Doll Face(10)

“Out with it then,” I groan, feeling my lashes flutter. Getting shot makes a bitch tired like nothing else. “Commence the breakdown of the sinister plot, complete with cackling. Can you gleefully rub your hands together while you do it?”

“If it'll make you feel better, I'll try,” Sydney says with a small chuckle. The amusement in her voice fades quick as it came though, right about at the moment she starts to tell me the sordid tale.

Here are the plot points as I see 'em: America killed Travis because she was a crazy bitch, Stephen thought the kid was his and raised it until America decided to hit him over the head with the truth, demanded Stephen relinquish said child to her, and then the two of them set into destroying one another in the most maniacal, egotistical, sociopathic ways possible.

That about sum it up? Any fucking questions?

I groan and clamp my hands over my ears. If only Cohen Rose had died along with Joel, then at least there'd be some good news coming out of this. I hope he gets his tiny penis stuck in a door and it falls the fuck off. It's so little, it'd be almost impossible to find. The thought's almost enough to make me smile, at least enough to make me drop my hands to my lap.

“So why are you here anyway, at the hospital I mean?” I ask when Sydney finishes and a tense silence settles over the room. I listen as she shifts in the chair and then yawns. I follow up with one of my own. In a minute here, I'll be drifting off to sleep, drowning in a blissful blackness that better damn well not include anymore octopus penis monsters.

“Brayden Ryker spirited away the other bands. I'm not in a band. I got left behind and ended up wrangling a ride to the hospital on Naomi's ambulance. I told them I was her sister.” I laugh, but Sydney doesn't echo the sound, coming over to stand next to me with a solemn expression in her blue eyes. “Whatever you say or do around Brayden's people, be careful. I can't tell if they're the good guys or the bad guys. Since I don't really believe in either, I'd say, take them with a grain of salt.” I'm instantly reminded of Poppet. Lola, this isn't about good versus evil. There's no such thing. It's just about us versus them. “Sleep tight, lady,” Sydney says, giving my hand a squeeze before making her way out of the room and closing the door carefully behind her.

The whisper of it snapping into place is the loneliest sound I've ever heard.





Three days in a crappy ass motel with dirty water and barely fucking there basic cable. Sounds like many a long weekend I've spent shooting up and passing out, only to wake up and start the process all over again. Here's the thing though, take that equation but subtract the drugs and add Turner Campbell in a melancholy rage and you've got my weekend splattered in shit across a public toilet.

“Man, can you please sit down?” I beg him, glad that the guards are finally gone, leaving us to our own personal hell. I guess they figured, hey, they're ten stories up and there are bars on the windows. The only way out of here is to take turns drowning each other in the dirty ass toilet. Even then, only one of us would be lucky enough to jump ship. “Pacing the raggedy ass carpet isn't going to get you more information.” I flip through our limited selection of fuzzy TV channels, looking for some sort of news station. I find a few, but the sound's so fucked up that all I can do is read the blurbs that flash across the screen every now again. The ticker on the bottom still says the new lead singer for rock band Amatory Riot is still in critical condition at UCLA Medical Center. After that flickers by, there's some football news, political mumbo jumbo, and a story about a dog who saved his owner from a house fire. Fascinating shit. “I will tell you the instant I see anything new to report.”

Turner keeps pacing, ignoring me for the third day in a row. We're basically prisoners in here – despite the fact that Mr. Ryker promised we could leave at any time. The asshole hasn't been back since his initial visit and only Milo's allowed to come and go. He drops food off, brought us our bags full of fresh clothes, but that's about it. According to the guards out front, we leave or break their shitty ass rules and it's hashtag game fucking over. Lola shot Joel; Naomi shot America. I don't know how they're going to escape this mess without any jail time, but if hanging out here will give them a shot at it – and it will, according to these assholes – then it's worth the pain.

I sigh.

I haven't been able to figure out what's going on and nobody seems willing to tell me, so I sit here and watch the news and wait for the sound to come back on, reading the miniscule amount of text available to me for information. Our latest fuckup – a concert that's achieved international attention – is on every Goddamn station, so it's not hard to find someone that's talking about it. What's hard to stomach is the misinformation and half-truths that are floating around. Poppet's being played off as a stalker, a girl who joined her sister on the tour and then fell in love with Stephen Hammergren – the CEO of Spin Fast Music Group who was so personally interested in Amatory Riot and Indecency that he decided to show up for the concert at America's invitation. I mean, now that word's gotten out, it's well-known that they used to be lovers who had a child together. The media has spun this tale, turning Poppet into a crazed girl so desperate for Stephen's affections that she was willing to kill for them.