Sam kept his cool a lot better than I did, but he didn’t waste any time starting the truck and speeding up the shadowy street. At the stop sign, I looked in the rearview mirror and noticed he did, too. My granddad wasn’t running up the dark sidewalk after us.
I fished in my purse for my dark red lipstick and reapplied it in precise strokes. Then I unbuttoned my shrug, shimmied out of it, and dropped it out of sight behind the seat.
Sam had started to press the gas and drive on through the intersection. When he saw me move, he stopped again, looked me up and down, and smiled. “Now, see? You acted like you were so clueless about what you should wear, and you had me worried, when all along you knew exactly what I was talking about.”
“Oh, this passes muster?” I asked archly. With lipstick on, my lips felt stiffer, like somebody else’s lips. I liked that.
“You know it passes muster.” Sam’s voice had been honey sweet since I’d met him, but this time I heard a darker tone as he met my gaze.
My pulse quickened. Maybe his claim to my granddad that he was taking me on a date was more than just a ploy to get me to the gig. Maybe it was wishful thinking, on Sam’s part as well as mine.
He winked at me, then reached behind the seat and produced a cowboy hat, which he settled on his head.
Now I didn’t know what to think. Did the wink mean he’d been kidding when he implied I looked hot? We’d just met—if you didn’t count that one festival years ago when I was completely smitten with him—and I had no idea how to read him. I’d grown so used to Toby and the other people I’d hung out with senior year, whose cardinal rule was to suppress enthusiasm. I didn’t know what to do with this excitable guy with a lust for life and music, who might or might not have had a lust for me.
“What’s wrong?” He glanced over at me as he drove. In the shadows between streetlights, I couldn’t see his face clearly, only his dark hair mashed beneath his hat and curling around his ears.
“I just . . . I don’t know.” Finally I exclaimed, “I can’t believe you flat-out lied to my granddad.”
“Your granddad is wrong,” Sam said simply. We’d turned onto a wider boulevard through town. He slowed to let a car flashing its blinker slide into the lane ahead of him. After a few seconds of thought, the guilt I’d been feeling seemed to register with him, too, because he went on the attack. “You mean to tell me that you’re eighteen years old, you just graduated from high school, and you never in your life lied to your grandparents or your parents about where you were going or what you were doing when you got there? A lot of girls are squeaky-clean like that, more power to them, but you don’t look like one of them.”
I gaped at him. “What is that supposed to—”
“And don’t even start with that,” he insisted. “You look the way you do on purpose. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
I blushed—not the reaction I would have had if I’d ever been able to achieve the screw-you attitude I’d wanted to achieve. On a sigh I admitted, “I did have some pretty wild nights in high school. I just never lied about them.” In fact, now that I thought about it, I’d felt morally superior because I might have been, at various times, a drunk, a pothead, and a bit of a slut (according to girls) or a tease (according to boys, describing the same series of events), but never a liar.
Until now. Sam didn’t even know my real name, and though I hadn’t lied yet about how famous my sister was about to become, I knew I would do it if he asked me a direct enough question. That made my stomach twist. I’d done a lot of bad things, but somehow I retained one fingerhold on this crazy code of honor. I was about to lose even that.
Sam repeated what he’d learned about me that afternoon: “You learned to play fiddle on the bluegrass festival circuit with your sister.”
I nodded. “From the time I was seven years old until last year, that’s pretty much all I did. No Girl Scouts, no sports, no . . .” I stopped myself before I said it, because I would sound pitiful. Then I couldn’t think of anything else to say instead, which made me seem addled. I finished, “Friends.”
“No boyfriends?” This time when he looked over at me, I could see his face clearly in the streetlights. There was no lust there, or jealousy, only curiosity. He wasn’t romantically interested in me. He only wanted to use me for his band. I was okay with that. I just needed to get that message through to my fluttering heart.
“Well, not then,” I admitted, “and not now. I dated in the past year.” Dated was a term I used loosely to mean getting drunk at Farrah Nelson’s Halloween party and letting Liam Keel and then Aidan Rogers feel me up in the guest bedroom. And then, of course, at a party several months later, Toby.
I realized I’d been staring at the dashboard in miserable silence when Sam leaned over to see where I was looking. Putting his eyes back on the road, he asked, “What made you quit the bluegrass circuit in the past year? Does it have something to do with why your granddad won’t let you out of the house?”
“No,” I fudged, “that’s just because he didn’t want me playing at a bar.”
Sam wasn’t buying it. “Fess up. It’s more than that. He was acting like he wouldn’t have let you out of his sight if he hadn’t known me and I hadn’t been so charming.”
“And if you hadn’t bought a guitar from him before,” I said dryly.
“There’s that.” He glanced over at me, looked at the road, eyed me again. As he drove, his face and his soft brown eyes brightened under a streetlight, then faded into the darkness. “You’re sure you’re eighteen?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Why does an eighteen-year-old let her granddad treat her like a child? Why is he so strict?”
I turned away from Sam, letting my gaze settle out the window. My granddad’s house was south of downtown, near Music Row, a quiet neighborhood where all the major record company offices were nestled. He lived so close to them, in fact, that some days this week I’d thought I could smell the smoke from the shriveled souls and dashed dreams burning in the record companies’ incinerators out back, wafting a few streets over on the morning breeze. Now Sam and I had steered out of the tree-framed streets and hit West End Avenue through the Vanderbilt campus, where stylish stores and hip bars lined the sidewalks.