Tess tugged at my chin until my mouth sat in an obedient O, then started to color me in.
“Why does it matter what color my lips are?” I said. “It’s probably going to be dark in there.” I assumed. I’d never been to a club, or a bar, or whatever these places were.
“Because when you make out with Sebastian, I want you to leave a mark.” Tess capped her lipstick. “Now mush your lips together.”
But I didn’t. “Make out? Nobody said anything about making out.”
“I figured it was implied.” Tess rubbed her thumb against the edge of my mouth. “A logical endgame.”
Instead of saying anything, I hit Tess on the shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah, je frappe toi more,” she said, and gave me a soft smack in return. “Look, Nattie, I get why you’d be nervous. Everyone thinks their first kiss should be this big, huge, world-changing, heart-stopping kind of thing. But it never is.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. Trust me. Look what happened with Zach the—”
“Shhzp!” I squeaked, even though there was no one in the hallway.
“Sorry,” Tess said at a whisper, which for her was more like a normal speaking voice. “My theory is that first kisses are inherently doomed, because you always want them to be more meaningful than they end up being. But this one could work out. First, Sebastian is experienced, so it’ll be a good kiss. Second, he’s only here for a while, so if it isn’t a good kiss, you never have to see him again.”
“Third?” I asked.
“How many more reasons do you need, Nattie?”
“A couple, okay?” I mushed my lips together. Having lipstick on just seemed to make me super conscious of my lips. “I mean, I’m not like the rest of the girls he’s been attached to, however briefly. I’m not sophisticated and, like . . . experienced. I’m not ready to have rumors circulate about me.”
Tess tapped a painted fingernail against her chin, pensively.
“That’s the beauty of it, though,” she said at last. “He’s gone. He’s an NYU man now. He’s not going to be following you around the hallways or publishing poems about you in the literary magazine. There is almost zero risk of anything reputation-damaging.”
“And he’s pretty cute.”
“Hot, Nattie. Sebastian is hot.” Tess shook her head. “He’s not a puppy, he’s a guy you want to bang.”
“Right,” I said, even though banging felt like an awfully percussive verb to apply to my feelings for Sebastian.
She closed-mouth grinned at me and adjusted the tank top over my shoulders. “Perfect.”
Twenty minutes later, the two of us were buckled into the backseat of Zach’s station wagon and cruising down Lincoln Drive as Zach messed with the radio. He glanced back at us.
“Can you put on WPHL?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Tess said. “This stuff is too loud. And eyes front, Captain.”
“No.” Zach flicked his iPod to something fast and power chord–y, but obeyed and kept his gaze dead ahead. Tess pouted.
“Look, if you’re going to strong-arm me into chauffeuring, I at least get to play my own music.”
“We didn’t strong-arm you,” Tess said. “You just happened to accept an invitation to hang out in the ’burbs with us and then, by complete coincidence, the two of us needed a ride to a concert that is literally blocks from your house. Right, Nattie?”
“Sure,” I said. There was a weird feeling in my chest, and I couldn’t tell if it was anxiety about the concert, the fact that Zach the Anarchist had yet to look me in the eye since the unfortunate Mia-mentioning slip the other day, or the cold air that was breezing through the holes in my top. It was all very unnerving.
“We’re keeping you company,” Tess said.
“You’re distracting me from the road,” Zach said. I was sitting on the opposite side of the car as he was, and each streetlight we zipped past threw his silhouette onto my lap. “And if you’re keeping me company, why are you both sitting in the backseat?”
“Safety?” Tess tried.
“It’s a Volvo,” Zach said.
“And?”
“And Volvos are like safest family vehicles on the road,” Zach said. “The Swedish are master engineers.”
“Tell that to all the IKEA dressers my dad has tried to build,” I said. “Or ABBA, for that matter.”
Tess looked put out. It was hard to tell in the dark, but I think Zach smiled a little. I felt a wash of relief.
“I like ABBA,” grumbled Tess.
“I hope you’re not going to see a tribute act tonight,” Zach said. “Because if I had known there was bad pop music, I would have made you walk.”
