There’s not much more pathetically lonely than a bowl of milk with just three Cheerios floating in it.
I reach across the breakfast table and grab the yellow box. Now I run the risk of overcompensating, having to add more milk and then more cereal in a never-ending downward spiral, but I can’t face those three drifting Cheerios any longer.
Dad watches me pour. His eyes are tired.
“You were up early today,” he says.
I have a flash of those minutes sitting on the end of my bed, morning sun sieving through the pine needles, the guitar in my hands. Even the memory makes my heart lift. Suddenly I can’t wait to be playing again, making the lines a little smoother, the notes even cleaner. God. I’m such an addict.
“Sorry,” I say through a mouthful of Os. “I just played the acoustic. I didn’t think I’d wake you.”
“I was already up,” Dad says. “What was that? Pink Floyd?”
I shovel in another mass of cereal. “Yep.”
Dad nods. He rubs his head with the flat of one hand. Dad’s hands are like baseball mitts, broad and tough enough to grab a flying fastball or hoist a splintering beam without flinching. His face is permanently sunburned. The bottoms of his feet are like cement. He is his own protective gear.
“Your mom said you had a good show last night,” Dad goes on as Mom drifts back to the kitchen table with a fresh mug of coffee. Goblin twists through her ankles, begging for scratches.
“Yeah,” I say, swallowing. “They want us to add a second night. Be the regular Friday and Saturday thing.”
Dad’s eyes don’t exactly narrow, but I can see the eyelids around them tighten, like he’s bracing for a blast of sawdust. “And he’s still not paying you? That Ike Lawrence?”
“He gives them dinner,” Mom puts in. “Right, Anders? And free drinks.”
“You draw crowds for him every week,” Dad goes on. “Now two nights a week. And he still expects you to do it for free?”
The tendons along my neck go tight.
Ike has been offering to pay us for months. I remember him striding toward us across the Crow’s Nest after a set last summer when we had completely packed the house. Ike could win a Henry Rollins look-alike contest any day of the week without even changing his clothes. He smiled his dry little hint of a smile. “With the way you’re pulling people in, I think the time has come for me to start paying you.” He looked around at the three of us. “You’re not open mic material anymore. You’re a draw. And I know it.”
Ike had been there for us, given us a stage and support and free sandwiches ever since we were the sloppiest of open mic material. I didn’t want to take more. Not from him.
“We want to keep things pure for now. You know?” I said. “Get in our ten thousand hours of practice before we make the jump to pro.”
Behind me I heard Jezz suck in a breath.
But Ike just grinned. “So you’re not ready to sell out yet.” He folded his beefy arms. “Just make sure when you do that you do it for the right people. Or at least for the right money.” Then he turned around and strode away.
“Dude,” Jezz had said, jabbing me in the side. Patrick had just stared.
We had a fight about it later, but at the end we all agreed that we wouldn’t sign any contracts or take any official payments until we had graduated, just to make things clean and simple. I kept up the lie about wanting to keep Last Things pure for now. Because I couldn’t tell them the truth: that I didn’t really deserve any of this. That the way everyone saw me was based on a lie. I couldn’t tell Ike Lawrence, and I couldn’t tell my own band, and I sure as hell can’t tell my dad.
I just shrug, looking down into my cereal bowl.
“You know, pretty soon, you’re going to have to stand up for yourself. Declare that your time has value.” Dad turns his coffee mug in a little circle. “You’ve made it clear that that’s your plan.” His voice gets harsher with each sentence. We’ve had this fight so many times, it’s like one big patch of scar tissue. “If you’re going to try to do this music stuff for a living, even as a side job, you’re going to have to stop letting people talk you into giving it away.”
I should defend Ike. But it’s easier just to shrug again.
“You put it to him this way,” Dad plows on. “You tell Ike Lawrence he can at least cover your expenses if he wants you three to be his unpaid house band.”
I glance at Dad sideways. “Expenses?”
“Your equipment, for starters. Transportation. Music lessons. It all adds up.”
There it is again. A familiar push on another familiar bruise. “Yeah,” I say. “I know it does. This summer I’ll mow lawns again, and—”
“Summer,” Dad cuts me off. “Sure.” He turns to Mom, his tone shifting. “Did you say you were heading to Halmstad today?”
