“Wait, what? No.” He jogged backward until he was in front of me again. When I didn’t stop moving, he kept walking backward into the road. “This bar where we’re playing may not be on Broadway,” he said, “but it’s close, in the District. I want to take the band to the next level. We’re getting there, but slower than I want to go. We’re not getting the attention we deserve. There are too many bands around town for anybody to give us our big chance. You know what we need?” He tripped backward over a curb around a tree.
“What?” I asked at the same time I instinctively caught his elbow to keep him from falling. Too late I realized he weighed a lot more than I did.
Using his guitar as leverage, he managed to balance himself again and keep me from falling in turn. We both held our instruments out to one side and gripped each other’s free elbows. A shock ran through me—the pain of his strong fingers wrapping around my arm, and the tingle of awareness that went with it.
If he felt the tingle, too, he was oblivious to it. He released my elbow, then patted my arm as if to make sure he hadn’t hurt me, that’s all. “We need a fiddle player! I knew it as soon as I heard you play.”
It had seemed to me yesterday that my trials with these bands were a test to prove I wasn’t worthy—as if I didn’t know this already. Now, here was the final task. I was being given the chance to do the one thing I wanted most in the world: play. The chance was presented to me by a guy so gorgeous, my skin turned to fire when he touched me. And joining a band was the thing I was most forbidden to do, the thing that would ruin my future.
Sam was still talking. “I thought so when you were dressed like 1956. But now that I’ve seen you for real . . .”
I walked past him, over the curb and around the tree to the parking lot on the other side, hoping he wouldn’t see how my face had fallen. He hadn’t seen me for real. He never would. That me was gone. Who was the real me anymore, anyway? Had I ever existed?
All of which was unbearably self-centered. I couldn’t seem to stop focusing on myself these days, and frankly I made myself sick. “What are you saying I look like?” I shot back at him over my shoulder. It came out more bitter than I intended or he deserved.
“Like you belong with us. Some of the bars on Broadway are really friendly to new bands. At least, it seems that way at first. They have a reputation for hosting the hottest new acts in Nashville, and record company execs wander in and discover bands that way. These bars will let anybody upload an audition video. But I did that last month. They said our sound was there but we needed something extra to bring people in. You are that extra.”
I turned to face him, leaning against my car and letting the sun-heated metal warm my back through my shirt. The car was a small secondhand Honda that I should have been grateful my parents had bought me. It didn’t compare with the red Porsche Julie had earned, which was sitting in the garage at my parents’ house, hardly ever driven, waiting for her to come home.
Out with it. It was a simple admission, but every word felt like a knife in my mouth as I said, “I can’t join a band right now.”
Stopping a few paces across the asphalt from me, he watched me for a moment and narrowed his eyes, as if he could read in my expression how loaded that statement was. How badly I wanted to join his band and play funky Michael Jackson covers on my fiddle, and how important it was to my future that I walk away.
Nodding, he said carefully, “Sure, you don’t want to commit when you haven’t played with us yet. Come try us out tonight, just this once.”
I couldn’t. But despite myself, I pictured it for a moment: a night out with this adorable guy, who had reined in his enthusiasm to avoid scaring me off, but whose intense, dark eyes still gave away how desperate he was for this. I winced as I repeated, “I can’t.”
“You can use our amp,” he said. “Do you have an electric pickup? I can scrounge you up one if you don’t.”
“I have one.” The equipment to amplify my fiddle had been coiled in my case for the past year, waiting for the son of a Johnny Cash impersonator to sweep me off my feet.
“Then what’s the prob? Please, Bailey.” He moved forward and put his hand on mine—this time on the hand holding my fiddle case. “I really want to play with you again.”
If he heard his own double entendre, implying that he might play with me in more ways than one, he didn’t acknowledge it. His hand rested lightly on mine, putting no pressure on me, holding back the pressure to come.
I felt myself relax, reluctantly, under his touch. I knew this gig was going to get me in trouble, and I was fully aware of the exact moment I started rationalizing that maybe it wouldn’t. My parents didn’t want me to play in public, yet my granddad had gotten me the mall job. He would let me play with Sam, too, just for fun, just this once.
Now that I’d decided to take this step, suddenly I realized I might not be able to after all. I let out a frustrated sigh. “What time is the gig? I have to make a phone call around ten.”
I figured he would want to know more about the phone call. He would declare that he wasn’t going to plan his gig around a phone call, and if that’s the way I wanted it, he could find another Goth fiddler.
Briefly I considered giving in if he insisted. It was ridiculous for me to demand to make a phone call at a certain time in the middle of a gig. But no. The consequences were too steep. I was calling Julie to let her know I still cared about her, whether she cared about me or not.
I’d worried for nothing. Sam said, “The gig starts at nine and lasts until eleven. Ten would be a good time to take a break. I lose track of time, though, so you’ll have to poke me in the ribs with your bow. What’s your phone number? I’ll text you the address of the bar.” He looped his guitar strap over his head and settled the guitar behind him on his back. Both hands free, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and watched me expectantly.
I had one last chance to back away, be a good girl like my parents told me, and keep my future safe by sacrificing my present. Unfortunately, in my present, Sam stood eight inches taller than me, smiling down at me. One dark curl played back and forth on his forehead in the hot breeze.
I gave him my number.
“Texting you.” He pocketed his phone. A second later my phone sounded in my purse, signaling my pact with the devil.
“And one last thing,” he said. “Try to look twenty-one.”
I remembered him telling me I looked eighteen. Then I realized what he really meant. “Oh, will we get in trouble for playing in a bar underage? I never tried.” That was exactly the kind of trouble that would make my parents’ heads explode.
