“I get it,” Elliot says, taking a right. “I passed, though, right?”
“You wouldn’t be driving me if you didn’t,” Dia says, and she reaches across, rubs her thumb at the corner of his mouth. These little things she does, possessive things—Elliot loves them.
They pull in to this burger place; it looks like the diviest thing ever, but Dia’s eyes light up. “Let’s get one of everything,” she says. “It’s all so good.”
They get their food to go and drive to a spot high up on the edge of town and sit on the hood of Elliot’s cousin’s car while they eat. The sky darkens and the town lights up beneath them. So it’s not the classiest date ever, Elliot knows that, but it doesn’t really matter. That’s not what he and Dia are about. This is good.
She’s in the middle of a story about Ciara and a broken-down van when her phone rings. Elliot watches her take it out, frown, and silence it. “What was I saying?” she says. “Oh, so yeah, we’re driving and all of a sudden we can’t see anything, there’s smoke everywhere—”
Her phone rings again. “You can answer,” Elliot says.
“It’s just Jules,” Dia says, and cuts it off again.
Then it rings, again, immediately.
“Maybe you should answer,” Elliot says, and this time Dia looks at him and puts her phone to her ear.
“What?” she says, impatient. “Juliana, I’m busy.”
Then her face falls. Elliot wipes his hands on his jeans as Dia begins chewing her bottom lip. “What? Where are you? I don’t know where that is. Whose house? Slow down.”
After a minute more of conversation, she hangs up and fixes Elliot with a moody stare. “Hanna?” he says.
“She caused a scene, Jules said.” Dia tugs a hand through the ends of her curls. “Smashed a window, and the girl whose house it is, is freaking out, and Hanna’s pretty much blacked out and Jules can’t get her to leave. So . . .”
Elliot rattles the car keys. It’s either leave Hanna to self-destruct or try to help. “Let’s go get them.”
Jules
It was ten on Tuesday morning. Hot, but not as hot as it was going to be, Jules knew.
And she was standing outside Revelry, clutching her bass, staring up at the marquee.
They’d had their name up there before, as Fairground. The first time it had ever happened they’d taken about a thousand pictures, posed beneath it. Today it was empty except for the words LIVE MUSIC.
Jules scuffed her feet on the sidewalk and took out her phone for the thousandth time since leaving Hanna’s yesterday. Still no response.
No texts, no missed calls. Nothing to answer the question Jules had asked around six in the morning, when she was too wired to sleep: You are coming, right, Hanna? You are going to be there?
Nothing from Autumn, either. No good luck or You’ll kill it! No anything.
(Did she deserve good luck from Autumn?)
“Hey.”
Jules looked up and Dia was right there. “Hey,” she said. “Have you—”
“No, I haven’t heard from her,” Dia said.
Jules resisted the urge to toss her phone across the street and instead folded her arms over her chest. “She’ll be here. I know she will.” She was trying to convince herself as much as Dia, because she knew nothing. She hadn’t heard from Hanna all morning, all last night. And the Hanna she’d seen yesterday had been a stranger. No, not a stranger. Someone she knew far too well and had hoped to never meet again.
Jules looked at Dia, and she was staring up at the marquee the same way Jules had been. “It’s been so long,” she said without looking at Jules.
“I know.” Jules looked down at the sidewalk, gray and dirty and already beginning to shimmer in the heat. “She has to be here. Right? Otherwise—what’s the point of any of this?” If Hanna didn’t show, and they didn’t play, and they didn’t win, then what was the entire point of everything they’d been doing?
Maybe there wasn’t one; maybe it was too naively hopeful, way too made-for-TV-movie for Jules to think that there was some grand meaning to this whole thing. Maybe it was just that they’d tried to do something and failed and that was it.
“Then there’s no point,” Dia said. “We fail. That’s it.”
But Jules refused to accept it. Dia was wrong, she had to be wrong, because Hanna was different now. Sober and changed, and she wanted this exactly as badly as they did. Didn’t she? “She’ll be here.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Dia said, and she didn’t sound angry, only tired. “We should go check in.”
