by Eli Lang
The biggest surprise was my drum set. It wasn’t set up—neither of my parents would know how to do that—but it was stacked carefully in a corner, all the hardware in a case beside it, the cymbals in another. I couldn’t play it now, even if I did set it up, but I went over and ran my fingers over the finish. It was old, the first kit I’d ever had, but it was still a good one. It made me feel funny, in the pit of my stomach, when my hands touched that familiar wood and metal. Like I was happy and uncomfortable at the same time.
I was wondering whether this would be a good time to set it up, so that the next time I came down here I could maybe work on the songs Tuck had sent me, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I answered it on the second ring.
“Hey, I’m here,” Cara said. She sounded a little breathless, like she was nervous. “Do you want me to ring the doorbell?”
I shook my head, despite the fact that she couldn’t see me. Across the room, Zevi was smirking, and I wondered what he was seeing on my face.
“No,” I said into the phone, giving Zevi a glare. “I’ll come get you. We’re in the basement.”
I thought about how creepy that sounded, but I’d already hung up. Maybe I should call her back and tell her we weren’t actually ax murderers. Zevi was almost doubled over laughing, and I contemplated tackling him, but Cara was waiting for me. I didn’t want her to get impatient and come to me instead, only to find me and Zevi rolling around on the floor like puppies.
When I’d called Cara, I’d babbled something apologetic about how late it was and how she didn’t have to but did she want to meet at my house, and how Zevi would be there so it wasn’t like I was calling to ask her for a hookup, but really, she shouldn’t feel obligated, even though I really did want to see her. She’d cut me off by laughing, almost as hard as Zevi was now, and said she wanted to.
She was milling around by her car when I got outside, like maybe she was trying to decide whether to make herself go up to the front door anyway. But she saw me right away as I came around the side of the house, and I don’t know if it was her smile or that I was exhausted or how honestly glad I was to see her, but I opened my arms. Actually held them out wide. No one really did that, except in dramatic scenes in books. But I really did, held my arms out for her and she stepped into them so I could hold her. She was a little taller than me, and she rested her chin on my shoulder and held me as much as I was holding her. The two of us stood there, pressed close together, in the middle of my parents’ driveway. They could look out the front window, where the breakfast table was, and see us, and I didn’t care. I didn’t care who saw. I didn’t care that Zevi was waiting for us down in the basement. I just wanted this moment.
Cara let me hug her for a minute, and then she pushed me back, enough that she could hold me at arm’s length and look down at me. “You okay?”
I shrugged and smiled. “Yeah. Fine. Tired.” I realized how bad that sounded as soon as the words were out. “I mean, I’m glad you’re here. Really glad.”
“Yeah?”
I nodded and took her hand. “Yeah. Come on. Come meet my cousin.”
She laughed, but let me tug her around the back of the house. “We already met.”
“Right. Well.” I waved my free hand in front of me. “Meet without having to shout over house sound, then.”
She didn’t answer, but she squeezed my fingers. I pulled open the back door and led her down the stairs.
I hadn’t exactly been worried about Cara and Zevi getting along, but there was always a little bit of nervousness when you were introducing two different people you liked. And the fact was that I didn’t really know Cara, not yet. I only knew the surface bits, and I didn’t know how those things would go with Zevi. But Zevi was . . . easy. And Cara had been the one to strike up a conversation with me on a plane, so my nervousness about them meeting was small.
Turned out I didn’t need to have any, because they hit it right off. Seemed what they were mostly bonding over was me. Zevi took it upon himself to tell Cara all about how I’d been as a teenager, and the last time he’d seen me, and embarrassing things we’d used to get up to in the basement of the house I’d grown up in. That time we’d decided to throw a party and only four people had come. The time Zevi and I had drunk ourselves into a stupor and Zevi had puked down the back of the basement couch we’d used for lounging. And Cara laughed at everything because Zevi was a damn good storyteller.
