I stare back at Patrick. I’m breathing hard. Words boil inside me.
If I’m all in? He has no idea.
He has no idea how much I want this. The music. The shows. The fans. I want the people in the blur beyond the edge of the stage screaming the words along with me. I want the weight of this guitar in my hands, the strap on my shoulder, Jezz to my left, Patrick behind me, both of them building the layers of sound that I can stand on and sing. I want bigger things than S&A. Bigger things than Minnesota. I want the world to know who we are. I want to be the best. I want to know I’m the best. I want it so much that it scares me.
So much that it’s dangerous.
“I am all in,” I say, in a voice that barely sounds like mine. “I’m . . .”
And then, instead of even trying to finish the sentence, I’m storming out of the Murrays’ garage. I’m stuffing Yvonne into the passenger seat of the battered white car. I’m gunning the motor, and I’m screaming off down the street, toward the only place I can think of to go.
Thea
The house at 751 Franconia Street is empty.
It’s beige and sealed and silent. The For Sale sign is coated with a light layer of dirt, picked up by the wind and pasted in place by months of drying rain and dew. The doors, front and back, are padlocked with clunky gray key boxes, and curtains are pulled over the empty rooms.
But the fence is easy to climb.
It’s a wood-slat fence, about six feet high. It encloses the entire backyard. The gaps between its planks release shredded flashes of Patrick’s backyard, next door at 749 Franconia.
Last Things is practicing.
A few kids from the high school are lounging in the yard, dangling off the lawn chairs, skateboarding slowly up and down the paved walk. Their Converse shoes smack the ground after each sloppy flip. Their voices crumble over the music that pounds out of the garage like an aluminum-sided heart.
Behind the empty house at 751, at the edge of the overgrown yard, there’s a sagging wooden playhouse. Scraps of linoleum on the packed dirt floor. Water-stiffened magazine pictures taped to the walls. Horses. Roses. Wedding dresses. There’s one small, paneless window at the back. Every afternoon after school I sit on an overturned bucket inside the playhouse, beside this window. I can see past the window box full of long-dead and dry geraniums to the fence, through a knothole in the boards, straight into a shady patch of the Murrays’ yard, just beside the garage’s open back door. No one can see me.
But I can hear everything.
They play new things, old things. “Dead Girl.” “Lost and Found.” They play “Frozen” for the first time in a very long time. The last time I heard it was at the Crow’s Nest, back in October, a few weeks after I came here.
It was the night Janos talked with me for the first time. The first time beyond Whole, two-percent, or skim? and You’re welcome, anyway. I was sitting at the back of the room, near the coffee bar, on the edge of the crowd. Janos came over when the set ended. He had pockmarked skin and a rasping accent. Slovak, I learned later.
“You come every week,” he said, leaning down to wipe my table.
“I like the music.”
“The music. Yeah.” Janos grinned at me.
He thinks it’s a crush. That’s all. Something small and sweet and harmless. Something to tease a girl about.
Janos is kind.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” Janos nodded across the room.
The stage was empty now, the band waiting for the place to clear a bit before packing up. But who he meant was obvious.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s really good.”
Janos nodded. “He’ll be famous someday.”
“You think so?”
Janos nodded again, calm, certain, like I’d just asked him if the Crow’s Nest would be open tomorrow. He smiled down at me. “And we’ll say we knew him before everyone else.”
“How long have you known him?” I asked, taking the last cold sip of my café au lait. I’d made it last through the whole night. There’s never money for a second.
“They played here the first time a couple years ago.”
“Were they already really good?”
Janos looked like he was considering this. “Good. Yes. Very good for sixteen. They played mostly covers. A couple months later they played again. Now mostly new songs. His songs. More people showed up. Then they started coming back every week. Like you.” He looked down at me for another moment. From a distance, I would have guessed that Janos was in his thirties. Up close, past the scarred skin, he looked younger. Maybe twenty-three, twenty-four.
