Maggie liked the swishy sound of the dead November weeds scratching against her jeans. She followed a thin, distinct path as she glanced over her shoulder at her parents’ house in the moonlight. It was bigger than it needed to be—a heated swimming pool and hot tub, extra bedrooms nobody ever slept in, vaulted ceilings—but since her parents were acclaimed country music stars, who would expect any less? The place was so big she practically had half of it to herself. She had always adored living in that house with her parents, but tonight everything was changing.
“Come over!” Grace had said over the phone a few minutes earlier. “I’ll be out back with a shovel.”
“A shovel?”
“That’s right! Get over here.”
Five minutes was all it took to walk to Grace’s house across two empty fields. Maggie’s parents didn’t care if she left. She was twenty years old and could go where she pleased, but they didn’t like Grace Bryant’s parents. Mr. and Mrs. Bryant didn’t like them either, so it always felt like sneaking around whenever Maggie went over there.
The Bryants were regular people, and celebrities like Todd and Sandy Roads did not hang around regular people, especially ones who took pictures of them skinny-dipping in their pool from across the fields and sold them to the tabloids. Grace insisted it was her sports-photographer uncle who took those pictures, but by that point it didn’t matter. If one place was sacred to Maggie’s parents, it was their home. They were embarrassed to have those pictures go public, but even more so by the rumors that they did such things with their teenage daughter around. Maggie had been out with Grace that day, so the rumors were unfounded, but the whole thing infuriated her parents enough to stop talking to the Bryants altogether. It didn’t mess up her friendship with Grace, at least. The scandal was only one example of why her parents were paranoid and why they tried to shelter her as much as possible. She understood their reasons, but she wasn’t sure it made her life any easier.
Her cowboy boots left shallow indents in the half-frozen mud as she reached the fence between the fields and Grace’s house, which was a lot smaller than hers. Grace’s bedroom light was on, as it usually was when Maggie went over at night, but she didn’t see Grace anywhere with a shovel.
Climbing over the wooden fence, she snagged her jeans on a bent nail and cursed out loud. She’d ripped her jeans once before on that damn nail. This time it had snagged more than her clothing. Was that blood she felt? She bent down to inspect the inside of her right thigh. Yep. Great. She hoped Grace could get her a Band-Aid.
She jumped over a small, empty pond in the Bryant’s back yard and finally reached the window. She knocked three times. Light. Hard. Light. Grace undid the lock, swung the window open, and popped off the screen.
“I scraped my leg on a nail,” Maggie said as she tugged off her muddy boots, left them beneath the window, and crawled inside. She landed heavily on the carpet. The chair she was used to landing on was gone. In fact, Grace’s room was completely cleared out except for some suitcases, a blanket and pillow on the mattress, and an old poster of Down Sugar Road on the wall.
“Why is that still up?” Maggie asked, pointing to the picture of her parents singing, their matching cowboy hats casting shadows across their faces. It was signed at the bottom.
“To piss off my parents,” Grace laughed. “Really, though, I’m going to give it to you before you leave tonight. It’s too valuable to leave here, but my parents refused to pack it and it won’t fit in my luggage. Besides, Brown doesn’t seem like the best school to tack up country music posters. I have to be all sophisticated now.”
Maggie snorted, unfazed by the jab. Oh, the stereotypes of country music. She would never be rid of them. She looked down at her leg as the stinging worsened.
“So, where’s the shovel?” she asked. “Why aren’t you outside?”
Grace threw up her hands. “I can’t find it! I left it out in the garage so it wouldn’t get packed, but Dad must have found it at the last minute.” She glanced down at Maggie’s leg and snapped her fingers. “I’ll go get you a Band-Aid. One sec.”
Maggie took off her coat as she waited. The room didn’t feel right anymore. It was missing all of Grace’s snapshots of her family, of her and Maggie, of her and her boyfriend, Trent, who was now at Brown University waiting for Grace to arrive. He would probably ask Grace to marry him within the next year or two. She was smart and energetic, with a willowy frame and stick-straight, reddish-brown hair streaked with purple or pink or whatever color she had dyed it for the week. She had freckles and wore cutoff jeans in the summer and flannel shirts in the winter. She managed to mix urban and country in a way Maggie had never mastered. Maggie was all country and had stopped trying to be anything else a long time ago.
When Grace returned, she opened her arms as if to encircle her entire room. “So, it’s true—we’re really moving.”
