Dear Rockstar (4 page)

“I hear he’s coming to the Silverdome in December.”

I nodded. Okay so I couldn’t deny it, that much was clear. Besides, why did I want to? There was no shame in being a Tyler Vincent fan. He had lots of them. Millions of them. So why was I blushing like a school girl?

“You going?”

I nodded again. Aimee and I had plans to camp out for tickets, like we always did, determined to get closer than thirteenth row, which was the closest we’d ever been, even in spite of being the very first in line on the day Ticketmaster began selling tickets.

“Is there a problem, young lady?” Woodall’s pointer was pointing right at me.

“No.” I straightened in my seat, putting my feet on the floor.

“Good.” He glanced between me and Dale, lips pursed. Then he slapped the periodic table with his pointer. “Then perhaps you could identify this element for me?”

I stared at the big K on the chart and the only science word I could think of was “Kelvin” which was a unit of temperature, not an element. K? What in the hell did K stand for?

“Kryptonite?” I croaked and the whole class cracked up. My face was on fire.

Dale leaned in, closer this time. I felt his nose brush my hair as he whispered into my ear, “Potassium.”

“No, Miss Wilson. Kryp
ton
is over here.” He slapped the periodic table with his pointer. “Krypton
ite
only exists in comic books.”

I looked at Dale suspiciously, doubtful, but I said it anyway. “Potassium. It’s potassium.”

Woodall raised his eyebrows and gave a short nod. “Correct. Mr. Diamond? This element?”

Woodall stayed over on that end of the periodic table, pointing to the PO.

“Polonium,” Dale replied and Woodall gave that short nod again, moving on to the Flashdance twins. I would have logically thought PO was potassium. Who named these things? Some confused, dyslexic scientist with no life, obviously.

“Thanks,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth and saw the flash of his smile.

“You’re welcome,” he whispered back.

He cocked his head so I could see both of his eyes on me, a gesture I was beginning to find quite endearing. “So are you going to the Tyler Vincent concert?”

“Yeah. We go every year.” Probably too much information. I wondered if he was a fan. He had to know how much he resembled the rock star. People must have told him before.

He frowned, brows knitting together, his perfect mouth—was there anything about him that wasn’t perfect?—puckered slightly like he’d just tasted something sour. “Who’s
we?”

Neither of us noticed the class had grown quiet and Mr. Woodall was looking right at us. Not until he spoke up anyway.

“Would you two like to come have your conversation up here so we can all share in whatever is clearly far more important than chemistry?”

I shook my head, trying to make myself as small as possible, thinking if Mr. Woodall only knew... It was pretty clear that there was nothing in the world more important than chemistry, and it was happening right now at my table, far more dangerous than any experiment. Elements were mixing over here that had the potential to blow up my entire life. Things had been mixed that couldn’t be unmixed. Chemistry. Indeed.

Dale glanced up, looking annoyed at the interruption, and some part of me thrilled at the aloof, cool way he eyed Mr. Woodall up at the front of the classroom.

“We’re good, thanks.” Dale gave him back that same, short, dismissive nod and, to my surprise, Woodall hesitated only a moment before moving on with his questions. He was up to Holly now, two tables over.

Dale picked up my drawing pencil—I never used number-two’s and always had to borrow them for Scantron tests. My pencils were always B’s or H’s. The one Dale picked up was a softer B-2. He turned it over in his hand, black instead of yellow, unfamiliar in a school environment, outside of an art class, and then pulled my notebook over in front of him on the desk.

I raised my eyebrows in a question as he began to write on the blank page.

Sorry about that. This guy is totally lame.

Nodding in agreement, I made a face, and he smiled again. Oh that smile—and that dimple! I wanted to touch it, just put my finger right there, just once. It was almost as appealing as the familiar dent in his chin. He was writing again.

You have a great smile.

Had I been smiling? I shook my head, covering my smile with my hand, but he silently protested, grabbing my wrist and pulling my hand back down to my lap. That just made me smile more.

So who’s
WE?

He underlined
WE
twice, raising his eyebrows at me in question, tipping the pencil toward me. I took it, turning the notebook so I could write a response.

My best friend, Aimee, and me.

