by L A Tavares
“Your house or mine?” she asks, and I choke on my final bite of sandwich. I swallow hard and clear my throat, looking at Alexander for some kind of interjection.
“Julian is coming over tonight, too.” Alexander picks up on his cue perfectly. “You’re more than welcome to join us, Kelly.”
She looks around with narrowed eyes and a confused expression.
“I’m staying with Alexander.” Short, sweet. Too much and yet, not nearly enough. I’ll have to figure out how to string words together and give her something though. It is a biography, after all.
* * * *
If I had drawn an ‘A’ card, my project would have consisted of all bullshit instead of mostly bullshit, like they usually do. I would have had to make up every detail, beginning to end, because if I had drawn an ‘A’ card, my real story would look something like this.
My mother was an international flight attendant and met my father on one of her trips into Cape Town. From what I understand, they fell for each other fast, holding on to the excitement and torment of not knowing when they would see each other next, until she learned she was pregnant and moved there.
I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure it was over for them before it started, but they stayed together for me. The fight that ended it all? Well, I missed the beginning, but I walked in with enough time to hear her say, “If you kick me out, my son is coming with me.” He didn’t argue or fight to keep me.
Looking back, things weren’t always as bad as they were recently. It’s almost like the farther we got away from Cape Town, the further downhill she went until she was over the edge completely. From the time we moved to America until the day I started staying at Alexander’s, I was relying on a woman who relied entirely on men, booze and bad decisions.
Not much of an autobiography, really, but pulling a ‘B’ card wasn’t much better. I still hadn’t nailed down which lies to tell, and Kelly will be here any second.
Julian and Alexander head upstairs to Alexander’s bedroom and Kelly and I sit at the kitchen table. Alexander’s mother has made it abundantly clear that there are to be no girls upstairs.
I take two pencils and drum them off the tabletop, trying to decide what I can say to make this project somewhat decent. I’m equally pleased and ticked off by this task. Talking about myself, my background or my history? That’s a whole lot of hell no, but I am looking forward to getting to know her.
She rips one of the pencils out of my hand, effectively pulling the plug on my intense tabletop drum solo. I stick the other one behind my ear.
“So, where were you born?” she asks with the pencil at the ready to write my answers down.
“Cape Town,” I say, and a slight grin crosses her lips.
“I thought you were from Australia.” She giggles as she admits the error.
“You’re not the first to think that, and you won’t be the last.”
“What’s it like there?” She rests her head in her hand with her elbow on the table.
“Oh, I don’t know anymore, really. I haven’t been there in years. I’ve been in five other schools over the last eight or so years, in all different parts of the country.”
Her lips part as her eyes widen. “Why?”
“My mother… She’s a…flight attendant.” I nod, leaning my elbows into the table and clasping my hands together. I mean, it’s not a complete lie.
“A flight attendant…” She jots down the words as she speaks them in a bubbly handwriting that crosses over the lines of the loose-leaf paper. “And your dad?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you that.”
Her eyes meet mine and she can’t decide if she should laugh or question my answer, so she does both.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t say any more. It’s not safe,” I whisper. “I’ve already said too much.” I throw my hand to my forehead for dramatic purposes and try on my best poker face, attempting to remain serious when I want to break into a laugh.
She grins and swats a playful hand toward me. “Come on, Blake. We have to get this done.”
“I have a better idea,” I say, and she bites her lip. “What about if instead of writing our biographies about who we are and where we come from, we write them about where we are going. Say, twenty years from now, we have our dream jobs and exciting lives. I’ll give you my story from the perspective of a famous musician—”
“A famous musician, Blake?” She raises an eyebrow. “Do you know how few people actually make it in music?”
“C’mon. It will be fun. I will be a famous musician and you will be a…” I wave my hands, prompting her to complete the sentence.
“CEO—of a huge company. Maybe I’ll have a husband and a few kids too.” She smiles and her eyes light up.
Kelly worries that we would get in trouble for not following directions, but everything turns out better than I could have planned.
I manage my first A. Alexander’s mother even puts it on the refrigerator.
Chapter Nine
Now
Xander sits at the bar by himself, staring into his drink. His head is in his hand, his thumb strokes through the facial hair at his chin. From where I stand as I enter, I can see his shoulders are weighted down like they’re holding the world. As I inch closer, I can see the fatigue in his eyes and the way he’s biting his bottom lip so hard it might bleed. I’ve seen that look before. Usually we get a helluva song out of it, but the inspiration is never good.
The stool screeches against the tile floor when I pull it out. Xander doesn’t even look up, and his drink sits untouched.
“What’s going on, man?” I ask, but he just shakes his head. I order a drink and we sit there, silent. I’ll sit here until he’s ready to talk.
It seems like hours pass by the time he finally downs his drink and speaks.
“Natalie and I have been trying to get pregnant,” he says, and I try to work out the issues.
“Do you…not want kids?” I scratch my head. Maybe the Mariah drama changed his outlook on the whole father thing, but his lack of enthusiasm is both confusing and alarming. I was under the impression that he wanted to start a family.
