She’d gotten two, maybe three hours sleep once she’d finished packing. Wide awake at five a.m., she’d wondered if she was making a huge mistake. On the bus, making her way here, she’d still been unsure. I can go back, she’d thought. Mom will never know.
But right now, on this stage with these girls, she knew.
This was right.
“All good,” Hanna said.
This disembodied voice interrupted. “Hello,” it called out. “All set up? It sounds good from here.”
Hanna held a hand up and squinted against the lights. Where was that voice coming from?
“Yes,” Dia said into the center mic. “We’re ready.”
“Thank you,” a different voice said. “So—Wildfire, is it? Before we get started, one question from me: give me some of your influences.”
Hanna caught Jules’s glance back at her; she looked as off-kilter as Hanna felt. But Dia stepped closer to her mic and cleared her throat. “Hi. Um, influences—Sleater-Kinney, Melissa Auf der Maur, Sade, Kacey Musgraves, Christina Aguilera—”
“Interesting,” the second voice said.
“Okay,” the third voice said. “What are you playing for us?”
“This song is called ‘Bones.’”
Dia turned to her, and Hanna looked to Jules. They looked perfect: focused, cool, their all-black outfits, their shiny guitars. Hanna locked eyes with Jules and saw everything she needed right there.
She rolled her shoulders, steeled herself, lifted her sticks.
Four sharp clicks and Hanna dropped, feet first, into the noise.
Their hours of practice had made them sharp, clean, in sync with each other. And Hanna let herself be suspended in the music, her aching muscles light now, but her breath coming in gasps between fills. She sank into Dia’s voice, her own lyrics.
“In the forest,”
Dia sang,
“Bones break like branches
Weighed down with words
And under the night is awake
Waiting to break.”
Jules brandished her bass and pressed her mouth to the mic, and Hanna felt their ghosts watching, the past ephemeral versions of her playing right in this same spot.
“I call the witches and
They say they won’t know me
Not without blue blood and moonlight
Moons under the skin of my loves.”
Dia vibrated at the front of the stage. Hanna could see the energy coming off her and fed from it. Jules’s jersey twisted around her waist as she bounced one foot off the floor, wrenched her guitar away from and then back against her body, and Hanna thrashed against the drums, releasing every ounce of her pent-up explosive anger on it.
“All the honesty
In the woods and the world
Isn’t going to save me
She can ride that horse until she dies
She can follow that river
Into deep darkness.”
Hanna pounded the drums, cracked skins, weathered cymbals, and felt the air stop around them. Suspended in this place, this sound, for a fleeting moment. This really was it. Not the end.
Everything.
“In the forest
In the dungeon
Wherever wildflowers grow
That’s not where I’ll be
When you’re not watching
The witches take me
To the forest of ever after.”
Dia’s voice ended it, the only sound above the fade of their music, and Hanna dropped her head forward, her chest heaving, her hands shaking.
This is everything.
“Thank you,” one disembodied voice said, and Hanna almost hated whichever one it was for the interruption of this moment. “We’ll be in touch.”
Dia
They broke everything down as fast as they could, in uncertain quiet. By the time they were done the judges had disappeared, and they left the stage, wound their way back through the club, and finally spilled out into the sunlight.
Dia took only a second before she began tearing into Hanna. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she yelled, and Hanna didn’t even look afraid, but the guy crossing the street away from them did. “Are you fucking kidding me, Hanna? You really had to pull a stunt like this on a day like today? What were you doing? What were you thinking?”
And Hanna spoke over her, trying to answer her: “I know, I’m sorry—”
“You’re sorry? Yeah, you’d better be! You almost cost us—”
“I know, I really didn’t mean to—”
“So what did you mean to do? You don’t text, you don’t call—”
“That wasn’t my fault, the traffic—”
“What were we supposed think? You didn’t even—”
“And I had to—”
“Why didn’t you call me? Call Jules? We—”
“But I got here, didn’t I? We did it, isn’t that what you—”
“What I wanted was—”
“God, stop!” Jules pushed herself between them, held her hands out while she whipped her head, looking from Dia to Hanna and back to Dia again. “Breathe. Please.”
