by Dave Reidy
During the ten seconds of feedback and chatter at the beginning of the recording, Kyle took his white Fender pick in hand and held it above the sound hole. The drummer clicked off the rhythm with his sticks, and the guitarist began to play. And when the singer came in four bars later, Kyle played his own guitar, spreading a layer of clear acoustic tones above the fuzz of the recording. He stared hard at the fingerboard, making sure to hit only the strings he was supposed to this time. He wanted Starlee to hear he could play.
After verse one, Kyle wondered if she could hear him at all. He’d set the volume loud enough to get her attention, but was the recording drowning him out? What if she thought he was simply blasting her own music back at her through his father’s computer speakers? What would she make of that?
Kyle looked out the window and found Starlee leaning her shoulder against the back of her house and facing his own. Then he mangled an F and returned his eyes to the fingerboard until he was back in sync with the song. When he looked up again, Starlee was staring at the ground between their houses. Her forelock hung in front of her face, keeping Kyle from getting a look at her eyes. She wasn’t smoking anymore. She was just standing on her back step, listening.
As the final verse began, Kyle’s stomach flooded with emotion and he strummed so hard he worried a string might break and blind him. “Song Against Sex” built to its climax—the speaker’s threat to light himself on fire—and Kyle played loud and hard and clean until the song petered out with three lazy descending notes from the trombone.
When he looked up, Starlee was gone.
Kyle leaned his guitar against the desk and wiped his sweaty face with the front of his t-shirt. Now he was the kind of kid who taught himself strange songs and slyly serenaded older girls. Maybe he always had been but hadn’t known it. Maybe his thing made him who he really was.
Kyle spent the following morning playing B flat major and F chords without any rhythm or purpose. He glanced out the window every few minutes, hoping Starlee would come out of her house to smoke or cool off or take out the garbage. He was sure that she would see him differently now and wanted to feel her eyes on him.
By that afternoon, Kyle still hadn’t been seen by Starlee, and he feared that whatever good his performance had done him was waning. To take the edge off his impatience, Kyle carried his guitar to the den, leaned it against the arm of the yarn-upholstered couch, and turned on the television. Every few minutes, he muted the sound, hoping to find that Starlee’s music had stopped. At four-thirty, it was still blaring. What can be taking so long? Kyle wondered.
Too antsy to sit any longer, Kyle walked out the back door and around to the front yard. The Camaro was still parked in front of Starlee’s house. It was painted in a matte-finish black, and two hubcaps were missing. All the driver’s money must be going into the rumble, Kyle thought. That must be his thing.
Suddenly Starlee’s music cut off right in the middle of a song, and her front door opened. Her two usual guests stepped out. The bigger one—they were both big—closed the door behind him. Kyle watched them as they walked toward the Camaro. When they noticed him and stopped, Kyle shifted his gaze to the house across the street.
“What are you looking at, boy?” the smaller one asked.
“Nothing,” Kyle said. He’d never noticed that the house across the street was peach-colored until now. He’d always thought it was yellow.
“Show’s over,” the bigger one said. He lowered the curved brim of his ball cap over his eyes and pulled a ring of keys from the left hip pocket of his jeans. “Run along now.”
Kyle didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either. He didn’t want to run along. He was in his own yard.
The bigger one took a step toward him. “Did you hear me, boy?”
Kyle knew the two guys would have no qualms about leaping the chain-link fence and giving him hell, so he walked toward his backyard, but slowly. The bigger one said something under his breath and the smaller one laughed. Then the engine started up, and the Camaro rumbled away.
When Kyle reached the backyard, Starlee was standing at the fence holding an unlit cigarette in her hands. Kyle felt himself get scared, more scared than he’d been of her friends.
“What are you doing talking to them?”
Her tone made him wince. “I wasn’t. They were talking to me.”
“What were you doing so close to my house?”
“Nothing.” Had he been that close to her house? “I was just walking around ’cause I was bored.”