They were involved in their own little getting-to-know-you world, sitting on opposite ends of the couch and chatting it up, but I didn’t feel left out. Actually, I felt better knowing they could get along. I wanted them to. And that was a scary thought, because really, I shouldn’t care. I should be thinking of Cara as temporary enough that it wouldn’t matter whether she got along with Zevi or not. But I wasn’t, and seeing the two of them laughing together did something to me, twisted me up in knots that were tight and uncomfortable and sweet and good.
I wandered to the other side of the room and started pulling the drum set down, laying it out, testing heads. I couldn’t play it now, but I wanted to put it together. I wanted to sit behind it. I dragged the pieces closer to Zevi and Cara and sat on the floor in front of them, and they both twisted a little toward me, so we were a triangle and I was included.
“So.” Zevi turned to me even further, but not enough that he turned away from Cara. “Dinner with your parents was awkward.”
I stared at him, my hands going still on the cymbal stand I’d been piecing back together. Someone had decided it was best to take it all the way apart, instead of only folding it up. “Seriously? We’re talking about this now?”
Zevi shrugged like it was no big deal, even though he knew full well it was. Cara raised her hands. “I don’t . . . I can . . .”
“See?” I gestured at Cara, but I was still staring at Zevi. “You’re making her uncomfortable.”
She shook her head, fast. “Oh, no. I know all about weird family stuff. But . . . you don’t have to talk about it in front of me if you don’t want to.”
“Oh, god, no.” I looked back down at my hands, focused on the metal against my fingers, the familiar feel of the cool, slick surface on my skin. “It’s not you. It’s just . . . It’s boring.”
She leaned against the side of the couch, getting comfortable. “How?”
“Ava’s parents want her to be girly,” Zevi said, breaking through my tension and stress.
I set the stand upright and waved my hand at him. “That. Well, I mean, that’s oversimplifying it a lot, but close enough.”
Cara squinted down at me, her gaze slowly moving over me, taking in my painted fingernails, my skinny jeans, the formfitting shirt I was wearing, with the V-neck that showed off a little cleavage. The makeup I had on—it’d been thick this morning, dark lines around my eyes, heavy mascara. I didn’t know how much of it was left, now. But it was definitely feminine—or traditionally feminine. I personally thought determining someone’s gender by the makeup they wore, or the clothes, or the things they liked, or the way they talked, was ridiculous and outdated. And I knew Bellamy was hot—and exceptionally masculine—with eyeliner on.
“You look girly enough to me,” she said dryly.
“‘Girly’ is a concept I don’t really subscribe to,” I replied, just as dry, and she gave me a sharp look and a slow nod. “And it’s not really about how I look. Although,” I said, thoughtful, “I think they were pretty disappointed when I pierced my nose. And about my tattoo.”
Cara tilted her head to the side. “I don’t see any tattoos.”
I grinned. “Maybe later.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zevi collapsing back against the couch cushions, consumed with laughter.
“Stop it, you psycho. I’m trying to woo a pretty girl, here.” I glanced around for something to throw at him, but the nearest thing was a cymbal, and that seemed like a bad idea.
He laughed harder, then gasped for breath. “Woo when I’m not in the room.”
C
ara had started to giggle too—an actual giggle, or at least what I thought an actual giggle sounded like—and I grinned a little bit. I tried to straighten my mouth and keep it contained, but I couldn’t quite.
Cara settled down and grabbed a pillow to hug to her. “So what did your parents want?” she asked when we’d all gotten ourselves more or less contained.
My eyes went right back down to the drum kit. All of these heads were junk. It’d be best if I could change them all out. But that would be silly, since I wouldn’t be here for very long, and heads were expensive. Maybe if I tuned them as best I could, they wouldn’t sound quite like whacking cardboard boxes. I reached for the first tom and set it in my lap. I had a drum key in my pocket. I didn’t even have to wonder about it. It was always there.
