Though Ace was talking to Charlotte, I saw a flash of his eyes in the rearview mirror, and I knew he was watching us. Then he rolled down his window, letting in the warm summer breeze and the smell of cut grass.
During the drive, I was surprised that Charlotte didn’t engineer some excuse to trade seats with me so she could sit with Sam—Oh, I must sit near the back so I can put one hand on my tom to keep it from falling—but she seemed content to keep her place in the front. She was absorbed in conversation with Ace about a TV show they both watched. Sam interjected a joke now and then, but I was utterly lost. I’d spent most of my nights practicing fiddle.
Along the drive from Nashville to Chattanooga, exits and billboards petered out until nothing was left but trees streaming by our windows. The interstate was a wide expanse of asphalt cut through the forest, tilting to one side and climbing mountains. When I blinked, I opened my eyes again and felt dizzy, disoriented because of the strange angle of the ground, and the SUV climbing the road like nothing was wrong.
As I looked around at the scenery that seemed normal and yet not, I glanced at my reflection in the window. The wind blew my short black curls around my head, the longer pieces in front teasing the tip of my chin. The sun lit my face. But what surprised me was that I was scowling at the landscape. That’s not how I felt. With effort, I lifted the corners of my mouth into a smile for my own reflection. Then I glanced at Sam so close beside me.
When he felt me looking at him, he smiled. He squeezed my shoulders, more gently this time, then let me go, because two hours would be a long drive with his heavy arm around me. But he rested his hand on my bare thigh.
I would remember this bright afternoon forever.
Arriving at the most luxurious house I’d ever seen, we pulled up to the back lawn, at the end of a pristine pool, and the boys got out to unpack Charlotte’s kit. I couldn’t help feeling curious about the gig. I imagined the record company execs who’d thrown parties for Julie had even more astonishing homes, but I hadn’t been invited.
Between trips back and forth from the pool to the van, while Sam wasn’t around, of course, Charlotte kindly explained that one of Sam’s exes had arranged for us to play this gig, her aunt’s surprise fiftieth birthday party. She went on to inform me that the band’s Lao wedding circuit was also a result of an ex with an in. She stated these facts as joylessly as she could manage, but I knew her ulterior motive. If she’d decided to back off me after I claimed Velma and let her be Daphne, she’d forgotten all about that when Sam put his arm around me.
It was hard to be angry with her after the party guests started showing up, bused in by a hired service so the birthday lady wouldn’t see their cars and suspect what was up. When she came in the front door and two hundred of her closest friends leaped up from behind her living room furniture, she screamed. Then she cackled with joy and dashed upstairs to change into her bathing suit. I hoped I could enjoy life that much when I was that old. Or . . . ever.
I’d never pictured myself playing a gig so crazy, much less playing it in a bikini top and a denim skirt. The party was a riot, full of great food and fun strangers, even if most of them were middle-aged and probably shouldn’t have been wearing bathing suits that small. Between sets, the band went in the pool, too. Mostly Sam and Ace and Charlotte and I talked together about music and Nashville and the CMA Festival starting Thursday—I carefully avoided any mention of Julie—but Sam and I kept finding excuses to flirt and rib each other. Several times when I teased him, he found it necessary to grab me, his hands strong around my wrists in the cool water.
The only negative of the night came when Charlotte quipped that I shouldn’t get my hair wet because the ink might run. Ace splashed her, and Sam dismissed the comment by putting his arm around me and changing the subject. However, at midnight when the party finally closed down and we packed the SUV with Charlotte’s drum kit, I was still thinking about my hair and other people’s perception of it, dyed an unnatural black.
After I’d deposited the last cymbal in the back, Sam opened the front passenger door for me. I was afraid he intended to take the back with Charlotte, just to keep her happy and spread the love around, while I sat up front with Ace. I asked Sam carefully, “Oh, are you driving back?”
“I always drive back at night.”
