Nope, not the name of a rock band. It’s a scientific article in a scholarly journal: "Schistosity and Slaty Cleavage" by George F. Becker.

More on that in a minute.

First, I had to revisit a scene I wrote in a novel that I never published. This is from Romany’s chapter, set on the sidewalk to The House of Bricks in Des Moines, IA, while waiting in line for a concert to begin. Sorry, I'm dropping you into the middle of a conversation, but here goes:
Cover by Hive account@rhondak

LEFT ON STONEHAVEN

.... “You and your moral standards,” Emma scoffed at me. “You're so…”

“Scrupulous.” That would be the word Emma couldn’t think of. “Me and my scrupulosity,” I thought aloud. “You and your velocity.”

Chelsea groaned. “Another poem in progress!”

She was smiling, so I smiled back. “What else rhymes with scrupulosity?”

“Nebulosity,” the curly-haired guy ahead of us turned to say. Six rings in one eyebrow, a lip ring, snake tattoos winding around his forearms, and Chelsea looked at him the way Lucky watched meat on the grill.

He poked around on his smart phone. “Not to mention schistosity.”

I had to ask: “Schistosity? What’s that, Yiddish for being a jerk?”

“No.” He looked right into my eyes, the corner of his mouth hiking up into a smile, and said, sorta suggestively, “Some kind of layering in rocks.”

“Might be a good name for a rock band.” I nudged Chelsea, who would be thinking about the zit on her forehead instead of acting natural and talking to this guy she thought was so hot. “Get it? Rock band.”

Chelsea elbowed Elliot, who had a notoriously hard time not looking at other guys.

The guy smiled at me, typed some more, than laughed. “Check this out.” He leaned forward, showing me his phone, casually brushing up too close to me. He pointed at a link to some science article about rocks.

“Schistosity and the Slaty Cleavage!” I couldn’t help laughing out loud.

“Schistose versus slaty cleavage,” the guy read from the phone.

“Omigosh!” I laughed harder. “Slaty. It sounds obscene.”

Emma stopped filming to give me the classic worried look.

“Hey,” I said, “you started it by faulting my scrupulosity.”

Chelsea’s supposedly hot guy howled with laughter. “FAULT-ing. Man, you’re good.”

He kept smiling at me, not his admirer, like we were now best friends or something. Chelsea would accuse me of stealing him just because I could. But I hadn’t done a thing to encourage him. She’d been the one staring at him, not me. I was the one who laughed like an idiot while she played it cool.

The line started moving.

“You like rhyme so much,” Elliot was saying, “and yet you don’t like rap music. I will never get it.”

A splinter of awareness of the Romany Fleet who was still on the sidewalk answered for me: “Rap isn’t music.”

Jamie was inside that building.

The door was open, and a sea of strangers bound by their love of The Romanies started pouring into the House of Bricks.

“…Rap is the best music,” Elliot carried on. “Next weekend come with me to El Bait Shop. I know Craigula, the guitarist….”

Elliot wasted his breath telling me about the You-Phonics or Uphonics or whatever, while I watched the door come closer. And closer. Jamie–any minute now!

“That’s him.” Some Goth girl with pink hair pointed out Jamie on a poster I was so going to steal after the concert.

I felt a song coming on.

The night is bright,
the flame in my heart
lights the sky
like a comet soaring by.

Scratch that. A million suns…no, that’s been done.

A billion stars are on fire this night.
Silence glows.
A beautiful stranger shows me
I am loved.
To him I surrender
my heart, my body, my soul.

Someday they’d be pointing at me on a poster, saying “We knew her. That girl, Romany. We knew her when she was nobody.”

Bodies surged ahead, and at last, I was in.

# #

FMI, for my information (okay, FYI, for yours, too), mud can turn into shale with relatively low pressure and lots of time. With more pressure and some heat, shale can transform into slate and mica. Metamorphic rock found closer to Earth’s surface splits or flakes into layers of varying thickness. This is called foliation. (Slate makes great tiles for roofing and floors, by the way.) With lots of pressure and lots more heat, “schist” forms. Schist is a medium grained regional metamorphic rock which tends to split in layers. It often contains crystals, such as garnets. Mud, under pressure, can turn into gemstones. (Don't get me started on the diamonds of Jupiter.)

Gneiss (pronounced “nice”) is formed by a higher pressure and temperature than schist. These rocks are coarse grained and do not split easily. Read more: Metamorphic Rock – Pressure, Rocks, Heat, and Earth – JRank Articles http://science.jrank.org/pages/4269/Metamorphic-Rock.html#ixzz2Gk2TZ3Sf