Studying Grace’s faded candy-cane print pajama pants, the bottoms stuffed into a pair of old cowboy boots, Maggie knew she would miss everything about her friend. She would miss the football games Grace had dragged her to so she could experience some “real school life.” She would miss their sleepovers and coffee runs. Maggie was home-schooled and had no clue what it was like to be one of those regular people her parents shunned. Grace was the closest she had to that, and now it was slipping away.
“Well, you’re not all moving together,” Maggie corrected as she took the Band-Aid and tube of antibiotic cream from Grace. She pulled off her jeans, hoping Grace’s brother or parents didn’t decide to crack open the door to say goodnight.
“True,” Grace said as she turned and knelt on the floor to unzip one of her bags, “but of course Mom and Dad had to plan their exodus at the same time as me moving out. Let’s make it as stressful as possible, why don’t we? I swear, it’s been a circus around here, and they’re dragging David to a new school in the middle of his junior year. How awful is that? I’m so glad I stayed at the same high school all four years.”
Grace’s parents were a lot older than Maggie’s. Her dad had just retired, so they were moving out to California to “soak up the sun” while Grace transferred from the local community college to Brown University in Rhode Island, nearly two thousand miles from Denver.
Maggie wiped blood from her scrape then spread on some cream and covered it with the Band-Aid. The last thing she wanted was a nasty infection at the CMA awards show in Nashville in two days. She would be uncomfortable enough as it was, and she couldn’t appear to be anything less than the perfect supportive daughter when the cameras swung her way. Nobody was making her play that role, but it was what she had always done and what everyone expected of her. Appearances in the music business were everything. They were what fueled positive attention, kept sales strong, and assured fans that stardom was as beautiful and wonderful as they imagined. She had to do her part to keep all that going, so she had already been to the salon with her mom in preparation for CMA, the two of them as different as they could be as they sat side-by-side in front of the mirrors. Maggie was tall and broad-shouldered, like her dad. She even had his ice-blue eyes and curly black hair, except his was cropped short and hers fell past her shoulders, usually straightened to death with an iron. Sandy, on the other hand, had an Emmylou Harris kind of beauty, with long, caramel-colored hair she kept in loose ringlets. She had a sleek sort of sophistication with her slender nose and peaches-and-cream skin that smoothed over any hint of age.
“Here, wear these,” Grace said, tossing her a pair of old jeans Maggie knew Grace loved dearly. “We need to get outside and dig.”
“For what?” Maggie asked, growing more and more curious as she put on the jeans. Her eyes stung as she realized this was probably the last time she and Grace would share clothes. “And how are we going to dig without a shovel?”
Grace grabbed a coat and shrugged it on as she opened the window again. “We’ll look in the moving truck. I haven’t checked there yet. Come on.”
Putting her coat back on, Maggie followed Grace out the window, unsure as to why they weren’t using the front door instead. She pulled on her boots and they both tromped around the house to an orange moving truck parked in the driveway. It didn’t take long to find the shovel. It was the first thing they saw when they opened the back.
“All right, down to business,” Grace said, straightening her shoulders as they marched back around the house to the fence, right near the spot where Maggie had ripped her jeans.
“Okay, you have to tell me what’s going on,” Maggie ordered as Grace paced back and forth, muttering to herself about “the right spot.” She looked up, a frown on her face.
“I buried something five years ago, right before we met. It’s like a time capsule.”
“The plot thickens,” Maggie laughed. “So, where is it?”
Grace stopped and pointed to a rock near one of the fence posts. “Right there, about two feet down, maybe less. I can’t remember.”
Maggie bent to lift the rock. It was smooth and cold, and she tossed it aside as Grace placed the tip of her long-handled shovel against the flattened ground. She dug for a few minutes then Maggie took a turn. The ground wasn’t frozen solid, but it wasn’t particularly soft either. “So, are you nervous at all?” she asked as Grace watched her. “I mean, about school and moving away.”
Grace put her hands on her hips. “Yeah, a little, but I just turned twenty. Twenty. That’s, like, official mooching-off-your-parents age. I have to grow up and get out of here. Be on my own, finally.”
There was an unspoken thought hanging in the air, one Maggie had never paid as much attention to as she did at that moment. You just turned twenty in September, Maggie. Time to move on and do what you’ve always dreamed of doing. You’re an adult now. Act like it.
She had to admit, it was easier to hang on to the only shreds of childhood she had left. Her closet was still filled with plastic totes holding all the old stuffed animals she used to take on tours with her parents. She’d been wearing the same T-shirts for five years. But it was the things she couldn’t touch that meant the most—things like waking up in the morning to her dad cooking waffles and hot chocolate, her mom giving her last-minute hugs backstage before a show, whispering how much she loved her as she placed a kiss on each cheek, just as she had done since as far back as Maggie could remember.