“Why do you always come alone?” he asked. “Watch alone? Sit alone?”
“I’m new in town,” I told him.
He tipped his head back. “I know what new in town is like. But this is a small town.” He gestured around with his damp rag. “It doesn’t take long for people to know you.”
“Maybe.” I smiled up at him. “But I don’t mind sitting alone.”
He picked up my empty cup. “You have family here?”
“My aunt Mae. I’m living with her for now. My father’s on the road.”
Janos squinted at me. “Mae Malcolm?”
“You know her?”
He shook his head. “People talk. You know. Small towns.”
Something about his face, his steady eyes, made me ask the question. “What do they say?”
“You really want to hear?”
I smiled at him again. “I’ve probably already heard.”
“They say stupid things. Superstitious.” He shrugged, flicking the damp rag. “She starts fires. She does magic. She found a body in the woods, someone missing for months, because a vision led her there.”
I smiled a little wider. The last part is true. But better if he thinks it’s just a rumor.
Janos went on. “Does she worry when you’re out late? Alone?”
“No. And I’m not scared.”
He glanced toward the window. Beyond the glass the autumn sky was saturating with deep blue darkness. “Not scared of the dark, or of being by yourself?”
“Right,” I said.
Janos laughed. He turned away, carrying my cup. “Café au lait?”
“I don’t have—” I began, but he cut me off.
“We have to pour out the old coffee anyway. You can drink it while you wait for . . .” He nodded toward the stage again.
The band had just reappeared. Jezz and Patrick and Anders were starting the ritual of packing up.
So I stayed at my corner table. Janos set down the steaming cup, giving me a quick wink. I sipped the hot, foamy coffee as the band laughed and talked about the set and nestled instruments into cases, and I wrote the words “Thank you” with a handful of pennies, which was all I had in my pockets, and left them on the table beside my coffee cup. When the band moved outside, I slipped after them, keeping so far back in the leafy shadows around the Crow’s Nest that none of them even noticed I was there.
Now, in the abandoned playhouse, I take a breath. Scents of damp paper, wet earth, old wood. My foot has fallen asleep. The overturned bucket isn’t the most comfortable seat, but I will wait here for as long as I need to. As long as it takes.
They’re still working the rhythms of “Come Out and Play.” The music screams loud enough that I can shift my weight on the bucket without being heard, stretch my arms over my head. I point the leg with the sleeping foot, making a little circle with my ankle. The toe of my battered sneaker scuffs the dirt. Something glitters. I bend down and brush it with my fingertips.
A little girl’s necklace, its chain too small to close around an adult’s throat. Strung with pink beads and tiny gold stars. Lost, or maybe buried here, like treasure. Left behind. I rub the stars between my thumb and finger until the black dirt is gone and they can shine. Then I hang the necklace on the head of a nail that sticks out of the playhouse wall. It twinkles against a picture of a sea-sprayed white stallion.
The garage ne
xt door has gone quiet. I can hear Ellie Hammond and Lee Skiff arguing about something one of them said or didn’t say, and Patrick’s voice murmuring something over the muted, habitual roll of drumsticks against a rim.
Then Anders’s voice. Jezz’s. The voices get louder. They’re talking. Arguing.
I press myself against the playhouse’s clammy wooden wall. Ellie is giggling. The wheels of a skateboard clack on the cement. Jezz and Patrick are talking. I catch Anders once more.
Then shouting.
“Why are we doing this?” I hear it again. “Why . . . Why . . .” Other words lost in distance, behind the barriers of walls.
They’re arguing more and more lately. I get to my feet, crouching in the playhouse. I wait until I hear the sound of an engine roaring away down the street.
I duck through the playhouse door. Thin stripes of the Murrays’ backyard flicker as I dart along the fence: grass, siding, arborvitae, pavement. I jump over the fence slats into the front yard, into a patch of overgrown shrubs and sour-smelling weeds. Through their leaves, I catch the white blur of Anders’s car peeling away.
At the end of the street, he turns left.
