by M. G. Reyes
Lucy’s playing continued for several minutes. It wasn’t a short piece, but the mood switched every few minutes. As spellbinding arpeggios gave way to a more contemplative melody, Maya and Paolo edged back toward their own rooms. Candace’s hand hovered over the doorknob. It seemed like sacrilege to burst in on Lucy, like interrupting a private moment between her and the guitar. Very quietly, she turned the handle and slipped into the room with an apologetic glance.
Lucy acknowledged her with a nod, then continued playing, her features stern with utter concentration. Candace perched on the edge of her bed and watched until the final chord. When it was over, she burst into heartfelt applause. Lucy smiled slightly, shifted a little uncomfortably on her chair.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”
“Are you kidding? Lucy, you can really play!”
Lucy shot her a look of thinly veiled derision. “I know. I got picked to play lead guitar in an up-and-comin’ band.”
“No, I mean, like, really, you know, like, classical.”
“I trained to play that. Only really started with the rock about three years ago.”
“Is that why your parents threw you out?”
Lucy’s answer seemed guarded. “Had something to do with it, yeah.”
“Well, you know I love rock music, but seriously, Lucy, wow!”
Lucy shrugged. “You think so?” She didn’t seem convinced. “That was going to be my audition piece for Juilliard.”
“You should still try out. You’re amazing.”
“Not so much. I’m still playing too slow in the arpeggios.”
“You don’t want to go to Juilliard . . . ?”
A beat passed. “No.”
“Why ever not?”
“It’s . . . not what I want. You think I’m good but, truth is, I’m not good enough. Do you have any idea what kind of talent is coming out of China and the Far East these days? There are twelve-year-old kids that play that Bach Chaconne better’n me. The only way a guitarist can make it in that world is as a soloist. You don’t see many guitars in orchestras. And I’m not good enough to cut it as a soloist.”
Candace hesitated. There seemed to be a degree of regret to Lucy’s tone. Maybe rock music wasn’t her first love after all. Candace shook her head. “Seems pretty screwed up to me, throwing your own kid out because they don’t want to go to a particular school.”
“Wasn’t only that. Wasn’t that at all, matter of fact. Just that me deciding that I didn’t want to try for Juilliard led to . . . a lot of stuff, actually. The rock music. And I fell back into some behaviors that . . . Ahhh. What’s the point talking about it? What’s done is done.”
“You seem sad. Are you?”
Lucy shook her head, staring into Candace’s eyes. “No. I’m really not. Maybe once, but not now.” She leaned forward and picked up the soft instrument case, which lay discarded at her feet.
Candace wandered over to the music stand and stared at the sheet music. She’d taken piano lessons until she was eleven and never reached a high standard, even for that age. Lucy’s music was covered with an impossible tattoo of black notes. Candace’s own tiny experience playing an instrument made her realize that to play as well as Lucy did meant that at some point she must have been completely dedicated. To be able to perform as well as she just had, without having practiced the piece at least since they’d moved into the house, meant that Lucy’s talent was prodigious. It was hard to believe that Lucy couldn’t go just as far as she wanted with the guitar.
There had to be something Lucy wasn’t admitting.
“You just love to rock, right?” Candace prodded.
Lucy allowed the beginnings of a grin. “I sure do.”
“How’d that happen, seeing as how you were this little goody-two-shoes classical player?”
“My big brother, Lloyd. He took me to see Green Day when I was fourteen. Told me there was a chance, if I could swear I could play, that Billie Joe would invite me on stage to play with him.”
“No kidding.”
“I looked online and he was right. Every big concert they did, some lil’ kid would get hauled up on stage to play guitar.”
“Amazing. So did you, like, study the songs before the concert?”
“Please. It was like three chords.”
Candace’s mouth stalled in mid O.
“Anyhow, we went to the concert. Lloyd made me get there real early so that we could dash for the front row when the doors opened.”
“And did . . . ?”
“Did he pick me? A black girl outta all those pasty white-boy faces? You bet your ass he picked me.”
