Red Velvet Crush (15 page)

A generator kicks in, and the lights come on again, half-mast and ghostly green. A sigh and some clapping come from the mass of bodies below.

“Those sad little pyros,” Winston swears as he walks on from backstage, lighting a cigarette and rolling up his sleeves.

“AFI wannabes.” Jay joins in, reaching for a cigarette.

Winston bends down and tries one of the amps. Nothing.

Ty stands, slips his sticks into his back pocket, and walks over.

“We look like schmucks waiting around up here,” he worries. “Like amateurs.”

Jay laughs. “We are amateurs.”

I unplug my guitar. Pull it over my head and set it on the floor as I search the stage. My heart thuds and stops.

“Where's Billie?” I ask.

A slippery curl of smoke is leaking from one of the coffee cans in the front corner, catching my eye. I cross the stage and find my sister there, down on the floor, standing with a small crowd circling her.

She is gray and crooked. Her arm is hanging funny, and I can see a line of sweat above her brow, even in the half-light of the generators.

I jump down off the edge of the stage.

“Billie?”

She is breathing hard, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

“Something's not right,” she says.

Then she pukes all over me.

B
illie rolls over and knocks into me with her cast. It is bright white in the early-morning light and scratchy. She drops it on the pillow next to my head. Her eyes flutter open, and she whimpers, “My prostaglandins hurt.”

I try to move her fat white arm over without hurting her, but it won't budge, as if the plaster and the bedsheets have become one. I slide myself out of its way instead—sleeping beside Billie has always been a contact sport—and she falls back to sleep.

I reach over and touch the tips of her fingers, lightly. Last night an ER nurse in light blue scrubs wrapped Billie's skinny arm in plaster until it weighed more than Billie.

I watched, sitting on the edge of the hospital bed. I held Billie's free hand, the fingertips of her right hand on the verge
of disappearing under all that wrapping.

“Dad, she's okay,” Winston said from the other side of the thin white curtain that hung between us.

Two more wraps, and Billie's fingers would be gone.

“She's fine,” he said. “Just a broken arm.”

Just, I thought. Dad probably loved that: just a broken arm.

“No, you don't need to come. I can handle it.”

I saw his boots pacing. They passed once, turned around, and kept going.

“We're all fine.” His voice drifted down the hall that smelled like pain coated over with Pine-Sol and a little bit of prayer.

Shing! The nurse was done. She pulled the white curtain open, exposing Billie to the world again. My sister looked skinny, compared with that cast, and she smelled awful, like smoke and puke and plaster.

When Winston got us back to the capital
H
hotel, I crawled into bed with Billie, knowing I was going to be battered and abused, but certain that she shouldn't be alone. She already had a broken arm, one bruised rib, and three prescriptions to be filled. Good thing she wasn't that drunk or we could have added a rap sheet to that list.

Careful not to move Billie or her arm, I roll over and feel for the prescriptions on the nightstand. I get a whiff of myself when I move. I am still wearing my shirt from last night, the one covered in Billie's puke and dried tears and my nervous exhaust.

I click the TV on, set it on mute, and find some cartoons for Billie to wake up to. I slide out of bed and grab a shirt off the chair on my way to the bathroom. It is Billie's, so it is going to be way too tight and way too sparkly, but its lack of little chunks of pink french fries glued to the front appeals to me.

The bamboo-printed wallpaper in the hotel bathroom is peeling, and the bathtub is older than my dad. It feels like the towels have been around since before his birth, too. My skin hurts a little when I dry off after my shower.

I knock on the door to Winston's room with dripping wet hair and Billie's prescriptions in my back pocket. He has the cash, and he knows the way. Everybody else can sleep in.

The Barracuda Lounge paid us for last night, even though we didn't finish our set. I think they were worried about getting sued. The Blasting Cap boys chipped in, too, once they saw how they had broken Billie. Miniature bastards.

Winston opens the door and tugs on a hooded sweatshirt and his leather jacket. His hair is wet, too. I hold out the car keys to him.

The van coughs into life, and Winston pulls hard on his first cigarette of the day. I count the remaining cash, and he turns on the radio, flipping past NPR and morning talk until he finds some rock. His leg bounces all the way to the drugstore.