Mom nods, happy to have things moving into a lighter key. “I have to return those shoes to Petersons. They just weren’t—Anders.” Mom stops me before I can push my chair back and walk away from the table. “What happened to your hand?”
“Oh.” I hide the carpet-burned knuckles against my side. “I scraped it on the stage when we were loading up last night. No big deal.”
“You look tired,” says Mom. “Did you get enough sleep last night?”
I look past her at the old cuckoo clock with the pinecone pendulums that hangs on the kitchen wall. It’s almost nine-thirty. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“You don’t think two shows a week will be too much for you?”
“No. I’m fine. Really.” I set my bowl in the sink. “I’m going over to Jezz’s before my lesson. That article is supposed to get posted this morning. We said we’d read it together.”
Mom’s face goes from worried to bright again. “Which article?”
“The one in Urban Planner. That arts magazine.”
Dad’s eyes are on his plate. “How are you going to get there?”
“. . . My car.”
“Your car? You mean the Nissan?” Dad says pointedly. “Your mom needs it for errands. I’m going to be changing the oil in the wagon today. It’s overdue. And it’s been awhile since you’ve filled the tank, by the way.”
There’s no use asking to take the truck. Dad’s let me drive his pickup twice in my life, always with him in the passenger seat, his work boots pressing phantom brake pedals the whole time.
“Fine,” I say from the kitchen doorway. “I’ll see if someone can pick me up.”
Mom says something to Dad as I leave the room, but I’m heading down the hall so fast that I can’t hear it.
Patrick pulls into the driveway half an hour later. The thing he drives and the thing my dad drives are both called trucks, but in the same way a champion German shepherd and a twenty-pound junkyard mutt are both called dogs. Patrick’s truck is mostly rust, with some black paint in between. Its prickly fabric seats are exploding with split seams and cigarette burns. The interior smells like oil, old coffee, cut grass, and feet.
“Thanks for driving all the way out here.” I lift Yvonne’s case into the cab. No way I’d let her slide around back there in the bed. “I’ll pay you back.”
“No problem,” he says.
Even though I know it is kind of a problem. Even though Patrick with his job making pizzas at Papa Julio’s doesn’t have much more money for gas than I do.
Patrick turns up the radio, which just barely picks up the rock station from the Cities.
“FFDP,” I groan. “God. They’re still playing this song?”
“Only every twenty minutes,” says Patrick.
“I need a Five Finger Death Punch in my ears.”
“You’re such a snob, man.” Patrick is wearing his tiny half grin, which is how I know he doesn’t really mean it. Everything Patrick does is so dry and understated, you have to look for little clues to decode what he’s actually thinking. I know him well enough that I can usually catch the truth. “Sorry there’s no Scandinavian death metal station we can pick up from here.”
“Hey, I’m impressed that this thing has a working radio at all,” I say. “What did it come with, an eight-track player?”
Patrick’s half grin curls a tiny bit higher. “Phonograph.”
I crack up.
We stream around a curve, past a riverbed, through a spread of thick old pines. A waft of air sweeps up over my leg. I glance down. There’s a hole in the floor near Patrick’s left foot. Through it, I can see straight down to the asphalt streaking below.
“Holy crap, dude,” I say. “There’s a hole in your floor.”
“Yep.” Patrick’s face doesn’t even change. “I was listening to System of a Down the other day and tapping my foot—”
“Tapping your foot?”
He shrugs with one shoulder. “Guess I tapped a little too hard.”
“Guess you’re driving the Flintstone mobile.”
One corner of Patrick’s mouth grins higher. He cranks up the Five Finger Death Punch.
Jezz is waiting for us in his room, which is half of his parents’ entire basement. He even has his own bathroom down there. It’s pretty sketchy, with a flimsy tin-walled shower and a utility sink with a mirror hung over it, but at least it’s private. His actual bedroom is big enough that there’s space for an old couch at one end. There’s a long built-in desk in the corner, cluttered with cords and iPods and discs and empty Mountain Dew cans. Jezz is sitting at the desk when we come in. He does a slow twirl in the chair, grinning at us the whole time.
Patrick and I flop down on the couch, which is covered with so many layers of Jezz’s clothes that you can’t even tell what color it is.
“Is it up yet?” Patrick asks.
