Thursday night, after the blowup with Jezz and Patrick, and after crashing Flynn’s lesson at the studio, I drive around town for a while. I keep trying to think straight, but I just keep reliving the fight instead, like an ugly track played on a loop. I’m finally heading for home when the song attacks.
I have to pull over to the side of the road. The lyrics and melody, the bass line and thumping drums fill my head. By the time I get the car into park, I can barely see.
I have a pen, but no paper. So I write the whole thing on my arm.
Hear the whispers
turning into roars
Volume rising
beating down the doors
Each note a scream
The drone is deafening
Beat beat beat
until the truth is beaten
Amplify
the things we hide
Tear it down
and turn up the silence
It goes on and on, three more verses, another chorus, all complete.
I have to just sit there for a while afterward. My mouth is sour, and my insides are spinning. I’m afraid some cop is going to pull up beside me and decide I must be drunk. But the road behind me stays empty.
I read the words on my arm. Even though it’s my handwriting, I feel like I’m seeing them for the first time. This isn’t right, says something in the back of my head. This isn’t right. But I’ve got the song.
Finally, when my hands stop shaking, I put the car back in gear and drive home.
Dad’s fixing something in the garage. He gives me a nod as I walk past. Mom flutters around me while I get some leftovers from the fridge. I manage to push the food into my mouth. Then I head down the hallway, shut myself in my room, and start the usual nighttime drill.
Scratch Goblin for a while. Let him out when he starts mrrk-ing at the door. Fifty push-ups. Thirty crunches. Jump rope until some of the energy boiling inside seeps out. Then I sit down on the floor at the end of the bed, take Yvonne out of her case, and start playing the chords that go with the new lyrics. I play them again and again and again, until they’re enameled in my brain along with the words, and my fingers are starting to cramp. Then I stop, even though I can hardly stand to. Stretch. More push-ups. My back aches. My eyes burn. I’m on fire, and it feels glorious. The song is awesome. The crowd at the Crow’s Nest will love it. And it’s mine, as far as anyone else needs to know.
I’m still nowhere near being able to sleep. I pull Yvonne back into my lap. Scales now. Then fingerwork, my hands flashing in the moonlight. Precise. Perfect. Then the song again, polishing the intro, and then—
Then someone knocks. But not at the door. At the window.
Yvonne jerks in my hands, the melody breaking off.
I look up.
Frankie’s face smiles through the glass at me.
It’s dark outside. Getting colder. When I open the window, the gust of air chills my sweaty shirt. Maybe sweaty and gross is better than damp and shirtless, like last time Frankie showed up. Either way, I feel exposed, unarmored, without a guitar between us.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey. What are you doing here?” This comes out even more unwelcoming than I mean it.
“Visiting you,” says Frankie. Like I don’t already know this.
I glance past her, into the woods. “Who else is out there?”
“With me?” Frankie shrugs. “Nobody.”
“Nobody?” Frankie Lynde, alone. The words don’t even sound right together. “Are you sure?” I ask, even though this is a really stupid thing to say.
“I’m sure.” She leans her arms on the windowsill. She’s wearing a soft, wide-necked sweater. Her fingernails are painted dark purple, or at least they look that way in the moonlight. “So. How’s it going?”
“Not great.” I rub the side of my head. “There was a stupid fight with Jezz and Patrick today.”
Frankie nods. “I heard.”
Of course she heard. This freaking town.
Frankie tips her head to the side. Her eyes are black ink, sharp and soft at the same time. “Do you think it will blow over?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Frankie’s eyes move over me, outlining my face, traveling down. “What’s that?” she asks.
“What? Oh.” She’s pointing at my forearm. “Song lyrics.”
Frankie reaches through the open window and grasps my arm. Her touch makes my whole body ignite.
“‘Amplify . . . the hugs we hair?’”
“‘The things we hide,’” I say. She still hasn’t let go of my arm.
Frankie laughs. It makes the air sing. “Your handwriting is terrible.”
“In my defense, you are reading it upside down.”
“Maybe I should come in and read it the right way around.”
“Um . . .” Something starts to fizz in the pit of my stomach. Alone. With Frankie Lynde. In my bedroom. I turn an ear toward the door. The occasional distant laugh track from the TV seeps through the wood. “I guess you could.”
Frankie slides through my window, head first. She reaches out so I can grab her before she hits the floor. “Thanks.” She clings to my hands, laughing at herself. “Please don’t remember how gracefully I did that.”
She’s wearing tight pants and high-heeled boots. Her hair is glossy. I can smell it—her—even a few feet away. I take a step backward. Our hands unclasp.
Frankie takes a long, slow look around my room. “Wow,” she says. “It’s a metal museum.”
She trails along one wall, checking out the posters, the stickers, the torn-out articles. I follow her with my eyes. She leans into the mirror, studying the ticket stubs wedged around the frame. “You’ve seen a lot of great bands. And a lot of bad movies.”
My heart is pounding. It doesn’t feel safe having Frankie in my room. It’s too much like having her in my head.
“So, why are you really here?” I say. Way too bluntly.
Frankie straightens and turns to look at me. “To see you.”
She moves toward me. I back up.
Frankie stops between my bed and the row of guitars. Yvonne is still on the carpet, where I left her. She glints like an oil slick. Frankie reaches out and gently touches the neck of the acoustic, propped on its stand. “It seems like there’s always someone else around, you know? Like somebody’s always watching. Like we’re never really alone.”
My heart pounds harder. Jesus. Is she actually reading my mind? “Yeah,” I say.
Frankie faces me. She steps closer. I try to step backward again and bump straight into the closed closet door.
