you were calling it Bootleg Records?”

      Fucking burnout. That was my last record company. Not that he remembered that.

      I ran past him for the door, hoping to catch the FedEx guy before he left. It was the third time they’d come by—I had gotten a couple of “sorry we missed you” notes stuck to the door. I wasn’t sure if they would come again, but I damn sure didn’t feel like having to haul my ass to FedEx to spend a half a morning in line waiting for a package that might not be anything than more contracts to sign for Lance. For a guy who was in this allegedly for his love of music, he sure did create a lot of paperwork. And since Lance was bailing, who fucking cared about his damn contract?

      But it could also be something else. Maybe something from the executive I had met with at the Music Festival three weeks ago. I had given him the demo of one of the bands I was planning to sign, as well as an overview of the label. He had seemed interested.

      I ran down the steps, all three flights, spotting the telltale blue uniform just before the front door shut behind Mr. FedEx.

      I leaped onto the final landing. “Wait!”

      He stopped, turned to look at me with a bored expression.

      “The package for 3C—Revelation Records? I can take that.”

      He handed it over, along with a pen, and I signed the line for “receiver’s signature,” my eyes running over the address label as I did. “Thanks, man,” I said, handing back the pen.

      I could barely make out the tiny, flowery scrawl, but once I did, my heart nearly stopped at the name above the E. 64th Street address.

      Maggie Landon.

      A bong hit might have been good about now. I mean, come on. It’s not every day a guy receives a letter from a dead woman.

      More than a letter, I thought, noticing the envelope had some heft to it. I hesitated before opening it—I mean, I was seriously freaked out.

      Curiosity got the better of me and I tore it open, sliding out a package of neatly typed pages, all clipped together and topped by a lavender piece of stationery, monogrammed at the top with a big ML.

      The note was short, and in the same flowery script I’d seen on the address label.

      It was dated June 9th. Three days before I’d tried to tell her who was in charge of Revelation.

      Three days before she…

      Dear Nick,

      I jotted down a few notes for the business plan for Revelation. Let’s talk about them this weekend at the beach. I can’t tell you how excited I am about working on this project with you. I can’t wait to get started!

      Maggie

      A few notes? I thought, flipping through the packet of pages and seeing that she had not only included song lists, but financial projections, graphs charting the label’s development, publicity angles—you name it.

      Jesus Christ. This woman was a piece of work.

      Was being the operative word.

      I shuddered, remembering how gung ho she had been about the label when I’d told her about it. Then how angry she’d seemed when I tried to tell her that I was the man with the business plan, not her. It was, after all, my label. I even said as much, which was probably a mistake, considering that Maggie’s spirits had dampened a bit. If only she would have listened to reason.

      I shuffled through the papers once more, peering inside the envelope as if I expected to find a demo tape from Maggie herself (she had also told me that night that she had dreamed of being a singer once) and was amazed at what I did find floating down at the bottom of the cardboard mailer.

      A check. For twenty-five thousand dollars.

      Hell, if I knew Maggie had already forked over the cash, I would have done things differently that Saturday night. Apparently, she hadn’t been planning to renege on her offer to put up a little money.

      A little money. Fuck. This was more money than I’d ever had in my life. At least, all at one time.

      The front door opened, letting in a waft of humid air and my neighbor from the fifth floor, some guy I barely knew—yet I still found myself stuffing everything back in the envelope.