Free Blame It on the Bachelor by Karen Kendall

lines of their hit single around a tongue that felt thick and half-paralyzed by tequila.
     
     
Gimme it all, gimme Miami Vice,
Gimme that hot girl—I’ll do her twice!
Gimme the next one, yeah, I’ll take a slice—
This is Miami, Miami Vice…
    He’d been autographing a girl’s bare breast with a hot pink Sharpie when Wilbo fell backward off the stage. He was dead before his skull hit the cement patio. His heart had stopped.
    Dev didn’t believe it, not even when the EMS team arrived on the scene and were unable to revive him. Will was asleep—he’d wake up any moment. Right?
    Wrong.
    Wilbo lay prone on the gurney, his hair askew, his eyes closed and his smart, sarcastic mouth weirdly slack.
    Once EMS had come and gone, the cops arrived and asked a lot of questions. Devon answered them mechanically, as best he could. No, he didn’t know exactly what Will had ingested, or where he’d gotten it, thank God. He wouldn’t have been able to live with the guilt. Bad enough that he’d offered to get him something.
    When the cops were finished with Dev, his first thought was to get to Will’s parents before they did. They deserved to hear the news from a friend first.
    He tore out the door of the hotel, barely registering that he’d barreled into Rizzoli, who was calling after him. “Hey, kid! I wanna talk to you.”
    “Not now,” Dev said tersely.
    He outran more cops on the way to Will’s parents’ home, when they tried to pull him over for speeding. But by the time he squealed his old Camaro into their driveway, another patrol car was pulling away from the curb.
    He threw open the heavy metal door and ran for the porch without removing his keys from the ignition. Then he stood there, unable to ring the bell, his hands shaking and greasy bile burning its way up his throat.
    In the end he didn’t have to. Will’s mother opened her front door and stared at him wordlessly with tears running down her lined face. Her eyes were bruises, shock pooling darkly under them.
    “I’m sorry,” Dev finally managed to say. “I got here as fast as—”
    She drew back her arm and slapped him, hard, without flinching. Then she turned and walked away, her shoulders shaking.
    Will’s dad met her halfway down the hall to the kitchen, her white cardigan sweater and her purse in his hands. He looked at Devon with pure hatred in his eyes.
    This wasn’t the guy who’d taught him and Will how to play backgammon. Not the guy who’d cheered them on in Little League. Not the guy who’d picked them up, no questions asked, when at age fifteen they’d called him at 2:00 a.m. for a ride home from an area of town they had no business being in. And that, after sneaking out.
    “You,” the stranger who looked like Will’s dad said. “You’re the reason he’s dead! Get the hell out of here. Get off my property.”
    Devon felt his face crumple and his lungs collapse. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “So sorry.”
    “Yeah, you are.”
    I loved him, too, Dev wanted to say. I loved him, too.
    But it clearly wasn’t the time or the place. Dev hunched his shoulders and turned away. Took the three steps off the porch and into his new reality…which now included not one iota of ambition to be a big rock star.
    Was it true? Was he the reason that Will was dead? After all, Dev had brought Will into the band, into the lifestyle that had killed him. Dev didn’t know. He didn’t know much of anything anymore.
    He walked to the car, still idling, and slid into the driver’s seat. Something in his pocket jabbed at him as he sat. He shoved his hand toward it and closed his fingers around hard plastic. Dev pulled out the pink Sharpie, recalled what he’d been doing with it when Will had fallen off the stage and threw up out the window of the Camaro.
     
     
    DEV CLICKED OFF the TV and bowed his head. His fingers played Will’s bass line from the Vice song of their own accord as tears rolled down his face and dropped onto his T-shirt.