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shrieks. “Best crowd ever. Thank you.” He soaked in their attention another moment, giving Mickey a chance to trade his own guitar for a mandolin. “We’re the Keeley Brothers, and this is one of ours.”
    Brian counted off, and they slammed into “The Day I Sailed Away.” I forced my fingers to let go of the stage.
    “They’ve got it tonight,” Megan yelled in my left ear. “Come dance!”
    “I’m too nervous!” I clasped my hands behind my head and turned back to the stage, my elbows blocking out everything but Logan.
    As always, he wore the wristband with the black-and-white triangles—the one I bought him last year during my pyramid obsession. In the white stage light, the wristband blurred gray as he strummed the Fender Strat with a new ferocity. His calf muscles twitched and stretched as he kept time with his heel.
    Sweat streamed down my back, tickling my spine. Around me, people bounced and swayed, but I kept still, as if I could shatter the pulsing perfection by breathing too hard.
    The set continued. The band was like a thundercloud of chain lightning, each musician’s energy feeding off the others’ until it felt like the stage couldn’t hold them. I thought the strings of Siobhan’s fiddle would catch fire, and for a brief second, that all three guitars were doomed to be slammed into Brian’s drum set.
    But even Mickey’s brilliant solos couldn’t steal the focus from my boy. Logan’s voice switched from a growl to a scream to a seductive whisper from one song to the next. As each new tune began, his face lit up, as if it was the first time he’d heard it. He looked like he was having a religious experience, one he wanted us all to share.
    Was it because the A and R guys were watching that he had such intensity? Or was it something else?
    All I know is that I was ecstatically, painfully in love with him, waiting for him to slip away, leaving me with my palms singed from clutching a blue-hot star. No matter how many times his eyes found mine, or how brilliantly he smiled at me, I could still taste the bitterness on the sides of my tongue. Because he loved the crowd more than he loved any one person, even me. He always would.
    After the last song, Mickey and Logan bowed together. Then Mickey shouted into the mike, “Happy birthday to my little brother!”
    That was our cue. All of us up front reached under the black drapery and brought out the plastic shopping bags we’d hidden there. Then Mickey held Logan in place as we pelted him with handfuls of multicolored birthday candles. Connor and Siobhan tossed them back into the crowd so we could hurl them again.
    Once all seventeen hundred candles had been thrown (most of them two or three times), the band waved and dragged Logan away.
    Megan and I and a few other friends scrambled onto the stage to collect the candles. The view from behind Logan’s microphone showed a darkened room ablaze with cell phones and lighters—and along the edges, more than a few ghosts.
    The Keeley Brothers came back for an encore, a cover of blink-182’s “Dammit,” with Mickey singing the chorus. Then their own “Ghost in Green,” which gave everyone a chance to solo while Logan crowd-surfed, and ending with Flogging Molly’s “Devil’s Dance Floor”—the hottest, fastest song yet, as if to prove they had the stamina to start over and go all night long.
    Finally they took one last bow, then sprang offstage, this time with their instruments.
    Megan pulled me into a long, tight hug. “Aura, they did it, they really did it. That was their best show ever by a hundred times.”
    Over her shoulder I got a glimpse of Logan backstage. He waved at me, then flashed both palms wide to signal
ten minutes
. Then Mickey walked up and spoke in his ear. Logan’s smile widened, then he signaled to me
twenty minutes
.
    “The label guys.” I let go of Megan, sweat making our shirts stick together. “This is it.”
    “Don’t worry, they can’t sign anything until