“No, no. I do.” He gets the attention of the bartender and points to our drinks, suggesting a refill for us both. “It just doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.”
“You’ve been to the doctors?” He looks at me as if this suggestion were as obvious as unplugging something and plugging it back in.
“A few. We’ve had a bunch of different specialists’ opinions. Our chances just aren’t looking so great.”
I swallow hard. Comforting people is not my thing. I offer alcohol and perfectly timed sarcasm to lighten the mood. That’s usually all I bring to the sympathy table.
“Hey, are you guys busy?” a young woman says, stepping between Xander’s and my barstools. She’s petite but her outfit and attitude scream that her personality is larger than her small frame. Her hair is shaved into a design at one side, longer on the other. Her skin is covered in tattoos that rival even the number Xander has, and her eyes are lined in a deep black that accentuates her fierce green irises that can’t possibly be natural. Neither of us answer.
“I’ll take that as a no.” She smiles behind her pierced lip. “I’m Stasia.” She offers her hand in my direction and I take it.
“I’m Bla—”
“Blake Mathews, I know. And Xander Varro.” She sticks out her hand toward him, but his mind is elsewhere and he doesn’t return the introduction.
“What can we do for you, Stasia?” Xander keeps his body and eyes straight ahead as he speaks. His distant demeanor doesn’t deter her.
“I’m up next. You two want to join me?” She throws her thumb over her shoulder toward the stage set for open mic night. Xander looks at me and I at him as we have a wordless conversation. We’ve done this for so many years, through so many situations that we nearly always know what the other is saying. Xander shrugs. “Why the hell not?”
He downs his drink in one swallow and hops off his bar stool. This surprises me, but I follow suit.
“You sure about this?” I ask him, clapping a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m thinkin’ a bit of music and fun is exactly what I need right now.” He turns his attention to Stasia and looks at her with inquisitive eyes. “You look familiar. Have we met before?”
“Nope.” She shrugs her shoulders and gently shakes her head. “Guess I just have one of those faces.” She turns away from him and his eyes linger on her for a moment in a long stare that says he’s still trying to figure out who she is or who she reminds him of.
Stasia waltzes across the venue to the backstage area and we follow. She picks up an impressive Gibson Les Paul that looks like it belongs on a pro rock tour and not on the stage of open mic night.
“That’s gorgeous.” Xander drools over the instrument. “May I?” He points to the guitar and she hands it over with a nod. “Very nice,” he says while looking it over, before handing it back begrudgingly.
“Thanks. My father gave it to me as a gift.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “What do you want to play?” She rushes the question, changing the subject before either of us could ask any more about her father or the guitar. “Something of yours, of course,” she purrs, and Xander takes a few steps back, picking up one of the guitars that belong to the house band and hands me one as well.
“Whatever one you know best.”
She thinks for a moment before playing a perfectly timed, well-executed riff of one of our more difficult songs.
“Yeah, that one works,” I say, equally impressed and annoyed that she can do it as well as I can—maybe better. “Let’s do it.”
The host of open mic night introduces us, and the small crowd gives a moderately increased applause.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for having me. My name is Stasia and these poor gents I conned into performing with me are Blake and Xander.”
Xander and I give quick waves and I plug in the house bass guitar. “You playing us in?” I ask her, adjusting the strap on the guitar.
“No, you do it so much better,” she says with a wink, and I start us off, playing the intro to one of our more widely recognized songs. Xander joins me and so does Stasia, only—it’s new. It’s different from anything we’ve ever done—a new twist on a song Xander and I wrote and mastered. And it’s perfect. She’s improved it in a way I never would have thought to do.
Xander sings into the microphone but looks back at her over his shoulder and smiles at her new additions to the old song.
We are nearing a portion of the song where I usually lean into the same microphone as Xander and we crank out the lyrics together, but I’m curious to see what Stasia is made of.
“You going up there?” she yells over the music, not missing a beat.
I shake my head no. “This is your show. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Stasia continues to play, rocking across the stage until she reaches Xander’s mic. Like they’ve done it for years, as if it were rehearsed, she leans into the microphone and sings the lyrics to our song in a harmony style I never would have been able to produce, given our differences in vocal ranges.
It’s magic.
It’s a rarity to find anyone with real, professional-level talent at these open mic nights but she’s incredible. It makes me wonder why she isn’t performing at a higher level than open mic nights at The Rock Room.
The song comes to a close and Xander high-fives Stasia at the front of the stage. She presses her hand to her mouth, covering her face-filling smile and laughs as the crowd gives us a rowdy applause. I join them at the front of the stage, and we take a quick bow before exiting.
“That was amazing. You guys are great,” she says, taking a sip of water backstage.
“You’re not so bad yourself.” I hand the bass guitar off to a Rock Room employee.
“Thanks.” She shrugs her shoulders. “I mean, it’s just something I do for fun.”
Xander pushes his hair back with his fingers and turns toward her.
“You’ve got something there. You should run with it—make it less for fun and more for a career.”
“You think so?” she asks, carefully returning her Les Paul to its case.
