I had no words.
Words weren’t important anymore.
If someone had given me the task of reciting my valedictorian speech, on the spot, in that moment, I couldn’t have remembered the first word, let alone the first line. And I’d spent hours nailing it down. Refused to use index cards. Didn’t use them. Still got a standing o.
So, when Savana slowed down at the bottom of our short drive and said, “I gave him your number. Hope that’s okay,” it wasn’t any surprise that all I could muster was a half-ass nod.
“’kay, well…” She smiled. “See you tomorrow.”
Another nod.
Once inside, I came to.
Routine.
Routine was good.
Routine was safe.
Methodically, I checked the kitchen, made sure all the dishes were washed, wiped down the counters and locked the front door. Dad was already in bed, but I leaned in, kissed his cheek and whispered that I was home and I loved him.
He whispered he loved me, too, and went back to snoring.
I showered, brushed my teeth. Gazed at myself in the bathroom mirror longer than usual. Would anyone ever mistake me for a beauty queen? No. But I wasn’t terribly unfortunate looking. Light blue eyes framed by full brows I’d resisted overplucking. My lips were a little too full—someone started a rumor in eighth grade that I got fillers, but of course that wasn’t true. Plain brown hair, nothing special. What did he see? I wondered. What was it like looking at me through his eyes? Eyes that’d doubtless seen some of the most beautiful women on Earth.
“Whatever, Evans.”
I tore my gaze from the mirror and went to my room. Changed into a tank and a pair of sleep shorts. I was tired. The kind that’s bone-deep and requires at least half on hour of winding down before you can get any real sleep. Reading would’ve been ideal. But then the night had been so abnormal, the book on my nightstand wouldn’t have done for an effective remedy.
Grabbing my laptop, I turned out the lights, slipped on my wireless headphones and sank underneath the covers.
And then I did what any normal girl would’ve were she in my shoes.
I Googled Lawson Hill.
chapter three
Music videos. Live performances. Full concerts—some professional, some fan-made. Interviews. Presentation speeches at awards shows. Acceptance speeches at awards shows. Segments on late night television. Cameras following him around on tour. Exclusive behind-the-scenes coverage. More interviews, more live footage.
He even gave guitar lessons to an elementary school music class.
Twice.
My head was spinning so fast I felt sick.
He was famous.
That I didn’t know who he was? When obviously everyone else did, because the video view count, the likes and dislikes, the five-million-plus subscriptions to his personal channel? The blaring truth I’d apparently lived under a rock for too long—long enough to not know the name Lawson-freaking-Hill? Said many, many things about me as a person. None of which were particularly complimentary.
Numero uno? Yep. I’d been living the hermit life.
Second, I didn’t know as much about music as I thought I did. In the least, I didn’t have a broad taste spectrum. Lawson was incredible. The man bled talent and charisma. In interviews, he was humble. On stage, he was fire. The crowd loved him. Fans sang every word, cried, screamed and begged him to play Maelstrom and To Me You Are and dozens of other songs I’d never heard of.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
He texted me.
6:30 am. As I was waking up, stretching my legs and arms, imagining all the ways Savana would grill me about Lawson once I got to work, my phone dinged.
Clumsily, I made a grab toward my nightstand. Dropped the phone. Reached down, half on, half off my bed to retrieve it. Fell off the bed.
Not my finest moment.
A number I didn’t recognize materialized on the screen, but it didn’t matter.
I knew it was him.
First song you played this morning.
The voice inside my head, the one everybody’s got that keeps that inner dialogue going, she let out a yip and a squeal and an ohmygodohmygodohmygod that kicked up my heart rate. I rolled to my back on the white plush rug I’d snagged on sale at Target. Before the move. Before this.
Haven’t gotten to it yet, I typed and hit send.
Bubbles. What? Columbus, you disappoint me.
I felt my face stretch with a smile. Not everyone has music on the brain 24/7.
Say it ain’t so.
True-blue southerner. Even in his texts.
#truth, I returned.
Bubbles.
Then…nothing.