Now Grace was leaving. She was breaking off from her parents to be on her own, but she also knew a lot more than Maggie did. She’d had at least four jobs and graduated from a real high school. What did Maggie know? How to navigate dressing rooms and film sets? How to tell men trying to use her in order to get to her parents to shove off?
Reaching a spot of ground that seemed harder than the rest, she dug the heel of her boot against the shoulder of the shovel, levering it until the dirt came loose. It was dark and clumpy, almost clay-like as she tossed it into the dirt pile. They had dug maybe a foot and a half down. “I need to move on too,” she said between grunts, her breath leaving white clouds in the air, “but I don’t know how. I don’t know anything about living on my own.”
Grace laughed and nudged Maggie’s ankle. “Whatever! You’ve been everywhere, seen everything.”
“Not really,” she answered. She had been all over the world and to nearly every state in the US, but most of her time was spent on airplanes, buses, hotels, and concert venues. “I’ve never really traveled,” she explained. “I’ve tagged along in my parents’ Down Sugar Road bubble, that’s it. I’ve seen a thousand landmarks and tourist attractions, but I don’t know the world—I know the country music business.”
Grace held out her hand for the shovel and Maggie happily gave it to her. This was more work than she had expected. Her brow was sweaty and she was breathing hard. Her hands hurt from the cold and from holding the shovel so tightly. Leave it to Grace to do something so crazy the night before she was moving.
“I’ll bet you know more than you think you do, and I’ll bet you have more career experience than you realize,” Grace said, widening the hole. “Think of all that time you’ve spent backstage, all the stuff you know about photo shoots and making music videos and how a concert is supposed to run. People get paid for stuff like that.”
Maggie shrugged. “Yeah, that’s true, but what I do for them is because I want to help, not because it’s expected.”
Grace nodded. “You have skills, whether you think so or not.”
“I’m still making royalties off a song I wrote for my parents,” Maggie admitted. “It’s not enough to live on, but it’s awesome anyway. I wrote the lyrics and music for ‘Digging Home,’ did you know that?” She laughed out loud. “Appropriate song for tonight, eh?”
“You wrote that?” Grace’s eyebrows rose. “That song is fantastic. And you’re always writing music and lyrics, so add that to your resume.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Oh, come on, Maggie. You’re talented!” Grace popped another piece of earth from the hole and tossed it aside. “When I’m buried knee-deep in astronomy, you’ll be calling me about some crazy-awesome job you just landed writing lyrics for a big label . . . or however it works.”
Stopping for a moment, she turned and put a finger to the tip of Maggie’s nose, pressing until Maggie batted it away with an annoyed laugh.
“Promise me!” Grace urged. “You will. Your parents are great, but you can’t spend the rest of your life mooching off them and living their dream. You have to chase your own.”
Maggie tried to swallow a growing bitterness in her mouth, but it wouldn’t go away. “They’ve been bugging me for a year now to go to college.”
Grace pushed a hot pink lock of hair out of her face and made an expression to imitate a highbrow professor. “Well? What’s wrong with higher education?”
Maggie held her breath. How could she possibly explain why college—why any sort of schooling—scared the hell out of her?
“They want me to take writing classes. I don’t want to write. I want to sing. It’s this need inside me. I can’t help it.”
Grace’s crumbling expression said it all. Everyone knew Maggie couldn’t sing worth beans. She could belt out lyrics, sure, but they sounded terrible. No matter what she tried, no matter who helped her, she couldn’t sing in tune. Cole, her parents’ drummer, was the only person on the planet who truly believed she would be able to sing well one day. She loved him for that, even if he wasn’t her boyfriend anymore.
“You . . . you shouldn’t sing, Maggie,” Grace said in the most serious voice she had used all night. “Not like your parents. You know that.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Groaning, Grace went back to the shovel and started digging harder. “We’ve had this conversation one too many times, my tone-deaf friend.”
“Oh, shut up. And I’m not tone-deaf, I’m amusic.”
“Cole has no idea what he’s talking about. Nobody even knows what that means.”
Maggie sighed. “He’s researched it! He knows.”
“Googling the term does not make one an expert. You need to find a voice teacher.”
“I’ve tried that. They all gave up on me, and now my parents won’t let me get another one.” Well, that part about her parents wasn’t entirely true.
“And how could they possibly stop you?”
