ONE
THEN
This was a bad idea.
Sucha bad idea.
There had been many times in my life that I’d felt out of place, like I didn’t belong, but never quite like this.
I tugged at the almost nonexistent hem of the slinky black mini dress Corrine had insisted I wear, hoping I wasn’t inadvertently giving the people around us a show, Britney Spears style.
“Will you stop it,” Corrine hissed, smacking at my hands. “I just bought that damn dress and you’re going to rip it.”
I dropped my hands back to my sides with a huff and let my gaze roam around the room, trying my best not to gawk at the raucous pandemonium all around me.
“I can’t let you talk me into this,” I seethed from the corner of my mouth, hoping she could hear me over the blaring music that seemed to be coming from every corner of the sprawling mansion. “This so isn’t my scene, Corrie.”
“Well it’s not mine either,” she harrumphed, “but how many times in a girl’s life can she claim to have partied with rock stars? Live a little, Gwennie! You deserve it!”
She wasn’t completely wrong about that. With the downward spiral my life had been on for the past few years, I definitely deservedsomethinggood. That was why I’d decided to pick up and move to Seattle in the first place.
Corrine and I had grown up together in the same small town in Idaho. We’d been best friends our whole lives, even moving off to Seattle together to attend college. But then, the summer after my sophomore year, my father died of a massive coronary. I’d made the choice to return home, unable to fathom leaving my mother all by herself. My creative writing degree had been put on hold indefinitely. I got a job as a checkout clerk at the local grocery store to help with bills while my mother did her best to maintain the farm that had been in my father’s family for generations.
It took a while for Mom and me to learn to function normally without my boisterous, lively father around. We missed him every single day, but life continued, and we eventually learned to roll with it.
Then the unimaginable happened.
My mom was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer just shortly after my twenty-first birthday. What the cancer didn’t steal from her, the treatment did. I spent a year watching my beautiful, spirited mother slowly wither before my eyes. Bearing witness to that killed me just a little bit more each and every day.
Thanks to the mountain of medical bills and a bad crop year, we’d eventually sunk so deep into debt that I couldn’t find a way to pull us out of it. My mother passed away just six months ago. Two months after that, the farm was seized by the bank. I’d failed both my mother and my father.
The only silver lining was that neither of them had been around to witness my downfall.
I spent the next few months getting by on the very meagersavings left to me while trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life. I’d always dreamed of being a writer, but after losing the two people who meant the very most to me, and being buried under the crushing weight of loss and failure, I’d eventually let that dream slip away.
The only saving grace in the whole heartbreaking mess was Corrine. She’d practically twisted my arm until I agreed to leave life in Idaho behind and join her in Seattle for good.
I’d been living there for two weeks now, and I was finally starting to find my footing. Our tiny two-bedroom apartment wasn’t anything spectacular, but we somehow managed to make it feel like a home. And I even lucked out and found work as a barista at a coffee shop just blocks from our place. It paid well enough, offered benefits, and I actually enjoyed what I did and the people I worked with.
Things were finally looking up for the first time in a really long time. So when Corrine came home earlier that day, nearly hysterical with excitement at having landed an invite to an uber-exclusive party in Clyde Hill, I’d—rather stupidly—let her enthusiasm infect me and agreed to tag along.
It had taken less than two minutes for me to regret that decision.
“How did you even get us into this party anyway?” I shouted over the deafening guitar riff coming from the surround sound speakers.
“Best I don’t tell you,” she yelled back, her eyes on the mayhem taking place all around us. “Deniable plausibility! It’s for your own good!”
My eyes bulged out of my head at the scene unfolding before me. “Jesus! Did that guy just snort a line of coke off that chick’s boobs?”
“That’s rock and roll for you,” Corrinelaughed like it was just another normal, everyday occurrence for us to witness drug use and sexual debauchery, up close and personal.
The evening was anything but normal. I felt like I’d just fallen down the rabbit hole and straight into the den of iniquity.
“I can notbelieveI’m standing in a house owned by one of the members of Civil Corruption!” She let out an ecstaticsqueeof delight. Meanwhile, I felt more and more out of place with every passing moment.
Civil Corruption was Corrine’s all-time favorite band, and judging from the number of people crammed into the obscenely large house—and the fact that I recognized at least a quarter of them from TV and celeb magazines—they were far more popular than I’d imagined. Then again, I’d never been a fan of rock music. I’d always leaned more toward Top 40, to my best friend’s detriment.
Corrie had tried to get me to listen to their music countless times. It just wasn’t my thing. Sure, I’d heard them talked about on the radio and television countless times, and I’d seen the guys in the band plastered on the cover of the magazines that lined my checkout stands when I worked at the grocery store in Idaho, but other than that, they’d never really been on my radar.