Jezz does another spin in the desk chair. A Slayer T-shirt flaps on the chair back like a flag. “Yep. Twenty minutes ago. Already two hundred thirty views and thirty-five comments.”
“There’s video?” I ask. “Which song?”
“‘Superhero.’” Jezz’s smile gets even wider. “It’s good. The sound’s decent. And you can see the crowd going nuts.”
“You already read it?” says Patrick.
Jezz’s eyebrows shoot up. “No. I waited. I said I would.”
I feel that buzzing electric feeling, that mixture of nerves and adrenaline and dread and hunger that comes on before a show. Nothing to do but dive in. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s read it.”
“I’ve got it up on my phone,” says Patrick.
“I’ll read it on mine,” says Jezz, getting up. “Here. Anders. You take the computer.”
The phone in my pocket is just a phone. The guys know this. They’re nice about it, which makes it sting a little more.
We all shut up and read.
At the end of a potholed road a few miles beyond the small town of Greenwood, somewhere deep in the Northwoods of Minnesota, you’ll find the Crow’s Nest Coffeehouse. And inside the Crow’s Nest—on Friday nights, anyway—you’ll find the future of American metal.
My heartbeat switches to double time.
On this Friday night in mid-April, just like every other Friday night for the past year, Last Things takes the stage. The crowd, which packs the coffeehouse from wall to wall, screams. The band launches into a blistering set of twenty original songs. Some are reminiscent of Tool’s mathematically swirling rhythms, some hint at the beautiful melodic lines of Opeth, and some sound like nothing but themselves.
There’s the link to the video. “Superhero.” In the still image, my head is bent, my left fist clamped around Yvonne’s neck, my strumming hand an upward blur. The other guys aren’t visible.
From the driving, distorted pulse of “Breakdown,” to heartbreaking, stripped-down solos like “Deep Water,” Last Things has cultivated a sound that’s drawing fans from as far off as Minneapolis.
The three-piece ensemble, featuring Jezz Smith (bass), Patrick Murray (drums), and Anders Thorson (lead guitar, vocals), has been playing together for four years. A deal with a major label is just around the corner.
. . . But first, they have to finish high school.
“We all agreed that we’d wait to sign anything until we had our diplomas,” says drummer Murray, 18.
“We can’t wait to sell out,” laughs bassist Smith, also 18.
Smith and Murray are talented musicians, the foundation of a tight ensemble. But Thorson’s skills as vocalist, guitarist, and composer push the band into another sphere.
Oh, Jesus. It takes every single muscle in my body to keep the smile off my face.
Onstage, Thorson is an engine of sharp, wordplay-heavy lyrics, a vocal range that goes from pitch-black growl to rich baritone, and guitar skills decades beyond his age. But as soon as he sets down the guitar, he’s self-effacing. Almost shy.
When asked how he feels about being called a prodigy, his face clouds.
“I don’t like that term,” he says. “It’s just years of lessons and practicing and sitting in your room alone. Just being an obsessive loser, basically.”
He’s even more reticent about his songwriting process.
“I don’t really have a process. Ideas come to me. I write them down.”
“That’s what he’s like,” says Murray as Anders ducks away to pack up an amp. “He can’t really talk about music. He just plays it.”
What’s it like working with someone like Thorson?
Smith grins. “You know how you’ll be driving down some empty country road and some maniac passes you going insanely fast, and without even thinking about it, you’re suddenly going ninety miles an hour, trying to catch up? Yeah. That’s what it’s like.”
Aw, Jezz. The gratitude and guilt both come so fast, I can feel my face turn red.
Last Things will play the Crow’s Nest every Friday and Saturday night between now and the end of August. Metal fans: Here’s your chance to say you heard them before the rest of the world.
Because the rest of the world will hear.
When I finish, it’s quiet. I’m not sure if this is because the other guys are still reading, or what. My cheeks are flaming so hard, I don’t want to turn around.
“Holy crap,” says Jezz at last.
Patrick sounds dazed. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” I agree.
Jezz laughs. Jezz’s laugh is this high, crazy cackle that always makes other people start laughing with him. “I wonder how insane the crowds will get after this.”
“Yeah. He really liked us,” says Patrick. “Well, he really liked . . .” He jerks his buzz cut in my direction.
Here we go. Good thing I hadn’t let myself smile.