He nodded, smiling again, taking the pencil back.

No boyfriend?

I shook my head, feeling my cheeks starting to get red for the millionth time that afternoon, and that’s when I noticed the class had grown quiet again. Woodall came around the desks, stalking toward us, slapping his hand down on my notebook.

“I said…
no distractions
!” He picked up my notebook, taking it up to the front of the room while the rest of the class watched with amusement as he threw it into the garbage can. It was like throwing my heart in the trash. All my drawings!

Dale nudged me and I turned to look at him, distraught. He pointed to the beige surface of the table where he’d written,
I’ll get it back for you
.

I nodded stiffly, but couldn’t take my eyes off the edge of my notebook sticking out of the top of the garbage can. I wanted to run up and rescue it. I glanced at the clock. It was nearing time to go, thank God.

Dale touched my knee with his, getting my attention. He pointed to the table again.

U OK?

I shook my head, taking the pencil and scribbling beneath his words.

It’s important.

I felt my throat closing up, like I was going to cry, and fought it, blinking back tears and looking at the clock. Time couldn’t move fast enough. Woodall was passing back our pop quizzes, nearing our table.

Dale shifted toward me again, his knee against mine, nodding at the table. I looked down.

I promise
.

He’d underlined that twice too.

He was writing again when Woodall slapped my pop quiz down in front of me with a big, fat D+ in red circled at the top, turning to move on to the Flashdance twins, and then he glanced back, seeing the writing on the table, his face going from puzzled to incredulous to furious in the space of about two seconds.

“You’re both staying after to wash these desks!” Woodall’s voice was actually shaking with anger, his face so red it was nearly purple. “This is inexcusable!”

I just nodded in agreement, nudging Dale under the table when he went to open his mouth and say something. Whatever it was couldn’t be good and would just serve to get us into more trouble. And we were already in deep enough. All I wanted to do was pass this class—and a D+ was passing.

I bit my lip and looked at Dale. He shrugged and when Woodall wasn’t looking, he crossed his eyes. I smiled in spite of the sick feeling in my stomach. Woodall continued to pass out graded quizzes, shaking his head and grumbling. Dale dug in his pocket, pulling out the Skittles again. He poured some into his palm, fishing through and using all the red ones to make a little heart on the desk.

I couldn’t help smiling at the gesture. He nodded toward them with that same
“Go on,”
cock of his head and when I swept them into my hand, I noticed the last thing he had written.

Make it up to you? I can get you front row seats.

My mouth, already full of red Skittles, dropped open. I only closed it again to keep all the candy from falling onto the floor. I think my eyes held the question—
are you serious?
—when I turned to him, because he smiled and dropped me a wink.

Glancing back at Woodall, Dale grabbed the pencil, daring to scribble again on the table.

#?

For a minute I felt faint again. There was a buzzing in my ears.

Instead of risking the table again, I grabbed my purse, digging through and finding a red pen. I reached over and took his hand, feeling calluses on his fingers as I turned it over, the touch of our hands making my body sing, so I could write on the back of it:
Sara 263-3231

When I drew a fat, red heart around it, he smiled.

     
CHAPTER FOUR     

“Hey, thanks for the ride.” Dale looked at me over the red-and-Bondo-colored hood of my Dodge Dart in the late afternoon sunshine. In the light, his dark hair was a thick, blue-black—not unlike a certain rock star—and it made my heart skip in just the same way. The flash of his smile showed that dimple again, like a secret wink. “I’m sorry I got your notebook thrown out.”

“Forget it.” I opened the driver’s side door, tossing my notebook and purse in the back seat. “You got it back, that’s all that matters.”

We’d spent half an hour after class spraying the tables with Windex and wiping them down with paper towel. I was worried about Aimee. I was supposed to meet her in the parking lot—I was her ride home. Dale offered to skip out and find her, risking Woodall’s wrath, but I wouldn’t let him. If I turned up missing, I knew she would catch a ride with Carrie and Wendy, if she didn’t make the city bus. I’d just have to hear about it later.

