by Mindi Scott
Now I regretted opening my mouth at all. Jerking a bitchy girl’s chain isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when you’re stuck there to suffer all the dirty looks afterward.
“I was making a joke,” I said, trying to calm her down. “Maybe you’ve heard of this thing called ‘humor’?”
She lifted her eyebrows. “I’ve heard of it. Like the other night when you said you hadn’t been drinking and I totally fell for it. That was a pretty good joke. I wonder: If I’d taken you up on your offer, would you have driven me to the beach drunk?”
Yeah, we were communicating now all right. What a low blow, reminding me of that corny ocean-trip thing I’d said. Riley—or whatever her romance-novel name was—fought dirty.
I didn’t know how, but I needed to turn this around. It was going to be a long semester if we were going to be at each other’s throats every time we got stuck together. Telling the whole truth was looking like my best—and only—option.
“First of all, I didn’t set out to lie to you,” I said. “I’m not naturally a liar. Not really. You got the wrong idea about the drinking stuff and I didn’t want to have to tell you that you were wrong. Anyway, I ended up leaving my car behind and walking home that night. So I didn’t drive anywhere drunk. It’s not like a thing I do or anything.”
She stared at me with her eyes open wide, but she didn’t say anything, so I kept going: “Now I’m supposed to be telling you about a recent interpersonal exchange I had that didn’t go well, right?” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, I talked to a girl at a party and sort of got caught in a lie. A few days later, I was having a bad morning and almost ran that same girl over with my car. And then, like a real bastard, I yelled at her. I suck.”
Riley put her hand over her lips, but not before I’d seen that she was covering up a small smile. “Tell me, Dick. Why do you think those exchanges might not have had your desired outcome?”
I shrugged. This was pretty hard actually, analyzing why a conversation went to shit. It had always seemed like a thing that just happens sometimes. Riley didn’t offer any clues, so finally I said, “Maybe because I was being a jerk?”
She smiled at me in a strange way. Like she was getting over being pissed at me, even though she wasn’t sure she was ready to be.
“I’ll take my turn now.” She opened her journal and read aloud. “We’re supposed to give everyone a clean slate and not think of them or judge them as the person they are outside the class. But yesterday I ended up being really rude to . . . someone . . . because he’d been a jerk to me earlier and I was holding a grudge.”
I was pretty floored that she’d written about me, but I didn’t want to say anything about it and accidentally make her mad again.
She closed the journal and looked at me, biting her lip. “The exchange did have my desired outcome at the time, but I think I regret it now. A little bit, I mean.”
A little bit was enough, I supposed.
“So what now?” I asked. “Mrs. D. said we need to talk about what we could have done or said differently?”
She nodded. “Yes. And we can do that if you want. But we both already know, so what do you think about giving that clean-slate thing another try?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Smiling, she put out her hand to shake mine. “Hi, I’m Riley.”
“Nice to meet you, Riley. I’m Dick.”
7:59 P.M.
I pulled into the storage-unit lot, parked between Mikey’s new truck and Daniel’s motorcycle, and rushed to unit 43. I was late for band practice, which meant my brother was going to be pissed. He was never on time for anything—except band stuff—since he had to bum rides everywhere he went after his DUI arrest and losing his license. But that didn’t stop him from taking other people’s lateness, and especially mine, very personally.
The retractable door to our rehearsal space—which Mikey paid for, and we called Studio 43 to make it sound cooler than the ten-by-twenty-foot storage unit it was—was open about three feet when I got there, but there was no rowdy music coming from inside. I couldn’t guess if that was a good or bad sign.
I reached for the door.
“We need to hurry up and decide on a name,” Jared was saying. “It’s going to be hard to advertise new shows without one.”
I stopped short. Not this again.
Jared had recently decided that the name he chose when he was fifteen and just starting this band almost four years ago—the Real McCoys—had to go because there are too many others out there with the same name. The big debate had been going on for enough months now that only Jared was taking it seriously.