Jules looked at her and their eyes met, and Jules felt about as exhausted as Dia sounded. Come on, Hanna.
She nodded. “Okay.”
Inside they signed in and were led into the warren of back corridors and left to sit on folding chairs at the end of a line of people. Guitars littered the hall, scattered between flannel-clad musicians who seemed to collectively turn and look at them. Scanned them and assessed their competition, it felt like to Jules. She fixed her face in a blank, I-don’t-care expression and stretched her legs out, looking at her beat-up boots. “We have time,” she said under her breath, so the person on her left didn’t hear. “She has time.”
“Thirty minutes,” Dia said. “You think she’s actually coming? Or you think she’s going to screw us over?”
“She’s not screwing us over.”
“What if she is?” Dia said. “What if this was her plan all along? Tell us she wants to play, get us this far, and then make us lose. Payback. For what we did to her.”
Jules screwed up her face. “What would be the point?” she asked. “Seriously. What does she get from that?”
“She gets to hurt us the way we hurt her.”
“No.” Jules shook her head. “She wants this as much as we do. You can see it, when she’s playing. When we’re writing together. Don’t you feel it?”
“Yeah,” Dia said, more a sigh than a word.
Jules turned toward Dia, the two of them shielding each other from the jagged whispers and sideways glances. “You don’t think she might—” She felt cruel even saying it, doubting Hanna this much. “Relapse?”
Dia’s eyes widened. “God. No. No? I hope not.”
Jules leaned forward and looked down the corridor, resisted the urge to get out her phone and call Hanna for the millionth time. So if she wouldn’t miss this, and she wasn’t downing vodka somewhere, then—where the hell was she?
“This is exactly what I expected, in the beginning,” Dia said, her voice low. “From Hanna. This is exactly the kind of shit I thought she’d pull. And before, this would have made me feel good, you know? Knowing that I was right about her all along. But now I feel like . . .”
Jules looked at her. “Like what?”
“Like . . . really? She spent all that time telling me how different she is. I believed that she’s different. And yet, here we are.” Dia pulled at her curls.
“She has changed,” Jules said, and she wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince Dia or herself. “She has.”
Dia was silent for a moment, and then she nodded. “I know.”
They waited while names were called, while groups filed in quiet and came out swaggering. They moved down the line, closer and closer to the backstage door. Jules looked down this hall, at the old posters and album artwork and flyers papering the length of it. They’d walked this hall so many times. They’d been on that stage and in the crowd and up on the balcony.
Why didn’t any of that make her feel less sick?
The door opened and the girl with the clipboard came out. “We’re running a little behind,” she announced, pulling a pen from behind her ear. “Don’t worry, we’ll get to everybody. Washington Forth, you’re up.”
They waited.
Jules bounced her feet on the sticky floor, her knees jittery, her hands plucking at her clothes and her hair as the time ticked up to eleven. When she looked at Dia her head was tipped back against the wall, her li
ps moving silently. Jules could make out what she was saying; comeoncomeoncomeon. Same thought running on loop in Jules’s head.
Jules leaned to speak in Dia’s ear. “We still have time,” she said. “She can still be here.”
Dia pulled away. “She didn’t know we’d have time,” Dia said flatly. “She should be here by now. She’s not coming.”
And Jules couldn’t fight that fact anymore. Dia was right; Hanna didn’t know about any reprieve. Eleven, that’s when they were supposed to have been up, and Hanna should have been there. “Shit,” she said, gripping her knees. “Fuck. What are we going to do?”
“Wildfire? You’re up.”
The girl with the clipboard said their name like a question, her voice going up at the end, her eyebrows rising to match. Jules supposed she was right; what kind of name was Wildfire, anyway?
What kind of broken band were they, anyway?
She locked eyes with Dia and they took the same deep breath, steeled themselves with the same strength. “We got this,” Dia said, quiet, to Jules. “Let’s go in there and lay it all out, the two of us. That’s all we can do.”