“Damn! That’s so awesome.”
“He picked out three of us. We played ‘Knowledge’ by Operation Ivy. Not the most challenging thing in my repertoire but . . .” She gave a nostalgic sigh. “Looking out over that crowd. A sea of upturned faces, all expectant, waiting to be entertained. The energy of it. I can’t explain. It was like the energy flowed from them to me and back again. In this incredible feedback loop.”
Candace grinned in appreciation. “I have some idea of what that’s like. Our Shakespeare youth theater group used to play to fifteen hundred people sometimes. You’re right, there’s nothing like that feeling from a crowd.”
“Take that feeling and multiply it by at least ten—’cause there were, like, seventeen thousand people in the crowd that day. I was buzzing for weeks. Went to sleep with the bass lines pounding in my veins.”
“You got the bug.”
“That was me bought and sold. Never could feel the same way about classical music again. When I play a piece like the Chaconne, I’m lost inside myself. Which is good, too, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not how I wanted to connect with music. Being on that stage was like being a lightning rod, collecting all this energy and transmitting it. I didn’t tell my folks, didn’t even tell Lloyd, but I knew it from the day of that concert. So that’s how I started on my third attempt at a career at the age of fourteen.”
Candace frowned in contemplation. “Don’t you mean your second?”
Lucy shook her head. Candace had a vague sense of some reluctance in Lucy’s manner. She put the acoustic guitar back onto its stand near the door. Then Lucy flopped onto her bed, eyes fixed straight on the ceiling. She fumbled under her pillow for her cell phone and reached for some earplugs. It seemed that the conversation was over, but Candace wasn’t ready to let it drop.
She had an idea and turned on her laptop. “Where was the Green Day concert?”
“In Oakland.”
She searched for a few minutes until she found the video online. She hit play and leaned back to watch. Sure enough, there was Lucy, young, slightly chubby and wearing blue jeans and a black American Idiot T-shirt, strumming the chords, eyes facing the audience, Billie Joe Armstrong singing along, his face wreathed with delight.
“Dear God, there’s a video!”
“There’s more’n one,” muttered Lucy.
Candace looked over at Lucy. “That would be a pretty tough experience to top.”
“My folks didn’t agree.”
“So—how come it was your third career? You did something before the classical guitar?”
Lucy hesitated. She eyed Candace with what looked almost like suspicion.
“Since you ask, I used to want to act.”
“Honest to God?”
“Yeah.” Lucy paused again and then admitted, “TV, actually. Kinda like you.”
“You wanted to act on TV?”
There was a too-long pause. “I did it, for a while.”
“Are you being serious right now?”
She felt sure Lucy might have said more, but John-Michael poked his head around the door at that point and asked if Lucy wanted to go with him to get some burgers from In-N-Out. He didn’t extend the invitation to Candace, which didn’t surprise her. Every now and then those two seemed only too eager to fall back into their older friendship.
Candace
watched them go. Then her eyes wandered back to the computer screen and fourteen-year-old Lucy Long, strutting her stuff with Green Day.
Now that was inspiration.
GRACE
BALCONY, THURSDAY, MAY 21
“Come look, it’s gorgeous out.”
From the balcony of the beach house, Grace announced her invitation to anyone within hearing distance, and then turned to watch a peach-and-magenta sunset flare against the horizon. The beach was largely empty, just the occasional dog gamboling along, owner and pet stark silhouettes in the sand. Out in the water she could see the lights of a few boats being rocked in a light offshore breeze.
The evening bar crowd was just beginning to arrive. Slightly more than the normal weekday buzz, fairly standard for a Thursday. After a moment, Candace appeared on the threshold of her bedroom, laptop in hands.
“I gotta finish this civil rights essay.”
“You still haven’t finished?” Grace asked.
“I got distracted by the ol’ ’Tube.”
“Hamsters playing the piano?”
“No,” Candace said calmly. “Lucy playing with Green Day.”
Candace placed the laptop on the balcony’s drinks table and played the video. Grace watched over her shoulder, marveling at the young Lucy’s supreme confidence.
