1989
David didn’t look up when I crashed onto his floor through the window.
“Hey, T,” he said. “Just felt like breaking and entering?”
“Doesn’t count if you leave your window unlocked.” Gesturing over my shoulder, I took him in. He sat in bed, reading Shakespeare, shirtless in his Doctor Who pajama pants. Outside, waves crashed.
“We’ll call it a casual felony.” He smirked and set the book down. “What’s up?”
He studied me. I was still in my prom dress (a rose-patterned, scarlet contraption that I’d forced him to drive me to pick up).
All around his room, the walls were plastered with photos. I was in more than half of them, including the framed one by his bed of us biking along the shore. Me ahead, him pedaling to keep up. I still didn’t know who took it.
“Tori?”
My eyes met his, and I sank onto the bed beside him. “You remember Patrick?”
“Mr. Fate?” He laughed. “From two hours ago?”
“Exactly.” His book sat between us, and I played with the pages. I could do this with or without him. With him was always better for some reason. One day he’d stay and I’d go, but he could come. For now. I’d played it over ever since Patrick made his offer. It would work.
“What about him?” David asked.
“He’s staying at the inn.”
“Okay . . .”
“David, it is fate. It has to be. He asked me to go to Nashville with him. Music City. To become stars.” The words rushed out. We’d been standing in the pale glow of the lobby’s lamp. He’d talked so grand for a boy in beat-up sneakers and a devil-may-care grin. Something pulled me to him that was greater than myself. The universe. The music. Journey. A journey.
David’s jaw literally dropped. “What?”
“He said he’s going to make something of himself. He’s going to go all in. He said I should come and we should sing like we did tonight.”
Usually, David didn’t question my ideas, no matter how wild. Jump off the bridge in the dead of night and see what it felt like to have the water catch us? No hesitation. Stand in the back of his friend Leah’s truck bed and spread our arms to the wind to fly? We did it twice. This time, he pressed the tips of his fingers to his temples like his brain was combusting. “What if he’s a murderer? You get in his car and—”
“I’m not driving with him.” I turned away from the pictures the moonlight painted across his bare chest. I reminded myself only Tori Peters would focus on that. Tori Rose didn’t. Not in the face of the music and it’s far more plentiful possibilities.
David looked out the window I came through. “You get a car I don’t know about?”
“I’ve got no future here. I’ve got nothing to lose,” I pressed on.
“Except you know, you don’t have a car. Would your moms even let you go?”
“Music is my dream. They understand that.” They were the ones who bought me my guitar. Mama taught me how to tune it. Mom introduced me to Dolly Parton. They listened to every song I wrote.
“We did cover the possible murderer point, right?”
“Singing like that? David, there was something there. I felt it.”
“Tori . . .”
“I want you to come.”
“What?” That wasn’t the word I was waiting for.
“Let’s go together.” I inched forward. “I’ve got savings from desk duty at the inn and my job from before. I can find work while I’m there too. It’s our last summer . . .”
“It’s our first summer together in years.” His gaze dropped.
“First and last. Don’t you want to make it great?” I took a deep breath. “I have an idea.”
“Other than following some dude you just met?”
“I’m not following him. I’m following my calling. The universe is telling me to go.”
“The universe has nothing on you.”
“It has everything.”
He sighed, giving in. “What’s your idea?”
“We spend half the summer in Nashville. Then we go to New York and you see those theaters you’ve always wanted to see. Let’s make it our Summer of Dreams.” We could both get something out of it.
A beat of agonizing silence passed. He looked ahead at those frozen pictures of us.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?” I squealed as quietly as I could (as to not wake his parents and three younger siblings) and threw my arms around him. He cleared his throat, patting my back in an uncharacteristically awkward way. I pulled back laughing.
His cheeks were flushed, and he glanced down at his lack of shirt. Oops. “Yeah, okay, let’s do it. Let’s get out of here.”
The anticipation, building nerves, and wanderlust calmed with my next exhale. I slumped against his shoulder. I was done waiting.
His hand rose, fingers trailing gently over the ends of my hair, before he dropped it and picked his book back up. “You staying?”
I’d already closed my eyes, falling into my own dreams.
My parents were harder to convince. The next morning, they sat across from me at our kitchen table. Mama shook her head as the request hung between us. Mom was silent beside her, clicking her spoon against the edge of a cereal bowl. Her palm rested against the stained wood, right over the spot where I’d scratched my initials when I was seven.
