Skin Hunger

by Eli Lang

  I was dusty from books and helping my grandmother go through her closet, so I went home to shower and change before we all met at the restaurant. When I got there, Zevi was already at the table, sitting by himself. I slid into the chair kitty-corner to him.

  “I feel like we’re waiting for our doom,” he said, leaning to the side so he could whisper dramatically to me, even though there wasn’t anyone there. It made me laugh, and some of the tension I’d been carrying around slipped away from me.

  “It’s only dinner,” I told him, but we both knew I was really telling myself. He nudged my knee with his, and went back to sipping his water.

  I didn’t know why I was nervous, not really. I’d already had a sit-down meal with my parents. And I loved my parents. My parents loved me. I wasn’t one of those kids who’d had a shitty childhood, for one reason or another. I’d been beyond lucky. I’d had everything I’d wanted.

  But I felt almost as if, as I’d grown up, we’d stopped remembering who we were. Like we’d lost touch with each other, for all that we lived in the same house.

  Dinner started off totally fine, and I was relieved all over again that I’d brought Zevi. My parents asked Zevi about himself and his job. He did something complicated with websites that I’d never quite understood but had always thought was really cool, because it was technical and creative at the same time. I always wanted him to tell me more about it, and he always worried he was going to bore me. My dad seemed to know everything about it, though, and it kept them talking through the appetizers and into the beginning of our main course. I wasn’t surprised. My dad was wicked smart. He always knew a little bit about everything, and could talk about almost any subject. When I was little, I used to come to him with all those weird questions kids came up with, and he’d always done his best to give me an actual answer I could understand.

  Unfortunately, my parents couldn’t really ask about Zevi and not about me. Escaping Indigo and my life across the country was something we’d actually managed to avoid talking about so far. It should have been impossible, but we’d gotten pretty good at it over the years. It wasn’t like they’d never come to one of my shows. They had our albums at their stereo. But we . . . didn’t talk about it.

  Maybe I could have brushed it off with a one sentence answer, and directed the conversation back to how the pasta sauce at the restaurant hadn’t changed at all since the last time I’d been, or to all the things we still had to do at Gran’s house, or anything else. But for the first time, having Zevi there made things awkward.

  He didn’t mean it. It was just that, unlike my parents, Zevi knew almost everything that went on with the band. So when I said we were planning to go back to the studio when I got home, he asked about it. And that started us on a conversation about the last time we’d recorded and how stressful it had been, and the grueling hours we’d put in to get everything done. Studio time was my favorite part of being a musician, because it was like a test of how much you loved what you did. How much work you’d put in to get there, how good your ideas were, how well you could work under pressure and time constraints.

  I let myself start to get excited about it. I wanted to get home and start really being able to write, to hear the songs as they were born, and not on my tinny phone speakers, alone in my parents’ basement.

  And then, while I was talking about how much work it was, my mom made a sound that was almost a snort. A delicate snort, maybe a laugh, really, if I felt like being generous.

  I didn’t.

  “Do you not think it’s work?” I asked, stopping in the middle of my sentence and turning so I was facing her.

  She went completely white, and I wondered if she even realized she’d made the sound herself. For a second, she looked so uncertain, and I thought she might deny it, or apologize even, and a spike of adrenaline went through me. But then she collected herself, put herself back together and gathered defensiveness around her.

  “It’s not quite going to work in an office every day, though, is it?” She sounded like she wanted to be halfway between arrogant and gentle. “It’s not what other people do.”

  I should have let it go. It was because I’d called her out like that, in front of my dad and Zevi, and she had to respond to it. It wasn’t a big deal. But I had this image of Bellamy in my head, of him slumped over his guitar, his fingers so tired he kept missing notes, this expression on his face like his whole life depended on getting the song right, because in a way it did. I had almost the same image of Tuck and me when we’d first started the band, sitting together in the tiny, dirty van we’d bought together by pooling our money, hoping it would get us to the next gig.