Two minutes, five, ten.
At twenty, I put the phone down, got up and forced myself into action. Showered, brushed my teeth. I couldn’t worry whether or not he replied. If I’d sounded dumb or chosen the wrong words. I wasn’t good at flirting. Definitely wasn’t good at flirting via text. Plus, he didn’t owe me anything. The experience of sitting at the piano while he sang like an angel? Maybe he was just being nice. Celebrities were like that. Kept their fans close, bated, reeled in. Then again, I wasn’t really a—well, yeah, now I was a fan. Sort of. Still felt strange listening to country music.
Regardless, I wasn’t the kind of girl who fed into a guy’s ego. Or anyone’s, for that matter. Texting him again, after I sent the last text? Out of the question.
I met my dad in the kitchen, both of us dressed for work. He in his polished shoes, tailored pants, starched white dress shirt and expertly knotted tie. Me in my ride-or-die Converse, skinny jeans and the I’m silently correcting your grammar tee that used to be white before I accidentally washed it with Dad’s navy socks. Now, it was a muted grayish blue.
He was handsome, my dad. Tall, toned, salt-and-pepper hair freshly trimmed. One of his first orders of business when we moved to Nashville was to find a good barber and a talented tailor.
“Hey, sport, doing all right this morning?” He took a seat across from me at the kitchen table. Toast with marmalade. Hot tea. Cream, no sugar. Same breakfast he’d eaten every morning since I could remember. “You look a little worse for wear. Trouble sleeping?”
“A little.” I sipped my dark roast. Thank goodness for Keurigs; I was the only soul in our family of two who drank the stuff. No sense in putting on a whole pot for just me.
“How’s work at the library?” He opened the book he’d been reading for the last couple of days, a biography on Sidney Poitier, to the page he’d marked with a CVS receipt.
Small talk. Conversation for the sake of conversation. Dad had this thing about keeping communication open between us. Even when there was nothing to say.
“Good,” I said. “Decent. Savana’s been cool.”
“Savana. She’s about your age.”
“Close, yeah. I think she’s maybe twenty? Twenty-one?”
He glanced at me from over the rim of his cheetah-print reading glasses. He’d had a normal pair last week. Black, red, I couldn’t remember. But he misplaced them every month or so, and they’d turn up in odd places like behind the fridge or in a load of laundry. CVS had a wide selection of pink, zebra and cheetah. Hence the cheetah and the CVS receipt he’d turned into a bookmark.
“She’s who you went out with last night?” At my nod, he said, “Where’d you end up going? Dinner? Movie? There’s some good ones out right now, I hear.”
Dinner. Movie. Hanging out at a local coffee shop. Bowling. Skating on 80’s night. Normal evening for an eighteen-year-old. For a girl from Columbus, Ohio.
But we weren’t in Columbus anymore and, as Savana bluntly pointed out, music leaked from sewage grates here. Why wouldn’t we go to a famous singer’s house the first time I went out with a friend? Didn’t everybody?
“We actually hung out with some of Savana’s friends.”
“Doing what?”
“Dad.” I got up, trudged to the coffee make
r for another cup. I’d have to make this one to-go. The library opened at nine and I liked to get there early, take a moment to browse the new releases.
“I know, I know. I shouldn’t pry. You’re an adult. I just…”
Coffee brewing, I turned to look at him. “You just…what?”
He set his book down. Removed the glasses. John Evans, ladies and gentlemen. About to get serious. “I just don’t want you hanging out with anyone who could get you in trouble, Harper. Okay?”
“Dad.”
“You’ve got a lot going for you.”
“I know I have a lot going for me.”
“And while your scholarships are solidified, as is Cambridge in the fall, a mar on your character, on your reputation—”
“Oh my God, Dad, I have to go.” Slipping a lid on my coffee-filled tumbler, I grabbed my backpack, slung it over a shoulder.
“I love you, okay?” I leaned in to kiss his cheek and he patted my shoulder. “You don’t have anything to worry about. See you tonight.”
“We can ride together, you know,” he reminded me on my way out.