“Okay, one,” Tess said, “ABBA is not bad pop music—”
“They’re pretty bad,” I said, but Tess ignored me.
“—and two, the band we are seeing is positively oozing hipster cred.”
“In that case,” Zach said, “I’ll let you off up here.” He gestured at the on-ramp to Kelly Drive.
“They’re not that hipstery,” I said. “They’re more . . . I don’t know. They rock, I think.”
“You think?” Zach was smiling.
“I mean, my baseline is Joni Mitchell, so I don’t have a good barometer for what’s hipstery.”
“Excuse me,” Tess interrupted, “but the Young Lungs are way hipstery.”
Zach had trained his attention back on the road. The Volvo’s turn signal clicked and swept us onto Kelly Drive. Outside my window, the Schuylkill River looked deceptively sparkly and pleasant in the moonlight instead of like the brown line of sludge it was in the daytime.
“But that doesn’t preclude them from being good,” Tess was going on. “I mean, if nothing else, Sebastian Delacroix is proof that hipsters can rock.”
Zach stiffened a little in his seat, but maybe it was my imagination.
“I guess,” I said. “I’ve only heard like part of one song.”
“Well, one hipstery song sounds like a solid reason for tricking someone into playing chauffeur,” Zach said.
Tess leaned forward and smacked him on the back of the head.
“Watch it!” Zach said. “Distracted driving!”
“Don’t be so sarcastic,” she said. “For your information, we go to concerts like this all the time.”
“Wasn’t the last concert you went to at the Academy of Music?” Zach said.
“That was me,” I said. “And it was the Kimmel Center.” It had also been “An Evening of Spanish Guitar” with my mom and Sam Huang, but I knew better than to bring that up now.
Zach smiled. “Dang. Please teach me to be hard-core like you.”
“Okay, anyway,” Tess interrupted. “We’re your friends, remember? Acronymphos forever.”
“Yeah,” he said, his eyes flicking briefly into the rearview mirror. “I know.”
I shifted under my seat belt, uncomfortably awake. The energy of the night was starting to get to me, and again I was full of doubts. Maybe Zach was right. What was I doing, showing up at this concert? What was even going to happen? I wasn’t fully sure what you did at a cool concert, whether you were supposed to dance or just stand there and absorb the music, and what you were supposed to do when you had to go to the bathroom. I tried to envision it, tried to picture Ruby’s Rock Club in my mind, but I just drew a blank. I wanted to tell Zach to slow down, even though he was right at the speed limit, just so we wouldn’t get to the show so fast.
But I didn’t, and he didn’t, and after fifteen minutes of silence—well, as silent as the car could be with Zach’s tinny speakers blasting angry antiestablishment music—we pulled up to the corner I recognized as being a few streets over from Zach’s town house.
“Is this it?” Tess said.
“You tell me,” Zach said. “You’re the one who’s always going to concerts.”
“Shut up,” Tess answered. I craned my neck out the window to see if any of the dark, skulking figures on the sidewalk were recognizable. One
of them, vaguely female with one hand pulling something suspiciously rolly, squinted into the Volvo’s headlights, then waved and came over to the car.
“Hey!” It was Meredith. “I’m so glad you guys are here. I felt like such a loser hanging out outside of this club with all my school stuff.”
Tess clambered out and rolled her eyes. “It’s an all-ages show. Let them judge.”
“Door, please?” Zach called from inside the Volvo. Meredith bent down and shaded her eyes with her hand.
“Zach West? Is that you?”
“No,” Zach said. “Just a chauffeur.”
Meredith laughed and waved, and Tess shut the door behind her.
“Thanks, dude!”
“You’re welcome,” Zach said.
“Yeah, thanks, Zach,” I said. My stomach clenched, and I felt the inexplicable urge to open the door, climb back in, and tag along to the safety of Zach the Anarchist’s house, where we could have an Acronympho movie night and where at the very least I knew how to find the bathroom. In the front seat, Zach was poking at the radio again, for no real reason. I hugged my arms around myself.
