by Tria, Jay E.
“But I thought that since you were going with Kim, and that it’s your post-anniversary celebration thing you guys wouldn’t want a third wheel.”
“I’m not going with him anymore,” Jill mumbled.
“Why not?”
Jill sniffed and hiccupped, staring at her hands. “Kim and I broke up.”
“What?”
“Kim broke up with me,” she corrected herself. Details like these were important.
“What?” Miki cried again. “When?”
“Last week. Friday. At 1:15 in the afternoon.” The details rushed to her now like water flooding a broken dam. “We had a fight and I slept it off in his couch and when I woke up he said he wanted to break up. And then he drove me home and it was over.”
Jill’s tears were falling fast like rain, and her voice was coming out as a chipmunk squeak, the pitch higher and higher as the words tumbled out of her.
Miki stared at her with a deeply furrowed brow, as if deciding if she was lying and just practicing some theatrics. Their fellow clients were now watching Jill’s loud, messy cry. Miki sighed, put an arm around her shoulder and started pulling her up.
“Come on let’s get out of here.”
“But I have to deposit this check today for my mother or she will kill me!” Jill cried, grabbing the front of Miki’s shirt.
She was bawling now, water streaming from her nose. Out of the blurred view of her watery eyes, she could see the tellers craning their heads at the scene she was making. The bank was dead silent, with only her voice echoing from the high ceiling.
“Give that to me.” Miki took the check and firmly, her hand, towing her to the biggest, farthest table in the branch.
‘Bank Manager’ was the title on the nameplate. As they plunked down on the two chairs fronting the table, the severe-looking lady behind it gave them a flat look, then a quick smile.
“Good afternoon,” began the bank manager. “How may I—”
“My friend here needs to deposit this check. It needs to make the clearing cut off.” Miki slapped the documents on the table.
The bank manager opened her mouth, her eyes swiveling to the growing queue in her lobby. Clients and bank employees alike were gaping openly at them. Miki cut her off again.
“I don’t care about the line. Usually I do. I am very respectful of these things, believe me, I am.”
“He is,” Jill put in, pawing her streaming nose with the side of her hand.
“But my friend here is upset,” Miki said in strong yet hushed tones, leaning forward to the lady. “So unless your entire lobby wants to hear the entire sad story, I would really appreciate your help so we can get out of here.”
Miss Bank Manager took another look at Jill’s hunched form. She took the check and the deposit slip from Miki, disappeared behind the teller’s counter, and came back in less than two minutes. She handed the validated slip to Miki.
“Thank you, ma’am, sir,” the lady said with her quick smile. She flashed an earnest look at Jill. “You’ll be alright, dear.”
Jill sniffed, fresh tears crawling up her throat. “Thanks.”
“Thank you,” Miki said stiffly. He had not let go of Jill’s hand. Their fingers entwined, he stood up, towing her along with him as they weaved through the crowd at the bank lobby, and out the glass doors.
Miki did not return her hand or say a word until they were in the confines of his car. He locked the doors, killed the radio, put the air conditioning on full blast, and finally turned to her.
“Jillian Marie.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
Miki’s whole body was turned to her, his legs tucked under him, the better to study every inch of her face. He was raking his fingers over and over his short wavy hair.
“Jill,” he said again. “What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know.” Her sobs have stopped now, her chest feeling the aftermath of a good release now that Miki knew. She should not have kept it from him for this long.
“I know you’ve been fighting a lot, but those were all stupid tiny fights.” Miki was echoing the hyper-analysis that had kept Jill up well into the morning for a week now.
“Stupid tiny fights build up to a reason for a breakup. That’s what Kim said, or something like it,” Jill said in a quiet voice. “He said I never took anything seriously and he was tired of it. He said I didn’t have any plans for my life, and I just coasted by, plucking my perfect guitar and writing my silly happy-ever-after songs.”