“You want us to let you go across the country . . .” Mom said. She held her hands up when I went to protest. “Just clarifying. To make sure I’m hearing this right.”
“Yes.” The music hummed in every one of my veins, filling them where blood should be.
“Tori,” Mama said. “Sweetheart, this is . . . not entirely thought out. Graduation is in a week.”
“Yeah, I’d go after that.” I leaned forward, foot tapping against the hardwood. I had to go somewhere after grad. It was the end of an era or something. “I want to see things. Do things.”
“We know you do.” Mama’s eyes softened a little. I got my drifter heart from her. She was the one who suggested she and Mom leave their town and make their own life.
“What if something goes wrong?” Mom’s knuckles were white around her spoon.
“Then I’ll figure it out. David’s coming.”
“Hold on. So now this is a cross-country trip with a boy?”
Two.
“Yes. Because we’re friends. Best friends.”
They studied each other with another one of their telepathic stares. That same gentle nature was there whenever they met eyes. The same stare they had while whispering over morning coffee and singing to me before bed when I was young. The same as every time a romantic moment happened on the summer Sundays when we stayed up until midnight watching love stories on television. Like they saw people falling for each other and just had to meet eyes across the room, say with their gaze: That’s us. I found that feeling in you.
They weren’t married, but they were the truest example of love I’d seen. A love too pure and beautiful for vows of forever to be illegal.
And then the word fell from Mama’s lips. “Okay.”
Just like David had said the night before. That one word held every aspiration. It was the key.
“Really?”
“We’re not going to hold you back. But there are going to be ground rules.”
Mom nodded to that. “Lots of them. Starting with you calling us every night. No matter what.”
“You have to stay to graduate.”
“You need to plan out your trip and money with us before you go.”
“And you need to know when to come home, baby,” Mama said. “Don’t get lost. Know you’ve always got a place here.”
Both of them, almost in sync, extended their hands across the little table, and I wound my fingers around theirs.
“I will.”
I could fit my way into most rhythms, but graduation was the exception. I’d barely scraped by, but here I was, peeking at David down the line and making faces. The move back to Sunset Cove threw things off, the music took my focus from work and essays, and I ditched school for it, finding this one hidden cove to curl up with my guitar. But today, it was over. Something new finally got to begin.
The crowd was too cheery and weepy, and I was vibrating with the image of Music City’s lights and all I had to prove. I still took my time, never one to pass up a stage, but I got off as soon as my turn was over, waving to my moms and blowing a kiss.
After an eternity, David crossed too, and he found his way to me. His steps slowed and his grin started.
Gently flicking his tassel, I smiled. “Hey, congrats.”
He wrapped his arms around me. “Congrats to you too, T.” He held on a second, and I grinned into his shoulder.
Goodbye, high school. Good riddance.
“You ready to go?” I asked. “Patrick’s meeting us by the sea.”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” He pulled back, and we left the caps falling like confetti.
Near the shore stood the boy with the rose tattoo. His smile gave his greetings and excitement away. His motive? Only fate could tell that.
“Hi,” he said when we reached him, and his poet’s eyes held mine.
“Hi.” I stopped in front of him. A little too close. Just like when he’d asked me to come with him, that night, standing in front of the piano.
“Ready?” he asked, almost a whisper.
“Always,” I said, nearly a shout.
We passed that taunting sign leading out of town, and I told David to stop. When he did, we scratched our initials into the post with a penny he found in his back pocket. And then the road became a blur. It was summer, squeezed into a collection of days. Laughter. Pit stops. Music. Dancing in the front seat. Street-lit parking lots where David ran in to get supplies while I hummed new Journey or Dolly Parton songs with Patrick Rose. Photoshoots with David who decided to bring a camera (to capture our dreams). Hasty meals and old record shops and more music.
Always, music.
David was a forever-reliable presence at my side through each moment. But Patrick was something new. Unfamiliar. And I caught myself looking too often at that tattoo with its delicate petals and thorns. A sign from the universe.
Patrick drove after us along the winding highways. David was in the driver’s seat of his beat-up minivan, and I was next to him, but I was the one guiding us forward with a map unfurled on the dash. Strumming the guitar in my lap and whisper-singing songs I wrote, I thought of the boy trailing so close behind.
And one night, as another sunset kissed the horizon and lit us up in pink and gold, I saw the city for the first time. I saw the place I’d fallen asleep envisioning every night this week.
“Tori Rose,” David said beside me, stalling so we could take it in. “Are you ready for a Summer of Dreams?”