I thought about all the heads I’d changed in my old basement, the one with the couch Zevi had puked on. I’d bought them all myself too. Cheap stuff until I could afford to save up for something better. It wasn’t that my parents had refused to pay for them, or for my drum kits or sticks. It was that I’d never bothered to ask. I hadn’t known if they’d say no, but I hadn’t ever wanted to give them a chance.
“They wanted me . . . They wanted me to take ballet instead of running track. They wanted me to play violin instead of drums. Or not play at all. They wanted me to go to college here, live here. They definitely didn’t want me to consider music as an actual career. Imagine how horrified they were when we signed our first record deal.” I laughed, but it wasn’t anything like the way Cara and Zevi had been laughing a minute before. It was dry and sad and sharp. “They thought I couldn’t think for myself. And they wanted to think for me.”
“And they still want to think for you?” Zevi asked. He was gentle about it this time, his voice soft, like he was reaching out to me.
I nodded. I kept staring at the drum in my lap, my hand moving around on the top of it, loosening all the lugs so I could tighten them again, one at a time, and make the tension on the head even. “Kind of. Yeah. Yes. They do.” I smacked my hand down on the drum head, heard the hollow thump it made. A terrible noise to my ears. “I’m almost thirty fucking years old.” I did glance up then. Cara and Zevi were both watching me. Zevi looked thoughtful. Cara’s eyes were wide, and I figured that after tonight, I’d never see her again. Maybe that was best. “Almost thirty,” I repeated. “You’d think I might have some of this figured out by now.”
Zevi turned from me to Cara and then back again, and when I peeked at Cara, she was focused on the couch. She was running her fingers over the rough fabric like I was running my hand over the head of the drum. I was trying to feel the tension, trying to anchor myself in the familiarity of that, the comfort of it. I thought she was trying to disappear. I’d asked her over here to hang out with me and Zevi, and we’d ended up having a weird discussion about my parents and how I wasn’t a fully functioning adult, even though I’d been an adult for quite a while. Great.
I took a breath, ready to . . . I wasn’t even sure. Change the subject or apologize or get us out of this conversation somehow. Even Zevi seemed guilty. But then Cara started to talk.
“My parents kicked me out when I was eighteen. An adult. Technically.” She glanced up at me and gave a half smile. Her fingers were still tracing around on the pilled surface of the couch. “I told them I liked girls, and they told me I should probably try to find my own way in the world. And for a long time, I thought it was my fault. My fault that they didn’t want me anymore.”
I felt immediately and horribly guilty. I hadn’t been disowned. I didn’t think I would be even if I told my parents I was bisexual. I hadn’t been abused or abandoned. My parents loved me, and even when I doubted them, or didn’t understand them, or wanted to shake them for the things I felt, I had never questioned that. I was one of the lucky ones.
Maybe she saw it on my face, because she held up her hand and leaned forward. I didn’t think she remembered that Zevi was even in the room, she was so intent on me. She stared straight at me, and held my eyes, and I couldn’t turn away.
“I’m not telling you to suck it up,” she said firmly, her voice doing that thing that was the universal sound for Don’t argue with me. “I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t feel bad because you don’t have it as bad as some people do. I think that’s bullshit. I got dealt a hand, and you got dealt a hand, and they’re both good and shitty in different ways. And they can’t be measured against each other. They just can’t. So stop thinking it.”
I nodded automatically. “Okay.”
On the other side of the couch, Zevi shifted in his seat. I didn’t know if he was uncomfortable with this whole conversation—that he had started, intentionally or otherwise—or if he had something to add, and I almost didn’t care. I didn’t want to turn away from Cara. This was her and me, and her moment. Her hair was swinging in her face, the short strands almost covering her eyes, and there were two bright, nearly perfectly circular spots of red on her cheeks. But she didn’t brush her hair aside, and she didn’t lean back, either, and if her eyes were a little damp, I was willing to chalk it up to old anger. She was . . . beautiful. Breathtakingly beautiful. Like she was ablaze, all impassioned with what she was saying, what she wanted to tell me, and I was a tiny bit frightened to be at the center of that. But the rest of me kept reminding that nervous part how fucking lucky I was that she was looking at me like this. That she was showing me this piece of her.