Starlee shook her head and smiled bitterly. “Well,” she said, “I bet you’re not bored anymore.” Then she stalked off, throwing open the screen door and disappearing inside her house. The thick back door thudded shut, rattling her kitchen windows.
Kyle could feel the humid air between his lips as he stared at the spot where Starlee had just been standing. He replayed the confrontation in his head, trying to figure out what he’d done. He’d been threatened and scolded in the space of two minutes and, so far as Kyle could tell, standing in his own yard had been his only offense.
He retreated to the den and lay down on the couch. Every chord he’d strummed to show Starlee how he’d changed sawed at his insides like a jagged blade. Maybe she would forget everything he’d done when school started, but Kyle knew he never would.
After a few minutes, Kyle rolled onto his feet. He wrapped his hands around the neck of the guitar and picked it up. Then he swung it slowly in front of his waist like a batter waiting for a pitcher to get a sign he liked. He imagined how it would feel to bring the body down on the arm of the couch, driving through until whatever was left in his hands had hit the floor. He wondered how many swings it would take to shatter the body like an eggshell.
Kyle sat down on the couch and rested the guitar’s curve on his right thigh. He strummed an F chord, then a B flat major. Then he started to play “Song Against Sex” at full speed, without any accompaniment. He sang, too, filling lines he couldn’t recall with words from other verses. He had to try like hell to remember the lyrics and keep the rhythm and make the right shapes with his hand, but through it all, Kyle realized that playing the guitar felt different than it had the day before. He was playing—at least in part—because of what had just happened with Starlee. But he wasn’t playing for her. He wasn’t playing for anyone else, either. He was just playing. Playing was just what he did. The realization buoyed Kyle somehow, and the buoyancy came through in his playing. He stomped his left foot on the carpet with each beat and strummed as hard as he could without losing all control. Even his head swiveled with the rhythm. And as he sang the melody of the trombone solo over the jangle of his messy chords, Kyle thought, This is what it feels like to have a thing. This must be.
Around noon, Kyle sat down at his father’s computer, determined to learn at least part of another song before school started the next day. He maxed out the speakers’ volume to drown out Starlee’s music and listened to the Neutral Milk Hotel album two times through with the guitar by his side, waiting for something to hit him the way “Song Against Sex” had. Nothing did. So Kyle picked a song that sounded simple. By Kyle’s count, the slow, plaintive, “Someone is Waiting” had only three chords. A tablature site confirmed the number of chords and named them: F, B flat major, and C. Kyle couldn’t believe his luck. Though he likely could play dozens of chords, the guitarist for Neutral Milk Hotel was partial, it seemed, to the two Kyle knew already.
The song’s tablature included diagrams for open C and barred C, which was just B flat major played two frets further up the fingerboard. But from the moment he realized that a C chord could be played without flattening a finger against a fret and bending his wrist around the guitar neck, Kyle focused only on open C. Following the diagram, he placed the tips of his index, middle and ring fingers on the strings. The shape felt natural, almost ergonomic. Kyle’s choice was rewarded again when he dragged the pick across the strings. The open C rang out in a way that even a perfectly executed
barred chord, with so much flesh on the strings, could not. Kyle hadn’t known his guitar could sound that good. He played open C after open C. With each strum, the strings wobbled wildly, settled into a tight blur, and came to rest as the chord faded into Starlee’s music.
When he had the C down, Kyle played an F, a B flat major, and an open C in succession. Getting his fingers in the right places and sounding each chord once took almost half a minute. “Someone is Waiting” was a slow song, but not nearly slow enough for Kyle to play it—not today, anyway.
As Kyle sat in the rolling chair, struggling with the chord progression, a melody from Starlee’s house pierced his concentration. Starlee was listening to “Someone is Waiting.” Had she heard him listening to the song? Had she heard him butchering Fs and Cs and B flat majors? Was she sending him some kind of message? An apology, maybe?