Winston doesn't like hospitals, doctors' offices, pharmacies, funeral parlors, or hair salons. Basically any place sterile and
possibly antiseptic. Still, he stands next to me, tall and tight, as we wait for Billie's prescriptions to be filled. His eyes are locked on the shiny tiled floor, and it feels an awful lot like the time he had to take me to the drugstore to buy my very first box of tampons.

He stood the same way that day, stiff and awkward, planted in front of a wall of pink and blue and lavender boxes. He acted like we'd never met before while I searched the rows, looking for something familiar, a box I might have seen at school or under somebody's sink during a sleepover—but nothing.

I was nervous, standing there, trying to figure it out, just the two of us. My tears built, waiting for something to push them over the edge so they could spill down my hot, embarrassed cheeks.

Winston twitched his leg and reached for a royal blue box.

“These are the kind I think Mom used,” he said, holding the box at arm's length, obviously out of his element.

They looked cheap. And generic. Nothing like anything that I would want to stick into my body. I shook my head no, my breath running at a rapid pace, and Winston put them back on the shelf.

Mrs. Cornwall, local school lunch lady and PTA president, was coming at us with a red store apron tied over her Christmas sweater and a tight smile on her face. Her rubber-soled shoes gripped onto the floor with a squeak and a squeak and a squeak.

I grabbed a soft pink box with the words “comfort glide” scrolled in the upper right corner before I heard one more squeak and started to cry right there in the tampon aisle. I headed for the cash register with my eyes down, wishing I had a mother.

Winston trailed behind me with a five-dollar bill in his hand, silent and steady, probably wishing the exact same thing.

A mother would be nice right now, too.

I wrap my jacket around me tighter, fighting off the onslaught of air conditioning. Like Winston said last night, it's just a broken arm. We will figure it out.

“Carter,” the white coat behind the counter calls out.

“Carter,” it repeats, louder.

I look over at Winston. He looks at me. We both look around. The place is overly fluorescent and completely deserted. There are only bottles of sweet cherry cough syrup, flushable undergarments, whiplash collars, and us. Why is this guy yelling?

We laugh and start to shuffle toward the counter to put the poor lab coat out of his misery.

“What will you do?” Winston asks.

“Is it only up to me?”

“Well,” he says, “it is your band. Not mine. Or Billie's.”

He looks over at me instead of staring at the floor.

“I don't know,” I say.

Maybe this should be it. Maybe we should be done. Maybe
when your little sister twirls off the stage and snaps an arm, the universe is trying to tell you something.

I know that Winston wants to go on, that he has found some kind of honor in this, some code of the samurai, and he wants to do what he said he would and finish the tour. It is very un-Winston of him, and it makes me want to help him get there. But he isn't going to tell me what to do, not now, because then it will be his fault if it falls apart.

We step up to the counter.

“You could do it all, you know,” Winston says as the lab guy pokes out our total on his computer screen. “Without her.”

So he does want to keep going, broken arm or not, Billie or not.

“I know.”

Winston pays with a smooth sheaf of bills pulled from his back pocket. I reach past him and grab the white paper bag.

He pauses. “But you won't.”

The drugs knock and rattle inside the bag. No, I probably won't, I think as Winston curls the change in his palm and we walk toward the door.

And I hate that about me.

I flop back into bed as soon as Winston and I return from our early-morning run to the drugstore. I wake up hours later, all alone, with only an empty spot in the bed where Billie used to
be. A pack of Sharpies lie open on her pillow. I lean up on my elbow and grab the closest one, stopping the pool of pink that is staining the sheets.

The TV, still playing silently, is now set to an infomercial for an exercise machine built of rubber bands. The room smells like brand-new markers and sleep.

I follow a trail of dirty clothes and find Billie in the bathtub, cast propped up on the edge, bubbles swirling around her body. All the towels are pulled off the metal rack and stacked on the floor at the edge of the tub, like bunting.

“How do you feel?” I ask, sliding down the wall next to the tub.

She points over the tip of her cast at the sink. Two of the orange pill bottles Winston and I picked up wait there, caps off. Pills litter the edge of the sink, melting in puddles and sticking to one another.

“Better.”

She must have wandered out of the room while I was asleep; she already has scribbles all over her cast.

I reach for her arm.

“You've been busy,” I say.

“Boom! Out Goes the Lights” is written in bright blue.

A random phone number is printed neatly in black near her elbow.

Dark green letters spell out “Way 2 Stage Dive! And “AWWWWwwww”
is written in red ink, a long, twisting
string that makes its way around the top edge of the cast and then trails down her wrist, getting smaller and smaller on its way back around toward her thumb.