After all her overnight musings, she couldn’t accept that these faults Kim had enumerated added up to the death of a relationship. Weren’t these things that she could fix, as long as she was with him?
“You’re eighteen years old. How are you supposed to fucking know what to do with your life? Is he that sure about his fucking plans?” Miki was wringing his hands. “I mean, he’s crazy about you. He loves you. Doesn’t he love you?”
Jill shifted her gaze. That was the fundamental question. “His mother says he does.”
Miki’s brow furrowed, distracted from his frustration. “His mother?”
“She called me. She said Kim will hit his head on a wall eventually and realize he made a shitty mistake. That he would come back.”
“At least we know his mother still loves you.”
“Yep.” Tears threatened to fall again, but Jill swallowed the lump on her throat and turned back to Miki. “It was supposed to be our anniversary in a few days.”
Miki sighed. He eased his posture, leaning back on the car seat. “Well, every breakup does have a probation period.”
“A what?”
“Three months, they say,” Miki expounded. “Three months to change minds, to take things back. Three months before moving on to someone else.”
Jill pondered this, repeating the words inside her head. “Three months of hope?”
Miki raised a hand to her cheek and wiped a stray tear with his thumb. “Three months to figure out how to move on.”
April 30, Thursday, afternoon
Jill and Julia led the song together, but it was Kim’s voice that swum over the chorus of bass and rhythm, perfectly afloat, loud and clear within the soundproofed walls of the basement studio. Cabinet-sized bass amps and foot-tall cubic tube amps powered their sound as Nino beat violently on his five-year old drums, nearly standing in his excitement.
“Shot gun to the bright side, oh/I’ll be waiting for you baby/Just get to the other side,” Kim sang, Son dancing with his bass beside him, until the drum beat ran off and left them all hanging.
“No.” Kim groaned, his pick sliding down the strings to a loud angry pitch, killing the song. “No no no.”
Miki and Jill turned to each other, sharing expressions of panic. Kim had just uttered the Quadruple No of Doom.
“You’re going too fast.” Kim swung around to face them, his dark gaze locked on Nino behind the drum set. “Are you truly physically unable to do a slower beat? Is that a real genetic deficiency?”
Nino glared back at him. “This is not a ballad, Kimball.”
“I’m not asking for a ballad.” Kim waved both arms in the air, one hand hitting his face with a loud snap. Jill slunk behind Miki, cringing at the terrible omens.
“I’m asking you to listen to how we’re playing and go with that,” Kim went on in a slow, deliberate voice. “And stop pounding on the fucking double bass.”
Nino closed his eyes, nostrils flaring. Jill knew he was struggling to let the double bass comment go.
“Drummers set the beat.” Nino spoke through gritted teeth. “Remember the traditional ‘ahonetwothreefour’?”
“Yes, my friend,” Son said in a pacifying tone, walking up between them. “What Kim here is trying to say is that maybe you can play your track as if you’re playing the same song that we are.”
“Sounds good to me,” Miki quipped.
“Best idea I’ve heard all day,” Jill agreed, peeking from behind him.
&nb
sp; Kim swiveled back to position, Nino boring holes at the back of his head. Nino counted off, drumsticks meeting in midair, “ahonetwothreefour,” and they all hit Bright Side again.
“Stop it, this isn’t about a fight/ This isn’t about you being right.” Kim crooned, his mouth on the mic. “Some people crumble when they stumble/Oh no/Sometimes it’s said that they’re unable/Uh oh—”
Jill kept both ears open for Nino, her heart tense as he pounded on the drum in perfect harmony with the rest of them. She smiled, singing along.
Then Nino’s beat shot ahead of them, his drumsticks hitting the double bass.
Kim grabbed the neck of his guitar, sending earsplitting feedback to the speakers. He spun around. “Nino, I swear to God—”
“Maybe all four of you are moving too slow, didn’t you think of that?” Nino burst out, shooting up from his stool and waving both drumsticks like weapons.
