Red Velvet Crush (4 page)

My fingers slide silently over the keys, note by note, as I lose myself in my memories.

“What is that all about?”

Ty nods down at my hands, and my face flushes as his fingers move in next to mine, hovering over the keys as if we were playing a duet.

A dull roar comes up from the couch behind us. Jay has rolled doubles, and now someone else has to drink. Ginger watches the action from the corner of the couch: a sentinel.

“Nothing,” I say, shaking the last few notes from my mind.

“That,” he says, scooting me over on the worn bench with his hip as he stretches his hands across an octave each, “did not look like nothing.”

His knuckles are banged up. He smells clean, like soap.

“It looked”—he glances at me with a raised eyebrow and plays a low chord—“heavy.”

He leans in and moves eight keys up the piano and says, “Complicated.”

His arm reaches across mine, honing in on one last chord, high and light, and says, softly, “Bittersweet.”

The word hangs in the inch of air between us.

“Show me,” he says, his hands next to mine.

I shrug and let my hands land in my lap. How did he find me here—past the people and the party and the chaotic jumble of mismatched furniture? Was he looking? And how did he know exactly how I was feeling? My fingers had hovered over the keys for only a few seconds, but somehow he had seen it all. I slump away from him, staring across the room.

Billie is threading her way through the crowd. The fingers
of some boy are hooked around her pinkie as she pulls him along, her eyes sloshing full. When she staggers, the boy slides closer.

His arms wrap around her tight. A bit too tight for some boy she most likely met while buying a pack of cigarettes, probably just yesterday. Now I bet they are beyond best friends.

Some kids pick up stray dogs. Billie picks up stray people.

They become very territorial and protective, not realizing that in a short time she will become distracted or bored and move on, leaving them alone and lonely, until she runs into them in a parking lot somewhere and invites them to Thanksgiving dinner. They are usually stupid enough to show up. We have weird Thanksgivings. We have weird everything.

Ty watches me watching Billie.

“Why don't you have a boyfriend?” he asks, pressing his shoulder, warm, against mine.

The room squeezes in small and tight when he speaks, the crowd around us disappearing, a blur of color and light in the periphery of my vision, unnecessary detail.

'Cause you haven't asked me out yet.

That's what Billie would say. Then she would probably rest her hand on his package. But I can't say that. I could never do that. I'm not like Billie. Boys don't run into me in parking lots or bump up against me on piano benches. Tonight is turning out to be an exception.

I look back at Ty. His cheeks are flushed from the beer or
the warmth of the room. They glow at me, lulling and pulling me in, inviting me to reach over and touch them, to lay my cool palms flat against their heat.

My eyes dance along the edge of the keyboard. I wish it were true: that Ty really is interested, that he wants to know the answer and me. I steady myself, finding my breath and focusing in on middle C.

“Tell me,” he says, nudging my shoulder.

“'Cause nobody ever asked,” I answer.

My heart races when Ty's eyebrows lift and his lips spread into a smile that puts all other boys to shame.

He rocks away from me, pressing his fingers into the keys.

Then he rocks back.

“Until now,” he says.

He rocks away again and I move with him, swaying on the bench as his hands ascend and descend, playing a song for me, soft and low.

M
ost time the notes and music and words are far away, drifting along, slightly out of my reach. They are there, but I can't get to them. They tease me for another time.

But in other moments, like right now—with my head full of Ty, his voice, his smell, the soft parts inside me still rocking to the rhythm he set out for us seven nights ago—they are so present and clear they practically write themselves. I find it strange and amazing. Where do they come from? How do I know which words will fit? Why do the words always match the melody so perfectly?

I have little control over it. I just try to keep up, the blue lines of my notebook holding me together, straight and orderly, safe and sane, as I fill it with scribbles that I hope I can read later when the rush has passed. I press so hard with my
pen that I can feel the words on the other side of the page. It is so loud I don't even have time to think.

I don't know how to write the actual music part, with the bars and the clefs and all that, but I have worked out a system.

I keep the melodies in my head and write clues down next to the lyrics so I can remember them later. Like, this is the one that sounds like a wet winter morning, or this is the one that bounces like a baby's curls in a stroller.