He’s not heading toward home. He’s heading downtown.
I grab my bike from its hiding spot behind 751’s garbage cans.
By the time the white car screeches to a stop on Main Street, just across from the music studio, I’m waiting in the intersecting alley.
The world is thin here. The whole town is thin; the woods all around Greenwood are binding it together like a black wire net. And there’s a spot, underground, right through the door Anders entered, where it’s barely held together. Where something dark and quick could push forward and slip straight out of its world into ours.
I climb off the bike. If I stay here, in the alley beside the corroded trash bins, I’m out of sight of the street. But I can see the dark things. They’re trying to hide, but I can spot them, hunched behind corners, pressed against walls. Shadows where there is no one to cast shadows. Nobody’s shadow would look like that anyway.
Warped. Bony. Bent almost like branches.
They are waiting.
I can feel them.
And they can feel me pushing back.
Anders
I shove the stenciled glass door. Nancy’s Needles. HOMETOWN INSURANCE. Underground Music Studio. The names flash and swing in front of me. I yank open the metal door, thunder down the steps, and charge across the central room. A kid with a stack of piano books in his lap looks up from the corduroy couch as I fly past.
I pound on Flynn’s door. Loud enough that I’m sure he can hear, no matter what noise is trapped on the other side.
A second later the door opens. Flynn blinks out at me. His eyebrows rise.
“Hey, Anders,” he says. “You okay?”
“Not really. Can I talk to you?”
“Sure.” Flynn pauses. Over his shoulder I can see a girl about ten years old perched on the folding chair, miniature acoustic guitar across her lap. Her feet swing a few inches from the floor. “We were almost done here.” Flynn turns toward the girl. “What do you think, Jamie? You want to do that Little Mermaid piece one more time? Anders could listen to you. Give you some feedback. He’s pretty good.”
Jamie glances at me. I’m clenching the door frame with one hand. One of my legs is vibrating with impatience.
Jamie shakes her head.
“Want to just be done for today?” Flynn asks.
Jamie nods.
She darts past me with her guitar, sneaking one more glance at me out of the corner of her eye.
Flynn beckons me in.
I step through the door, and he shuts it quickly behind me.
Suddenly I feel wrong, like I’m missing part of my body. I realize a second later that what I’m missing is my guitar. I’m never in this room without it. I left Yvonne outside, locked in the car. My hands feel huge and empty.
“What’s up?” asks Flynn.
“The band. The other guys.” I want to pace, or punch a wall, or do something to let out the energy searing through me, but this is Flynn’s studio, not my own bedroom. I try to stand still. “They’re pissed at me. And they should be. I did something stupid. But there was nothing else I could do.”
“Okay.” Flynn lowers himself onto his usual chair. He folds his ropy arms and leans back, listening. “Did you guys break up? Is the band over?”
“What? No. No.” Just the idea throws me. I swear, the cement floor starts to rock. “I don’t think so. Jesus. I hope not.”
Flynn nods. “Okay. Then you’ll move on. You fight, and you move on.” He gives me a dry smile. “That’s what bands do. They fight. With occasional breaks to play music.”
Flynn is so . . . Flynn. He’s so mellow and cool and ready to laugh at whatever deserves it, I can feel the tension inside me lessen a little bit. But it’s not quite enough.
“This was more than that.” I try to string words together. “I don’t know if—I don’t—I don’t know . . .”
“Okay,” says Flynn again. “Just take a breath.” He nods to the other chair, inviting me to sit. I throw myself down. Flynn uncrosses his ankles and leans forward, elbows on knees. “So, this isn’t really about the other guys, right?”
I writhe in the chair. I can’t seem to remember how sitting works.
“Right,” I say. “It’s my fault.”
Flynn keeps his voice light. “What’s your fault?”
The water I’m wading into is cold and deep. I take a breath, like Flynn said, and slowly let it out again. “Someone from S&A Artist Management called me a couple weeks ago.”