“Well, I’ll be. . . .”
“I know. She’s got major stage presence,” Candace said. “You know what’s even more surprising about her past?”
Grace hesitated for a moment. There was a gleam in Candace’s eye, the air of someone on the verge of divulging a juicy secret. Did Grace really want to risk where this conversation might lead?
“More surprising than Lucy playing live with Green Day?”
“Yeah,” Candace said. “You’d think she’d have mentioned something huge like that before, right? But I’m talking about something else, something bigger.”
Grace began looking for some kind of distraction. She swung around, toward the sunset. “Whoa. I never get tired of looking at that view.”
“It is awful pretty.”
“Your mom’s so lucky to have this place. What made her buy out here?” Grace risked a sidelong glance at Candace. But she didn’t seem remotely suspicious of Grace’s apparent lack of curiosity about Lucy. She leaned forward on the rail, shoulders hunched, and allowed a dreamy gaze to fall over the golden beach.
Good ol’, laid-back Candace. Grace faintly wished that she could be just as relaxed when the time called for it. Her own languor was studied by comparison.
“My mom always dreamed about living with artist types,” said Candace. “Such a boho wannabe. Until she got her hands on some real money. Now she does all her shopping on Rodeo Drive. A real hipster, ha.”
“Her loss, our gain.” Grace smiled at Candace. “You wanna walk down to Santa Monica? We could go to the boardwalk. I’m kind of in the mood for a banana split with a lot of hot fudge. And a fairground ride.”
“Banana split?” Candace frowned. “You have any idea how long I’d have to run to burn that off? I’m not allowed to gain more than a pound or two.”
“Maybe it would be more fun if we went with the others.”
“Yeah. You know, when we moved here, I thought we’d be there every couple of weekends.”
Grace grinned. “Me too. It’s because it’s so close. We can do it anytime.”
“So we do it never.”
They both laughed. Candace straightened up. “God, I love living here. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened, and we had to move out.”
“We have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” agreed Grace. The distraction seemed to have worked—Candace had gone quiet, probably thinking about food, which wasn’t surprising since she was usually hungry.
“We could just walk along the boardwalk,” Candace suggested. “Maybe grab some fish tacos. Or a chicken salad. My treat, little sister,” she said, wrapping an affectionate arm around Grace. “And then I can tell you this amazing news about Lucy.”
“Are you sure it’s something Lucy wants everyone to know?”
“Why not? It’s nothing bad. She didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
Grace gave up. Clearly, there was no discreet way to prevent Candace from indulging in gossip. “Okay, so what is this big secret?”
“Well, guess what? Our Lucy, rock guitar goddess, used to be on TV.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, she was on some show.”
“Regularly?”
“Didn’t say.”
“On network TV? Or some crummy cable channel?”
“What, you mean like me?” Candace said, smirking.
Grace frowned. “Yours is hardly one of the crummy cable channels, Candace.”
“She didn’t say what channel it was on.”
“So maybe she was on a show one time.”
Candace shrugged. “Hey, getting any kind of a spot on a TV show is major. Especially for a kid.”
“Huh.”
“Why are you so down on this, Grace? I thought you’d be psyched like me.”
“I don’t get why it’s a big deal.”
Just then, the yellow-painted spiral staircase began to shudder with the rhythm of someone ascending the steps. Maya’s face appeared in the stairwell. She seemed tired, with gray shadows under her eyes.
“Did I miss the sunset?”
Candace said, “Almost.”
“Darn,” Maya said. “I promised myself I’d catch one this week.”
“We were just talking about that,” Grace said. “All the cool things we said we’d do but never actually do.”
Maya nodded. “There’s just so much schoolwork. With all the shopping and the cooking and cleaning, and the coding on top, I swear, I haven’t had more than an hour to myself these past two weeks.”
There was definitely more work involved in simply keeping a home going than Grace had expected, too. But like the rest of them, there was no way she was going to admit it. They’d all bought into the idea of emancipation and so far, none of them had breached the unspoken rule to never say a word against it.