“I like the walk.”
Truth: I did enjoy the walk. Three blocks from our house to the college and I got to pass a florist and a donut shop, both of which smelled amazing, especially commingling in the air. The streets and sidewalks were clean, not too much traffic.
This morning, however, Savana was pulled up to the curb, passenger’s side window rolled down. “Hey!” She’d probably woken every neighbor. “Get in!”
I propped my forearms on the door. “You could’ve texted,” I said, peering in at her.
“Did. But did you answer?” she said through a wad of pink bubblegum. “No.”
Hair up in a ponytail, designer shades parked at the end of her nose, she looked like she just walked off the set of Mean Girls: Nashville.
I checked my phone. Sure enough. Two texts from Savana.
None from Lawson.
“Oops.” I’d left it upstairs. Along with a laundry load of mixed feelings about the guy with blue eyes and a two-hundred-dollar haircut. Which was more than a little ridiculous, when I thought about it. How could I have mixed feelings about someone I’d known less than 24 hours? “Sorry.”
“Well, get in, sister. We’re ditching work today.”
“Uh, no. I’m not ditching work.”
“Yep. You are. Let’s go.”
“I don’t ditch anything.”
“Guess today will be your day of change.”
Was she serious? I’d never called in sick to anything in my entire life. “Savana, people are depending on us.” Someone had to be the voice of reason and, between the two of us, that person was definitely not Savana Petrov.
“Called McEntee this morning, told her we both had the runs,” she said as if it was nothing. As if she didn’t lie to the head librarian, our boss, with a diarrhea excuse. “That we’re not sure if it’s a bug or the Mexican we ate last night—”
“We didn’t eat Mexican last night.”
“Would you get on board with me here, Evans?” She rolled her eyes. “Car. Now. First breakfast, then shopping. Chop, chop!”
I gave up. Right there at the end of my drive. Four months, I told myself. Four months of letting go, having fun, and, thanks to Savana, doing a few things out of my comfort zone and I’d focus on college. On the future that was only a handful of years out of my reach.
Throwing my bag in the backseat, I set my tumbler in Savana’s cupholder and fastened my seatbelt. “So, what did she say?”
Savana turned up the radio, humming. “What’d who say?”
“McEntee. When you told her we weren’t coming in?” Because of diarrhea. My cheeks heated at the thought.
“Oh, you know McEntee. Germaphobe supreme. Didn’t even have the words out of my mouth before she was gasping, ‘Oh my gosh, please stay home,’” she said, adopting Ms. McEntee’s warbly tone. “‘Both of you. Please. We have this. Really. Stay home. You’re staying home, right?’” Savana laughed. “God bless that woman. I’ve never seen someone who sets a timer for when she needs to Germ-X her hands.”
She started singing again, tapping her thumb to the steering wheel. “So, are we gonna talk about it?”
Warmth crawled up the back of my neck. “Talk about what?”
“Talk about what.” She snorted. “You and Law?”
“Uh, what?” A weird laugh burst out of me. “There is no—no.”
“Because you know he’s a player.”
I took the bait. “He is?”
Laughter. The radio deejay announced that was Josh Cole’s latest—number one on the country charts, and it wasn’t until he was leading up to the next song that she finally stopped laughing. “Sister. There’s no you and Law? Please. I may not have a scholarship to a fancy British school, but I’m not that stupid.” She cut her eyes at me, lips twisted.
“Savana,” I said, “I honestly don’t know what you mean. We talked. We laughed a little. It was nothing. Just two people talking.”
“And laughing,” she said.
“Is he really a player?”
She rolled her eyes, accelerated through a yellow light. “I told you he’s nice.”
“Okay. So, he’s nice. Lots of guys are nice.”
“Not like Law.”
I chewed on that for seconds. She didn’t say it like it was a bad thing, him being nice, but it didn’t sound great, either. How could nice be considered a bad quality?
“Thing is,” she said, “he’s been hurt—shit, he’d be pissed if he knew I was telling you this.”
“Then don’t.”