Flynn’s eyebrows twitch. Flynn stays pretty chill about almost everything, but now and then his eyebrows give him away. “S&A, huh? Decent people.”
“Yeah. And I told them I wasn’t interested.”
“Without talking to Jezz and Patrick,” Flynn supplies.
“Yes.”
Flynn nods slowly. “Kind of a dick move.”
“I know. I know. We all said we wouldn’t sign anything until we were done with school, but I still should have told them. It was just—they were just asking me. Like I was in charge. Or maybe like they just wanted me. Not us. I don’t know.”
“Okay.” Flynn turns his hands up in a tiny shrug. “So maybe it just wasn’t the right thing.”
“But that’s not really it.” This is colder, deeper water than we’ve been in before. I can’t see the bottom here. “I guess . . . I’m worried about what will happen when I do say yes.”
“Ah.” I can hear Flynn take a deep breath of his own. “I get it.”
My head snaps up. “You get it?” He does?
Flynn nods again. “Oh, yeah. It happens to almost everybody, man. You climb up the ladder, you walk down to the end of the diving board, and all of the sudden you see how high up you are, and you think maybe you don’t really want to jump. I get it.”
I twist in my seat. God, I wish I had my guitar. Just so I had something to clench in my hands. “No. It’s . . .” I scrape my fingers through my hair. My scalp is sweaty. “I’m not, like, scared of leaving town or something. I’m not scared of taking a chance. I’m—” I have to stop and swallow. “I feel like I’m about to get everything I’ve always wanted. You know? Everything.”
“And that scares you.” Flynn leans on his elbows. He brings his face close to mine. “We knew this was coming, right? Representation, touring, a record deal. I mean, the things you’ve been writing, the way you can play. People were going to notice.” He cracks a smile. “I don’t promise any of my students fame and fortune in the music business, but if I was going to make a bet on someone . . .” He gives my knee a quick, warm pat. “Listen. Anders. If you’re thinking the life of a touring musician isn’t what you want anymore, that’s one thing. That’s fine. That’s sane.” He grins knowingly. “But if you’re just doubting yourself, that’s another thing entirely.”
I stare hard at Flynn, grabbing every
word out of his mouth like it might be the thing that saves me, that makes the shitty situation with my best friends seem not so shitty after all. For a second I think about Flynn’s life. Single. No family that I know of. Scattered friends. No roots but the shallow ones he’s put down here. Maybe music pulls people apart as often as it brings them together. Maybe I’m headed for loss no matter what I do.
Flynn leans back, the graying coils of his hair sweeping over his shoulder. “You know, life isn’t a one-way street. You can play lead guitar in a metal band for a few years, touring the world, doing crazy stuff, and then you can move to some small town where the rent is nice and cheap and teach guitar to schoolkids.” He shrugs, grinning. “But Anders . . .” He pauses. His face gets serious. “You need to at least try. I mean it. Go down that road far enough that you can see where it leads before you turn away.”
There’s another moment of quiet. I can hear the hum of pipes and vents, and the muffled plinking of a piano lesson in another studio seeping in under the door.
In that quiet I want to blurt out everything. I want to tell Flynn the whole truth.
But I can’t.
I can’t tell him about that night in the woods. If I even try, he’ll know one of two things: either I’m a fraud, a pathetic lying tool, or I am batshit insane.
“You know how we talked about talent.” I measure the words. “About gifts.” My heart’s pounding. I’m so close to going too far. “If something’s given to you, then somebody else had to give it, right? And if they give you more and more, won’t they—probably—want something in return?”
I stare straight into Flynn’s eyes. I’m begging him to understand. I’m praying for him to see through the words into what I can’t say.
Flynn’s eyes are greenish brown and steady.
He looks right back at me.
“Giving everything is scary,” he says at last. “Giving your whole self to something—it’s huge. I know. But sometimes that’s what music demands.” Slowly, lazily, he scratches his bicep with his missing-fingered hand. “Sometimes it demands a sacrifice.”
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