Daniel spoke next. “I’m telling you, I think we should go with the Fake McCoys.”
Then Mikey. “And I’m all about Potts, Jackson, and the Motherfucking McCoys.”
I knew he didn’t seriously want that as our new band name, but I cringed anyway. And him not saying “Thomas” bothered the hell out of me. The rest of the guys seemed to be used to Isaac being gone, but I sure wasn’t.
“Speaking of motherfucking McCoys, where is my brother?” Jared asked.
“I had him scheduled to get off at seven thirty,” Mikey said. “But maybe my dad needed him to stay later?”
“Maybe you should call,” Jared said.
Time to go in. Since I had to.
I slid the door up high enough to fit through. “I’m here,” I said, ducking inside and pulling it shut behind me.
As always, the room—dimly lit by two small lamps and strings of red Christmas lights snaking around the walls—smelled like pine-tree air freshener and stale cigarettes. Everyone was just hanging out and drinking beer: Mikey behind his drums, Jared at the mic, and Daniel on the ratty green couch we’d rescued from the side of the road at the start of summer.
“You look like shit,” Jared said to me.
He was right, but Jared always thought I looked like shit. Compared to him, I usually did, I guess. It isn’t like he got the better genes or anything. We look a lot alike: same medium build, dark hair, and sad excuse for an eye color that Mom called hazel. But I just threw on whatever decent clothes I could find, while he was always dressing in some retro James Dean way.
I ignored him and headed over to the wall to grab the doghouse bass. The sooner we got this rehearsal over with, the sooner I could get out of here. Away from my brother.
“Where’ve you been?” Jared asked.
“Tutoring, class, car wash, Good Times. Now band rehearsal,” I said. Honestly, I was feeling as run-down as Jared thought I looked.
“That’s too many places to be in one day, dude,” Mikey said.
Jared frowned. “Good Times? You stopped for dinner after work when you knew we were waiting around on your ass?”
When Jared spent fourteen hours straight doing something besides sleeping, then he could criticize me for taking ten minutes to try to choke down some food. He seemed like he was in a mood to throw me against a wall if I said that out loud, though, so I focused on tuning instead of arguing.
Daniel got up and pulled another beer from the minifridge. “Hey, Dick!” he called out, motioning like he was going to toss it to me.
As a reflex, I started to put my hand out. But then I thought about the bullshit that had gone down at Daniel’s that morning and let it drop. “No thanks.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think I’ll just pass,” I said, looking straight at him. “I’m over it.”
Daniel shrugged and cracked it open for himself while Jared and Mikey exchanged glances I couldn’t quite interpret. My best guess would have been: Right. Like this is gonna last.
Maybe they were right. But I wanted to try not drinking for a while and see where it went.
Jared finished his PBR and tossed the can in the direction of the already overflowing trash. “Now that we’re finally all here, I have some news,” he said. “Will at Good Times gave me a heads-up that the Rat Rodders are going on
tour, and they’re talking about having us come along. I called up Owen to say we want to get in on it, so he’s going to get back with me about dates and all that. Sounds like it’s going to be cool.”
Typical Jared, saying “we” would do it without asking the rest of the band first. The Rat Rodders were on an indie label and had a pretty good following, but they were also flaky with opening-band bookings. Their lead singer, Owen, promised us shows a few times before, but something always went haywire at the last minute.
Nothing could stop Daniel from getting caught up in it, though. Again. The crazy optimist, Isaac used to call him.
“Sweet,” Daniel said, grinning. “Where are we going?”
Jared shrugged. “Everywhere. California, lots of Southern states. Like I said, they’ll be getting back with me real soon.”
“Sounds good,” Daniel said.