  It wasn’t like working in an office, no. I was sure there were lots of hard things about office work, or any normal job. But being a musician had its own complications. I couldn’t go to work every day and be sure I’d have a job the next. There was no certainty in it. I had to put my whole body into everything I did, and my mind, and my heart. I couldn’t leave it behind when I wasn’t at work. I had to always be my best, in every way, and so did Bellamy, and Tuck.

  “You’re right.” I knew I sounded bitter, but I couldn’t really keep it out of my voice. It just wasn’t going to happen. “It’s not what other people do. It’s not like what anyone else does. It’s still my job, though.”

  “Ava,” my dad said softly, and I glanced over at him, unassuming but still fierce in his own way, with his glasses perched on the edge of his nose. “It’s only . . . All those times you didn’t have any money. When you were living out of that van . . .”

  “We were touring,” I said, vehement.

  “You couldn’t make rent,” my mother said, speaking even louder than me. “You were living on people’s couches. The bars you played were paying you in beer!”

  “That’s how it works!” I glanced over at Zevi, but he was staring pointedly down at his breadstick, which he was shredding to pieces on his plate. “Besides,” I added, trying to get myself under control. “It’s not like that anymore. I bought a house. I paid for it myself.” It was a nice house too. A house I loved.

  “Yes,” my mom said, and I thought she’d let it go, but then she laughed and said, “Ocean view,” and I knew she wasn’t congratulating me, or making it something good. She was poking at me.

  And yeah, okay, my ocean view was a strip of water and beach I could see through the houses across the street. And yeah, I’d probably paid far more for the house than it was worth, to have that. But I could see the water from every room. I had the ocean, right there. I could walk out onto my porch and smell the salt and seaweed in the air. I could feel it on my skin when there was a breeze. Every day, that tiny strip of blue and gold reminded me that I had made it, that I’d brought myself all the way across the country and created a place for myself, and it was a good place. Looking at that water was like looking at victory.

  “You have never known what was important to me,” I said, my voice so much lower than before. I saw Zevi leaning forward to catch my words, and then jerking back when he heard them.

  Neither of my parents responded to that. My mom looked as if I’d hit her, as if my words had physically lashed out and attacked her. My dad didn’t seem to know where to look, or who to comfort. He reached out and put his hand over my mom’s on the table, and seeing him do that made me feel terrible. Instantly terrible. Any victory I’d had, any point scoring I’d won, was gone, and instead all I felt was guilt at making them feel bad. That wasn’t what I’d wanted. I’d only wanted my mom to acknowledge that I’d done something good, come out okay. But that wasn’t going to happen, and now they felt bad, and I felt awful.

  I stared down at my dinner and picked at it with my fork. There were a few long minutes of strained silence. Then the waiter came around and filled our water glasses, and in the broken tension he left, Zevi started up a new conversation, something completely innocuous. We all went with it, because we didn’t want to stick with what we were doing. And that was ho
w we got through dinner. By the time we left, none of us were exactly happy, and I’d been wrung out too many times, but we were still all on speaking terms. I supposed that was a win.

  I told Zevi I’d meet him back at my house. Then I realized how awful that sounded, to ask him to go there and wait for me, and tried to take it back. But he told me to take all the time I wanted. I gave him the key for the door, and then I walked to my car alone.

  It was just that side of sunset when the sun was completely down, but the light was lingering, highlighting all the trees from underneath, turning dull brown tree bark into something gold and glowing and beautiful. I watched my parents pull out of the parking lot and head off down the street. Instead of doing the same, I turned and leaned against my car. I knew I was supposed to get in and lock the door and not sit in the parking lot—safety and all that. It was probably solid, if unfortunate, advice. I was a girl pushing five feet, and drumming had given me some muscle but not much. I wasn’t fool enough to think I could take anyone. But I figured that if I could survive alleys between clubs and dimly lit inner-city parking lots, I could handle one in the middle of a sleepy town.