“It wasn’t just about me,” I say quickly. I swivel the chair sidewise so I can see Jezz and Patrick without facing them head-on. “It was about us. And I barely talked to him.”
“Which adds to the mystique.” Patrick puts on a reverent voice. “You’re in another sphere.”
“Dude.” Jezz punts him lightly in the shin.
“Whatever,” I say to a heap of shirts and socks on the end of Jezz’s desk. “I hate it when they call me ‘the front man.’”
“Well, you are,” says Patrick simply. “You play lead. You sing. You write everything now. You stand in front.”
You write everything now. The words hit like a dart.
Patrick and I used to write together, way back when we were coming up with our first original, totally crappy songs. Over time, as better songs started coming to me, with the lyrics finished and all the parts already complete, I switched to writing on my own. It was faster that way. And the way the songs came, overwhelming me, filling up my head, I couldn’t move or think or do anything else until I’d let them out on paper. It wasn’t my choice.
But Patrick doesn’t get that.
“You want to write some songs?” I spin around to face him. “Seriously. You want to write something? Go for it. Go ahead.”
That’s not all I want to say. I want to ask if he’d like to be the one awake at three a.m., unable to stop until he gets the songs out. If he wants his brain to be like a radio where someone else keeps switching the stations. If he practices until his whole body hurts, and if that just makes him love it more. But I don’t. Because that would get too close to something dangerous.
Patrick hesitates for a sixteenth beat. “No,” he says. He looks straight back at me. His voice has gone back to being as steady and cool as usual. “I don’t do that. That’s yours.”
I take a breath.
Patrick is not the kind of guy you’d normally find on a stage. He’s the kind of guy you’d find in the back of a garage, modifying an antique car or fixing a short in an electrical circuit. He’s in on this because he likes the music. He likes the drums, because they’re the perfect mix of physical strength and technical precision. He likes Jezz. And he likes me, most of the time. When I’m not being a jerk.
Patrick and I stare at each other for a second. His expression doesn’t soften—nothing about Patrick is ever really soft—but eventually I see it shift, and then there’s nothing bitter in it anymore. It’s just my best friend, looking back at me.
“And I’m sure as hell not going to write anything,” Jezz cuts in. “Unless I can just set some Dr. Seuss words to a Rage Against the Machine bass line. So it’s a good thing we’ve got Mister Other Sphere writing for us.”
“Yeah,” says Patrick. “Right.”
“I know I’m right.” Jezz’s tone brightens. “Hey. What do you call a drummer who just broke up with his girlfriend?”
Patrick blinks. “I don’t know.”
“Homeless.”
Patrick gives a one-syllable chuckle. “Good one. So, a drummer walks into a bar . . . Ba-DUM-chick.”
Jezz laughs his crazy laugh. I want to laugh, too, but I don’t think the sound actually comes out of my mouth. I’m still feeling something—something heavy and dark, down in the pit of my stomach. Like the sign of something bad about to start.
Jezz slides sideways off the couch, hopping to his feet at the last second. “You guys want a can of pop? There’s more Mountain Dew in the fridge.”
“Throwback or regular?” says Patrick in the way someone else would say, “Cabernet or Zinfandel?”
“Both, I think.” Jezz turns to me, eyebrows up. “Anders?”
It’s too warm down here. My skin itches, like the words of the article are still crawling all over me. I lurch to my feet. “Actually, I’ve got to go. I need to get to the studio a little early today.” A lie. What I really need is to be outside, alone, away from that article, away from the reminder that somebody is always watching, listening, waiting. “See you guys on Monday.”
“Okay,” says Jezz. “See you Monday.”
“You don’t need a ride home?” asks Patrick.
“Nah.” I can’t quite look at him now. “I can walk. Or call home. But thanks.”
I charge up the basement stairs. Yvonne’s case swings heavily in my hand.
It’s bright outside, everything tinted yellow by pollen and clear sky and late April sun. My first impulse is to hit something. A cinder block. A cement wall. Something hard enough that what gets hurt is me.
You can’t be the lead in something without it putting other people in the background.
And you can’t just keep taking what you didn’t earn. You need to pay for it somehow.
But you can’t just stand outside punching a wall, either. Not in the middle of a small town, where everybody knows your name and your parents’ names and your grandparents’ names, on a sunny Saturday morning.