As I climbed into the passenger seat, I held my breath to keep from sighing with relief so loudly that everyone could hear. I had another two hours in proximity to Sam—though I would probably sleep through most of it. Three late nights were catching up with me.
“I’ll never know whether I inherited the alcoholic gene from my dad,” Sam was saying as he slid behind the steering wheel and slammed his door, “but I definitely inherited the barfly gene. I can’t sleep at night, and I can’t get up in the morning.”
I could see that. Sam was creative and dedicated, but his wasn’t the plodding bright-and-early work ethic of the morning person, like mine. It was the crazy creative burst of the night owl, long dark hours of despair before dawn.
“Here.” He hadn’t pulled his T-shirt back on after our last dip in the pool and our last set of songs. Now he wadded it up, crammed it into the console between our seats, and gently pressed my shoulders until I laid my head down. I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and tried to relax. Sam was at the wheel, and I trusted him. As he started the SUV and cruised past the mansion’s marble columns, I wondered if Julie would buy a house like this in the next few years, and whether she would throw parties like a record company exec, or if she would never get a chance because she would always be gone.
I struggled back from sleep, then started upright, sure something terrible had happened to wake me. The SUV droned along the interstate. The wind whooshed through the open window, and the forest spun by at the edges of the headlight beams.
Sam looked over at me and smiled, shadows long across his face and bare chest. “Sorry. I woke you up on purpose. I didn’t mean to startle you. Lie down.”
I peeked over the seat. Ace leaned against the side of the SUV. On the opposite side, Charlotte had her back to the door with her knees bent and her bare feet up on the seat, nearly touching Ace’s thigh. Ace was most definitely touching Charlotte, with one big hand on her ankle. I studied them for a moment, weighing whether their positions were random or “accidentally on purpose” touching, and on whose part. In any case, they were definitely asleep and unconcerned what they looked like. Both snored softly with their mouths open.
I obeyed Sam by settling back down on his T-shirt between us. “Are you falling asleep?” I asked softly enough that I wouldn’t disturb Ace and Charlotte over the white noise of the wind.
“No.”
“Why’d you wake me up, then?” I grumbled.
“I don’t like to be alone.”
I stared out the window, so low in the seat that I could see only the tops of the trees racing by. I murmured, “I like it, mostly.”
“What do you do when you’re alone?” he asked.
“Practice fiddle.” I wrote music, too, but that was none of his business. “What do you do?”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I start thinking, and I drive myself crazy.” He moved one hand into my hair and twisted it gently. “You’ve said you can’t be in this band because you’ll get in trouble.”
“I will.”
“But you don’t want to be in it anyway. You don’t want to major in music in college. You want to do anything but. Which doesn’t make any sense to me when you’re practicing fiddle so much.” He worked his fingers farther into my hair, down to the nape of my neck. “What happened to you when Julie got discovered?”
“Nothing happened to me. I did it to myself.”
“Tell me.” His fingers stroked the skin beneath my hair that no one ever touched.
“We’d been at a bluegrass festival all weekend,” I said. “Before our last performance, my mom told us there was a scout in the audience, so we’d better do our best. Afterward, she and my dad had a meeting with him. Julie and I waited in the RV and watched one of those singing contests on TV, because we liked to critique the job the singers did and guess whether we could do better under that kind of pressure. We didn’t seriously think anything would come of our parents’ meeting. They’d had meetings before that didn’t pan out.”
I wondered if he could feel my muscles knotting up underneath his fingertips.
“My parents came in somber, like they had before. I figured we’d lost out again. But they made us all sit down together around the little dinner table. They said the record company was taking Julie and not me. Julie would be traveling for the next year. I would stay home, and my parents wanted me to stop pursuing my own deal. They said it would be better if I quit music altogether. They couldn’t back me anymore, anyway, because they couldn’t help two daughters in two different places. It would be no fun for me to live my life in competition with someone I loved.”