Woodall gave us both an extra assignment for good measure but had been thankfully been called to the office over the P.A. before he could finish his lecture, and that’s when we grabbed my notebook, leaving the Windex and paper towels on his desk, and took off, practically running through the empty hallways and breaking out of the back doors like two prisoners escaping a maximum security prison.

“Free at last!” Dale shouted, pumping his fist in the air, making me laugh as we made our way across the practically empty parking lot toward my beat-up car.

“So where to?” I asked as Dale got in and immediately went for the radio.

“Kensington Gardens.”

“What?” I turned to him, stunned. The coincidences just kept on coming!

“The apartment complex. Over on Wisteria.”

“Yeah, I know. I live there.” I pulled out of the nearly empty parking lot and turned right, heading toward home.

“I know.” Dale settled on the classic rock station, beginning to flip through the cassettes I had tucked into the console. “You laid out a lot this summer at the pool. Black and white bikini?”

“Oh.” I blushed. Our apartment complex had a pool and Aimee and I had spent a lot of our summer spreading ourselves with her “homemade goop”—a mixture of coconut and baby oil and God only knew what else—and working on our tans while we ran the batteries out on her boom box listening to Tyler Vincent. “Yeah, that was me.”

“And that was your friend, Aimee, with you?” Dale assumed. I just nodded. He was listing my cassettes under his breath as he looked through them. “U2. Duran Duran. Madonna. Rick Springfield. And of course, Tyler Vincent. Do you listen to anything that isn’t Top 40?”

“What’s wrong with Top 40?” I protested, feeling defensive about my music choices. “I never saw you at the pool.”

“I had a busy summer.” He opened the glove compartment, finding more cassettes inside, starting to flip through those too. “No time to swim.”

“Doing what?”

“Getting my band up to snuff.”

“Your band?” Did the similarities to Tyler Vincent never end? “What sort of band?”

“You like the Dead Kennedys?” He glanced down at his shirt, pointing. “The Cure? INXS?”

“Ummm…” I shrugged. I’d heard of them, but that was about it.

“Oh that’s right, you like Tyler Vincent.” He was teasing me, grinning, and I told myself to take it lightly, not to overreact, but I hated it when people made fun of Tyler Vincent.

“Don’t do it!” he begged me. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!”

“You know you look like him.” I changed the subject, glancing up at the red light we were stuck at, waiting for it to turn, trying to keep my cool, but the hair on the back of my neck was standing up.

“Nah, he looks like me.” His eyes—a decidedly devilish blue—narrowed slightly at my comment. The light still hadn’t turned and we looked at each other across the console. I didn’t like to be teased about my thing for Tyler Vincent, but from the look on his face, he didn’t like to be compared to him either. It was a brief, tense moment. “Is that why you offered to give me a ride home instead of making me call a cab?”

“No, it was the front row seats you promised.” I stuck my tongue out at him as the light turned green and I gave it some gas.

He laughed. “Touché.”

“You must know someone at Ticketmaster,” I mused. The thought of front row seats to see Tyler Vincent seemed almost too good to be true. Was he telling me the truth? “Or the radio station?”

“Yeah, I know someone,” he agreed, going back to his search through my glove compartment. “Hey! The Violent Femmes. There might be hope for you yet.”

I rolled my eyes. “So you obviously don’t play any Tyler Vincent.”

“Occasionally.” He made a face. “We have to do some covers, because the crowds want to hear familiar songs. Some day I’m going to perform my own.”

“So punk rock?” I prompted. “Like the Dead Kennedys?”

“Yes and no.” Dale closed the glove compartment, giving up. “I spent most of last summer in Seattle and you wouldn’t believe the music coming out of there. It’s like hardcore punk mixed with heavy metal and something else, like its own thing. You’ve never heard anything like it. That’s what I do. What I write, what I play.”

“Where can I hear you? Are you playing clubs?”

“Some, when we can get the gigs.” Something about his energy had shifted. He wasn’t so cool and casual and who-gives-a-crap anymore. “We’re auditioning for MTV’s Battle of the Bands. By then we should have it all together. I hope.”

“You don’t sound convinced.” We were coming up to Kensington Gardens, three stories high, red brick face, windows like dark eyes. It reminded me of a prison, even with the tall white columns in front, and my heart always sank when I pulled into the parking lot.