I stand at the end of Jezz’s driveway for a minute, taking deep breaths. Then, when I feel a little less freaked out, I turn and head down Franconia Street.
I walk downtown—or what passes for downtown in Greenwood. Six blocks of cafés, junk stores, dentists’ offices. You could sleepwalk from one end to the other in three minutes. I keep my steps slow. I’ve got hours to waste, and nowhere to go, and a guitar in my hand, and $3.75 in my pocket.
At Sixth Street I turn right, away from Main, toward the park. You don’t look like you’re loitering if you do it in a park. I shuffle past the rows of old brick and clapboard houses, under trees flaming with fresh gold leaves, past alleys and yards and streets all still half asleep and Saturday-morning quiet.
I’m in the middle of a block when it attacks me. The line. Rhythm. Lyrics. Melody tangled into the words.
Damn it.
I shove my hand into the pockets of my jeans. No pen. No paper.
Goddamn it.
I spin around on the sidewalk, searching the ground, like there might be a notebook and pencil just waiting there. More words are coming. They pile up in my skull, water behind a dam.
Hold on. I could text it to myself. Every text costs money, as Mom and Dad will be sure to remind me. But hopefully it won’t take more than two to get it all down.
I set Yvonne’s case on the sidewalk and pull out my phone.
Shadow Tag
Turn + turn again
as fast as I can
You’re still beside me
No matter how I run
you’re behind me
holding tight to my ankles
And if I fall
if I stagger into the street
if I stumble
that’s when you’ll finally catch me
The music swallows me up. I’m lost in it; I’m in love with it; it’s inside of me, but it’s so much bigger than I am that I can’t hold on—
And then a car horn blares right beside me.
I jump. Like a moron. I barely manage not to drop the phone.
“Hey,” calls a voice.
Frankie’s deep blue car has pulled up beside the curb, purring softly. Frankie cranes around Sasha, who’s sitting in the passenger seat, and beams out at me. “Need a ride?”
“Um—not really.” My vision wavers. My brain is still scrambling after the song like a kid chasing the string of a runaway kite. “I’m just . . . walking.”
“I’m dropping Sasha off. She spent the night,” Frankie says.
Sasha smiles at me as though this is fascinating information.
“Oh,” I say. Great answer, moron.
“Then I’ll take you wherever you want to go,” Frankie says. “Frankie’s Taxi Service. Come on. Get in.”
I can’t think of a single excuse. Not even a stupid one. I pick up Yvonne and climb into the backseat, like a little kid sitting behind his babysitters.
“So,” says Frankie over her shoulder as she pulls back into the empty street, “what were you up to this morning? Being a wandering minstrel?”
Her inky brown eyes meet mine in the rearview for a second, and I finally remember to put on the rock-star face. I raise my chin. Lower my eyelids.
It’s stupid, yeah. I know why Frankie likes me.
But I still want her to like me.
“I was at Jezz’s,” I say.
“Oh, yeah,” says Sasha. “That big article just came out.”
My chest tightens. “How did you know?”
“Jezz just shared it. He tagged you.”
The back of my neck starts to prickle. I have the stupid urge to look out the rear window, just to see if someone’s staring in. This freaking town.
We pull up to Sasha’s house, which looks like something you could order out of a catalog. Frankie turns into the driveway, and Sasha hops out and runs inside.
“Come up here,” says Frankie, patting the passenger seat. “Unless you’re actually going to pay me for the ride.”
I climb out and into the front, leaving Yvonne in back, hiding my raw knuckles in my pocket. Frankie waits for a moment, her perfect face turned toward me. She’s wearing this funny little smile, like she knows something I don’t. Her hand rests on the gearshift. There’s a beat, while she just smiles at me and I try not to smile back at her, and then Frankie puts the car in reverse. I realize only as we’re bumping out of the driveway that she was waiting for me to kiss her.
God, I’m dumb.
I guess I should have known. I’ve kissed her before.
Once.
Once, if you go by number of sessions.
If you go by number of seconds, or by number of individual lip-to-lip contacts, it’s a lot more than once.
It was December, at a party at Blake Skoglund’s, way out in the country. It was one of those parties that nobody was actually invited to but that everybody knew about anyway. By nine o’clock the crowd got too big to fit inside the garage and started spilling out into the sheds and the snow and the woods, getting drunk and loud and frostbitten.