“Absolutely. Thanks for inviting us up. It was fun to do it…just for fun and less for career,” he jokes. His phone rings, and he takes the call.
I pick up one of the acoustic guitars at the edge of the backstage area and sit on the couch, strumming a series of chords I’ve been trying to perfect and transform from idea to song for weeks.
“That’s pretty.” Stasia sits on the arm of the couch. “What is it?”
“A mess,” I say through a laugh. “I don’t know. Something is just not right.”
She listens, wordlessly analyzing the piece as I play it over and over again.
“Okay, play it one more time.” I do as I’m told. “Now, speed it up right…here,” she says, and I quicken the strum pattern. “Now let this last note ring…pause…quick pattern there… There you go!”
And just like that, she’s done it. It’s excellent. All in a few moments she perfected a piece I’ve been tweaking for weeks. I keep playing and she picks up an acoustic guitar that belongs to the venue and jumps in, only she plays the same notes in a finger picking style while I strum, and the two together are magnetic—opposites meant to find each other to form one piece.
“That’s bad-ass,” Xander says, rejoining us at the backstage area. “What is it?”
“The same song I’ve been working on for weeks. Stasia reworked it a bit.”
“It’s damn good.”
“Last week you told me it sucked.”
“It did suck. It doesn’t anymore.” Xander and Stasia laugh. I throw a guitar pick at him and join in on the laugh. “I have to take off. Blake, you need a ride?”
This is the most motivated I have felt in a long time, and I’m not ready to put the guitar down and leave the inspiration here behind the stage.
“I think I’m going to keep working on this, if that’s okay with you?” I ask, returning my attention to Stasia.
She nods an enthusiastic yes.
* * * *
Then
Forty-five small, round lights cover the yellowing ceiling of the school auditorium. I know this because I’m lying in the aisle of the room between the seats, counting the bulbs instead of trying to come up with new music.
“When did this stop being fun?” Alexander asks, playing the same sub-par riff on his guitar that he’s been picking at for the last two excruciating hours. He’s just saying what we are all thinking. It was easier when we were covering other people’s music instead of making our own. “And where the hell is Blake?”
“Marco?” Theo yells, his voice echoing through the empty auditorium.
“Polo!” I yell back. His footsteps sound closer but he doesn’t reach me.
“Where are you?” he says, and the other band members laugh.
“Here.” I raise one arm high in the air, reaching toward the lights I had been counting. He enters the row I’m in and stands toe to toe with me, leaning forward and giving me a hand up.
“What were you doing up there?” Dom calls.
“Thinking,” I say.
“Try not to hurt yourself,” he adds, followed by a well-timed ba-dum ching drum roll and cymbal clash.
“Let’s go do something more fun than this. Ya know, like homework or a dentist visit,” Julian says. He punches a random assortment of keys into Theo’s keyboard before jumping off the stage.
“Hey, do that again,” Alexander says, the lightbulb above his head suddenly illuminating.
“I have no idea what that was.” Julian scratches his head.
“I do,” Theo says, returning to his instrument and mimicking the series of sound Julian made, half by accident.
“I have something for that.” Dom spins on his stool and beats on the drums, adding
a new dimension to the tune.
I pick up the bass guitar I’ve been borrowing from school since my mother got rid of mine and make a musical contribution. The instruments together, unplanned, unscripted, create this melodic coherence that is something of a miracle—something created from nothing, nonexistent one moment and the cornerstone to our first full set and album the next minute.
Alexander penned most of the lyrics for that song, but it was the first time he hadn’t picked up an instrument when we’d put it all together. The best part about playing that song the first few times we played it for a crowd was seeing what Alexander was capable of without a guitar in his hands. Every eye followed each move he made. He put on a tiny show all in itself, dancing across the stage and putting himself into every word, every note. For a guy who didn’t even want to be a singer, he sure as hell sells the part.
The rehearsal was almost a complete waste of time, but turned into one of the better sessions we’ve ever had. Upon returning to Alexander’s house, he pushes the door open and sets his guitar down. I haven’t been home in weeks. My mother doesn’t call to check in, doesn’t contact Alexander’s mother to see if I’m okay or if she can contribute. It’s unfortunate, because Alexander and his mother struggle too. He and I share a room, and she sleeps at the other end of the hall. There’s always food on the table, and if we need money for school pictures or a field trip, it’s available, but she works very hard at two jobs to keep us taken care of—and I can’t help but feel guilty about it. She didn’t ask for the responsibility of a second teenage boy, but she never complained about it either.
We turn the corner into the kitchen and there’s a guitar case sitting on the small table we usually eat at. At first, I assume it’s an upgrade for Alexander, but then I realize, it’s not just any guitar. It’s my guitar.
I bring it to the living room where Alexander’s mother is pacing back and forth. I hold it up and ask in a small voice, “Did you do this?”
She shakes her head no.
“Your mother left it earlier.”
“My mother? Did she say anything else? Did she ask to see me?” My voice is frantic, wondering if maybe this means we’re on the upswing again. Maybe things are improving.