Free The Scream by Craig Spector, John Skipper

perforce to the principal's office. When Chris's homeroom teacher, a wretched old bat named Miss Renquist, had inquired as to the scholastic appropriateness of his black leather jacket, he had said, "Why, I'm just modeling the new Miss Renquist line of lingerie."
    It was nice to have found a friend.
    Ted studied the painting on the back panel of his jacket. It was a staggeringly good reproduction of the Scream album cover. The superimposed images of the band in the foreground, semitransparent and shimmering. The tortured sky. The burning lake.
    Best of all was the mouth, subtle but unmistakable, that spanned the length of the sky.
    Its subtle, unmistakable smile.
    God, he's talented
, Ted told himself. No way he was gonna say it out loud again, but lordy, weren't it the troof. In New York or California . . . in any halfway civilized place . . . Chris would be rakin' in the bucks with a talent like that.
    But here, way out in West Buttfuck, nobody gave a shit. It was like the whole town had already decided that Chris was no good, that he'd never amount to anything, that he and his whole deadbeat Polack family were completely beneath their contempt.
    If Chris is ever gonna get anywhere
, Ted concluded,
he's gonna have to get the hell out of this town first. Go somewhere where people's taste isn't lodged in their ass.
    Somewhere where nobody knows his name
.
    Then he looked at the jacket again. From where he stood, it looked damn near perfect. It made him want to look at the cover and compare. Unfortunately, Chris had opened it up and was using it to clean the pot. He leaned over Chris's shoulder to check the readiness, and wound up looking at the inside painting instead.
    It was an uppergrandstand view of an enormous indoor coliseum. The oval floor was ringed with a wall of brilliant flames. Within it was a pool of what appeared to be molten lava, in the shape of a five-pointed star. There were contorted tidbits of human anatomy at every point within the pool: clawing arms, straining torsos, screaming faces. They sizzled and smoked in what seemed phenomenal anguish.
    In the heart of the pool, something huge and terrible was beginning to emerge from beneath that steaming gumbo of body parts and souls. A misshapen claw.
    The crest of the head.
    And surrounding the pentagram on all sides was the crowd: filling the seats, the aisles, every bit of available space. They were all young. They were all hip. They were all dead.
    And though their bodies were extended in wild gestures of supplication, they all appeared to be screaming
. . . .
    "You know," Chris said, as he folded the E-Z Wider and began to load it with clean green, "I wonder about these guys sometimes."
    "Well, you can wonder out loud to your little heart's content at the concert on Monday."
    "I mean it," Chris reasserted, lighting up and taking a deep lungful off the joint for emphasis. "These guys are extreme."
    "So what are you saying?" Ted took the doob for him.
    "
I'm . . . just . . . saying
. . . ," Chris began, then his lungs exploded in a racking cough. Ted laughed. Chris was roughly twelve times more stoned by the time he finished. "I'm just saying I
wonder
about them, sometimes."
    "I'm sure they wonder about you, too. You're such a dork."
    "No, but really. Think about it. All this 'Critical Mass' shit: it's like they really
want
the world to blow up, you know it?"
    "Well, hell"-Ted laughed-"who doesn't?"
    In the living room, nearly three minutes of blessed near-silence had passed. Those minutes were over. The heavy-metal thunder from above had resumed.
    "Bang, crash, boom," Rachel Adams said, rolling her eyes in time with the music. A lock of her long red hair fell over said eyes; she brushed it away without losing a beat. She was scarcely an inch over five feet tall; her faded denim dress clung to the voluptuous padding that pregnancy had draped over her frame over a year ago and that still clung tenaciously on. Among those who knew and loved her, it was