  I pulled my phone out and called Tuck.

  “Hey,” I said when he answered, because I’d had about enough conversations that didn’t start with a greeting.

  “Hey.” He sounded a little bit sleepy, like he’d been lounging in front of the TV or something when I called. “You okay?”

  I shrugged, but said, “Yeah,” into the phone. I didn’t know if I was okay. I didn’t know what I was doing here. It had turned out to be so different than I’d expected, somehow different than it ever had been before, like I was seeing it all through a new filter.

  “You just don’t usually call so often,” he explained, and I felt immediately guilty.

  “Sorry. Were you doing something? I can call you later—”

  “Nope,” he said easily. “Not busy at all. Bellamy and Micah and Quinn are here. We’re all watching a movie.” I knew all meant Lissa too. Of course it did. She lived with him now. The two of them were basically inseparable.

  “Good.” I meant it too. I wanted him to be happy. God, I did. This wasn’t the way I’d pictured it, or hoped for it, and it made me feel jealous and bitter and awful. But I still wanted it for him. I’d hate myself if I didn’t. I could be seething with jealousy and still happy for him at the same time. That was a surprising thing. I’d never have believed that was possible until I felt it for myself.

  The human heart. What a fucking piece of work.

  “So what’s up?” He was trying to sound more awake. I bet he’d been falling asleep on the couch. He always did that when we watched movies—had to watch them in two or three installments, because he could never keep his eyes open. I caught myself wondering if he’d been sleeping with his head on Lissa’s shoulder, or her lap. If she’d run her fingers through his hair, the way I sometimes had when we’d crashed, in those early days, after a grueling show schedule. I wondered if she felt as lucky as I had, every time he picked me to lean on.

  Then I shook myself, forcing the images and the wondering and all of it out of my mind as best I could.

  “I got the songs you sent,” I said, because it was something to talk about. My phone had beeped earlier in the day, and it had been the only thing to drag me out of my obsession with the books. I’d paused to listen to them, and my grandmother had glanced over and seen me nodding my head along to one. She’d turned back to what she was doing, no questions and no reprimands for not working when I should have been. “They sound really good. The second one especially.”

  “Yeah. The bridge is weird in that one. Skips into a couple measures of three-four before it goes back.”

  I nodded, and let the parking lot and the gold on the trees and how deceptively beautiful everything was—let the weird not-quite argument with my parents and the distance between me and my family—fade away. I imagined I was there with Tuck, pictured myself in his house. I had to switch, because at first, I pictured him in his old place, the tiny apartment he’d never bothered to move out of, his couch crammed into the miniscule living room. But he’d moved into a house with Lissa, not very far from my own. I had to picture him there now.

  When we were done, and I hung up, I didn’t know if I felt better or worse. Tuck had passed the phone to Bellamy at one point. I always thought passing the phone was a crazy rude thing to do, normally, but Bellamy had asked to talk to me, and there wasn’t ever going to be a time I could imagine when I didn’t want to talk to him. And Quinn and Lissa and Micah had shouted hello. And then Tuck had said goodbye and we’d hung up, and I was left standing in the now-pitch-black parking lot, the only light coming from a streetlamp at the other end, with the sounds of their voices in my ears.

  I wanted to be back there with them so bad, and I felt crazy for wanting it because it had only been three days. That was all. Three days wasn’t enough time to miss anyone. It wasn’t enough time to get homesick. But I’d been homesick sitting on the plane, watching the Atlantic Ocean come into view. I’d been homesick from the minute I’d left, and now I had the strongest feeling that all of this was wrong, that I didn’t belong here, that I needed to go. And I couldn’t.

  It was starting to get chilly, and I actually was a little freaked out about standing alone now—not so much because I thought someone was going to attack me, but because the woods were right there, and at night the woods were so black and so thick, and I always imagined they could hold anything at all. I slipped into my car and shut the door between me and them, and then I called Zevi.

