Red Velvet Crush (18 page)

B
eing a senior gets me a better locker, but that's about all I can say to recommend the experience so far. Everyone is running around, crazed and college bound, talking about scholarships and grants and early acceptance.

College is not even on my mind. All those decisions still seem light-years away somehow, completely insignificant, even though I am here every day, books and backpack, pens and paper in hand.

I am glad to be upright. Out of the house. Away from Winston's jiggling and Dad's worried looks. The farthest I can see down the road right now is the bell at the end of the day.

I thought about not going back. It seriously crossed my mind. And then I thought: How many hours a day can I spend watching stolen cable? Or swallowing down Winston's
secondhand smoke? Sure, school kind of sucks, but at least they give me a ticket every morning for a free hot lunch.

Rumors about Billie flourish and grow. She is touring the world. Has leukemia. Got knocked up over the summer and was sent away to a home for wayward girls to save our family from further embarrassment.

On the fourth day of classes, one of the rumors catches up to me in the library during study hall. My books are spread out in front of me on a round table, warding off any spirited sophomore with bad skin who might decide to sit down next to me sporting his first boner. It happens.

Instead I get two little freshman girls in striped tights, short skirts, and tiny T-shirts stretched over long john tops. Billies in training.

The one with auburn hair steps up to me and says, “Is it true your sister ran away with a carny?”

The other one gulps.

I look up from my notebook and stare.

“Yes,” I say. “She did.”

The two freshmen turn and look at each other wide eyed.

I sit up straight and glance around the room before I lean in closer.

“I saw them,” I say. I slide my American literature book over and nudge her beige little fingernails off my table. “They all had tiny hands.”

She pulls her hand back and grabs her friend by the arm,
their chain-linked purses swinging as they skitter across the quiet library, only checking back once to glare at me.

At least that version of the story is closest to true: the Blasting Cap boys are freakishly small. But mostly I let people believe whatever they want. September is slipping by one week at a time, and I am still rocking myself to sleep at night, watching the moon make its way across my window. The world is still moving; life, apparently, still goes on. My heart doesn't believe it much.

I sleep little, and my dreams are full of long, empty hallways and glimpses of Ty—his back, his arm, his hand—but never him.

Billie shows up, too, in somebody else's shoes, smiling like the Cheshire cat. I miss seeing her messy blond hair pooling on top of her pillow across the room in the moonlight. I even miss hearing her annoying loud breathing when I wake up.

I stay in my bed late one Saturday morning, feeling battered and frayed, another week's worth of schoolwork and just as many sleepless nights behind me. My fingers are stiff. I haven't played in so long.

My nose is cold outside the blankets. It is finally, definitely fall. The weak slant of light sneaking under my curtains confirms it. Fall.

I roll over, smushing my pillow so it will fit my neck, and listen to Dad outside my door as he packs his lunch in the kitchen and leaves.

Rolling onto my other side, I wait for Winston.

He coughs to life. There is the flick of a lighter, the flush of the toilet, and then the slam of the front door. The van roars from the front yard before it calms down and then rattles away down the street. Will Jay ever come back and take that thing away?

Flipping over again, I face the wall, snuggling down under my quilt and the extra blankets I stole from Billie's bed. I stretch, slipping into the soft sheets and silence of the empty house, reminding myself that swimming around in thoughts and memories of Ty won't do me any good. He is still gone. So is Billie.

I think I hear something in the garage. It sounds like a guitar. I lie still, my ears straining. Thieves don't usually tune up before stealing your shit, do they?

There's the creak of the side door and the sound of shifting, as if the boxes and other crap out there were being put into place. Followed by a bass line—I'm pretty sure. The windows shimmy in their frames.

I sit straight up. Is that “Smoke on the Water”?

I tiptoe out of bed and peek out the corner of my window. The side door to the garage
is
cracked open. The glass in front of me vibrates with a low, long note. I grab a sweatshirt, pull it on over my pajamas, and head for the garage.