Not bad, considering I started out with nothing but a stolen guitar, a used piano, and a book borrowed from a rolling library. That book is the source of all my knowledge, and I have never once thought about returning it. The fine for it is probably worth way more than our house by now.

My mom loved the bookmobile. Oh, she wouldn't go in, she said it made her claustrophobic; but we had the schedule taped to the front of the fridge, and every two weeks, like clockwork, we packed our Marlboro Lights canvas bag full of dog-eared books and marched the however many blocks to where the RV was parked.

She would stand on the curb and smoke while Billie and I climbed the three steps into the curved cab. My mom couldn't commit to more than a magazine at a time but always said to us, “It's important to have a love of the printed word.” One of her English teachers must have told her that once.

Plus, the bookmobile was free. She didn't even have to scratch under the couch cushions for change to take us there. I had read almost everything in the children's section by the time she disappeared in the second grade. All the good stuff anyway.

“Do you have any books on guitars?” I asked the librarian one morning.

She handed me a worn board book without looking at me. It had a chicken on the cover pecking at a guitar string.

I held the chubby pages in my hand, disgusted.

“No,” I said, “how to play the guitar.”

“I have one,” she said, finally seeing me, “but it's for grown-ups.”

“Can I check it out anyway?” I asked.

“Is your mom or dad here, honey?”

I lifted my hand to point out the window to where my mom usually was, flicking ashes at her ankles while Mr. Conway chatted her up in his plaid golf shorts, but there was only a yellow street sign:
SPEED HUMP
.

“She's waiting in the car.” I lied, my eyes honest and big.

“Okay, then.”

She smiled at me as she took my card, probably more than happy to find someone reading above her grade level in the tiny library on wheels.

I cracked the spine as Billie and I walked back home. Apparently not many adults in town were learning
How to Play
the Guitar in 25 Easy Lessons
. The ink inside was still fresh and strong.

Glancing up from the complicated finger diagrams as we walked along, I wondered: How did you end up being the librarian in the bookmobile? Instead of the one manning the reference desk or, you know, being in charge of the Dewey Decimal System? Was there a hierarchy?

Was she the only one with a valid driver's license and the ability to parallel park a thirty-five-foot vehicle alongside the curb? Or did she just draw the short straw, mumbling a blue streak of big, encyclopedic bad words under her breath when her turn came?

I hopped off the curb and hoped not. I was glad for her. She let me have a grown-up book and I was going to learn to play the guitar, all by myself, one easy lesson at a time.

From the very beginning—all the way back to page one, “How to Hold Your
Instrument”—the guitar was perfect for me. It was clean and sharp. The lessons were systematic and structured. The next steps were laid out for me in black and white, and the ones after that, too. I knew exactly where to go.

Pressing its solid body against my softness, I studied and struggled and wished hard, tripping along chord after chord, finding a place to hide, to live, to feel safe, lost in the notes and strumming.

During the dark nights and the long days after our mom left us, it soothed me. It grounded me. I could not float away
in a bad dream or drift away, forsaken, while it was in my hands.

I learned enough to play Billie to sleep, my little fingers rasping along the strings in our lamp-lit room until she snored.

“Go to sleep now,” Dad would whisper when he walked into our room and found me awake. He would lean the guitar up against my bed as I snuggled down and closed my eyes, protected under its silvery moon and stars.

I don't play Billie to sleep anymore, but I still stay up late, writing down my words, building them into songs by the light of that same lamp.

My head has been crazy all week, crammed full and bursting with songs about Ty. It's been seven days since we swayed together on that piano bench, held fast by a low vibration only the two of us could feel, and I can barely keep up. It's as if he turned everything I had inside me up to ten.

But he doesn't call. He doesn't text. He simply shows up for practice every night, smiles hello, and then beats his drums behind me.

I have been filling the margin of my notebook with song titles like:

“Show Me”

“Tell Me”

“Rockin”

“Boys Suck Big Time”

“Ask Me Out Already”

And, my favorite:

“My Beautiful Disaster”

I take my pen and scribble a line through them all. They aren't right. They are small and short and don't capture how I feel, how I have wished for just a word from him, any word, how I have been waiting for the night to fall, over and over all week long.

Because that's when they appear—three black silhouettes against the orange light of evening as my heart stretches out, eyes reaching down the driveway for the second one in line. Jay bounces in first, and Ginger stands tall, bringing up the rear. Ty is the glue.