Dia did as Jules said, pulling in sticky summer air and breathing out the taste of exhaust. Hanna was watching her carefully, face flushed red.
Dia looked away. Her clothes were sticking to her. Her stomach felt empty.
But they’d done it. That was real.
“Okay,” Jules said now, stepping back. “Better?”
And now that Jules was out of her way, Dia set her stuff down, reached out and grabbed Hanna, pulled her into a viselike hug. “I didn’t think you were coming,” she said into Hanna’s hair. “I thought I was right about you all along.” She closed her eyes. “Thank god you made me wrong.”
Hanna’s laugh was pure surprise. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Dia said, meaning it, so sincere, and she hugged Hanna tighter. “But don’t do that ever again.”
Dia pulled back, pulled a caught curl from her lips and looked at Jules, the surprise emblazoned across her face, too. “I’m hungry,” she said now, feeling a little delirious. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” Jules said.
Hanna pulled cash from her pocket. “I’ll buy,” she said. “And then I’ll explain.”
Dia picked up her guitar and her amp, and tilted her face up to the sun. Nothing was ever easy with them. But easy wasn’t always good.
“Let’s go.”
Hanna
In the gas station across the street from the bar they got dollar hot dogs and chips, Skittles, and a bunch of candy bars and sodas. “And a pack of Marlboro Lights,” Hanna said as they piled their stuff on the counter.
The guy behind it didn’t ask for ID before getting the cigarettes and sliding them across to Hanna. “Eighteen seventy-nine.”
Hanna started to pay, then swore. “Can I get a lighter, too?”
They paid and left and then, without even talking about it, they crossed back over to Revelry, lugging all their equipment behind them. This time they walked down the sidewalk to the tattoo shop and slipped through the alley that led to the parking lots behind the buildings. It was what they used to do all the time, when they couldn’t get in or had opened for Graceland. They’d go out to the parking lot of whatever venue they were at and sit on the curb with their legs stretched out onto the asphalt as they waited for Ciara to take them home, giddy and happy.
So that was what they did now, the three of them in the corner of this empty lot, surrounded by guitars and drum paraphernalia.
Hanna peeled the cellophane off her cigarettes but didn’t open the pack. “I think it went okay,” she said, turning the pack over in her hands and looking straight ahead. “We kept it together. We played as good as we ever have. We have a chance, I think.”
She turned her head, Dia and Jules both looking at her. “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “You want to know what happened?”
Dia
dipped her chin, and Jules almost smiled. “Shoot.”
Hanna took out a cigarette, tapped it against her palm, and started from the beginning. “My mom said I couldn’t do the contest. She doesn’t trust me, and I get it, I do. But I’m also tired. I don’t know what else to do to make them trust me. She said as long as I lived in her house, it was her rules, and she said no. No band, no music.” She lit the cigarette. “‘If you want to do your own thing, then you need to do it outside my house.’ That’s what she said. So, fine. I packed my stuff and I’m out.”
Her words were met with the rushing of traffic out on the road and the faintest noise from the club.
Then Dia shook her head, her face confused. “Wait, what?” she said. “You left home? Like, gone?”
“Where are you going? What are you going to do?” Jules grabbed Hanna’s knee. “Oh my god, Hanna, are you for real?”
“Because of this?” Dia said. “Hanna.”
She shook her head, a lazy curl of smoke twisting from her lips. “Because of everything,” she said. “I’ve been good, you know? Since rehab, I’ve tried so hard to be the best version of me. I got my grades up. I got my license. I’ve never missed work, not once. I stopped going out anywhere, really, so my parents would know I wasn’t doing something stupid somewhere. I hang out with Molly, I try to keep my self-destructive ways to the absolute minimum, and yet—none of it is enough to make them stop looking at me the way they do.”