The grass between the house and the garage was a beaten-down dirt path when we left, but over the summer, it had a chance to sprout up and spread out.

My bare feet step lightly on top of the springy green shoots, and I pass the peony bush, unsure what I am about to find, other than someone now playing The Doors, and playing them well.

I cross the threshold to the garage with the doorknob held tight in my hand. My guitar has been set up across the room. It rests against a stool, the case locked and stowed under Winston's workbench.

Someone has straightened up since the last time I was in here. That was the night we got back, when all I could manage to do was dump my stuff into a shitty pile. Now I can see the floor; a semicircle has been swept clean. A road map of black cords navigates toward the nearest outlet.

Ginger Baker is standing in the shadows. He lifts his chin at me when I walk in, but he doesn't stop playing. I smile. It is the closest we have ever gotten to hello.

Blocks of morning light are breaking through the dirty windows of the garage door: warm, glowing squares that land on the spots where Billie and I used to stand. The sound of Ginger's guitar pulls me closer. When he can play like that, there is no need for us to talk.

I take a seat on a stool as Ginger rolls into another song. I listen, my toes curling around the base of the stool and warming in the morning sun.

The music loosens the lock on my thoughts, softening up the black hole that Ty left behind and towing me back to
earth. I haven't played a note or heard a song in my head since the night I saw the two of them together. I didn't realize how much I have been missing it, how much it means to me. But I'm not ready yet. I just listen for now.

The squares of light grow warmer and brighter, song after song, as they slowly slide up the wall behind me while Ginger plays.

They are long and skinny and angled, stretching all the way up to the cobwebby rafters to shimmer there in the dust when he finally packs up his bag hours later and sneaks out through the crack in the side door, leaving his guitar resting next to mine.

Ginger shows up again on Wednesday after school. Dad and I are washing dishes when he suddenly appears, tall and skinny, rolling through the backyard on his gold twelve-speed.

He ducks under the clothesline with a soft guitar case strapped to his back and a plaid thermos gripped against his handlebars.

Dad looks over at me, and I shrug.

Winston leaves the table and squeezes in next to me to see through the window over the sink.

“He's baaa-aaaack,” Winston sings quietly over my shoulder as we all watch Ginger lean his bike up against the side of the garage and walk into the open side door, taking the guitar off his back as he goes.

“Maybe he's in love with you,” Winston says, grabbing a Coke from the fridge while I dry my hands on the dish towel.

“Maybe he misses his friends,” Dad says, still staring out the window at the garage.

Maybe he's right. Ginger is a senior, like me. I have to remind myself that with Jay off at college and Ty gone, his friends have disappeared, too.

“I'm not convinced.” Winston coughs, the soda bubbles biting at his lips and bursting into a misty spray as he gets ready to sip. “I'm picturing redheaded babies.”

I toss the dish towel at him. To Winston, everything is a horny love story.

He laughs as I pull the kitchen door open and leave him grinning stupidly, catching the dish towel between his fingers without spilling a drop of soda.

Ginger brought an acoustic bass in the case on his back. He is tuning it as I walk into the garage. He has my guitar set up next to the stool again and a cup of coffee poured from his thermos waiting for him on the nearest amp. The air smells like axle grease and coffee beans.

This time I am ready. I slide onto the stool and set my guitar on my knee, the moon and stars strap swinging loose. I find my spot, the starting place my fingers call home. Ginger plays, leading me in. There is nothing else to do but close my eyes, feel the pop of each string, and focus. I am slow at first, but I lighten up.

Ginger is just as good on the bass as Jay, even if he doesn't jump around as much. Not that anyone could.

He pushes me, getting technical. Trying out songs that were never on our set lists, seeing where I can go. I do my best, feeling a little lost in my own skin, struggling sometimes to keep up. But he is patient and kind, if demanding.

