Red Velvet Crush (6 page)

Her fingers peel back the foil wrapper, and she hands me one.

I pop it into my mouth. Lean in close and bite down.

“Did you see it?” I ask.

The cheese in her hair shakes, and she hands me another one.

We are two tiny little girls, sliding around in a big backseat with minty fresh breath, all the way home.

“G
ot your next gig,” Winston announces as he steps into the garage the next Friday afternoon.

It is the end of April, and the sun has been shining for almost a week straight. That is a seriously long sunny streak for us in Oregon. A trail of dust follows him across the threshold, sparkling and swirling up into the sunshine that angles through the windows.

He has been wandering in and out all afternoon, his old flip phone cradled on his shoulder. That thing has more miles on it than my car. A lit cigarette dangles from his lips. He is hustling for something, I can tell.

Jay's amp hums, a tense undercurrent, as we all freeze, staring and surprised. Without saying a word, Ginger Baker walks over and gives it a sharp, small kick.

“Uh, don't you mean
first
gig?” I ask.

“Semantics.” Winston dismisses me with a wave of his hand before he walks back out the open door and into the yard, his mission complete.

A flood of nerves smacks into the mountain of excitement building in my belly and leaves me overwhelmed. I glance around the garage. Is it possible we'd made Winston into an overachiever after a lifetime of just getting by?

“But we don't have a set yet,” Jay says to the four of us, his voice rising.

“A set?” Billie gulps. “We don't even have a name.”

“Sure we do.” Ty answers from the back of the room. “It's Red Velvet Crush.”

“Red Velvet Crush?” Billie twists around her mic stand to look at me.

“What does that even
mean
?” Jay asks, pulling the strap off his guitar. He sets it in the corner next to an old broom and then runs his hand across the top of his head, rubbing his short hair. I didn't think he'd be so inclined to panic.

“You know . . . ,” Ty starts to explain, his eyes checking in with me as he starts to articulate something that I myself have never tried to define. I mostly like how the words sound all strung together. I focus in, curious to hear what it means to him. “Sweet. Rich. With the potential for serious damage.”

I suck in my breath and hold tight to my guitar. That boy
is
perfect.

Billie sets a half-eaten Pop-Tart on top of the amp in front of her and dusts the crumbs from her fingers. “We are not rich,” she explains, as if Ty were an idiot.

“Don't be so literal, Billie,” Ty says.

He points one of his drumsticks at me. “Sweet.”

I blush a little bit.

And Jay. “Rich.”

Jay looks down and shuffles his feet, even though it is true—and literal.

Then he points at Billie. “Potential for serious damage.”

I smile at Ty, pretty much delighted with his explanation, even if it does make Billie sound more interesting than me.

“Besides,” he says to Jay and Billie, “you're forgetting. We have covers.”

“Are we a cover band?” Jay asks, his eyes big, suddenly a soprano. “I thought that was just where we were starting.”

Ginger Baker cringes so hard it is almost audible.

I am with them. I have no intention of always being a cover band, but I don't know what we are yet. We haven't even had a chance to talk about it.

I honestly didn't think we'd make it this far. We are only six weeks in to being a band. So far I've been looking to keep Winston employed, Randy on our good side, and Dad happy.

I figured we'd make it only a couple of days, a practice or two into the musical experience, before Winston would bail, ditching us for something better or shinier or faster. But he
is still here and actually trying. So covers of classic rock are fine until we figure ourselves out. We are working on some newer stuff, too, some Interpol for Ty, Editors for Jay, and a little Shooter Jennings to round things out when Randy is ready for it.

I watch Winston through the garage window, pacing in a circle in our side yard, his mouth moving faster than his legs. His left arm swings up into the air, punctuating the speech he is giving or promise he is making. I wonder what else he is getting us into.

He has the same long legs, the same bullshit smile, the same loud laugh as always, but I'm not used to the go-getter my brother has become.

Until now Winston has given up on everything: high school; his career as a kick-ass martial artist, which lasted three karate lessons (he claims his boys never felt comfortable in a gi); the thrill of motocross; even Emily, the one girl who actually seemed to love him and stuck around for a while.