He shrugged. “Different places have different rules, depending on whether they serve food and what time it is. I haven’t asked this place. If it doesn’t come up, we’re not breaking a rule, right? I don’t want to give anybody an excuse to tell me no.”
This was one more warning that playing with this boy was bad news. Once more I chose to ignore it. I asked him, “Is that what the stubble is for? You’re trying to look older?”
He grinned and ran his hand across his jaw. “The stubble is for style. See you there before nine?”
“Nine,” I affirmed, sliding along the side of my car to the driver’s door.
“Before nine,” he repeated. “Not right at nine. When everybody isn’t there on time, I tend to have a stroke.”
I thought of a song as he was walking away. As soon as the idea hit me, I wished he would walk away faster so I could get it down in my notebook. I didn’t want him to see me scribbling. Months earlier, Toby had taken my notebook out of my purse and read my lyrics in a sneering voice. I’d always kept my songs to myself, fearing that he’d ridicule the thing I loved most, and true to form he’d confirmed my worst fears. Thank God he couldn’t read music. If he’d tried to sing to me, I would have hated my own work forever.
In my rearview mirror I watched Sam walk one row over and put his guitar case behind the seat of a Chevy truck. The truck was older than he was, with a scratched and dented bed, but I knew from experience on my parents’ farm that pickup trucks were hard to kill. I could wait to write in my notebook until he drove off, but he was probably already wondering why I sat motionless in the driver’s seat. I started the ignition, drove about a mile toward my granddad’s house, and pulled off at a gas station to jot a few lines of poetry and music before I forgot them.
When a song stuck in my head like that, I felt like I was holding my breath until I got it down on paper. Finishing, relieved, I looked up and noticed everything I hadn’t noticed initially about the gas station: the people going in and out of the building, the riotous colors of the beer advertisements in the windows, the sweeping noise the traffic made on the nearby street. My whole trip here hadn’t registered with me, either. I’d driven the car and navigated the road, but my brain had waited until now to start processing again. Even driving away from Sam hadn’t registered.
I thought of him bending over to put his guitar behind the seat of his truck, big biceps moving underneath the sleeves of his T-shirt. His father had been nowhere in sight, which must have meant they’d driven to the mall separately. Maybe Sam didn’t even live with his dad anymore. He had more and better friends than I did, potential roommates, and the second he’d graduated from high school, he’d moved out.
But as I pulled back onto the street and puzzled through Sam, I decided he more likely was stuck with his dad like I was stuck with my family. He relied on his dad for the job like I relied on my granddad. I could tell from his enthusiasm that nothing had ever been more delicious to him than the taste of his own gig tonight. It took a lot for a big guy like him to give the impression of a wide-eyed puppy.
I felt like that myself—about the gig, and about him. I couldn’t wait for before nine.
I pulled up to my granddad’s house and walked through the front room, which he’d converted to a workshop and showroom. Most of the time even his living space in the back smelled like sawdust and varnish. At the moment it smelled like steam and spaghetti. He was a pretty good cook for only having learned ten years ago when my grandmom died, and I was hungry. My stomach growled, and my heart leaped. I missed sitting down at the dinner table with my whole family, but I still looked forward to eating with my granddad.
“Hi,” I called, popping into the kitchen.
“Hey,” he said, turning around from the pots on the stove with a spatula in his hand, wearing my grandmother’s apron over the denim shirt and jeans he worked in. When we were younger, Julie and I had made fun of him behind his back for cooking us dinner in the frilly apron. My mom had told us sternly that he missed her mother, and not everything in life was fodder for cruel little girls.
His eyes lingered for only a second on my asymmetrical hair—it seemed that in a year, he’d never quite gotten used to it—before he asked, “How was work?”
“This was probably the best day all week.” At least, the day sure had looked up after work was over. “I got invited to play another gig tonight.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
Stunned, I stared at him with his sauce-covered spatula in the air. Technically, I was forbidden by my parents to play any gig at all. But my granddad had gone out and gotten me the first one, so I’d thought he would agree to the second one, too, if I presented it the right way. I’d rehearsed my speech all the way from the gas station, and he’d just cut me off.
This couldn’t be happening. Not when Sam was involved. I took a deep breath, kept my cool, and started again. “This gig is in the District—”
“Even worse,” my granddad interrupted. “In a bar? You’re underage. And you’re more likely to attract attention playing in the District. That’s exactly what your parents said to keep you away from. I didn’t see the harm in the mall job, no matter what your parents thought, but even I can see you shouldn’t be playing in the District, like you’re trying to get your own recording contract. Julie’s record company asked us not to talk about you because they don’t want the public to hear she used to play with you. What if the record company found out?”
I stared at him a moment more, this rangy, white-haired man in a woman’s apron, controlling my life. He was the one who’d gotten me into this mess, in a roundabout way. He’d taught my mother to play guitar. He’d taken her and her brothers to blue-grass festivals. That’s where she’d gotten the idea that a drive for musical fame was fun for the whole family. My granddad still had one toe in the music industry. He might not have caught the bug that badly himself—he’d never seemed to crave the spotlight—but he was ultimately responsible for all our obsessions with it. And he was the one taking this gig away from me. If he wasn’t my ally against my parents anymore, I didn’t have a friend left.
He watched me uneasily for a moment, then added, “I’m just doing what your grandmother would have done.”
At his mention of my grandmother, I felt a heavy shroud of failure descend across my shoulders. I wouldn’t argue with him when he invoked my grandmother. He loved her too much, living his life as if she were still around. She’d been dead since I was eight, but I remembered her as a lady who liked pretty things and proper girls and never clapped loudly enough when Julie and I performed for her, as if music wasn’t what she was after.
“Dinner’s ready,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down at the table, and you can tell me about work.”