Jules picked up her bass. “Let’s go.”
They walked, instruments in hand, up to the clipboard girl. “All right,” she said, snapping strawberry gum, the smell of it enough to turn Jules’s stomach. “You have—”
“Wait!”
A clattering commotion, someone yelling, “Watch it!” and someone else saying, “Ow! My foot!” and Jules wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or mightily pissed off as she turned to watch Hanna, here, finally, sprinting down the hall.
“I’m here!” she said, out of breath, heading to them with what seemed like half her drum set in her arms. “Wait, I’m here.”
She came skidding to a stop and bent over, her head almost between her knees. “Jesus Christ, Hanna,” Dia hissed. “It’s about time.”
Jules pulled Hanna to standing. “Get it together,” she whispered. “We need you.”
She looked back at clipboard girl, her mouth curled into a sneer. “Ooo-kay,” the girl said, dragging the sound out. “So, anyway . . . you have fifteen minutes to set up, and then the judges will come in. Good luck.” She sounded so utterly bored, and Jules hated her for a second.
But there was no time for that, and no time to talk to Hanna, either, because they were through the door now, and in the wings, and in the dark Jules could only see the gleam of Dia’s eyes and the white of Hanna’s hair, and then the brightest lights bathed them as Dia led them out onto the stage.
Elliot
OCTOBER
Elliot crawls along the street. “Which number did she say it was?”
“She didn’t,” Dia says. “She said—”
She cuts off, and Elliot sees why, sees Jules standing on the sidewalk in front of a landscaped front yard. “I’m gonna go a little farther,” Elliot says, because the street is crammed with cars parked up and down, and if he parks too close and someone hits this car, he’s going to pay.
“Okay,” Dia says, and then in the same breath, “I can’t leave her alone for one night. Jules is supposed to be taking care of her, you know? This is fucking ridiculous, I cannot—” She cuts herself off. “Whatever. Let’s go get her.”
Elliot parks and they walk back down to the right house, and Jules is still outside waiting for them. “I know, I know,” she says as they get near. “I was supposed to keep an eye on her, I know.”
“It’s not your fault,” Dia says. “She always does this.”
“What happened?” Elliot says. “She smashed a window?”
Jules shakes her head. “A mirror,” she says. “In the bathroom.”
“Did she get hurt?” Elliot says, imagining the force it takes to crack the glass. “Did she, like, smash smash it?”
“She threw a bottle at it,” Jules says, and she looks at the ground. “The whole thing shattered.”
“Why the fuck would she do that?” Dia says, but Elliot knows enough now to know that it’s not a real question. “Where is she now?”
“She wouldn’t let me take her home,” Jules says. “The girl who lives here is pissed.”
Dia rolls her eyes and Elliot looks between the two of them. “Let’s just go get her out as fast as possible,” he says. “Minimal collateral damage. I mean, minus the mirror. And the bottle. And herself.”
They split up—Jules takes the kitchen and the backyard, Dia and Elliot take the living room and the upstairs, because, as Dia says, “Hanna has never met an off-limits sign she didn’t completely ignore.”
She’s not anywhere they look. Upstairs, downstairs, outside, upstairs again. Jules is with them now, checking under the bed of the master bedroom. “Where the hell is she?” she says, and Elliot can hear the panic in her voice. “I left her dancing in the kitchen.”
“You can’t take your eye off her,” Dia says. “You know that.”
Elliot opens the closet, a last resort, and of course, there she is. Slumped against the wall with a pile of knocked-down clothes blanketing her. He looks over his shoulder. “I got her.”
Dia comes over, stands by him, and Hanna looks so peaceful that Elliot is almost afraid for her, for what she’s facing when she wakes up in about 0.2 seconds.
“Hanna,” Dia hisses, crouching. “Get up.”
Hanna’s lips move, but no sound comes out and her eyes stay shut.
“Hanna, I swear to god.” Dia jabs Elliot’s ankle. “Help me.”