She was great. She had this soft curly hair and a round face. Her lips were red and bowed up at the corners, like the cupids you see dangling from the ceilings in elementary school classrooms on Valentine's Day. She was sweet and smart and, for some reason, truly smitten until Winston went and ruined it.

I heard them fighting late one night a few years ago as I shifted around in my bed, Billie's breathing a hushed rustle in
the background. Even in anger Emily's voice was soft. It curled under my door and across the rug.

“Why did you do it, Winston?”

I couldn't hear his answer. His voice was too low and muffled.

“I hope she was worth it,” Emily said clearly.

There was a pause, and then I heard the front door close quietly but firmly before her tires crunched down the driveway and her headlights crossed my ceiling as she drove away.

We never saw her again. I hoped Winston felt like shit.

Why would he do anything that would risk her? Make her leave? Didn't he realize who she was? What she was? There would never be another Emily. There were a lot of Tinas and Brittanys and, for some reason, Cheryls. Yuck.

Then, the summer after Emily left, some stereos and other AV equipment went missing from the high school. It was a big deal at the time, with local crime fighters knocking on our door, but Winston was away from home, suddenly, and fortuitously, attending broadcasting school.

Life without him was too quiet, too cold. The cable went out, and there was no one to fix it. I wrote a lot of songs about snow and ice, even though we never had much of either one here where it is always wet and green.

Eventually the PTA coughed up enough cash to replace the TV sets. Then old Mrs. Crawley and her bony ankles, along
with the rest of the faculty, finally got to sit back down, dim the lights, and get back to some serious teaching.

They also bought bars for all the first-floor windows.

Though he has never copped to the crime, I have always wanted to ask Winston: Couldn't you have stolen something less useful, like the sewing machines or the uneven bars?

Winston dropped out of broadcasting school last spring, and since then every word out of his mouth has sounded like a damn commercial.

Outside the garage, he laughs loud and continues his phone call.

Ty lifts up off his stool and cuts to the chase, getting to the important detail that the rest of us have overlooked.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, he yells toward the yard, “When?”

Winston reappears in the middle of the doorway. He holds up his finger, listens for a second, then answers, “Randy says next Friday night.”

His answer fills the garage with electricity. Next Friday night isn't that far away. I feel more combustible than those cans Winston has hidden in the corner, pumped full of anticipation.

Ty nods at Winston: message received.

Winston flicks his cigarette butt into the air and casually walks away. Like a tiny firework, it sparks and blooms before it crashes onto the well-worn concrete. I imagine a blue streak
burning its way toward us, a vapor trail streaking along the floor, rushing forward from spark to flame to hit man, with only seven days till we all explode.

Tonight is the night. We are finally going on last at The Night Owl, an armpit of a bar out on the highway, where everyone knows Winston by name so it doesn't matter that we are all too young to be on the premises, let alone onstage.

The sound of rain dripping off the roof and the clank of Dad putting pot lids away fill the house. Billie and I are in our bedroom. Winston took off in my car hours ago, promising to come back in time to take us to the show. His rusty 280Z is parked in our front yard, hood open, gutted like a fish.

I lean over and turn on the radio next to my bed. I tune it to the country station we like to listen to on the weekends and then empty my makeup bag onto our dressing table.

Putting on makeup calms me. It takes the shakes out of my hands and gives me something to think about other than the changeups we have been practicing all week and what we will do if no one shows up at all tonight and we end up playing to an empty room, dead silence.

Plus, if I have enough eye shadow on, maybe nobody will know who I am onstage. It is like camouflage.

“Now do me,” Billie says, her blue eyes round and big as she leans over my right shoulder and crowds me right out of the mirror.

Billie always likes it when I do her makeup. She sits on the stool in front of the dressing table, cross-legged and patient. The dressing table was another gift from Grandma. It is curved and painted Dutch blue, with a large oval mirror.

If it weren't for that old woman, we'd all be sitting on the floor in a bare room, huddled around an old milk crate and a black-and-white television set.

Billie angles her chin up. She knows how to stretch her eyes just right so I can get eyeliner along the lower lash. She is a pro.

