Born to Rock by Gordon Korman Read Free Book Online Page B

prospect of a Purge reunion that everything was sunshine and roses. On her usual online soapbox, KafkaDreams posted this message:
Nobody bug me today. This is the greatest moment in the history of recorded time! Tell you all about it tomorrow, but right now I’M GOING TO SEE PURGE!!!!
    Her enthusiasm hadn’t dampened on the train. “I can’t believe,” she was raving, “that when we get there, the four guys sitting behind the microphones are going to be Purge. I mean, what do they look like now? Has anybody seen them in all these years? King used to be so sexy!”
    Owen nodded thoughtfully. “But you know who’s smokin’? That guy who calls himself Ylang Ylang—the drummer for the Ball Peens.”
    Melinda shook her head. “The real hottie is Pete Vukovich from the Stem Cells. P.S.—he has the best butt in punk.”
    While they giggled like sixth-graders, I sat there, working up a migraine, scared witless. I felt a lot like those Olympic athletes who train for decades, and then it all comes down to a ten-second race. How was I going to get close enough to King Maggot to give him the letter I’d written, explaining who I was, and how I desperately needed to talk to him? Would he read it? And even if he did, how seriously would he take it? Rock stars collected paternity claims like baseball cards. I could be one of a royal court of thirty Prince Maggots.
    I had thought that getting into Harvard and competing for a McAllister scholarship was pressure. I didn’t know the meaning of the word.
    On the subway ride down to the SoHo Grand Hotel, those two got talkier, and I sank even deeper into my personal sensory deprivation tank, until I felt like a disembodied brain, floating in formaldehyde.
    Melinda noticed my anxiety. “Leo, are you okay? There’s no color in your lips.” Her voice seemed to be coming from a long distance away.
    Owen beamed triumphantly. “I knew you were going to have a great time!” Like being pale and ill was a barrel of laughs.
    When I saw the hotel ballroom, my heart sank through the soles of my shoes. There must have been eight hundred people in that room, packed bumper-to-bumper. The close-in section was roped off for the press. We squeezed into the back of the peanut gallery with a bizarre mix of neo-punks and middle-aged housewives—black leather and body piercings pressed up against L.L.Bean and minivan keys.
    I was a light-year from the dais. To get King Maggot’s attention from this distance, I’d have to spontaneously combust. How was I going to get closer?
    I shouldn’t have worried. Melinda had no intention of being this far from the bands. As the interviews started, she took our hands and began to ooze us forward through the crush of people until we were right up to the velvet rope that separated the spectators from the press.
    There were nine bands signed on for the Concussed tour—the Stem Cells, Dick Nixon, the Ball Peens, Mark Hatch and the Hatchlings, Skatology, Chemical Ali, Lethal Injection, Citizen Rot, and the immortal Purge.
    Since they were the headliner, Purge was scheduled to go on last. That meant we had to endure three hours of the other groups, a collection of unkempt, nose-picking thugs who didn’t have a word to say that was more than four letters in length. Each was determined to shock by being more rude/outrageous/nasty/obscene/stoned than the others, the net effect being that they all sort of blended together into a mass of generic cave dwellers.
    The crowd had their favorites here and there. Melinda snapped dozens of pictures of the Stem Cells, and Owen went pretty wild when the Ball Peens took their place on the dais. Dick Nixon’s drummer had just gotten out of jail, so he was the object of a lot of media interest. But it was pretty obvious that everybody was waiting for the main event. Like me, they wanted to see the return of the legend.
    We all had to sit tight.