Red Velvet Crush (11 page)

I know he'll never call. Dad is more a sit and wait, no news is good news kind of guy. And texting is out of the picture; his fingers are too big for his phone. I wipe my eyes, bracing myself for the good-bye.

I am cowled up in my jacket. It smells of woodsmoke and the rich tallow of meat from the night before. I lower my chin and breathe in deep, hoping that memory will stay with me a long way down the road.

Dad holds on tight for another second and then lets go, the pain of our departure already recorded and stored away for safekeeping. He watches us leave, hands jammed into his parka, the wind picking up and sweeping his dark blond hair off his forehead.

I wave as the window closes, then press my palm against the cool glass while Jay jerks us into first gear and we roll away.

I
climb onto the stage in shadowy darkness. Our first gig on the road is in a tiny basement bar called the Rathskeller. It may be small and dark and damp, but tonight the place is packed.

I see the crowd and start unsteady, with a little wobble instead of my usual rip. Every night we will get farther from home, I think. Each night will be new, a different place, with a crowd of people ready to clap or boo or, worst of all, have no reaction at all. My fingers fumble. I'm unsure how to find my way.

I turn my back on the world and let Ty lead me in.

Focusing on his face, I lock my eyes onto his. He wipes his arm across his brow and shakes his head between beats; the pink sweatband he always wears flashes on his right forearm.

His rhythm settles into me, and I imagine we are in my
garage. It's just another Saturday night. The song is familiar, the size of the space about the same. My breathing slows as I center myself on Ty.

Billie blurs between us: boots and blond hair streaking across the tiny stage as fast as she can go.

Jay holds steady on our left with a sound so low and deep I can feel it behind my back teeth, making my throat tingle. I can't bend low enough to get to the grumble of Jay's bass guitar. I stick with Ty's bass drum instead.

Ginger Baker stands tall next to Ty, his elbow so pointy in the swampy red light, so close to the crash of Ty's cymbals. His arm cuts through the air around the drum kit like a bony sickle ending in lightning fast fingers.

Feeling grounded, I straighten my spine and turn to face the crowd. I don't need to worry if the music followed me down the road or away from home because Ty will be right behind me, note by note, all summer long.

I ratchet it up a notch, and we shake the windows down the street.

The original plan was that Billie and I would share a room. We share everything, don't we? But after a long, hot day trapped in the van, followed by a set in a tiny German basement, Ty grabs my duffel bag and swings the motel room door shut behind us.

Ty throws our bags onto the sagging double bed meant for Billie, and we drop down onto the one on the other side
of the nightstand. The sleeping arrangements have changed.

The trouble is, Ty's shoulders take up too much room. I long for my skinny bed at home, the softness of my quilt. I am stuck in the crook of Ty's neck, the bleachy smell of the sheets and cheap hotel soap pressing into my nose.

I lie there for hours, flipping and flopping and sniffing the sheets until the sounds of footsteps slow in front of our door, then move on down the hall.

“Billie.” Winston's voice echoes along with the soft thudding of his fists on a door. “Billie.” I wait to see if she answers, scratchy sheet pulled to my chin.

“Billie.” Winston thumps again.

When I sit up, Ty rolls over onto his side.

My jeans and sweater are on the floor. I pull them on and grab the room key from the dresser, then give myself the once-over in the mirror so I don't run out into the hall with a condom wrapper stuck to my foot or something.

As soon as my bare feet touch the hall carpet, I wish I had put shoes on. It is spongy.

Winston is a couple of doors down, still thudding softly. The sound of the television set blares through the closed door when I step in next to him.

“How do you know she's in there?” I ask before I start to pound along with him.

He looks pissed. “Because I'm crammed in down the hall with Ginger Baker and Jay!”

I push him out of the way with my shoulder. “Don't you have a key?”

“I didn't want to just go busting in,” he says, glaring at me. “You never know what might be going on.”

I hold my hand out, and Winston drops the plastic card into it. It takes me two tries; the stupid little light keeps blinking red.

“What
is
going on?” I ask as I shove the door open.

The room is lit up like the local 7-Eleven, with the curtains to the window by the parking lot window pushed open and dirty clothes tossed all over the floor. The TV is on with the sound turned all the way up.