“How’s the computer stuff going?” Grace asked.
Maya leaned lazily on the edge of the balcony and stared up at the canopies of the palm trees, black fronds of silhouette against the teal-green-colored sky. “It’s going really well, thanks.”
Candace interrupted, “So hey, guess what? I was just telling Grace that I found out that Lucy used to be on TV.”
Maya glanced at Grace. She didn’t seem all that impressed, either. “Really? What show?”
“We don’t know,” Grace said cautiously. “Did you ever see a TV show with Lucy on it?”
“I hardly ever watch TV,” Maya said, in a wary tone, which struck Grace as slightly jarring.
“We could search for her online.” Candace pulled up a chair and sat in front of the laptop. “Why didn’t I think of this before?”
Grace froze. This wasn’t taking the direction she’d expected. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the housemates knowing more about Lucy. It might not be safe.
“Because you’re not an actual stalker?” Grace answered, trying to sound casual.
“It’s TV. Hardly a state secret,” Candace said. “Presumably she wanted to have an audience.”
“Is that why people act?” Grace said with an edge of challenge to her tone. “For the audience?”
Candace shrugged. “It’s a big part of it.”
“But in TV you usually don’t see the audience.”
“You still know they’re there. I mean, you gotta kind of imagine them. Anyhow, Lucy actually told me she loved the buzz she got from playing on stage with Green Day.”
Maya flinched. “Lucy played with Green Day?”
Candace nodded. “They got her up on stage when she was, like, fourteen.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Grace looked at Maya with sudden curiosity. “Why would you?”
&nbs
p; “Just seems like she’d tell us a thing like that.”
“I wonder how many other secrets she’s got up her sleeve,” Candace mused.
Grace and Maya said nothing, exchanging uncomfortable looks.
“Okay. I can’t find anything on IMDb for Lucy Long,” Candace said. “Not for Lucille, either. What else is Lucy short for? Lucinda?”
Maya interrupted. “Candace, no offense but this is getting kinda stalkerish. If she didn’t tell you the name of the show, maybe she doesn’t want to talk about it? Shouldn’t we respect her privacy?”
Candace looked baffled. She closed her computer and shrugged. “Whatever. I just thought you’d think it was cool is all.”
Deep in thought, Grace studied Maya. Ever since the younger girl had caught her looking through Lucy’s letters, Maya had been a vault. She never revealed anything about herself. It seemed everyone’s secrets were safe with Maya— Grace’s own crush on Paolo as well as Lucy’s past. But what did they really know about Maya?
JOHN-MICHAEL
VENICE BEACH, FRIDAY, MAY 22
John-Michael was behind the wheel of the Benz within five minutes of the end of his calculus class. The shock of being accosted outside school by Judy yesterday hadn’t quite left him. Maybe he was being paranoid, but John-Michael didn’t want to stick around to find out if she’d be back.
The Friday afternoon commuter beach dash had already started. A five-minute drive back to Venice turned into a twenty-minute crawl in the blazing sun. He thought of the beach, the weekend ahead. He plugged in his headphones and listened to his newest pop punk playlist. Yet even as his lips moved along to the lyrics, his mind couldn’t quite let go of the image of Judy.
There’d been venom in her eyes.
His dad’s executor had told him how much the estate would be worth once the house sold. It wasn’t a fortune, but even half of it was a whole lot more money than Judy had ever been near. He didn’t regret calling her a skank. As far as he was concerned, she was a gold-digging harpy, a former stripper with zero education who’d lived off the vices of idiot hetero men for most of her life.
Now that the police had decided that his father’s suicide was suspicious, however, Chuck Weller’s place might forever be whispered of as “that murder house.” It might affect the sale. That was all the money John-Michael would ever be able to count on. It included his mother’s inheritance, which they’d used to make a sizeable down payment on the house. It made him sick to think that he might not be able to sell the place. Even as a rental, it might be hard to find a tenant. These weren’t the kinds of problems he’d ever envisaged having during high school.