“What way?” Jules asked.
“Like I’m the biggest disappointment of their lives.” She flicked ash to the ground and scratched at the back of her knee. “They’re not wrong. I’ve done a lot of bad things. But I never could get it right with my mom, even before the drinking. And playing music with both of you again, it’s like—the best thing that’s happened to me in forever. And I’m supposed to give that up?”
Hanna put her cigarette out. Then she told them everything: that she’d gotten up this morning and acted completely normal at breakfast, had apologized for her words yesterday.
Her mom had taken Hanna’s hand. You understand, she’d said. You understand why I want this for you?
“Yes,” Hanna had said. “I get it.”
And her mom had said, “Your part in the band is over. We’re agreed?”
“Yes,” Hanna had lied. “It’s done.”
“We’ll discuss this more tonight,” Theresa had said, and then left for work.
Molly had eaten cereal as she’d watched Hanna packing up the parts of her drums that she could take. “You’re really doing this?” she’d asked, plucking at her bottom lip.
“Yes,” Hanna had said, coming back into the house. She’d checked her reflection in the hall mirror, checked she looked ready for their performance. Then she’d looked at her sister and tried her best to smile. “I’m not going far, Molls. And I’ll call you tonight.”
“What about Mom and Dad?”
The note Hanna had left on the table wasn’t exactly subtle.
I’m sorry. I have to do this. I can’t stay here when you won’t let me breathe. And I don’t want to lie to you anymore, but I don’t know how not to. I wish I could say this to your faces but I don’t think I could. So instead, let me call this the last time I’ll lie to you and break your trust. I have to do this. I love you.
Hanna
“Don’t worry about them,” she’d said. “They know this has nothing to do with you.”
And then she’d hugged Molly goodbye, kissed the top of her head, and hauled her ass to the bus stop.
“I went by work first,” she said, wrapping up. “It was the only place I could think to go. I had to get away. Then Ciara picked me up to bring me here, and we hit traffic. There was an accident on Piper and everything was backed up, and then I didn’t even have any service to text or call.”
Dia shifted. “What about last night?” she said. “You never texted me back then. You had service then.”
“I know,” Hanna said, scuffing her feet on the asphalt. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. So . . . I didn’t know what to say.”
“I really thought you weren’t coming,” Dia said, leaning back. “So, you’re actually moving out? Where are you going?”
“Ciara’s. At least, for now. It’s not that big a deal, really,” Hanna said, and part of her believed those words. “Plenty of people are out on their own at eighteen. In a few weeks I’ll be working full time. I can rent a room somewhere and . . . I’ll eat ramen and cereal for every meal. It’s a rite of passage, no?”
Dia and Jules exchanged a look, and Hanna turned her lighter over in her hands. “What?”
“Nothing,” Jules said, but Dia exhaled loudly.
“We were worried,” she said. “That you might have—slipped.”
“Slipped?”
“Had a drink.” Dia squeezed her elbows to her ears. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”
Hanna thought of that bottle of Jameson, the one she’d managed to keep just out of her reach. “I don’t do that anymore,” Hanna said. Well: she didn’t know the future, what might happen, but for as long as she could, she would keep herself away from that bad habit. She didn’t want there to be a next time for any of the things she used to do. She didn’t want there to be another time for somebody to find her.
She pulled her feet in so she was cross-legged and looked at the pack of smokes. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” she said. “I know you’ll think I’m terrible.”
“I’ll reserve judgment until I hear what it is,” Jules said. “And so will Dia, won’t she?”
Dia held her hands up. “Swear.”
