I turned to face him, leaning against my car and letting the sun-heated metal warm my back through my shirt. The car was a small secondhand Honda that I should have been grateful my parents had bought me. It didn’t compare with the red Porsche Julie had earned, which was sitting in the garage at my parents’ house, hardly ever driven, waiting for her to come home.
Out with it. It was a simple admission, but every word felt like a knife in my mouth as I said, “I can’t join a band right now.”
Stopping a few paces across the asphalt from me, he watched me for a moment and narrowed his eyes, as if he could read in my expression how loaded that statement was. How badly I wanted to join his band and play funky Michael Jackson covers on my fiddle, and how important it was to my future that I walk away.
Nodding, he said carefully, “Sure, you don’t want to commit when you haven’t played with us yet. Come try us out tonight, just this once.”
I couldn’t. But despite myself, I pictured it for a moment: a night out with this adorable guy, who had reined in his enthusiasm to avoid scaring me off, but whose intense, dark eyes still gave away how desperate he was for this. I winced as I repeated, “I can’t.”
“You can use our amp,” he said. “Do you have an electric pickup? I can scrounge you up one if you don’t.”
“I have one.” The equipment to amplify my fiddle had been coiled in my case for the past year, waiting for the son of a Johnny Cash impersonator to sweep me off my feet.
“Then what’s the prob? Please, Bailey.” He moved forward and put his hand on mine—this time on the hand holding my fiddle case. “I really want to play with you again.”
If he heard his own double entendre, implying that he might play with me in more ways than one, he didn’t acknowledge it. His hand rested lightly on mine, putting no pressure on me, holding back the pressure to come.
I felt myself relax, reluctantly, under his touch. I knew this gig was going to get me in trouble, and I was fully aware of the exact moment I started rationalizing that maybe it wouldn’t. My parents didn’t want me to play in public, yet my granddad had gotten me the mall job. He would let me play with Sam, too, just for fun, just this once.
Now that I’d decided to take this step, suddenly I realized I might not be able to after all. I let out a frustrated sigh. “What time is the gig? I have to make a phone call around ten.”
I figured he would want to know more about the phone call. He would declare that he wasn’t going to plan his gig around a phone call, and if that’s the way I wanted it, he could find another Goth fiddler.
Briefly I considered giving in if he insisted. It was ridiculous for me to demand to make a phone call at a certain time in the middle of a gig. But no. The consequences were too steep. I was calling Julie to let her know I still cared about her, whether she cared about me or not.
I’d worried for nothing. Sam said, “The gig starts at nine and lasts until eleven. Ten would be a good time to take a break. I lose track of time, though, so you’ll have to poke me in the ribs with your bow. What’s your phone number? I’ll text you the address of the bar.” He looped his guitar strap over his head and settled the guitar behind him on his back. Both hands free, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and watched me expectantly.
I had one last chance to back away, be a good girl like my parents told me, and keep my future safe by sacrificing my present. Unfortunately, in my present, Sam stood eight inches taller than me, smiling down at me. One dark curl played back and forth on his forehead in the hot breeze.
I gave him my number.
“Texting you.” He pocketed his phone. A second later my phone sounded in my purse, signaling my pact with the devil.
“And one last thing,” he said. “Try to look twenty-one.”
I remembered him telling me I looked eighteen. Then I realized what he really meant. “Oh, will we get in trouble for playing in a bar underage? I never tried.” That was exactly the kind of trouble that would make my parents’ heads explode.
He shrugged. “Different places have different rules, depending on whether they serve food and what time it is. I haven’t asked this place. If it doesn’t come up, we’re not breaking a rule, right? I don’t want to give anybody an excuse to tell me no.”
This was one more warning that playing with this boy was bad news. Once more I chose to ignore it. I asked him, “Is that what the stubble is for? You’re trying to look older?”
He grinned and ran his hand across his jaw. “The stubble is for style. See you there before nine?”
“Nine,” I affirmed, sliding along the side of my car to the driver’s door.
“Before nine,” he repeated. “Not right at nine. When everybody isn’t there on time, I tend to have a stroke.”
I thought of a song as he was walking away. As soon as the idea hit me, I wished he would walk away faster so I could get it down in my notebook. I didn’t want him to see me scribbling. Months earlier, Toby had taken my notebook out of my purse and read my lyrics in a sneering voice. I’d always kept my songs to myself, fearing that he’d ridicule the thing I loved most, and true to form he’d confirmed my worst fears. Thank God he couldn’t read music. If he’d tried to sing to me, I would have hated my own work forever.
In my rearview mirror I watched Sam walk one row over and put his guitar case behind the seat of a Chevy truck. The truck was older than he was, with a scratched and dented bed, but I knew from experience on my parents’ farm that pickup trucks were hard to kill. I could wait to write in my notebook until he drove off, but he was probably already wondering why I sat motionless in the driver’s seat. I started the ignition, drove about a mile toward my granddad’s house, and pulled off at a gas station to jot a few lines of poetry and music before I forgot them.
When a song stuck in my head like that, I felt like I was holding my breath until I got it down on paper. Finishing, relieved, I looked up and noticed everything I hadn’t noticed initially about the gas station: the people going in and out of the building, the riotous colors of the beer advertisements in the windows, the sweeping noise the traffic made on the nearby street. My whole trip here hadn’t registered with me, either. I’d driven the car and navigated the road, but my brain had waited until now to start processing again. Even driving away from Sam hadn’t registered.
I thought of him bending over to put his guitar behind the seat of his truck, big biceps moving underneath the sleeves of his T-shirt. His father had been nowhere in sight, which must have meant they’d driven to the mall separately. Maybe Sam didn’t even live with his dad anymore. He had more and better friends than I did, potential roommates, and the second he’d graduated from high school, he’d moved out.