“No, you should know, because he’s into you and, yeah, it’s fast. Really fast. But it’s Law and in a way he’s like a brother to me, to all of us. We want him to be happy, because he’s been too fucking unhappy for way too fucking long, and it’s fucking up his creativity like a son of a bitch.”
I was too hung up on he’s into you to question her excessive use of cuss words. Wasn’t that I didn’t cuss. Finals made me swear like an extra in a Tarantino flick. But four cuss words in one sentence could’ve easily been exchanged with better adjectives.
“He’s unhappy?” I asked.
“Artists are always experiencing some level of unhappiness. Just the way they are. Creativity requires tapping into all kinds of emotions. That’s how the best songs get written, the most memorable movies get made. Those are the stories we connect with. It’s the happy moments, sure, everyone likes to be happy, but it’s also the painful shit we go through. Every human knows what it’s like to suffer, to feel the clench of a broken heart. And Law? He’s in the ugly aftermath.”
My heart sank.
Who was she?
Gazing out the passenger window, I ticked a fingernail to my teeth. Another celebrity? A gleaming blonde beauty like Savana? The type seemed to be the norm here. Tall skinnies in boots and jeans with rhinestones on the back pockets. At least five of the same just filed into a Starbucks at the corner of 11th and Charlotte.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Usual. Different schedules, too much time apart, opposite interests. The bigger issue is he’s having a hard time writing.”
“Oh.” I tried to imagine what that might be like for a songwriter. For a person whose livelihood depended on his ability to not only write a song but a song good enough to make a record. And then to do it multiple times over to make an entire album? I envisioned all the artists I loved, my favorites—The Killers, The 1975, Declan McKenna, Halsey—and the grueling process they must’ve gone through to put out the songs I kept on repeat. Until then, I’d never really given it much thought.
We drove a while, the radio playing music new to me, familiar to Savana. Not only did she know every song, but she could recite the backstory of each artist. It was like being with a tour guide, the kind that takes you by stars’ homes and tells you how they started out poor, living out of their car, before hitting it big. I didn’t mind. H
istory, regardless of where it came from or who it was about, fascinated me. Wasn’t uncommon for me to choose a Netflix documentary over the newest romcom or action flick.
About an hour later, Savana pulled into the parking lot of a corner café.
“Yeah. So.” She unfastened her seatbelt, reached back for her handbag. “As I was saying, before I got sidetracked.”
Easy for Savana, I was beginning to learn, getting sidetracked.
“He has an evening with you, and suddenly he’s at the piano playing Elton John, something none of us have seen him do in months.” She pulled out a tube of gloss, used the mirror in her visor to do a touch up. Popped her lips together a couple of times. “Luke said after we left, Law and Jack Daniels were up all night writing. Said there was staff paper all over the piano, the floor. I’m telling you,” she said, “it’s been a while, but when Law writes? He’s like that fucked up, mad composer from Amadeus. Scary and awesome at the same time.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that fucked up, made composer from Amadeus was Amadeus. Or, at least, Tom Hulce portraying Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
“Luke lives with him?” I grabbed my backpack, fished around for my wallet.
“Nah. Luke just crashes sometimes.” She ran her ring finger over each eyebrow. Glanced from side to side in the mirror. For all the world as if we were about to walk into a fashion shoot. “His fiancée’s on tour right now. Backup singer. Telling you, sister.” Her visor flipped up with a snap and she zipped her purse. “Everybody’s involved in the music scene here. Someway, somehow. Ready to eat?”
“Sure.”
The café was quaint and cozy with brick walls, red vinyl booths and a jukebox. Savana went all out with a stack of pancakes smothered in powdered sugar and maple syrup. Since I wasn’t much of a breakfast person, I ordered coffee and toast with butter.
“So, what do you own besides yoga pants and sweaters made out of old circus tents?”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I have other clothes.”
“Oh, excuse me. Jeans and nerd tees.” She gestured with her syrup-covered fork. “Any skirts? Dresses? Heels and boots?”
“Skirts, no. Dresses, yes. Heels—”
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