“And you bought that?” Sam asked skeptically.
“I think you’d agree this situation doesn’t sound like fun.”
“Only when you’re on the losing end.”
“Which I am.”
Sam’s hand stopped on my neck. “I don’t understand,” he said so loudly that I thought he would wake Ace and Charlotte. At least he realized this. He lowered his voice before he asked, “I don’t mean to insult you, but what kind of people are your parents?”
“I don’t blame them,” I said quickly. “They’re normal.” My mom came off as mean sometimes to people who didn’t know her well. In truth, she was only ambitious, and she never let anyone get in the way of her drive—not even Julie and me, when her drive was on our behalf. My dad was the opposite. He hung back and let her make the rules, then supported what she said. But if it weren’t for him, my mother would have gone off the deep end a long time ago. He consoled me after she screamed at me, cleaning up the mess she’d made. He kept her stable so the friction generated by her own body didn’t tear her into pieces. In public I could always find him a pace behind her. At home or in the RV he would rub the knot in her neck—
I sat up faster than I had when Sam woke me.
“What is it?” he asked sharply.
I slouched against the door and curled my legs on the seat, rubbing my own neck with one hand. “You know what? I’m not normal, and you’re a nice person, and I don’t want to tell you this story.”
His mouth quirked sideways in disagreement. “Girls tend to think I’m a nice person because I’m polite and I may make you feel good, but you have no idea what I’m thinking.” His tone was so dark that sparks raced across my skin.
I hesitated. When we’d first played together at the mall, I’d thought we had a lot in common. I was thrown for a loop when I told him about Toby’s wreck and he acted holier-than-thou. I didn’t want to feel rejected like that again.
But I’d never shared with anyone what happened with my family that night. It had eaten away at me in the form of a song I was trying desperately to write, like Sam had said, playing on an endless loop in my head. And if anyone would understand my jealousy, it would be him.
I sighed. “My parents didn’t intend to hurt me. I’m sure they just wanted to get all the news out of the way at once. I’d always been responsible before—believe it or not—and they thought I could handle anything they threw at me. It wasn’t their fault they were wrong.”
“Mm,” Sam said as though he doubted my explanation but wasn’t quite willing to say it out loud.
“After they told me, I sat there a minute, and then I left the table and climbed to the upper deck of the RV, where Julie and I slept. They let me go. I guess they figured I wanted to be alone to sulk, and I would get over it soon enough. I found my scissors, and I pulled my hair back into a high ponytail and started to chop through it—”
Sam gaped at me. Quickly he put his eyes back on the interstate, but he kept his mouth open, horrified at me.
“—and the smaller bits of hair were falling down around me, glinting golden in the lamplight, and I knew I should not be doing this, that I was angry, that I would regret it. Maybe I didn’t quite realize it would be the worst thing I ever did in my life. Regardless, I was halfway through it and I couldn’t stop then. I kept hacking until I was holding my ponytail.” I made a fist. I could still feel the long, heavy skein of hair in my hand. “Of course, the way I’d cut it off, it had fallen longer around my face, and I was almost bald in the back. That’s how I climbed down the ladder.”
Sam watched the road. I watched his chest. He was holding his breath.
“And I threw it—” Flexing my wrist, I tossed my hair onto the table. I wasn’t aiming really, but I meant for it to land right smack between my parents. Instead, it skidded across the slick tabletop and into Julie’s lap.
I winced. “I meant to say something to go along with it. ‘You want me to disguise myself, too, so nobody will recognize me and embarrass your precious Julie, is this what you wanted?’ But I didn’t get any words out, because Julie was crying.” Screaming, really, on what should have been the happiest day of her life, and the night she’d always waited for.
“And then I slammed out of the RV, and my parents have hated me ever since.”
The roar of the truck filled the silence between us. Sam was breathing again, blinking against the interstate lights, thanking God he didn’t have a brother.