That’s where things got complicated. Maggie stared at Grace’s determined face as she dug deeper and deeper, her breaths dissipating around her. Maggie knew she wasn’t normal like Grace, even a random, eccentric sort of normal. She lived a life most people didn’t understand. Even Grace didn’t understand what it was like to live with parents most people recognized no matter where they went in the world. It sounded glamorous, and in a lot of ways it was, but it came at a cost. The more famous her parents became, the more they had to lose and the more fragile their career grew, like an eggshell. The smallest thing could chip that shell and make it crack. She didn’t necessarily want the same amount of fame as her parents, but she did want to sing.
“They can’t stop me,” she said as her throat threatened to close up. “They want me to write because that’s a safer talent, but if I ever sing in public with my voice as bad as it is, I think it will hurt them. Articles might be written about it. Rumors might start flying about their voices. They’re ashamed of me when it comes to singing, and they have every right to be. So I’ve been afraid because I haven’t wanted to make it worse than it already is.”
Grace stopped digging and leaned the shovel against the fence so she could surround Maggie in a big hug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, burying her face in Maggie’s coat. “I’m sorry I’m leaving you when you need me.”
Maggie hugged her in return. “You’re sorry I won’t be around to help you dye your hair anymore.”
Grace’s arms loosened. “You got me! I’ve been using you this whole friendship.”
“I knew it.”
They both erupted into a fit of laughter only late-night exhaustion could bring on, and Maggie took another turn at digging, finally hitting something harder than dirt.
Grace squealed. “Yes! I knew it was there.” She took her turn at the shovel and forced the wooden box out of the hole before setting it on the grass. It was the size of a large shoebox, with crude pictures of stars and galaxies carved into the lid and the sides. “There’s a lot of stuff in here,” Grace explained. “Most of it’s stupid, but there’s one thing I wanted to get out of here before I moved and left this house forever. It’s something for you.”
Maggie shifted her weight as she watched Grace pull off the lid. “You don’t have to give me anything,” she said.
“Yes, I do. Remember when we first met and all I talked about was flying to the moon?”
Maggie nodded. “How could I forget?” All Grace could do back then was talk about reaching the stars and other planets and living on a space station. Now she was more interested in the science of the universe rather than actual space flight, but still, it was her dream, just like Maggie’s dream was the stage and singing. Unlike Maggie, though, Grace was making hers a reality.
“Well,” Grace explained, digging around folded papers and old photographs, “my grandpa gave me this necklace when I was little, and I want you to have it. I put it in this box because I was silly and afraid I would lose it or break it. I thought it would be safe in here. It was the memory of it that mattered the most to me.” Her fingers closed around a delicate silver chain which she pulled from the rest of the clutter. It was tarnished from years of sitting in the box, but a few shiny spots sparkled in the moonlight. At the end of the chain was a star-shaped pendant inlaid with a mosaic of silver and turquoise mother of pearl. Grace held it out to Maggie. “I have some polish inside,” she said as Maggie took the gift. “We can get it sparkling again.”
“Thank you,” Maggie answered. “But why? Why me?”
Grace smiled and shrugged. “I realized the other night how much you remind me of myself from a few years ago. You want certain things, and I feel like you’ve lost your focus. When my grandpa gave that to me, he told me to keep my eyes on the stars and never lose sight of what matters most. That might be love from other people, but it’s our dreams too. We’re nothing without them. Every time I felt myself slipping, I’d think about that necklace. It’s a good luck charm. It’s part of what got me where I am.”
Closing her hand around the cold necklace, Maggie rushed forward and hugged Grace. “Thank you,” she whispered. “So, if I want to sing more than anything in the world, you think that’s what I should go after, right?”
Grace chuckled, her body shivering from the cold. “If it’s what you really want, yes. Tone-deaf or not.”
Later that night, after spending more time in Grace’s empty bedroom, Maggie gathered up the signed poster of her parents and the newly polished necklace, gave Grace a long hug goodbye, and headed back home. She struggled to keep her tears in, but a few escaped and slid down her cheeks as her boots crunched through frozen mud and dead weeds. Halfway across the second field, she stopped and looked up at the stars dotting the sky. In a few hours, they would disappear as the sunrise broke across the horizon.
Taking a deep breath of frigid air, she let herself wallow for one more moment. Her time with Grace was over. Everyone except her parents came and went in her life, like comets shooting across the sky, brief and brilliant and then gone. Grace had been her friend for five years. It was the longest friendship Maggie had ever had, but she knew Grace would quickly fade away, just like brief friends in the past who had moved on and disappeared. Grace would make new friends and forget about Maggie because Maggie lived in a sphere nobody could touch for very long unless they were inside it.
“I still have Cole,” she whispered to herself as she wiped away her tears and continued walking. She looked down at the necklace in her hand, knowing she was far from alone. “I still have the band and my parents, and I still have Cole.”