I’d never spoken to Frankie Lynde before. She came to the Crow’s Nest every Friday night, but so did everybody else at Greenwood High School. She was always in the middle of a whirlpool of loud, laughing friends who were way more interested in one another than the music. They probably wouldn’t even have noticed if we’d launched into a medley of Disney songs.
But suddenly, there she was. By herself. Walking across the Skoglunds’ garage, straight toward me.
I was standing beside a metal tub packed with snow and cans of pop.
Frankie pointed down into the tub. Her fingernails were painted silver. “Would you hand me something?” she asked.
If I hadn’t been leaning against the wall, I would probably have looked over my shoulder, just to make sure she wasn’t talking to somebody else. I looked down into the tub instead. “Which one do you want?”
“I don’t care. I just want something to do with my hands.” She smiled at me.
Frankie Lynde smiled at me.
I felt like someone had just unzipped the front of my chest.
A rush of icy December air slid through my rib cage. My heart shivered and thumped harder. Frankie Lynde, smiling, looking straight at me with those deep brown eyes. I didn’t know that actual human beings could have eyelashes so thick and dark and long.
I grabbed a can of Coke.
“Thanks.” She took it. Her fingers brushed my skin.
“Whoa.” I gave a little jerk backward. “Your hand is colder than the can.”
She laughed. “I know. My hands are always cold.” She leaned a little closer. “But that doesn’t mean I’m a dead girl. I swear.”
Jesus. She was quoting my song to me. The most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in real life knew the words to one of my songs.
“Oh,” I said, like the giant idiot I was. And am. “That’s good.”
“They say, ‘Cold hands, warm heart,’ right? I guess the moral is: Don’t trust anyone with warm hands.” Before I knew what was going on, she grabbed my right hand, pressing her smaller, softer palm to mine. “Hmm. Warmish. But not coldheartedly warm.” She turned my hand toward the dusty ceiling lights, staring down at my palm like she was reading the lines. “Wow. Do you have any actual skin, or are your hands just one big callus?”
“Yeah. The guitar will do that to you.”
“That seems mean,” she said. “That something you love would hurt you.”
“I don’t know. Isn’t that just how it works?” The words came out before I could even think about them. They made me sound way deeper and darker than I deserved.
Frankie gave a little laugh. Music. Sound perfectly arranged in time. “Maybe. I guess.” She still hadn’t let go of my hand. Now she turned it over and touched her fingertips to mine. “Can you even feel anything with those?”
“Yes.” There was a little rasp in my voice now. “I can feel that.”
She looked up at me. Smiled again.
I don’t even know how it happened, but next we were in the three-season porch at the back of Blake Skoglund’s house, on a low, afghan-covered couch that smelled like bonfires, and my lips were on hers, and hers were on mine, and her cold, soft hands were sliding up under my shirt, and even in the freezing air, even with my unzipped rib cage, my skin was burning, and I couldn’t feel the cold even when the shirt was on the floor, because Frankie’s fingers were in my hair, and my fingers were everywhere, everywhere—
And then it was late, and cars were crunching down the gravel driveway, and Frankie was smoothing her hair, tugging her jacket back on, and giving me one last small, soft, teasing kiss. And then she slipped off into the house, and a few minutes later, I’d collected enough strength in my burning, shaking body to get up and drag myself home.
And that was that.
People knew, of course. In this town, everybody knows everything about everyone. Almost.
I guess I could have said something. I could have done what the guy is supposed to do. I could have asked her out. Asked her to be my girlfriend. Even though that would have felt like handing her a can of Coke and asking her to pretend it was champagne.
I could have. Because I got the sense afterward, from the way she looked at me, and the way she kept coming to the shows, and the way she didn’t avoid me, that Frankie didn’t regret it. That she might actually be interested.
But she was interested for the same reason as everyone else.
Because I’m the guy with the guitar.
I wasn’t going to try to build something real on top of that.
So I’ve just been walking around with an unzipped chest since mid-December. I’m always kind of stunned that people can’t seem to see straight inside me. That they aren’t backing away, grossed-out and horrified. And I’ve tried to make sure that I’m never alone with Frankie, which, considering her giant circle of friends, is usually pretty easy to do.
But now, here I am. Here we are.