It didn’t sound that good to me, to be honest. Swear to God, some of these dudes made it their lives to argue whether you can call your band “rockabilly” if you don’t play exactly the way they did in the fifties, if using an electric bass instead of an upright makes you the ultimate poseurs, if psychobilly is the crappiest subgenre ever to exist, and on and on and on. Basically—like most music scenes, I guess—rockabilly is overrun with know-it-alls.
“If it actually pans out this time, we’ll have a lot to plan,” Mikey said.
“Like our brand-new name,” Jared said.
The rest of us groaned.
We got in our places and played through a few songs for the next hour or so.
After almost a year in the band, I’d done only a few rehearsals fully sober, and all of those had been long before this past summer. I can’t say whether it was better or worse this way. Neither, maybe. Just . . . different. But it was kind of surprising how much the little screwups stuck out and how off Daniel’s timing was.
Just before nine, Jared started having problems with his mic and Daniel broke a string. It was about time to pack it in for the night anyway, so I put the bass away and started to leave. Before I got out the door, though, Jared looked up from the box of cords and shit he was digging through and asked, “Hey, Seth, have you seen my other mic anywhere?”
I shook my head.
From his new place on the couch, Mikey said, “You know, I think I remember Isaac letting Kendall borrow it a few months back, after she got that karaoke machine.”
“Well, I need it,” Jared said, standing. He looked straight at me. “Can you get it?”
“What? Why me?” I asked. “I don’t hang out with Kendall.”
“You see more of her than the rest of us do, right?”
“No.” The way he’d asked made me think he knew I’d slept with her or something. I hadn’t told anyone, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t gotten out. Crap like this always seemed to get out. “I only see Kendall when she’s with Mom.”
Daniel gave me a weird look. “What are you talking about? You see her at school all the time. Just ask her for it the next time you run into her.”
His way of being all casual about the chicks he fooled around with had always been a mystery to me, but never more than at that moment. Daniel hooked up with Kendall once at a party last winter. Things got screwed up for all of us when Isaac found out about it, beat the shit out of Daniel, and quit the band. After a month or so, Isaac and Kendall got back together, like they always did, and Isaac started playing music with us again, but things between him and Daniel were never cool after that. The thing I didn’t get was that Daniel never even seemed sorry. There was no chance of Isaac finding out about what I’d done, but I felt like a bastard over the whole thing, anyway.
“You’ll probably get your mic back faster if you give Kendall a call and ask for it,” I said to Jared.
“Can’t you just do it for me? I don’t have her number.”
As much as I didn’t want to risk making these guys suspicious, I wanted to talk to Kendall even less. “Get it from Mom. I’m not your secretary.”
Mikey rolled his eyes. “You know what? I’ll call Kendall. It’s only a microphone. No big deal.”
“Cool,” I said, lifting the door and heading out.
Mikey and Jared stayed put, but Daniel caught up with me and we walked to our parking spots. For a few seconds I wondered if he was figuring things out and was going to give me shit over Kendall, but instead he said, “That’s pretty awesome news about that Rat Rodders tour, huh? I think it’s exactly what we need.”
“Yeah, if it even ends up happening,” I said, shrugging.
And right then I wondered how I could let it happen. No one had said much about my sloppy, embarrassing performance at our show the week before, but I’m sure they’d have just told me to get over it and get back up there. What they didn’t get was that I couldn’t. Not without Isaac.
Daniel crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s going on with you? Why do you have to be such a downer? You were never like this before.”
Before? Did he mean before all the times the Rat Rodders screwed us over? Before Isaac died? Or maybe before I’d found him on the floor this morning.
“I’m trying to be realistic,” I said. “Those guys never come through. Maybe we should just hold off on getting our hopes up.”
“Whatever.” Daniel climbed on his bike. “You keep being negative, Dick, but I’m going to think good thoughts. Like about how, soon, this is all finally going to be paying off. We’re going to get out of this town. The four of us. We’ll travel all over. Get paid to play music. What could be better?”
