“I’m staying,” Shane announces as if this were news. It’s not. They told him he had to stay before they even got in the minivan. Then he says, “This doesn’t seem like much of a plan. You’re just marching up there with a shotgun? Isn’t that illegal?”

Chris’s face paints a wicked grin. “I think it’s pretty badass.”

“You know what’s also illegal?” Atlanta asks. “Burning someone with cigarettes. I’d say it’s even a little bit evil.”

She thumbs a shell into the shotgun. Snaps the breach shut. That ends the conversation.

Together, she and Chris creep along the side, toward the barn. Toward the music.

John Elvis has a band. If the black spray paint on the kick drum is any indication, that band is named Warshed. She’s not sure if that’s “war shed,” or “wars hed” or just a mispronunciation of “washed,” though truth be told she doesn’t give a rat’s right foot.

The band—three members deep—plays loud, calamitous thrash music in the open back bay of the barn. The two doors are pulled back, and she and Chris walk up the earthen ramp—like where you’d drive a tractor into the belly of the building.

The trio doesn’t notice them, so absorbed are they in making intensely shitty music. The guy behind the five-piece drum kit is another student from Mason High: a metalhead who Atlanta’s pretty sure is named Travis, but she can’t stop thinking of him as “Manboob,” given the fatty peaks rising behind his sweat-stained T-shirt. On the bass is a skinny chick in a torn, white, swastika-emblazoned T-shirt and a pair of acid-wash jeans slung so low you could tuck a fistful of pencils in her well-exposed ass crack. She faces away from them, thrashing her short bob of white-blonde hair, giving them a good look at the top of her moon cheeks.

John Elvis, he’s on guitar. A cherry-red electric fresh out of a late-eighties hair-band video. Shaped like a cartoon bolt of lightning. It’s pristine. He plays it with long, spidery fingers, but the grace of his movement doesn’t match the sound that’s coming out, which to Atlanta sounds as if someone is throwing their instruments into a wood chipper. RAR RAR RAR JUGGA JUG JUG.

He headbangs so hard she thinks his skull might come loose, go rolling down the hill. His one arm is inked from wrist to shoulder. Even from here she can see that it looks like a giant tattoo of a Hitler youth rally. You stay classy, neo-Nazi douche-nozzle. A cigarette hangs pinched between his lips. As he thrashes, embers whirl.

Her quickening heart matches the speed-tumble of the drums.

They don’t stop playing. They don’t even see the two interlopers standing there fifteen feet away.