Anooshka Stargirl sometimes sees her life as a movie. But she can't escape the realities. At home there's a depressed mother who often won't emerge from bed. And a dad who's not in the picture. There are two best friends but a stifling pack of aspiring glamour girls. Fortunately there's Zoetrope Zallulah Moon, modish older sister extraordinaire, living a bus ride away in New York City.

Visiting Moon one summer weekend when the heat won't relent, Anooshka hears rock singer Orpheus's music. She's immediately entranced by his sound. His lyrics seem to echo her mood and light a spark in her core. After meeting the shy, approachable Orpheus by chance, Anooshka can't shake him from her head. And his Internet diaries keep signaling that they share a magnetic synchronicity. Soon Orpheus expresses an interest in her, and like the Greek mythological heroine Eurydice, Anooshka descends deep into a mesmerizing underworld -- until she reaches a place where fantasies topple and the unspoken finally makes itself heard.

Dakota Lane's tantalizing, allegorical tale follows a teen's obsession as it transforms into empowering self-discovery.

The Orpheus Obsession

By Dakota Lane

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2005 Dakota Lane
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060741732

Chapter One

Freedom

Just an angel, in a green disguise

-- from "All Faces," © ORPHEUS XTIIMUSIC (Japan import)

Imagine having two good wings and never using them.

The first time Zack escaped, he shot out the front door, a turquoise streak headed for the dark cluster of trees across the road. That night, I woke up worrying he was dead. I lifted my window and the black spring air was soft. I sensed him out there.

So many tiny birds, in every bright color, were kept like toys in their cages, waiting for a chance to fly.

If he made it back, he'd never be locked in his cage again.

Zack was perched on the porch rail the next morning, preening, an animated spot against the green day. When he saw me, he froze and held me in his gaze. He still had something of the wild about him. And then he flew, making a neat landing on top of my head. I took him in.

I saw you in the waves / you needed to be saved / maybe you were just trying / to make me feel so brave

-- from "Don't Look Now," © ORPHEUS XTIIMUSIC

It's an old red Honda with a few things wrong, like Ms. ZZ Moon cannot roll her window down on the morning after my birthday, the hottest day in New York in twelve years. The broiled fumes are floating in through all the other windows and too bad for everyone else -- sealed within their icy cars, oblivious to the demented beauty of real heat. We're headed to Brighton Beach.

Moon's Orpheus CD is cranked up. Not loud enough -- we really have to blast it to wake up those people behind their windows.

Life is so fragile, but there are days when you discover you've climbed into your own heart and the narrow course of your veins becomes a water park joyride, flooded with a steady chemical drip from some gland in the brain, the trickle adding up to a waterfall of joy, and you just fly down that intense slide even in the presence of death and all the other drab prospects.

"You're manic today, aren't you?" says Moon, in her husky mermaid voice.

"Yeah, maybe, so what," I say. "You think I should be on medication or something?" I turn up the music.

"No," she shouts. "It's just that I can tell, that's all. I can see it in your eyes."

And I can feel it as a kind of shiny heat inside. It gives me a jangly energy, a sense of strength. Like two cappuc-cinos with lotsa sugar. I don't mind it a bit.

Ms. Z looks faintly like a space-age clown, with her high cheek color and her brows plucked into thin zigzags. She drives with her usual calm -- her long brown foot on the gas. She hates shoes and she hates bridges. But she loves clothes! She's always got some new creation on; today it's a piece of oddly sculptable, glimmering fabric, cut that morning with a pair of scissors, wrapped around her body like a piece of origami and tied with a coarse piece of rope. That damn cutie pie. She gives off a certain delicious smell -- licorice and basil, heightened in this heat.

i love to blast music out into the world.

Everything is festive that way.

Ma hates it, says it's tacky. When I'm back home with her, driving around our boring country roads, she forces me to keep the windows up and the stereo low. Only five or six hundred more bucks and I'll drive my own car away. Freedom, I can feel it beating through my blood already, I can feel that day in my heart like a small sun. I can see the shooting stars in the sky and the bright yellow birds flying and the gorge guys in my car on that sweet sweet day, in my own swift-flying freedom mobile when I rocket my own songs into the world.

People will snap their heads around, beaming at me and nodding in agreement with who I am. Maybe they already are, pulled in by our magnetism, mesmerized by Orpheus, with his rich, slow guitar and tribal drumming and that beautiful, echoey voice. I'm starting to like this guy. Moon always finds the best new music.

Traffic's thick but still moving, and people will be looking our way any second now. Moon and me are like magnets. But no, the shorthaired guys in their sport-mobiles keep their eyes on the road, with their hands resting on the knees of their blond girlfriends. Their windows are plastered with college stickers: cortland. suny new paltz. binghamton. There are families and families who won't glance our way, troops of them in SUVs. We're the only ones existing in the raw element of the heat, a heat so bad it's either prehistoric or slyly futuristic. No one else on the bridge is experiencing our silver-heated reality; they're moving along, all foolish and bland within their simulated environments, oblivious behind their closed windows, not even the flick of an eye toward the one coolest girl on earth -- ZZ Moon -- and her sixteen-year-old cohort Anooshka Star. No recognition of my lime green heart sunglasses, served up my post-birthday morning in a glass of hand-squeezed lemonade by my sister, walking bent with a headache hangover.

Yes, I'm racing a little, but people take drugs to feel like this. Why does everything have to be a malady? I don't mind when my mind is like a pinball, jumping from thought to thought, not when all the thoughts make me happy.Time-out for nostalgia.

"Hey Moon," I say, "remember those fat ladies on the beach with drawn-on eyebrows and coral mouth gashes and the most festive rubbery 3-D bathing caps with squiggly spikes and flowers and nubbles growing out of their heads?" Moon turns down the music a notch, looks at me and laughs.

"Yeah," she says. She's one of those drivers who use just two fingers to drive. I want to be one of those.

"And Moon, remember their matching bathing outfits and flowery thong shoes in electric citrus colors?"

"Yeah, you thought they were drag queens," says Moon.

She'd swiftly corrected me: "Idiot -- they're transvestites!"

Continues...

Excerpted from The Orpheus Obsessionby Dakota Lane Copyright © 2005 by Dakota Lane. Excerpted by permission.
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