How I breathe when I see him. Dance inside when he smiles at me.

Ty has a routine, the same steps every night. He adjusts his stool, tightens the cymbals, stretches his hands. He touches the edge of the snare and then sits down, facing me.

Caught, I look away as fast as I can.

His fingers move along to the music when he is listening to Jay or Ginger play. When he thinks nobody is looking.

I write about how hard it was raining last night and how I hurried to open the side door as they rushed in, Jay and Ginger through the garage door. Ty through the side door I was holding open.

He ducked in and brushed his hand up against mine as he passed.

“I know what you're thinking,” he said. “Late again . . .”

But, you smell so good was my only thought as I stood frozen with the doorknob in my hand. I want to eat him up with a tiny spoon so he lasts forever.

Flipping the page in my notebook, I rush from one night into the next, one song into the next, feeling the dark ink from my pen smearing onto the soft curve of my left hand as I put it all onto paper.

“This is the one where the stars shine just for me,” I write next to the song about how I study the drumsticks Ty leaves behind every night, waiting for him.

How the stars are worn gray from his hands.

How I don't dare sit or hold them in my hands.

How he isn't mine . . . yet.

“D
on't smoke in here tonight,” Winston announces as he walks into the garage, snapping me awake. I am tired. I stayed up too late last night writing songs about Ty and it's finally catching up with me.

A waxy bag of little powdered donuts is crooked in Winston's left arm. He eats each one in a single bite. No muss, no fuss. They disappear, swallowed whole, in what can only be a wet, sharp death.

“I am afraid the place might blow up.”

He gestures toward a stack of dented metal cans in the corner, half covered by a dark green tarp, that wasn't there the night before. I don't ask where they came from or how big the explosion will be. Sometimes it is better not to know the details.

I don't know why he feels the need to announce our new smoke-free environment. He is the only one who smokes. Jay pretends to, and Billie tries once in a while; but she is just an amateur. She mostly carries a pack around so she will have something to fill up her purse. Lord knows there is never any cash in there.

Knowing his fear of flames is completely justified, I nod at Winston anyway.

I've seen him try to light a cigarette with one of the gas burners in our kitchen and singe off most of his left eyebrow. Billie got him a lighter that Christmas to keep him intact. (Stole him a lighter, I should say.)

He keeps it crammed in his front pocket, along with this psycho blue rabbit's foot key chain Mom won for him at the fair. It is so old the rabbit's foot is almost bald. It is more like a knuckle.

He started our couch on fire once a few years ago, too. It was a hot summer night, and Billie and I were outside catching fireflies in a Mason jar. Billie liked to crush their bodies and smear the glowing guts across her cheeks like war paint.

I looked up from her face, glittering in the deep blue dusk, to see a stream of smoke rolling out of our open living room window.

“Dad! Dad!” I screamed, and he rushed out of the garage, the side door banging shut behind him.

I pointed at the gray swirl drifting out of the living room
window, and he disappeared in a flash, a string of swearwords trailing behind him into the house. My heart beat like a tom-tom, preparing for homelessness.

Billie continued to dance around the yard, arms out, the streaks on her cheeks fading as the sun sank behind the trees and our front yard filled with smoke.

Winston had fallen asleep on the couch, his cigarette blazing a hole beneath him.

We lived with the big burned smoke hole in the corner of our couch for years. My dad just kept adjusting the cushions and propping a limp pillow into the corner to hide it.

We finally got a new sofa when my grandma died. It came with the piano. It was still just like new since it had been covered in plastic the entire time she owned it. We pulled that plastic off and Winston carted the old, burned beauty to the dump with a smile, his firebug days safely behind him.

Jay and Ty were warming up when Winston walked in, and Jay is still playing a note on his bass that bounces enough to make your back teeth rattle.

Winston sets the bag of donuts onto the closest speaker and wipes his fingers onto his jeans.

“Take the edge off the heavy.” He winces at Jay.

Jay stops the sharp, grinding note and spins, switching songs on the fly.

He is so fast. I study his shoes and his fingers, wondering how either one holds up.

He bobs his head at Ty, and the beat changes behind me, becoming low and deep and addictive. I want to drown in it. Throw my arms open wide and fall back, because I know Ty's low, solid beat will be there to hold me up.