Together they pull Hanna up to standing, and Elliot puts her arm around his neck as she starts mumbling. “Leave me alone,” she slurs—or, he thinks that’s what she’s saying. “Tired.”
“Yeah, well, I’m tired too,” Dia snaps, taking the other half of Hanna’s weight. “Jules, get the door.”
They maneuver her out of the bedroom, down the stairs, through the hall. Jules has Hanna’s bag, something that Elliot thinks might have been Hanna’s shirt earlier tonight because now Hanna has on a men’s button-down and the thing Jules is holding is stained red. “I think she’s bleeding,” Elliot says.
“Hey!”
Jules looks back at them, her eyes wide. “That’s the girl,” she says. “We should be gone, like, now.”
“Get back here!” A white girl with long, blond hair and angry eyes jumps in their path. “She owes me, that crazy bitch! She trashed my house. I want my money.”
“We’re really sorry,” Jules says, and she grabs the front door. “We’re going, we won’t come back, we’re really sorry—”
“I want my money.”
“It’s only a mirror,” Elliot says, and he notices the curious circle forming around them. They should really get out, before this turns into something.
“It was an antique.”
“Well, you should’ve taken it down before you threw a party,” Dia says, out of breath, and the girl’s eyes go wide, and Jules puts herself between them.
“Go!” she says, and Elliot does what she says, dragging Hanna out of the house and through the neat yard—more collateral damage—while the girl keeps yelling at them but does not follow.
“Way to defuse the situation,” Elliot says.
Dia glares at him. “Help me get her to the car.”
It takes forever to get her up the street to the parked car, but eventually they get there and Elliot bears Hanna’s weight while he fishes the keys from his pocket. “Lay her down,” he says, and Jules is on the other side, coaxing Hanna toward her. Eventually she’s stretched out across the back seat, and now Elliot says again, “I think she’s bleeding.” He starts to check her over but Jules shakes her head.
“She’s fine,” she says. “She spilled wine on her shirt.”
Dia almost chokes. “Where the fuck did she get wine?”
“Where the fuck does she get everything?” Jules shoots back.
It’s dark and Elliot’s adrenaline is running high. He looks back toward the house, checking that no one is coming after them. “Antique,�
� he says. “How much, do you think?”
“Did you see that house?” Dia says. “We don’t have the money, trust me.”
“We better pray she doesn’t find out who we are,” Jules says, and she rubs her face. “Can we take her home? I’m tired.”
Dia gets in the back, lifting Hanna’s head and laying it on her lap. “You get shotgun,” she says, and then she looks at Elliot for the first time in what feels like hours. “Thank you.”
He shrugs. “No big deal,” he says, like he carries half-comatose girls out of parties every weekend.
Elliot drives them back to their side of town, five miles under the speed limit, Dia’s dad’s words echoing in his head. The radio is on low and Jules flicks from station to station. In between snatches of sound Elliot hears Dia talking quietly, and at first he thinks she’s telling Hanna off. But when he listens, he hears it, this sweet, low whisper:
“It’s okay, Han, you’re okay. Why do you do this to yourself? It’s not good, it’s not good. You scare me when you’re like this. I know, shh, it’s okay. We’re taking you home. You’ll be okay.”
He turns the radio up and keeps driving.
Hanna
They flew into fast motion, plugging in amps, testing mics, setting up the cymbals and snare and kick pedal around the house drums. Hanna would have preferred her own kit, but she had no way to bring it all, and usually she could get by with the basics and her own essentials. She steadied her hands, shivering with the adrenaline surging through her, and sat. In front of her Jules looked over to Dia, stage left. “Give me an A?”
Hanna settled her sticks in her hands, gave the snare an experimental hit. Her heart was battering her ribcage still, her lungs burning from having to run all the way from the bus stop to here with her equipment weighing her down and her head playing latelatelate on a loop.
“Hanna.” Dia looked over her shoulder. “All good?”
Hanna thought of the bag she’d packed last night, now stashed at her job.
This Is What It Feels Like Page 20