“I look ridiculous, right?” I said, kind of quietly. Zach tipped the rearview mirror a little, so that the reflection of his eyes was right on mine.
Maybe it was just a kind of postpubescent physical evening out, or maybe it was just my own postpubescent hormones making me see things, but somewhere in the last few months, Zach the Anarchist had changed. It wasn’t that he was taller, exactly—I mean, he was taller, though thankfully still not as tall as Tall Zach, which would have thrown our nicknaming schema into chaos. He just looked . . . older. Bigger. Not huge or anything, but just slightly broader, grown-up in the way that you grow when your diet is 75 percent tofu lo mein. In the low light, his cheekbones really stuck out, and his mouth . . . well, it had always been a pretty nice mouth, but now it seemed . . . pouty, I guess. Not in a supermodel-duck-face way, but more in the way that all the punk guys on his bedroom posters looked. Thoughtful. Boy-like. The kind of mouth that wouldn’t have been so bad for a first kiss.
“You look a little . . . cold,” he said at last. As if on cue, I shivered. Had I just been checking Zach the Anarchist out?
“Nattie!” yelled Tess from the sidewalk. “While we’re still young?”
“Yeah, well.” I tugged at the Volvo’s door latch and started to climb out. “Tess has some idea that this is going to make me blend in with hipsters, but—”
Something soft hit me in the back. Zach’s plaid shirt.
“What?” I scooped it up off the sidewalk. Zach, now just in his T-shirt, only shrugged.
“Camouflage,” he said. “And I’m trusting you not to lose it.”
I didn’t even have time to say thank you before he pulled away.
CHAPTER FIVE
Inside, Ruby’s Rock Club was far from a blank. Actually, it was kind of a dump.
We’d each paid our ten bucks at the door and gotten our hand stamped by a bouncer who was about as wide as he was tall, and he was really tall. Inside, the space was dark, warm, and smelled vaguely of beer. There was a bar with a couple stools crammed around it in the far corner, but the rest of the club was just a long, narrow room with brick walls and a barely elevated stage at one end. Strings of lights with bulbs shaped like giant lips scalloped the walls, and something rhythmic and unidentifiable was pumping over the PA system.
“Follow me.”
As soon as we were fully inside, Tess charged forth to secure us a good spot in the back left corner of the room. Zach’s shirt was a little too hot in the stuffy air, but something about the red light on the red stripes of plaid made me feel intriguingly alien and different. Cool, even.
We got a couple stares from college-aged-looking kids in vests and knit hats as we settled into place, but I imitated Tess’s ultraconfident posture and ignored them. Besides, most of them were staring at Meredith’s backpack (which, I noticed, had her initials stitched on it and everything). If Meredith saw them staring, she at least had enough sense not to deploy the wheely part.
I couldn’t say that I was feeling quite as relaxed as Tess. My senses seemed supercharged, even as everything was reduced to a dull roar of voices competing with music competing with one scruffy-looking guy shuffling around the stage area and tapping his finger on the microphones.
“When do you think they’ll go on?” I asked no one in particular, my voice hardly cutting through the landscape of bar sounds.
Tess checked her watch. “It’s ten of nine, so . . .” She shrugged. “I guess it depends on if there are any opening bands or not.”
“There are,” Meredith said. “I looked on their website. The Young Lungs are up second.”
“Second out of how many?” I asked.
Meredith frowned. “I think four?”
“So technically speaking, the Young Lungs are the opening band,” I said.
“An opening band,” Tess corrected. “The first band is bound to be the worst, so comparatively I’m sure they’ll be much better.”
More people were coming in now, in groups of three or four that brought little gasps of cool air from the outside and began to fill up the clear view of the stage I’d had before. Beside me, Meredith scooched her backpack behind her legs, so that it was between us and the wall, more or less concealed from public access.
Tess glanced back at the bar. “Do you think they would serve me if I tried to order something?”
“Sooner you than me,” I said. Tess could probably pass for at least twenty-five, if you squinted.