Tugging her arm closer to me, I take the pink marker and write:

If Lost or Broken, Please Return to:

Teddy Lee

Tiny House at the End of the Street

Crazytown, USA

Billie reads what I've written, wrinkles her nose, and pulls her arm away. She points her toes and presses them up against the faucet.

“So . . . ,” she says, slipping down, chin just above the water, “looks like my guitaring days are over. I should probably start learning your songs now.”

Sighing, I press the back of my head hard against the wall. Of course that is what she thinks. I have something, and Billie wants it, no matter the cost.

I grab her before she can slide under.

“Not now,” I say, wishing she were normal. Not broken and bruised and so damn Billie. I wish there were any way to win with her, any way other than giving in. “Not at least until your bone sets.”

She splashes and looks away.

I push myself up from the floor, stop, and stare at myself in the mirror. I pretend not to see Billie in the background,
picking at the fluff around the edge of her cast by her fingers, watching me, waiting for me to give in and change my mind like I always have.

Damn you, Winston, I think as I drop the marker and grab one of the sticky pills off the countertop. Why couldn't you be a ninja-level martial artist or a monster of motocross and just leave me alone? Leave me out of decisions and responsibility and the opportunity to disappoint everyone. Leave me to my music and myself, just like I was.

I wipe the pill dry with a hand towel from the floor, hearing a voice that is a lot like Winston's booming in the back of my head: “'Cause nobody ever got famous playing the guitar alone in their bedroom.”

Yeah? Well who says I want to be famous?

I don't stop until the rest of the pills are dry. I drop them back into the bottles, counting up the cost of each one as they plink into the plastic bottoms. I add them up, telling myself we can't afford to miss tonight. Not after a trip to the emergency room. There is no way I am going home with empty pockets, a dishonored brother, and a broken sister. The show must go on.

Billie turns on the tap with her foot. She toes it to the right, all the way past hot.

“Do you think you can do it tonight?” I ask, turning toward her and the mountain of steam rising from the tub.

She looks so tiny, so swallowed up. But she nods with
certainty. No big deal. No doubt.

I wish I knew what that feels like.

“Bring me some more bubbles,” she says, just bossy enough to get the job done. “I'm starting to see the bottom.”

So I pour them in, pink and pearly. They mix with the water, bubbling up to the edge, lapping at Billie's cast and broad grin. I add more, drowning her in a shimmering sea of hopeful sparkle, shine, and pop. Then I sink down, rest along the edge, and wait for her to wrinkle.

There is only a dusting of applause as our last notes drift over the stage and dissolve into the crowd. It lands on my shoulders and weighs me down.

Billie has been a pain in the ass all night. Tonight and every night of the week since she broke her arm, really, singing off-key and mumbling her way through the choruses, leaving me and the boys dragged down by the end of each set, wishing it were over.

But Billie won't be happy until she gets what she wants. No worries if that makes everyone else—especially me—hate her. She is used to getting her way no matter what, and since I am the only one who can give in and let her sing my songs, she's going to make every moment onstage miserable for me. Ty and Jay and Ginger are just along for the ride.

Ty's sticks tumble impatiently on top of his snare after we grind to a halt.

“Get your shitkickers out, boys!” Winston says sarcastically as he climbs up onto the stage from the dingy bar floor. “We might have to fight our way out tonight.”

The crowd is milling around with straight faces and dirty work boots. Most of the drinkers sitting around the bar turned their backs on us during the last song, not even waiting until we got to the end to act unimpressed.

All the older men in plaid shirts and big belt buckles are making me miss my dad, miss home. It would be great to wake up and know where I am.

“Let's get the hell out of this bar.” Ty pushes back from his drum kit with his eyes cast down and hooded, hiding from me.

“This is not a bar,” Jay says. The flames on his guitar strap glimmer as the lights flash and then dim. “This is a sweat sock with a soda machine in the corner.”

He's right. The bar is down a deep set of stairs, and it is cavernously dark inside. A shoebox with rectangular windows positioned way up high that glow with leftover streetlight. It looks like it used to be a bunker or a bomb shelter.

A small circular dance floor is cut out of dark carpeting. The barstools are black and fake leather, with high curved backs and long silver legs. They have those old glass candles, dark red and gold, wrapped in plastic netting sitting on the black horseshoe-shaped bar.