He backed me up when everyone else dropped off that first day in the garage. He waited for me later that night at the piano.

He keeps holding on, as if he knows there is more to see and he is willing to wait for it. “It'll be worth it,” I'll say as I dance along on the high notes above him, showing him what I've got.

He's only a few feet away, but like always, there's too much music and too many people in my way.

The fluorescent tube hanging above Ty's head flickers, momentarily lighting up his dark hair. I imagine feeling it, sharp and prickly one way, soft and slippery the other, as it buzzes along under my fingers while he leans in and finds my neck, his lips warm and soft.

Blood rushes toward every exit point—my toes, my ears, the tip of my tongue—and I take a step closer to him.

My guitar cord has been getting shorter and shorter as I slowly move myself toward him. I am tightening up our already tiny garage, day after day, practice after practice, inch by inch, waiting for the moment, again, when it will just be the two of us.

I join into the song Ty and Jay are playing and take a step
closer still. Now only a pile of tires stacked up in the corner, a half-built but completely forgotten engine, some potentially explosive cans, and a few primed car panels are between us. I tiptoe even closer.

At this rate I will be standing on the edge of his snare drum by the end of the night.

We play through the songs we all know by heart and some trickier B sides that none of us have heard before. Winston copied the sheet music for us down at the station and then returned the books to the music store for a full refund.

Ginger and I don't read along. He closes his eyes and plays as if every song already existed inside his head, just press play. I have to listen until I can find my place; then I can drop in and feel it.

I am studying my fingers, figuring out an unfamiliar hook when everyone else stops playing. I look up and blush, the singular sound of my guitar filling the air.

“We have an exam tomorrow,” Jay says, nodding toward Ginger Baker. “Gotta get ready.”

Jay and Ginger start sliding their guitars into their cases and snapping the latches shut, but Ty stays put, planted behind his drum set.

Maybe he doesn't have the same test, I think as I pull my guitar strap over my head and prop my guitar against the stool next to me. I'm not sure how their fancy school works. They probably don't just squish everyone together based on size
and then crush their spirits, like they do at mine.

The former Trigger Brothers all go to Walden. It sounds completely crunchy, but it is actually a school for those on the fringes. For kids who are too smart or too scary or too special for regular, boring, public education.

I picture a combo of geniuses and socially frustrated misfits studying together and bouncing into each other in the hallways that are painted with happy murals and construction paper silhouettes of Einstein and Brahms.

Where fighters and biters and firestarters are mixed in with the truly exceptional. Sort of like, this guy can play Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 by ear, and this guy can sit in the corner and knock on a wooden block while drooling. Welcome to the sixth grade!

Jay told me that he and Ty and Ginger have been there since they turned eleven.

I can tell that Jay makes it through on charm and superior mechanical abilities. He wired one of the older amps back into service and put a dimmer switch on the light just inside our garage door before the end of our second day together. He says it enhances the mood.

But Ty and Ginger are total goners. Gifted is what teachers usually call it, though. It sounds better that way.

The garage door is open, and I can hear the sounds of dishes being done and TVs turning on down the street. It is starting to get dark, and lamps are lighting up as kids run
home, that last game of horse played out.

Jay checks his phone and pulls the cord on his bass. It snaps out of the amp and slides across the floor.

Winston and Billie left for cigarettes long ago. They won't be coming back anytime soon. One time Winston went out for a pack and called two days later, from Michigan.

Jay reaches over and adjusts the mood lighting to soft and romantic.

Ty shrugs and sets his sticks on top of his snare.

Jay and Ginger walk a few feet down the driveway to Jay's car: wingmen with guitar cases bumping up against their hips. They stop and wave good-bye: a short muscular arm and a tall, freckly salute.

I wave and bend over before Ty can look at me. We are so set up.

“I hope they work out,” I hear Jay say with a low laugh, “'cause I'm not hauling that drum kit back out of there.”

I straighten up from locking my guitar into its case and smooth out the front of my shirt. My fingers are shaky. It is finally, nerve-wrackingly—have my armpits always been this sweaty?— just Ty and me.

I am used to helping Billie and Winston get what they want, but I don't know what to do when everyone else is helping me. Should I act surprised or nervous or embarrassed, or just run right over there and hop on top of him?