“Okay.” Frankie shifts into drive. “Where were you headed?”
“I was just killing time before my lesson at one.”
“All right.” She nods. “I like killing time.”
Riding with Frankie is worlds away from riding with Patrick. Her car is glossy and new and smells like cinnamon, laced with the softer scent of Frankie’s shampoo. A pop station plays on the stereo. It’s all too nice. I feel totally uncomfortable, like I’m sitting on someone’s expensive leather furniture in a pair of soaking wet shorts.
“Want to go to Roxy’s?” she asks.
Roxy’s is the town diner. It’s got narrow red booths, sturdy white cups and saucers, and chipped beef on toast.
“Not really,” I say. And not just because there’s only $3.75 in my pocket. “I don’t feel like just sitting.”
“We could go to the park,” she suggests. “There’s lots of room to not sit there.”
I had been headed there, but with Frankie, it seems wrong. Too quiet. Too alone. Too much temptation to lunge across the armrest, cup her perfect face in both hands, and—
“No. Not the park.”
“All right.” Frankie stays cool, even though now I sound like a brat. I don’t know if this is because she is so cool, so comfortable just being herself, or because she’s humoring me. “How about we just drive around for a while? I’ll even let you pick the music.” She nods at the glowing display on the dashboard, the hundreds of satellite stations to choose from.
I click the volume dial to Off.
Frankie laughs. “Nothing’s good enough for the prodigy behind Last Things.”
She’s teasing. I know it. She both right and wrong. I’m a total snob. But sometimes everything feels too good for me.
“That article was pretty amazing,” she says after a minute.
“You read it?”
“Sasha and I read it together.” She throws me a coy look, one eyebrow up. “They made you sound like a mysterious musical genius.”
I don’t even know what to say to this. I almost say, When actually I’m just an awkward musical dork, but I don’t want Frankie to know this. Let her think that I’m a mysterious musical genius. It’s much better than the truth.
“It’s funny, though,” Frankie is going on, because I haven’t answered. “It made me realize that I don’t know anything about your songwriting. Like, at all.”
I shift on the seat. “You’ve heard my stuff.”
“No. I mean, I don’t know how you write your songs. Where they come from. If you start with the melody, or with the words, or with the concept for the expensive music video you’ll make someday, or what.” She pauses again. I don’t speak. “So—this sounds totally corny, but where do you get your ideas?”
We’re heading past the park, along a road where the houses grow thinner and the trees grow thicker. Green walls surround us.
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Oh. So you are a mysterious musical genius.”
“No. I just—I can’t really explain it.” And then I tell her the truth. Partly. “I’m not controlling it. It just happens.”
“Hmm.” Frankie lifts that eyebrow at me again. “Maybe you have a muse.”
“What?”
“You know, how people used to think that art came from some goddess coming to you and inspiring you. They all had weird names, like Euterpe and Calliope. . . .”
“Euterpe?”
“I don’t know why that one hasn’t caught on as a baby name.” Frankie shrugs with one shoulder. “So, maybe you have a muse. Maybe some force is coming in and giving you your songs.”
There’s a gust of wind around my unzipped heart. I take a deep breath. Maybe some force is coming in . . . Yeah. She’s pretty close. But it’s not like some filmy Greek goddess is slipping into my head. It’s more like she’s breaking in with a sledgehammer. I stare down at Frankie’s bare knee until I can get my thoughts in a row again. Jesus. Even Frankie’s knee is perfect.
“It just makes being praised for it seem stupid,” I say after a minute. “I mean, if something is just giving it to you, then it’s not really your work at all.”
“I don’t know.” Frankie shrugs lightly. “It’s only stupid if you think muses are real.”
We skim along the road. The pavement is so dark with shade that it looks wet. Even with the sky bright above, the woods are thick enough to rinse us in their chilly shadows.
I want to reach over and touch Frankie’s hand. See if it’s as cold as before. I want to run my fingertips up the underside of her light brown arm, where the skin is like silk. I want it so much I can already feel it. I clench my fist instead. I keep my fingernails long, for playing the acoustic. I clench until the fingernails dig into my palm, and I keep my face rock-star blank the whole time, keep my breath steady, even when the pain starts to spear up my arm. I clench until I feel like I’ve paid, at least a tiny bit, for all of this.