“Um, sooner both of you than me,” Meredith said, her eyes lingering on the gap in Zach’s shirt where my bra was still clearly visible. “I didn’t realize I should have gotten dressed up. No wonder the guy at the door was giving me weird looks.”
“Mm,” Tess said, craning her neck toward the bar. “Maybe I’ll just get a Diet Coke for fortification.”
She ducked between us and disappeared toward the bar, leaving me standing kind of awkwardly with Meredith. A few people over, I could see one of the guys in the knit hats dart a glance our way and whisper to his friend, a blond girl with a bull ring through her nose. I brushed my hair forward to cover my shoulders and reminded myself to stand up straight. Meredith was looking toward the stage and kind of rubbing her hands together, like she was nervous.
“So do you have a lot of homework this weekend?” she asked after a brief moment of relative silence. “Because I have this bio project—”
“Not really,” I said shortly, because for some reason Meredith didn’t get that talking loudly about homework at a rock show was the equivalent of wearing a sign that said “We Are Just Dumb Children.” The bull-ring girl was snickering behind her hand.
“Oh. Lucky you.” Meredith gave the Backpack™ a little thump with her heel. “I wonder where the bands are.”
“I would guess backstage,” I said, “but then again, I’m not sure this stage has enough room to have a back.”
“Yeah,” Meredith agreed. “I figured they’d be here hanging out.”
I looked around at the collective coolness that was the crowd around us and shrugged.
“Maybe they are,” I said. “I feel like any one of these people could be in a band.”
Bull-ring girl was gone, but the guys in the hats were looking at us again.
“Dude.” Tess reappeared at my elbow, clutching a glass of soda with a little straw in it. “Nattie. That guy is totally checking you out.”
“Er,” I said. “No thanks.”
“Come on. You’ve still got”—she checked her watch—“two minutes before the first band goes on. Assuming they’ll be on time, which I guess they probably won’t. That gives you, what, at least half an hour before Sebastian’s onstage? Might as well practice.”
I glared at Tess to make her stop, not exactly wanting Meredith to overhear.
“What I meant was,” Tess said, “his friend is kind of cute. Think she’s into girls?” Sh
e sipped her Diet Coke.
“Your guess is better than mine,” I said.
“Are you a big fan of the Young Lungs, Nattie?” Meredith said suddenly.
“Sure,” I said. “They’re pretty good.” It wasn’t an outright lie. I didn’t really know from indie rock, but the half-minute snatch I’d heard of the Young Lungs’ oeuvre was decently catchy.
“I just sort of realized they existed,” Meredith said. “I mean, I had always really liked Sebastian’s poetry, and I knew he was good on the guitar, but I didn’t know he had started a band. But he started posting videos of it on Pixstagram and so eventually I was like, okay, fine, I guess I should go to the concert and support a . . . um, a friend of mine.”
Meredith took a breath. She was talking at the brisk clip of the perennially overcaffeinated, and I couldn’t tell if her face was actually flushed or just basking in the glow of the lip lights like everything else.
“But I haven’t listened to any of their songs yet,” she finished. “Do you think that’s weird? Are any of them good?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, no, it’s not weird. You’ll hear them now, right? So that’s good enough.” At least, I hoped that was how these things worked.
Meredith nodded, as if she had any idea what happened at rock shows. “Yup.”
Onstage, a girl with a shiny black bob of hair and precariously tall platform shoes was clomping up to the microphone. Behind her, the scruffy guy who’d been shuffling around the stage earlier was settling in, a single drumstick in his hand, behind a keyboard that had a tambourine mounted on one corner. Meredith got really quiet, and Tess raised her eyebrows.
“Is that the first band?” Meredith asked.
“Is that even an instrument?” I asked.
Tess did a palms-up. “Don’t look at me. Maybe that’s what’s cool now.”
“Hello, everyone,” she said. The microphone gave a little squeal, and the lights dimmed just enough to turn the sequins on her dress into little winks of green light.
“We’re Ultimate Trajectory and these are some damn good songs. One! Two! Three! Four!”
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