We have been practicing since she was eleven and Dad decided that makeup was okay, for fun—at home.

She likes to find ideas in fashion magazines and tear them out so we can try them later. The wall around our dressing table is covered in magazine pages: lightning bolt nails, hot pink lips with matching eyes, batwing blue eyeliner and black mascara.

Billie reaches up, smooths her hair over one shoulder to keep it off her face, and quickly twists it into a braid.

“What about a loose braid like that?” I ask, nodding toward her reflection before I put shadow on her brow bones. It glitters in the lamplight. It will twinkle on stage.

I add two coats of mascara. She blinks, and I wipe.

“Don't you think I'd dance it out?” she asks, stretching her face toward me, her lips pouted.

“Maybe,” I say, searching the top of the dressing table for
the honey-colored lip gloss I know she likes because she keeps trying to steal it from me.

She rocks her head left and right, just barely, and the braid slips out.

“Okay, probably,” I say.

I put gloss on her lips with the smallest brush. Dropping the brush back into my bag, I look her over. My fingers sweep an eyelash from her cheek, and then I give her a nod.

She stands, eyes down, trying to keep her back to the mirror. Billie doesn't like to see herself until the look is complete, head to toe.

“Beat-up blue jeans?” she asks, stepping into our closet.

“Yeah.” I sit back down in front of the mirror while she digs around in the back of our closet. I hear a
zzzipppp
, and then she is posing in front of our pile of dirty laundry, wearing the oldest pair of jeans known to man.

They are also the best jeans ever, patched and repaired and held together by pieces and parts and lots of love. Once they were Winston's, then they were mine, and now they will eternally belong to Billie.

Winston got too tall, I got too curvy, but Billie stays the same. A perfect fit. I am still getting over it.

Billie kneels down in front of the closet and starts sorting through our shoe collection. A soft drum is tocking from the radio, and I hear Dad's boots coming down the hall toward our room to say good-bye. His steps match the
rhythm of the Lady Antebellum song that is playing.

He walks across the pink rug and scoops me up into a small two-step between our twin beds. With his hand on the small of my back, he leads me around the rug in my bare feet for one ambling turn about the room.

A boot bounces to the floor as Billie leans out of the closet to watch us.

“Break a leg tonight,” Dad says as he returns me to the dressing table.

“It's not musical theater, Dad.” Billie rolls her eyes, sitting in a tangle of boots and sneakers and stretched-out sandals.

Dad reaches down for her. He slides her up into his arms and twirls her on his finger like a ballerina. “Good luck then,” he says.

He lets her go and crosses the room. One big hand grips the door frame as he looks back and says, “Be safe tonight. Wish I could be there.”

“Me, too,” I say as he retreats. But he has to work. Like always.

“Boots?” Billie asks, suddenly standing next to me on one leg.

She has on one black boot, the ones that lace up the front, and one red rain boot that has a frog face painted across the toe. Someone's been raiding the boot bin at Goodwill again.

She flamingoes, helping me to choose.

“Black,” I say. No question.

She bends over to lace up her boots.

I turn and face the mirror, sliding my hands through my hair, smoothing out the tangles. Moving in toward the glass, I study myself. Something is missing. I reach for my favorite eyeliner and stretch my eyes wide.

“Blue?” Billie asks, sounding skeptical, coming out to watch me smear the dark blue liner into my lash line.

I nod, unapologetic. I like it.

Outside our window Dad is leaving for work. He makes his way across the front yard as wrapped up against the weather as a grown man allows himself to be. He throws a stick for the neighbor's dog, watches it run, and then climbs into his truck, gone.

I finish my makeup and turn around. Billie steps out into the middle of the room. She is ready: black boots, beat-up jeans, and shiny blond hair swinging loose and long over her right shoulder.

I stare, my mouth open and my heart sore.

Taped in the medicine cabinet, just above the rusty shelf, where Dad's razor sits surrounded by a sprinkling of whiskers, is the one and only picture we have of my mom. Billie looks exactly like that picture, secreted away and suspended in time, minus the peeling Scotch tape at the corners. She takes my breath away.