Late in the day he sets his bass on the floor. He reaches for my guitar, lengthens the moon and stars strap, and then he plays for me, flat out, just him, and it is so good, so, God . . . orchestral, full of soaring notes and plummeting changes. He takes all kinds of melodies, historical and classic, and he turns and twists them, making them into a rock and roll song, showing me how it's done. That is our conversation.

When he leaves, an orange flash in the dark night, he leaves a book behind on Winston's workbench. I pick it up.

Music Theory
, it says. It looks used but well loved. Two of the pages are marked with Post-Its and extremely sharp hand-drawn arrows. I grin, opening to the first one.

I am folding laundry on the couch when Ginger shows up with an electric keyboard on Thursday. Then, a couple days later, while I am putting away the groceries, he rolls in with a snare, followed by a high hat.

I half expect him to ride up the next Saturday morning fitted out as a one-man band, with a bass drum strapped to
his back and a harmonica on a harp rack next to his mouth.

We take back the garage, pushing all of Winston's stuff to the side. Ginger rigs up a deal where he can play his guitar and the bass drum at the same time while sitting on the stool stolen from the auto parts store.

Winston watches sometimes, shoulder against the peeling doorframe, a halo of smoke over his head. I think he harbors hopes and dreams of loading up the van and hitting the road again.

What neither one of them knows is a few Mondays ago, the Monday after Ginger showed up for the first time, actually, I stood in line outside the band room with the misfits and their musical instruments and mixed orthodontia to meet my adviser for the first time.

It was first thing in the morning, and I was packed in next to a tuba player and some tiny kid with a saxophone so huge it could double as a foghorn.

I waited for my turn, resting against the cold brick wall, shifting and sliding my bag back up onto my shoulder. I spent my wait considering the cosmic irony that I had just now, after more than three years of high school, discovered that my adviser is also the music teacher. Maybe I should have visited sooner.

The office door finally swung open, and I slipped past a large girl with a tiny flute, cutting the tuba guy off at the pass. He smiled anyway.

“I want to change my schedule,” I said to the comb-over sitting behind the desk, holding the necessary pink paperwork out in front of me.

“Why?” he asked without looking up.

“I want to sign up for individual study.”

He stuck his arm out for my form.

“And what will you be giving up for such an honor”—he paused and read the first line—“Miss Carter?”

“Study hall.”

“Concentration?” he asked.

“Music.”

He finally looked up at me, his pen poised over the signature line of the form. Now I had his attention.

While everybody else is getting ready to go to college, I am going to get ready to go somewhere. It might not be college. It might just be the next town big enough to have a good music scene. And I will strum my fingers off to get there if I have to. I promised my dad at the beginning of summer that I would come back. I never said I would stay.

My long-lost adviser signed my form but never took his eyes off my mouth. “You look like you would have good embouchure.”

Great, my adviser is a total perv. If there were any other way to get some time in the private music rooms without him, I would have walked out right then and there.

I snatched the paper away from him and turned to let the
tuba player in, hoping that at the very least, he had a leaky spit valve that needed to be fixed.

Now during third period of each and every school day, I sign in with the perv at his desk and listen to his instructions. Then I lock myself away in a tiny practice room with a fingerprinted black upright and a window the size of a business envelope, strumming and learning, skipping the assignment I have been given and making my way through Ginger's annotated book, one step at a time.

The solitude of the carpeted walls and the measured tick of the metronome loosen me up. It is a place that reminds me of nothing and nobody. The sun doesn't shine in, haunting me with spirits and specters and the whispers of soft kisses.

I unwind, testing my strength. There are no crowds, no encores, and no cover charges. Nobody twirls off the edge of the stage to barf or break a bone. It is completely mine.

And every day, without fail, Ginger rolls through my yard. I imagine him flying, long legs tripping toward my house, his head filled with strings and horns and odd three-quarter tempos.

He is technical and tight. He eats the cheeseburgers that Winston delivers to us in concentric circles, chomping smaller and smaller, spiraling until all that is left is the bite in the middle, the one with the pickle hidden under the bun.