Chapter 53
THE BUTTONS
The bar was alive with the sound of music.
The Buttons, as their band was formally named, had just played their first gig in front of an audience of disinterested patrons.
They had not wanted press there, after a whole life of being followed by cameras, so they did not advertise their performance; they simply signed up and arrived at their allotted time.
It had only been a few weeks since their first conversation about the band at the coffee shop in Queens, thus, as was to be expected, they were terrible.
Their set consisted of outrageously strewn-together mash-ups of songs from the ’60s and ’90s. It had been Bilal’s idea to combine Britney Spears’s “Lucky” with “Help!” by the Beatles, and it was truly as dreadful in reality as it sounded in theory.
It also turned out that despite being great at almost everything, none of them could sing. Fola, who had dutifully taken to the vocals, had screeched the audience into near-early graves—which explained the dead silence of the crowd after they’d finished.
If you were to ask any of the Buttons how they thought their set went, they would probably tell you that it was the best night of their lives. Because it turned out that not being a genius at things was sometimes just a lot of fun.
This initial awful gig would be the first of many for the Buttons.
Sometimes these performances were the only times they got to really see each other, with Fola teaching; Perdita working on her art projects, as well as her new charity; Octavius “becoming one with nature,” whatever that meant; Romeo’s new Parisian culinary school ventures; and Bilal’s extensive traveling.
But when they did get together, they always had the best time.
Though every day the truth of what happened on that yacht and the aftermath would follow them like a dark cloud.
Romeo still worried that one day they’d be found out at long last and taken away to a prison cell.
He spent months after that night waiting for the call to come that his time was up, but it never came.
Henry had made sure of it.
Their endings would not come for many, many years anyway. After they had grown older, wiser, sharper. After they’d settled into lives where they no longer had to sell their youth for profit, where they could just be.
It would be the end of being extraordinary children and the beginning of just being somewhat remarkable adults.
This ending was only harrowing, of course, to the adults who sold their abilities for profit. But it was freeing to the prodigies who, unlike Peter in Neverland, got to grow old and escape their cages of youth for good.
THE END
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