Frankie’s a lot shorter than I am. We’ve stood face-to-face so seldom—because I’ve avoided it, in part—that I’m surprised by it all over again. But when she looks up at me, with those dark eyes, I know that I’m the smaller one.
“What are you afraid of?” she says.
There are so many answers that they crash into one another. My head’s full of rubble.
Frankie is something else I haven’t earned. She’s something else that could disappear in a second, and it will only hurt if I try to hold on.
“I’m not afraid,” I say. “I just— We’re about to graduate. Leave. I don’t think I can, like, promise anything.”
Frankie looks like she might laugh. “Have I asked you to promise anything? Because I don’t remember doing that.”
“Okay. No. You haven’t.”
“So, how about instead of guessing what I want, you just let me tell you?”
My skin is electric. If my heart pounds any harder, she’ll be able to hear it. Christ, my deaf cat who’s hiding somewhere in another part of the house will be able to hear it. “All right,” I say.
But Frankie doesn’t tell me anything. She stands on her toes, and she places both hands on me, one on my neck, one on my chest, so I’m sure she can feel my pulse, and then she presses her lips against mine.
And I’m lost.
In an eighth beat, my arms are around her. One wraps behind her back, all the way around her body, crushing her against me. The other hand slides up through her sleek black hair.
She moves her palm against my jaw, tilting my face downward, so she can kiss me more deeply.
My breath is on fire.
She pulls me backward. We stumble together toward the bed. My foot bumps Yvonne, still lying on the floor. I don’t even glance down.
We hit the saggy little bed with a creak.
Frankie Lynde. In my bed. Beneath me. Her body, the shape of her, the hollows and curves, pinned under me, my weight crushing the space between us until there isn’t any space left.
All my worries suddenly seem so distant and small that when I look back I can’t even recognize them. Who cares? Who cares about anything but this?
Frankie moves against me, spaces notching against curves. She’s breathing harder, too. She runs a hand up beneath my shirt, over my back. Each fingertip leaves a track of fire. Or ice. I can’t even tell.
And then, slowly, she pulls away. She puts a finger against my lips and smiles up at me.
“Anders Thorson,” she murmurs. “You really like to keep a girl waiting.”
I smile back. We both start to laugh.
“Since December,” she says. “I’ve been waiting since December to do this again.” Frankie laughs some more, eyebrows pulling together. “Why were we waiting?”
“I don’t know,” I say, because I don’t. I don’t know anything.
Frankie pushes lightly at my chest. I lean back, and she gets up, smoothing her hair and tugging her sweater back into place.
“I’d better go,” she says, sidling toward the window. “But I want to see you again. Alone again. Not in front of a crowd. And not four months from now.”
“Good.” I’m still trying to get my breath under control. “Me, too.”
“How about tomorrow? After the show?”
“Sure. Perfect.”
“Good.” Frankie’s lips curve upward. I want to touch them so much, it makes me dizzy. “Then I’ll see you at the Crow’s Nest.”
I offer her my knee, and Frankie uses it as a step to climb up and through the window.
I look past her into the blue-black woods. “Hey. How did you get here?”
“My car.” Frankie nods into the distance. “I parked way back on the road, so nobody here would hear me come or go.”
I grin. “You planned all of this.”
Frankie grins back.
Then she hops down from the stump and flies off into the trees. I watch her go. I’m just turning away from the window when I catch sight of something else.
A pale flash behind a big pine. A shape that looks like a face. Glittering eyes.
I freeze.
I stare at that spot for more than a minute, but whatever I saw doesn’t reappear. Maybe it wasn’t there in the first place.
I shut and lock the window.
Then I flop back onto the bed that still smells, really faintly, of Frankie Lynde.
I take a deep breath.
What am I fighting against?
If life’s trying to give me what I want, why don’t I just freaking take it?
I roll over on the bed and grab Yvonne from her spot on the floor. I lay her across my chest. The sleek surface of her body begins to warm. I can feel my heartbeat reverberating inside of her.
There was a guitar that used to hang on the wall at the Underground Music Studio. A Fender Stratocaster. Arctic White. The tag dangling from its neck said it was six hundred dollars, but it might as well have said six million. The Fender was there when I started lessons with Flynn nine years ago. Back then the only guitar I owned was an acoustic we’d gotten for free from one of Mom’s coworkers who didn’t play anymore. It came with a cardboard case and a pack of spare strings and a book called You Can Play Folk Guitar! I’d sit on the lumpy navy couch in the middle of the studios, waiting for my lesson with my own crappy guitar beside me, and I’d stare up at the Fender’s pearly curves and glossy finish. It looked like it had been made of magical snow.
For my thirteenth birthday Mom and Dad got me a secondhand electric, an Epiphone Les Paul Special. That same year Flynn helped me find a great deal on a decent Yamaha acoustic, something I could afford with two summers’ worth of lawn-mowing money. Later I found out the deal was so great because Flynn had paid for half of it himself. And the whole time that snow-white Fender hung there, above the lumpy couches, just out of my reach.
I’d gaze up at that guitar week after week. I’d picture it in my hands. In my bedroom. I could see our future together stretching out in front of me, all the glory, all the music.
You can want something so much that it feels like it’s already yours.
I thought I’d never want anything as much as I wanted that Fender.
But that was before Frankie Lynde.
And it was before Yvonne.
I remember how it felt the very first time I played her. The skin of my forearm on her curve. My hand wrapped around her neck. The way her name just came to me, Yvonne, like someone had whispered it in my ear, like it already belonged to her, just the way she already belonged to me. It seemed impossible that something so exciting could feel so familiar. I guess that’s how you know it’s right. I guess that’s why you should just take it, without dissecting it into pieces. Even if you know you don’t deserve it.