I feel naked standing here without my guitar.

Ty stops pretending to be tightening down a cymbal.

“Give me a ride home?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Let me get my keys.”

No hopping necessary.

The sun is sliding low, the sky fading from lavender to black when I climb behind the wheel of my car and pop the lock on the passenger door for Ty. It sticks sometimes.

It had been hard to find a car that had enough properly working parts to pass the inspection before my driving test. I had to borrow our neighbor's minivan; Dad's passenger taillight got knocked out one night when Winston was chased by a jealous boyfriend. It's a good thing he didn't knock up Mr. Tenny's daughter, or I never would have gotten my license.

I bought my own car as soon as I could, and I let Winston drive it as little as possible. He is too libidinous.

Ty and I drive in total silence for a while, more than a couple of blocks, making our way around the edge of town.

“Ginger likes Titchy,” he says out of the blue, pointing me to the right at the next intersection.

“Who's Titchy?” I ask.

For a second I think maybe Ginger Baker is in love with a cat.

He shakes his head and laughs. “For a band name.”

“Oh.” I take the next left, following his finger again.

“But we're not British,” I say. “Although Ginger Baker
does kind of look like a young king of England.”

“Twitch then?” he suggests as the houses get bigger and the yards start to slope and grow.

“And definitely not punk.” I wince.

Ty sits, no tapping, his hands calm in his lap for once, and looks at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Wait,” I say, looping back to the beginning of the conversation as we stop at a red light. “Ginger said that?”

“Yes.”

“I mean—and this is a weird question to have to ask—he speaks?”

“All the time.” Ty laughs. “He's just very selective.”

“Should I be offended?”

“Hope not.”

He looks over at me like he is wondering if I have the hots for Ginger Baker. I shake my head. I so do not.

Ty points straight ahead, and we pull into a quiet neighborhood under a canopy of tall, curving trees. A leafy arch of sabers stands over the wide street, and I feel protected as we pass underneath, my crooked headlights leading the way.

Happy people live here, I think. Happy families that eat prime rib and grow organic gardens and have perfect teeth.

“I was thinking . . . ,” I say, slowing to look both ways at an unmarked intersection, studying the striped lines of the crosswalk that separate safety from danger.

Ty waits for me to finish my sentence.

I breathe out before I press on the gas because I have been thinking about a band name for so long and have never said it out loud to anyone else before, but here it goes. “Red Velvet Crush.”

It sounds better now than it ever did in my head.

Ty leans his elbow up against the door and rests his chin down, staring out his window, taking my idea in, and giving it some gravity.

“Cool,” he finally says.

Thank God.

He directs me toward the third house on the right. “It reminds me of cars.”

“And cake,” I add, because cake is always a bonus. Always.

We pass his driveway and pull up in front of his house.

“Perfect.”

I'm not sure if he is commenting on my choice for a band name or my superior parking ability. I learned from Winston, who can drive better with his knee while rolling a joint than most people can with their hands at ten and two. Either way, I am good.

He doesn't get out.

I don't really breathe.

Instead Ty reaches down and pulls a CD from the side pocket of my passenger door. George Michael smolders back at me. Crap.

“Really?” he asks, incredulous.

He sets the CD flat onto his palm, as if it were poisonous, and opens it up. It creaks like a vault or a crypt.

I know the case is cracked. But still, I watch as the cover falls off and the CD rolls down his leg and onto the floor.

So much for this love affair.

“What can I say?” I shrug as he bends down to pick up the pieces. “It came with the car.”

It's true.

“I know what you need,” Ty says.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really.”

He snaps the corner back onto the front cover and slides the whole case back into the door. Then he dusts his hands off on his jeans, as though attempting to wipe away the shame of the eighties, and turns toward me.

“Come with me?” he asks, his eyes warm and steady on mine.

A million heartbeats in one second can't be wrong. I put the car into park.

Lit only by porch light, we make our way across the soft, grassy rise of Ty's front yard. The dark wood shingles and tall, pitched roof of his house wait for us in dusky stillness.

He opens the front door and turns on the hall light. I step in behind him. It smells clean inside, but unused. Like everything
is brand-new and nothing has ever been accidentally set on fire.

Ty kicks off his shoes and bounces down a set of stairs at the end of the hall, his frame loose and jangly.