Billie is out cold, asleep on the floor on top of a pile of lumpy hotel pillows while a fat man on TV sells knives to insomniacs at the top of his lungs.

I click it off.

“The manager called me,” Winston says as he walks toward the bathroom. The exhaust fan is shaking up a storm over the tub, permanently rigged to work whenever the light is on. Winston reaches in and hits the switch. The room becomes quiet. “The neighbors got tired of the rattle.”

I pull the covers back on the bed, and Winston picks Billie up from the floor. He kneels on the edge of the mattress and sets her down. She curls up on her side as soon as she touches the bed, one sock dangling from her toes.

She curled up that same way, like a cat, in the bottom of
Mom and Dad's closet right after our mom left. She'd crawl in where Mom's clothes used to hang, under the empty hangers that were clumped together and pushed into the corner, abandoned, and fall asleep.

Dad would find her when he got home. No blanket, no pillow. The single bulb above the shelf, left on to scare away any monsters, was the only thing keeping her warm.

He'd pick her up, carry her into our room, and slide her onto her bed. He'd pull the covers up under her chin and smooth her hair back as I pretended to be asleep, waiting until she was brought back to her bed, snoring and snuggly, so I could fall asleep, too.

The whole closet thing lasted about a year. My dad dropped her off each night, and then everyone but me seemed to forget about it by the next day.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table each morning before school, my cereal getting soggy, trying to figure out how she'd turned on that light. It was so high above the shelf, and the string had snapped off long ago.

Tonight the room is still bright as Winston pulls the covers up over Billie and tucks them in under her chin.

I set the extra pillows onto the bed next to her while Winston shuts the curtains. I meet him at the door with the key card in my hand. I hold it out to him and shut off the lights.

He steps past me, expecting me to stay with Billie, because
I always have. I press the key card against his chest and pull the door shut.

Winston pins the card to his shirt and shakes his head. “We're going to have to figure this out tomorrow, Teddy Lee.”

I walk away, down the hall and back to Ty. Tomorrow is still a few long hours away.

“What were you thinking, Ted?” Winston asks me the next morning, as promised.

He is propped up against the outside of the roadside diner, his leg a denim kickstand covered in a trail of ash, waiting for my answer.

Honestly, I'm not thinking yet. With the door banging and the boy in my bed, I'd barely gotten any sleep last night.

The sign shaking in the wind next to the highway says
BREAKFAST ALL DAY
. Billie is inside, sitting in a booth facing the window and drinking a chocolate shake at 7:00
A.M
. She probably slept like an angel.

She bangs on the thick glass between us, waves from the inside.

A small circle steams up the window as she leans toward it, lolling the cherry from the top of her shake around in her open mouth, coated in foamy spit and red dye number three. The cherry slips from her lips and bounces off the tabletop.

“Why?” I ask Winston, as Billie's drool dries on the Formica tabletop. “Are you worried about her?”

He looks over at me with his jaw tight, and I realize, ten years later, that it was Winston who pulled the string on the closet light for Billie.

Ty and Ginger and Jay are in a booth across the aisle from Billie, huddled around mugs of coffee that are mostly milk, pretending to be awake.

“Then you sleep with her,” I say as Billie wipes her lips with the back of her hand and then sucks her shake dry in one long pull.

It is someone else's turn.

Winston glares at me and starts inside. My eyes burn with the sharp exhale of his cigarette smoke as it clouds around me. He presses his phone up against his ear and pulls the door open, probably ready to give Randy a full report.

A trucker walks up behind me, his reflection stopping next to mine in the glass. He looks in at Billie, crosses his hairy-topped arms on top of his big belly, and says, “Hell, I'll sleep with her.”

I turn toward him, and he laughs and walks away.

Inside, Ty purses his lips and bends down to blow on his coffee. He looks up and finds me staring. He waves me in through the glass and I cross the crowded diner and slide into the booth by his side, leaving Billie all on her own.

Ginger listens to classical music. I know. I can hear it leaking through his headphones when he takes them off
for a second. Beethoven and Bach and things like that.

I am squeezed onto the van's bench seat between him and Billie. Billie and I are playing hangman on the back of a paper place mat from the diner, and she is stealing her words from billboards as we pass.