Kyle stood up and traced the music’s path with his eyes through a dirty steel screen that made everything inside Starlee’s living room look pixilated and gray, like images read from a pirated videotape. Kyle saw those two guys kneeling on the carpeted floor, facing each other with their jeans bunched around their calves. Starlee was on her hands and knees, moving—or being moved—back and forth between them. The guys were smiling at each other, as if Starlee weren’t even there.
It took Kyle a few seconds to understand what he was seeing. Then he turned and stood with his back to the window, feeling his heartbeat in his ears. Even with his back turned, his parents’ bedroom seemed too close to it all. He closed the window, keeping his eyes on his bare feet. Then he walked to the den, sat on the couch, and gripped the sweaty hair above his temples.
But sitting in the den didn’t reduce Kyle’s sense of alarm. I should be doing something, Kyle thought. But what? Ringing her doorbell? Making a ruckus? Starting a fire? It occurred to Kyle that what he should be doing—what other guys he knew would be doing—was watching through the window, imagining themselves in place of one of those guys, or both of them. But Kyle didn’t want to. It occurred to Kyle that not wanting to watch might make him queer, but he didn’t see that there was anything he could do about that right now.
Eventually the Camaro rumbled away, and Kyle knew it was over. But he stayed in the den until it was time for dinner, ate with his back to Starlee’s house, and went straight to bed. He didn’t want to see Starlee on her back step, confirming with her calm, smoky exhalations that what had happened today—or something like it—had happened many times before.
Kyle lay awake, helplessly generating more questions. Did Starlee like doing what he’d seen her doing? Did she love one of those guys, or both of them? Did everyone at school know about this? If they didn’t, Kyle figured they would by tomorrow afternoon. Those guys wouldn’t see any reason to keep their mouths shut and, if high school was anything like junior high, word would spread in a hurry. Part of Kyle couldn’t even blame those guys for blabbing. If he had done what they’d done today, wouldn’t he have felt compelled to tell someone? But the thought that this was what kids at school would think of when they saw Starlee—that this was, in effect, her thing—made Kyle roll over on his side and groan.
Kyle hated those guys. He hated them for coming into his neighborhood every day with their pointlessly loud engine, and for smiling at one another while Starlee rocked between them. He wished now that he’d stood his ground when they sent him out of his own front yard. “Show’s over,” the bigger one had said. “Run along now.”
At least I didn’t run, Kyle thought.
Run along now.
Show’s over.
As Kyle connected the taunts he’d absorbed yesterday with the scene he’d witnessed today, his stomach dropped. He sat up and wrapped his arms around his gut, envisioning with searing clarity what would become of him. He’d be fine until the first time those guys saw him in the halls of El Dorado High. They’d shout to get his attention, but Kyle would keep walking. Then they’d explain to their onlooker buddies that he was the kid who’d watched them go at it with Starlee: the little pervert. Kyle would never get the chance to make the guitar his thing. Pervert would stick.
Kyle replayed the confrontation with those guys, hoping for some hint that he was taking their words the wrong way, but he only confirmed his new understanding. Then he played out the memory of his slow retreat to the backyard and felt, in a way he had not in that moment, the fury radiating from Starlee’s eyes as she stood at the fence, waiting to demand an accounting.
I bet you’re not bored anymore, she’d said.
“Oh no,” Kyle whispered. He had not yet considered whether or not Starlee would believe, once word reached her, that he was a pervert. Now he was certain that she believed as much already. The prospect of being ruined at school and in Starlee’s eyes for something he hadn’t done—at least, not on purpose, and not when they thought he’d done it—was more than Kyle could bear. He threw himself back onto his pillow and curled into a tight fetal ball, trying to squeeze the shame and anxiety out of his stomach.
After a minute, Kyle unclenched and lay there, blinking sweat out of his eyes in the dark. He needed to do something. He might have played his guitar if not for fear of waking up his parents, but even so, Kyle knew that playing the guitar wouldn’t fix anything. He needed more than something to do. He needed something that would do some good, a grand gesture that would prove he hadn’t been peeping. He couldn’t stop those guys from telling people he was a pervert, but he might still convince Starlee that he wasn’t what she thought he was.