What he didn’t mention were the parts he was looking forward to most: the partying, the booze, the drugs, the chicks. For Daniel, being in a band was about fun first and music last.
“You realize this isn’t going to be tour buses and ritzy hotels,” I said. “We’ll spend half our waking hours driving in some van from one sketchy club to the next. And then we’ll sleep on strangers’ floors and live off convenience-store hot dogs and chips.”
“Sounds like a hell of a great time to me.” He started his bike and yelled over the engine, “Maybe you can try keeping an open mind?”
But it was way too late for that.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
5:38 P.M.
Two days later. A thrilling afternoon at work. Mikey, who manages his dad’s full-service car wash/gas station, had given me the crap job of scrubbing wheels, so I was on my knees finishing up a minivan. It was overcast, and with the wind redirecting the water from the hoses Trevor and Lyle were using, my sweatshirt and jeans were getting damp.
I was deep in concentration when someone touched my shoulder. I looked up to see Kendall staring down, wearing her orangey hair in those stupid pigtails again. “You’re in luck, lover,” she said. “I was here dropping something off for Mikey, and he just so happened to mention that it’s time for your break.”
So the missing microphone thing was over and done with. It was good of Mikey to take care of it for Jared so I didn’t have to, but it was really not cool that he’d sent Kendall out to harass me afterward. Especially since I was shaky and sweaty, and I hadn’t felt much like eating ever since I’d started this no-drinking thing.
“I don’t want to take a break,” I said.
“Of course you do.” As she put one hand on her hip, her fitted black shirt with too many undone buttons shifted so I could see the top of her lacy red bra. “Everyone wants to take breaks. And anyway, we need to talk.”
Trevor and Lyle were watching. How could they not with Kendall’s boobs hanging out? And her legs. With that skirt. Jesus.
I didn’t think Kendall would say anything about That One Night in front of them, but I didn’t want to risk it. “Finish this for me?” I asked Lyle.
He nodded, so I tossed him my brush and walked with Kendall until we were out of earshot.
“Have you ever considered that I don’t want to spend my break with you?” I asked.
“You only get fifteen minutes. Don’t waste i
t arguing.”
Then she grabbed my arm and pulled me across the parking lot. I was too tired to fight her, and even if I’d tried, she’d only have blabbed loudly at me anyway. What was the point?
We sat together on a bench facing the busy street, and I could smell her gummy bearness. With the headache I had going, it made me kind of queasy.
“Our last conversation didn’t work out the way I’d planned,” she said.
It was weird that she was so calm about it. I’d expected her to go crazy on me for driving off without her. But even when I’d hurried to get past her in the halls at school, the worst she’d done was stick out her tongue.
I raised my voice so she could hear me over the traffic. “Yeah, I’m sure it was a real bummer having to find another ride to school.”
“Actually, I drove myself.”
“In what?”
She twisted her lips in this guilty-looking way. “My . . . car.”
“It was an easy fix, then?”
“Very easy,” she said, still making that weird face. “I stuck the key in the ignition and away I went.”
“I don’t get it.”
She put her hands over her face and peeked through her fingers at me. “Don’t get mad.”
And that’s when I got it. “You’re unbelievable. You actually made up a lie about your car breaking down just so you could come over and tell me that you think my friend—your boyfriend— was a loser who deserved to die?”
She was frowning as she dropped her hands. “First of all, I never said that about the car. You assumed. Second, Isaac and I had been broken up for two months when he died. And third, I never said he deserved it.”
“So you broke up for a while,” I said. “Like that was anything new. Everyone knew you’d get back together like you always did. Isaac said it was only a matter of time.”
“Isaac was wrong.”
I stood. “I’m going back to work now.”
But before I’d made it two steps, she jumped up, grabbed both my hands, and squeezed so hard it hurt. Her eyes were intense, serious. Pleading, even. “We still have, like, twelve minutes left. There’s something I’ve wanted to say to you and I need to get it out, okay?”