  “Are you there?” I asked him, forgetting how I’d promised myself I would start phone conversations with real greetings.

  “Yup. Said good night to your parents, slipped in the back door. Did you know you have a drum set down here in the basement?”

  “I thought I might.” I’d meant to check, but I hadn’t gotten a chance. One mystery solved. “I’ll be there in a few minutes. You sticking around?”

  “Definitely.” He paused, and I could hear him take in a breath. “But you’re sure you don’t have other plans?”

  Cara had been in the back of my mind the entire day, and all through dinner I’d wished I was with her instead, wished I was back at the worn diner with the excellent pizza, in the booth that, for a couple of hours, had felt like it held the whole world, or at least everything important in it. But now I was tired and probably not super pleasant to be around. She didn’t need that.

  “Yeah. No.”

  “Is that a yeah? Or a no?”

  I groaned and thumped my head against the steering wheel. “I don’t know, Zevi. I told her I’d call. But I’m all . . . worn out from dinner, and I’m not up for anything, and I don’t even know if I want to see her again.”

  “What? Why?” He actually sounded really concerned, and I wondered what impression Cara had made on him in the short time when they’d met. Or what impression I’d made, about needing someone.

  “I don’t know,” I said again, although I really did.

  Zevi waited for me to come clean.

  I sighed. “She isn’t . . . she isn’t Tuck.”

  I could almost hear his frown. “Do you want her to be?”

  “No!” I didn’t. I totally didn’t, not at all. I wanted Cara to be Cara, because she seemed like a girl I could fall in love with. A girl someone would be very lucky to fall in love with. “I mean . . . Zevi. Please don’t make me say this out loud.”

  “You mean you’re still all wrapped up around the hope that Tuck will pick you, when almost a decade of evidence to the contrary says it’ll never happen.” He didn’t sound concerned now. His voice sounded flat and angry in a tired way.

  “I . . . Yes. How is that fair to her?” I argued. “Besides, I’m leaving. I’m not staying here. I can’t get involved with her.”

  There was another long pause, and I knew he was running over everything I’d said, trying to read between my words. He’d alw
ays been so damn good at that. “Are you? Getting involved?”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t have it in me to dissemble with him. Not right now. “Maybe I could. If I let myself.”

  “Call her,” he said sharply.

  “Zevi . . .”

  “Call her. Tell her we’re getting together. Nothing fancy. And invite her to come over too. If she wants to, she will.”

  “What if I don’t want her to?”

  “Do you not?”

  At least he was kind enough not to tell me what I wanted. At least he had the decency to ask. It made me feel okay, in a strange way, about saying what I actually did want.

  “No. I do.”

  “Then call her. I’ll see you when you get here.”

  He hung up, which I thought was a little rude, but maybe he’d had it with me. I couldn’t really blame him. I’d almost had it with myself. I stared at the phone in my hand. There wasn’t much debate in me. I wanted to do what Zevi had told me to. So I did.

  When I got home, I stepped out of my car in the driveway and stood in the dark, staring up at the lit windows in the living room. My parents were still up—it wasn’t that late yet. I thought about going in the front door like I probably should, but my mind skittered away from that thought. It’d be fine. I was sure it would be. I just didn’t want to. I went around to the back instead, and through the basement door Zevi had left open for me.

  I hadn’t been down there since I’d arrived, but I remembered that it had been carpeted and furnished at one point, to be almost like another den. It still was—it was dark and dusty, like no one at all had been down in a while, but with a couple of lamps turned on, the place had a homey, cozy feel. Close, like it was a secret club or something. Zevi must have felt the same thing, because he grinned at me when I came down, and waved, and said hello in a soft voice, as if he wanted to maintain the quiet. I felt like we were sneaking around down here, even though we didn’t need to sneak at all, and it seemed like he did too.