Kyle got out of bed, pulled a sheet of paper off the pad on his desk, and wrote: Starlee,
Thanks for the CD. I can play one song off of it now and I’m learning another. The one I know already is pretty easy. If you want, I can come over after school and teach it to you. Let me know.
Kyle
Kyle held the note in his hand and read it over. No one gets caught peeping and then invites himself over to give a guitar lesson, he thought. Starlee would have to see that things didn’t add up: her accusation had not been understood because the deed had not been done. And once she understood that, Kyle believed that he and Starlee would be on firm ground. Word would spread about each of them, but they’d have each other and they’d have the guitar. That the guitar was Kyle’s thing—in his own mind, anyway—somehow made what people thought of him seem a little less important. Maybe the guitar had enough in it to do the same for Starlee.
With something to do that stood a chance of changing things, Kyle brightened a bit. But as a grand gesture, delivering the note fell short. He wanted Starlee to feel how he felt when he held the guitar in his hands. He wanted her to start thinking of the guitar when she thought of herself.
Kyle looked out his bedroom window. The deep blue sky was clear all the way to the tops of the tall pines down the block. The weather would hold, Kyle figured, and with Starlee leaving for school in just a few hours, the humidity wouldn’t have time to do much damage. At the bottom of the note, Kyle scrawled, “P.S. Please bring the guitar inside before you go to school.” Then he taped the paper’s horizontal edges to the rounded head of the guitar case.
As he eased the screen door closed with his free hand and stepped into the saturated night air, Kyle’s first thought was one he hadn’t considered: that Starlee or her mother would catch him making his delivery and accuse him of peeping. Kyle stood on the top step of his back porch, listening to the night bugs and weighing the options. Nobody peeps with a guitar, he thought. If I get caught I’ll be accused of serenading, which is weird, but not as bad as peeping. But Kyle knew that Starlee was not likely to give him the benefit of the doubt whether he was carrying the guitar or not, and that his father would be furious to learn he’d been out at night for any purpose. The only solution, Kyle decided, was not to get caught.
He crossed the backyard on the balls of his bare feet, lifted the guitar case over the fence and leaned it against a rusting post. Then he hoisted himself up and swung his legs over, making as little co
ntact with the fence as possible. As the chain links settled back into silence, Kyle squatted behind the guitar case, listening for any signs of stirring through the open windows of Starlee’s house and his own. Nothing. He took the case in hand and crossed the driveway, stepping gingerly from weed patch to weed patch. Without ever setting foot on Starlee’s back step, Kyle leaned the case against the frame of the screen door, leaving the note he’d written facing up and out.
Climbing back over to his side of the fence, Kyle caught the panel of chain links with his feet. The woven snippets of steel rattled against the hollow steel posts as Kyle dismounted and ran inside, closing the back door behind him. He stood in the dark kitchen and listened, half-expecting to hear the Camaro’s rumble. But only the hum of the old refrigerator and the muffled buzz of the night bugs reached his ears.
When Kyle got up the next morning, the lights in Starlee’s house were on, and the guitar case was still on the back step. He took a shower, toweled off and put on a pair of jeans, wondering all the while how Starlee would react when she saw the guitar case and the note. Would she consider them exhibits A and B, hard evidence that he’d been on her back step at night and violated her space again? Or would she see the gesture as an overwrought apology and, thus, an admission of guilt? Pulling a red t-shirt over his head and putting his arms through the sleeves, Kyle reminded himself that his gesture could very well have the effect he had intended it to have. But when he tried to imagine Starlee reading the note and smiling, even a little, he could not.
Kyle stood in front of the bathroom sink and looked in the mirror. He had always parted his wet hair on the left, allowing it to dry and fluff up a bit as the morning wore on. But today he decided to leave it the way it was, mussed into clumps and runaway strands by the towel drying he’d given it. His thing was the guitar; parted hair didn’t seem right. Kyle wondered how the guy who played guitar for Neutral Milk Hotel had worn his hair in high school.