“And we are taking five,” Miki called out, clapping his hands loudly over the tension.
Son pulled Nino to a corner, shoving a cold bottle of water to his hand as Jill stepped forward and took his drumsticks away.
The studio door opened and Mars’s short, bulky body walked in.
“That’s a good track,” Mars said, bringing in a metal stool and plopping down on it. “At least the first half or so of it before you guys stop playing and start tearing at each other’s throats.”
“Don’t look at me,” Nino growled. “Somebody woke up on the bitchy side of the bed today.”
“Hush, child!” Son muttered, shooting Kim a panicked look. Kim had found himself a chair and sat, his back against the wall, staring moodily at his hands.
“Is that making the album?” Mars turned to Kim.
“We obviously like it, or we wouldn’t have spent half the day on it.” Kim gritted his teeth.
Jill recognized his stiff stance, his chest heaving up and down as he tried to tame his temper. This was something he did when he regretted shooting out laser beams from his eyes and fire from his mouth.
“It better make the album,” Nino muttered. “I’ve been pounding so hard here I’ve grown tired of my own genius drum track.”
“Will you be recording all the songs live? Just like with the other albums?” Mars went on. He was so used to Kim losing his temper on Nino that he did not bother stressing out over the strain in the room. Kim lost his head on all of them every other day, anyway.
“Yes.” Kim turned his gaze on his bandmates in turn; even Nino nodded curtly back. “Live is what matters most. We’ll mix the dirt off after that.”
Mars dipped his head, humming his consent. “How are the rest of the songs coming along?”
“We have three songs we’re happy with. This would be the fourth one.”
“It’s first single material.” Mars said thoughtfully, jotting down on his organizer. “This could be it.”
“Well that depends.” Son pointed a thumb at Jill. “This one says she’s still fixing something.”
“Shut up,” she hissed. Jill had her own notebook tucked inside her backpack, the pages inside it as torn and ruined as the lyrics to All the Way.
“Well, make up your minds soon,” Mars ordered in a carrying voice. “We need a single. We’ve booked Pink Rock music festival for next month and we’re debuting it there.”
Their heads snapped up to attention. Mars sat straight with his arms crossed over his puffed up chest, wearing the smug face of a man extending a basketful of candy to starved children.
“We did?” Nino perked up, forgetting to be surly.
“That’s in Singapore right?” Miki turned to Jill, eyes wide. “We’ve never been there, have we?”
“So this is why you went dictator on a new single. You were plotting.” Son was shaking his head, but he crossed the room and gave Mars’s back a loud thump. “Why didn’t you just say so? We would’ve bickered less and worked more.”
Jill exchanged high fives with Miki. “Because he wasn’t sure he could book it.”
“Well I did, didn’t I?” Mars stood up, massaging his shoulder where Son hit him.
“This is cool, lah,” Son said. “So who dropped out and gave us a vacancy?”
“Does it even matter?” Mars sighed in exasperation.
“It doesn’t,” Kim put in. He wasn’t completely recovered from the shadow of his dark mood, but a smile lurked at the corner of his mouth. He turned to Jill, holding her gaze, and after a quick second looked away.
Kim stood up, pushing against the wall, hands on his waist. He turned to Nino. “Alright Nino, let’s try things your way.”
Nino beamed, all signs of hostility wiped from his face. He tossed his water bottle aside and grabbed his sticks from Jill, ready behind his drum set. Jill, Miki and Son scrambled to get to their instruments in time just as Nino started the count-off on his feet.
Mars scurried out of the studio, his stool and organizer in tow. “I guess five’s over.”
May 8, Friday, night
Jill tossed the crumpled paper in the air, attempting a juggle with another balled up piece of notebook page. When she failed she picked both up and shot them to her trash can. They rebounded against the already tall pile of torn, heavily-inked paper, and landed sadly on the floor.
“I will fix it,” she muttered to herself, rhymes and clichés for All the Way colliding inside her head.
