WE DID A NEW TUNE, with words from my notebook and music by Relly.
It was weirdly wild, full of sudden starts and stops, like a crash-test joy ride. I finally got the riff under my fingers and could whip it off just as fast as Relly. Of course, on the bass it was way heavier, like somebody tap-dancing with cement blocks strapped onto their feet.
"OK. I think we've got it down," Relly said after we'd run it a few times.
Jerod read over the lead sheet again, trying to figure out the words. "What does hellebore mean?"
"Ask Zee," Relly said.
"You wrote this?" He looked at me. I mean he really looked, eye to eye, for the first time.
"Yeah. Me and Relly together."
"So what does it mean?"
I felt like a slug, and Jerod was the guy with the salt. In two seconds he'd pour the salt over me and I'd melt down to a nasty little puddle of goo.
"Well?"
"Hellebore is a poison plant. But in the olden days they used it to cure people who were crazy."
"It's a poison and it's a cure?"
"I don't know if it really works. Anyway, it sounded good and it fits in the song. And it rhymes with 'farthest shore.'"
"Yeah. I guess." It seemed like he really wanted to understand. My words and me too. He looked me over, from head to toe, like he'd never even noticed I was a girl before.
"It's no big deal," I said, getting more embarrassed by the minute. "If you don't like it, we'll change the words."
"No, no. It's OK. I don't care." Maybe he had really wanted to make sense of the song. But now it was too much work for him. So, with a shrug, he went back to being Cool Sneering Guy again.
He went to a way-better school than the rest of us, out in Pittsford with the other rich kids. He drove his dad's BMW. His dad was a big-deal lawyer and his mom wasn't a drunk like Butt's or gone off with a new husband and new family, like mine. He was headed to Cornell, like his father and his grandfather. Straight Ivy League. Upper crust. He let us know that whenever he could.
Relly had gone through three other singers before he found Jerod. He was just what the band needed. Relly had that wispy, warlocky look. Butt was like a caveman. And I was me, invisible, behind and way down below. We needed somebody who looked great and loved to show off what he had.
So we put up with his whining and his rich-kid snottiness. And he put up with Relly's weirdness most of the time.
We did my new song, "The Rising Sigh," which was a phrase I got off a tombstone. Above the beautiful, terrible noise, Jerod poured out my words. I especially liked it when he closed his eyes and reached real high, like his brain was about to explode. I watched him from the side: his sleek shoulders, his gorgeous hair, the power in his arms as he clung to the mike stand, wailing.