She gives it away, her eyes glancing to the side of the road whenever it is her turn. “Steakhouse.” “Rest stop.” “Hot showers.”

I wait for her, watching the grass waving along the sides of the freeway. It is tall and dusty green with pools of purple that disappear as it sways, pulled along by the wind and the draft of eighteen wheelers loaded with cattle and performance tires and frozen food.

I admit it, “saltwater taffy” takes me awhile. Billie bites the end of the pen and grins at me as my hangman gets feet, then hands, then a handlebar mustache. Somehow I missed that one when it rolled by.

Jay and Ty are up front, driving and navigating, while Winston leans in between the bucket seats from his spot in the middle, playing with the radio and lighting cigarettes with the dashboard lighter as the mile markers fly by.

But Ginger Baker is lost somewhere, centuries ago, his fingers twitching along on an imaginary fortepiano posing as a shag-covered bench. He is scribbling away, making brisk pencil strokes on a lined page in a leather notebook, stopping to compare it with another sheet of graph paper that he has
half hidden under his long, skinny leg as he juggles a coffee in his other hand.

I am not judging his musical choice, and I am not entirely surprised by it. Classical seems like the perfect fit for Ginger. It is full of structure and purpose and feeling, but without words—just like him.

Maybe I am a little bit impressed and, okay, jealous. I can play better by ear than by reading music. If I close my eyes and listen to a song, I can knock it out with the few chords I know. If I try to read the music, it takes me awhile 'cause I can't feel it as much when my eyes are busy.

I study Ginger, wondering how what he is listening to morphs into the scribbles coming out of his hand. I wish I could climb right into his head, that I could write music the proper way, like him.

“Someday can you teach me how to do that?” I ask, staring at the sharp little notes with long winged tops stretching across the paper, ordered and systematic.

Billie crowds in, the hangman word she is working on forgotten. Her bottom lip sticks out as she examines the paper in Ginger's lap.

“Then Ty is going to teach me the guitar,” she says, swaying as we change lanes.

“Why do you always have to get something if I get something?” I ask. It's like she is still five years old and we are getting chocolate bars at the grocery store.

“It's only fair.”

“To who?”

Ginger watches us, silent as always. He would be an excellent secret keeper. Or spy.

“To me,” Billie says. Of course, what was I thinking?

“Besides,” she says, looking over at Ginger, “he didn't say yes.”

She twists away, filling in the blanks below the hangman's noose, pressing hard with the ballpoint pen. “Up yours,” it says, but there are three spaces left over.

“He doesn't say anything,” I say, grabbing the pen.

I draw in her hangman. Crook his neck and dangle his toes. Dead.

I am afraid I bothered Ginger, botched up his brilliance somehow with my unexpected request, because he has stopped writing. I lick my lips, suddenly nervous around this innocuous boy, this quiet creature who has probably never made anyone's pulse race.

His freckles grow together as I stare too hard, watching him return to his work. He slows, deliberately drawing two big dots at the end of a staff. I know enough to know that means repeat. He looks up at me, waiting.

“Someday can you teach me how to do that?” I ask again.

He nods and turns away, never even stopping to pause his music.

In the world of music, you gotta go with who you are. And we are not Command Option Control, the techno band we are opening for. I peek out at the mostly packed tapas bar, completely unsure how and why Randy and Winston booked us this gig. Maybe we are getting paid in tacos.

With Randy tapping into his never-ending network of retired alcoholics strung across the Pacific Northwest for gigs, every night has been different: biker bars, nightclubs, house parties, bowling alleys.

Usually we don't have the time to get nervous. The van starts to shake and chatter at anything over seventy miles per hour, so most nights we walk in and we are on, practically.

It's good that way. It stops us from peeing our collective pants when we learn the headliners are a speed metal band called Black Zipper, like we did last night. Or, like tonight, when we discover my amp is blowing blue smoke again.

I twist my microphone into the stand and check out the crowd.

They all have full-on fancy square eyeglasses and bright white snug-tight T-shirts. The girls and the guys and the band itself are a mob of nearsightedness and Clorox bleach.

Last night was better.

Last night there was some flannel out there. Plus a chick with pink streaks in her hair, as well as a bunch of skinny, tattooed guys that gathered in the back. It was a good fit—a little rich, a little sweet, and some potential for damage.