Trainman had polished six songs and is now rehearsing the seventh. By the end of the month they would be recording, and Jill’s song still wasn’t ready. At several points in the past two weeks, she had despised every letter on the wretched lyrics. When and why did she and Kim write that song anyway? She couldn’t remember the feeling, the inspiration behind the words.
“Maybe Kim was right. The song sucks. It doesn’t work. It can’t be fixed.”
She rolled over on her bed, fully clothed down to her faded high-cut sneakers. Her wall clock said eight o’clock, only an hour before the last full show. She needed this a-Capella-girls-on-a-mission movie night. She needed a break, if only Shinta would finally drive up her house and pick her up as he promised.
Her phone rang from somewhere under her sheets. She found it and pressed it to her ear.
“You’re cancelling aren’t you, Shinta? Don’t you dare. I already bought the tickets!”
“Jill.”
That was not Shinta’s voice. That was an old voice, burned forever in her memory.
“Kim. Why—?”
“My mom. She’s sick. Can you come over?”
***
Kim’s car was parked in an awkward diagonal line outside the gate of their house, as if it was supposed to drive off somewhere but changed its mind. Kim was sitting on the backseat staring at the pavement between his shoes, four car doors open, the engine running.
Jill paid the taxi driver, got off the cab and walked up to him. Kim turned his face up to her and scooted over without a word.
She sat beside him under the white interior light, their faces half-hidden in shadow. He spoke, breaking the silence.
“Mom has a lump on her left breast. The size of a small orange. The doctor said her operation is two weeks from now.”
Jill turned to see the dark smirk on his face.
“She said it over dinner, as if she was just telling us about a movie she’s going to see.”
Jill held back her shock, knowing the horror mirrored on her face would not help him. She tried to stop her obsessive imagination from spinning images of Kim’s mother, ailing and weak. That tough and sturdy woman she had known for years, suffering from a monster that crept up on her from the inside and now revealed itself, a terrible surprise.
Jill had not seen her for months. Surely she still looked the same?
“There could be no better way to say it, I imagine,” she said quietly. “Did you notice anything wrong with her before this? Was she feeling ill, or something?”
“No. She’d been loud and nagging as usual. But I should have. I should have noticed
something. Then maybe—”
“This is not something you plan for. The big C just kind of springs on you. You know that, right? Don’t be harder on yourself than you already are.”
Kim released a deep breath, eyes fixed on his hands. “You’re right,” he said in a still voice. “Of course you’re right.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“Inside. Probably still sitting on his chair at the dining table. He was glued there when I left.”
“And your brothers?”
“My car is the only one left here.”
Jill nodded in the darkness. She thought those all constituted an acceptable response to an announcement like that. “Were you going somewhere, too?”
“I was going to find you, if you told me on the phone to fuck off and leave you alone.”
Iron tightened around her chest. In her panic at Kim’s words about his sick mother, Jill had forgotten that this was the first time he had spoken to her like this in months.
“What, your new girl can’t handle this?” she blurted out.
Kim’s head jerked to her, his dark eyes wet. She knew she stepped over a line.
“I’m sorry. That was horrible of me. I didn’t mean to be a—”
“She’s not my new girlfriend. She’s just.” He paused, struggling for words. “A girl.”
Jill chewed her tongue, pulling in a deep breath to tame the swirl of cold air inside her stomach.
“I am sorry, about your mom,” she said after a pause. “But she’s a badass lady, she’ll pull through. Remember the time she unearthed the master key to your room because you locked us inside?”
“She came in with a bathrobe for you,” Kim said. “And a frying pan for my head.”
“Yeah that attempt didn’t go well.”
“She loves you, you know.”
“I know. Me and my virtue.” She flashed him a small smile, and he smiled back. She turned her head to Kim’s house, imagining she could see his mother’s face through the lighted windows. “I don’t think I should go in and say hi though. It will be weird.”
“You’d be better company than my dad. Or me.”