“Well, I got these guys together this summer,” he admitted. “We’re working hard, but the band I had back in Maine… we’d been together for years.”

So he had lived in Maine—Wendy had been right.

“But you moved to New Jersey,” I reminded him.

“I know.” He sighed, looking up at the apartment building in front of us, and I wondered if I looked just as forlorn when I contemplated its red brick visage. “Up until today, I couldn’t tell you one good thing about living in this hellhole.”

I nodded, fully agreeing with his assessment. “Wait… what happened today?”

He turned and looked at me, a question in his eyes, a half-smile playing on his lips, like he thought I must be kidding him. “I met you, duh.”

“Oh,” I replied stupidly, feeling even dumber than I sounded, but he didn’t seem to mind. His gaze moved over my face, lingering for a moment on my lips, and I licked them nervously, attempting to change the subject. “So why did you move here?”

Dale glanced back at the apartments, looking up and waving to someone standing in a window. “My dad got a job teaching at Rutgers. He couldn’t turn it down.”

“Rutgers?” It wasn’t Harvard or Yale, but it was still pretty prestigious. “Wow.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m at the stupid academy.” Dale hooked a thumb in his belt, drawing my attention there to the silver studs as he leaned back in the passenger’s seat with another sigh. “If I get my high school diploma, my dad can send me to Rutgers for free.”

I blinked in surprise. “That’s quite a deal. A degree from Rutgers for free?”

“I don’t plan on going to Rutgers,” he replied flatly, giving me a dark look.

“What do you plan on doing?” I asked, although I had a feeling I already knew. He didn’t respond but the answer was written all over his face. He didn’t just
look
like Tyler Vincent—Dale Diamond wanted to
be
Tyler Vincent. Or some cooler, funkier version of the rock star, I could only assume, from his Dead Kennedys t-shirt and his ultimate disdain for my cassette collection.

“Let me guess,” I smirked. “You want to be a rock star?”

“I gotta go.” He reached for the door handle and I felt my stomach clench into a ball, suddenly sorry I’d teased him.

“Hey, wait.” I grabbed his arm. It was warm and muscular and the touch was electric. When he looked at me, my breath went away. I had never had such an instant attraction to someone and it scared me a little. “I didn’t mean anything. I think you’d make a great rock star. Hell, you already sort of look like one. I like rock stars. Remember?”

He relented a little, giving me half a smile, but not enough to bring out that dimple in his cheek.

“Do you have a car?” I inquired. 

He shook his dark head. “I sold it last year to pay for a new guitar.”

“Do you want a ride to the academy?” I offered. I had to pick up Aimee, of course, but she was just down the road. I tried to imagine her reaction when I showed up with Dale Diamond in the car.

I patted the dashboard of my Dodge Dart affectionately. “I know my baby here is old and temperamental, but she’s transportation. I worked all summer at a Dairy Queen to buy her. Four hundred bucks.”

“You got taken.”

I laughed and he rewarded me with a real dimple-making smile.

“So, do you want a ride on Monday?”

“Yeah. That would be great.” He looked down at my hand, still touching his arm. “Hey… can I still call you tonight?”

“If you want to.” I suddenly wanted him to, very much.

“I want to.” He got out of the car.

I didn’t believe in fate. Strange coincidences happened all the time, but it was all just random, nothing we could control. That’s what I told myself as I watched Dale go into the building.

But I didn’t quite believe it anymore.

I heard it before I even got out of the car, and everything inside of me went silent. I sat there for a moment, hating to go inside. Hating
him.

I gathered my purse and notebook and opened the car door. I was glad Dale lived somewhere up on the third floor and had already gone in. I didn’t want him to hear this.
I
didn’t want to hear this. Dried leaves crunched under my feet as I walked toward the apartment building door. There was one lone tree at the side of the building. It looked as lost and forlorn as I felt.

Inside the building it was a little warmer. Just down that short flight of steps and beyond that plain white door, a monster waited. The yelling got louder. I hated coming here every day, to this dingy building, with its rust-colored carpet and peeling walls. I remembered a time when there was a house to come home to, before the stepbeast had lost his longest-running job. Then there was a succession of lost jobs—and this place.