“What I mean,” she continued, her voice softer, not quite as hard, “is that . . .” she shrugged and glanced nervously over at Zevi, then back to me, “being an adult doesn’t mean you automatically have it all figured out. It doesn’t really mean anything, except that you get to vote. And that your parents can kick you out and there’s nothing that can stop them. But it doesn’t mean you have all the answers.” Another glance at Zevi, and this time I thought she was trying to include him in the conversation. “Sometimes it takes a long time to figure that shit out. Took me a long time, at least.”
I wasn’t really sure what to say to that. I mean, I thought she was one hundred percent right, and logically, I’d known what she was saying was true before she said it. Hitting eighteen didn’t prove anything, didn’t make you an invincible adult. You didn’t wake up one day and suddenly realize all the ways your parents screwed you over, or how your teenage friends messed you up. You didn’t all of a sudden have everything about yourself or the people around you figured out.
But it felt like I should have, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that. Part of me still wanted to let my parents think for me, because they were my parents, and I was the kid. And even though I’d spent most of my childhood and teenage years—and let’s be real, my adult years—defying what they wanted from me, every time I did it, I was still . . . anxious about it. Because they were my parents and they should know best. And because all of my defying and rebelling and doing the opposite of what they wanted had never had anything to do with hurting them, or being stubborn, or proving something to them. It had only been about doing what I knew I needed to do to be happy. And I didn’t want to disappoint them, even now.
“Takes all of us a long time,” Zevi said into the silence that was growing in the room. “At least we’re figuring it out though, right? Some people don’t ever, I think. Don’t ever know themselves well enough, outside of the box they’ve been given.”
Cara pulled in a long, slow breath and leaned back against the couch cushions again. “True. I think they don’t.” She flashed a quick smile at me. “Least we’re not living in a box.”
“True,” I repeated, and smiled back at her shyly. I wasn’t a shy person, generally. But it was like we’d just shared something or walked through something important together, even if it was only something small, and I wasn’t sure how to look at her, or myself, right now. But I knew I was glad she was here.
By the time Zevi left an hour later, I had the drum kit all set up, Zevi had told seven more embarrassing stories t
hat’d made both me and Cara laugh until we cried, and Tuck had texted me three times. I hadn’t read the texts—I figured they were probably jokes or about songs or something he found funny or interesting. That was how Tuck and I worked. We talked to each other all the time, any time, about whatever was on our minds. But I didn’t want to interrupt my time with Cara and Zevi, not right now. I didn’t want to think about how much I wanted to go home when I was actually, for the moment, pretty content. If it was something really important, Tuck would call.
The room had been full of laughter and conversation, and when Zevi left, it was like he took some of it with him. Not in a bad way. But it was quieter, and the room felt a bit closer with only me and Cara in it. She tipped sideways on the couch, lying down, and watched me while I sat behind the kit, making sure everything was positioned right, everything within reach, tapping the drums lightly with a stick. I didn’t want to hit anything—it had gone quiet upstairs too, and I figured Mom and Dad had gone to bed—but I skimmed my sticks over the heads, testing reach, and tapped my feet against the bass pedal so it thumped softly.
I looked up from my testing and found Cara still staring at me, her eyelids heavy, like she might doze off. But she was focused on me, enough that I could feel it, and it made my heart pound a couple of times.
“How’s it look?” I asked, softly. It seemed like conversation should be soft now—now that it was late, now that the house had gone to bed around us.
The grin on Cara’s face this time was slow, and wide, and lovely, and a little bit flirty. “You know I have no idea what a drum set should look like, right?”
I smiled back. “Didn’t ask if it looked right. Only how.”
Her smile went impossibly wider, and she closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against the couch like she was embarrassed enough to want to hide her face. “Pretty sexy, honestly, you sitting behind it.”