Hanna took a deep breath. “I didn’t just decide to quit drinking,” she said. “Molly found me in my room one night. I had been drinking, obviously, and I passed out, and when she saw me I wasn’t breathing. She called 911. So I got to do the whole ambulance-ER-stomach-pumping thing for the second time. Except this time it was so much worse, and I didn’t even think that was possible but it was, because this time my sister had to see me doing it. She had to make the call.” The guilt sat in her stomach, jagged. “But that’s what made me want to finally stop. I couldn’t believe that I’d let Molly do that, be the one to find me, like—what if it had been worse?” She looked at Dia and Jules. “I didn’t believe in wake-up calls before, but that was totally mine.”
Jules’s eyes looked full of sorrow. “Why wouldn’t you tell us that?”
“Because I hate it,” Hanna said vehemently. “I’m so ashamed of it. And I wanted you to think that I turned myself around and got better all by myself. But really, it was only because of this terrible thing I did.”
“You didn’t have to. Quit,” Dia said, breaking her silence. “How many times did you try before? But this time you did stop. You decided to do that. I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of.”
It was as if the pressure, the guilt wound tight within her, suddenly snapped, and Hanna found herself wiping away leaking tears. She had nothing to be ashamed of.
I am okay.
“You don’t know how much I needed to hear that,” she breathed. “God.”
They sat in silence a while, the rushing cars, snatches of music from the club and the road.
Dia looked up at the sky. “Look what we did,” she said. “At the beginning of summer, could you even imagine this? Look what we put in motion.”
“Let’s enter Sun City,” Jules said, in a perfect imitation of Dia. “What’s the worst that can happen? Oh, yeah, Hanna gets kicked out of her house, no big.”
“I never said that,” Dia objected. “I said, what do we have to lose?”
“Same difference.”
Hanna drummed on her knees. “It’ll make a good story,” she said. “When we’re famous.”
“A great story,” Dia said. “Teenage mother, out and proud lesbian, reformed bad girl. We’ll be on every blog worldwide.”
“We should celebrate,” Jules said. “We actually did this. Let’s do
something good.”
Dia rolled her eyes. “Like what?”
Jules began reeling off ideas, Dia shooting every one down until Jules accused her of being a downer. They worked their way through their candy stash, melting chocolate under the hot sun, and Hanna laughed along with them, hard enough to make her stomach ache. And she felt both so overwhelmed with everything and so overcome with gratitude for these girls that she didn’t know what to do.
So she ate her candy, and sat with them, and it was good.
Dia
Dia had to leave for work after a while; when Dia asked, Hanna insisted she was okay, and Jules rolled her eyes when Dia hesitated. “Go already,” she said, flicking her hand in Dia’s direction. “We don’t need you getting fired, we have enough drama already.”
“All right, I’m out,” Dia said, stealing a Reese’s cup for the bus ride. “Both of you text me later, okay? Okay, bye!” She turned, and then whipped back, unable to keep the shit-eating grin off her face. “Can you believe we pulled this off?”
Hanna raked her hands through her hair, shaking her head. “I can’t,” she said, her smile as wide as Dia’s. “It’s too much.”
Dia really left then, had to rush for the bus with her guitar smacking against her back and her stupid heavy amp bashing her legs.
It only took ten minutes in the bakery to make the morning feel like it was years ago, moons away. Imelda had her running around on a rush order, and she spilled an entire vial of food coloring over her hands, her skin tinged blue no matter how hard she scrubbed. When she was working the counter, she looked up and saw Jesse walk past with two guys whose names Dia could never remember. He didn’t stop, and he didn’t look in, and it took Dia a split second of hurt to remember what she’d said to him.
Of course he didn’t stop. It wasn’t like he was going to come in to flirt over cookies like normal, was it?
She pressed her knuckles into the hard plastic of the register and swallowed hard. Sacrifice, that was what this was. She couldn’t have everything she wanted, nobody could. And she wasn’t the only one losing things; Hanna was losing her home, wasn’t she? So she should suck it up and forget about him. Remember the feeling of singing her soul out this morning, feeling so really and truly awake for the first time in years.
This Is What It Feels Like Page 21