“I hate Rock. I hate Heavy Metal. I hate all that shit.”“I know you do, Pebbles, ” said Judy. “But it’s just the one gig and you can progr...m your synths to make whatever kind of sound you want. Think of it as us being like the Prodigy or the Chemical Brothers... ”“Anyone who doesn’t want to perform at the Penitence doesn’t have to, Pebbles, ” said Crystal diplomatically. “We can arrange the songs so we don’t need keyboards. You don’t have to come on stage with us.”“Fuck!” I exclaimed, knowing. Do you believe I’d want you to kill our baby? What’s wrong with you!”“SETTLE DOWN!” Ben thundered. “Carly, those are serious words. When did Kevin say that to you?”“He wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to mom the night before she got sick. I was hungry and got up for a snack and heard them arguing. He said if she died he would break up with me six months after her funeral.” Carly saidKevin threw his hands in the air. “Fuck. Just shoot me.”“Carly, you didn’t hear the whole thing,” Meghan. I was devastated when she stopped calling, blocked my calls to her cell phone (I didn’t know their family’s new phone number), and didn’t answer my e-mails. At first, I worried that something had happened to her, but realized that her parents would have called us. They still knew our phone number and address, even if we didn’t know how to contact them now.That was five months ago, and I hadn’t dated anyone since. My sister Janie made me promise to ask a pretty girl out on a date before classes. A full-length porch stretched from one side to the other, across the full length of the hotel. Two old timers were seated side-by-side on some old cane-bottom chairs decorating the front of Mooney’s. One old timer, scruffy looking with a grey tobacco-stained beard and moustache, leaned forward long enough to squirt a stream of brown tobacco juice with a dead eyed aim at a brown lizzard, just as the critter opened its mouth to flick it’s tongue at a slow moving horse fly. Needless to say, the.