Girls and guys strolling hand in hand were dressed a lot like me, and like Sam without the hat. They’d lingered after exams were over, or they lived here full-time because they’d broken away from their parents and no longer spent the summer at “home.” I would be one of these people in August, God willing. Sam was right. It made no sense that my parents had collared me like a dog and tied me to the side of my granddad’s house with a bowl of water and a dirty rawhide bone.
I sighed harder than I’d meant to, then stopped myself right before I rubbed my eyes and smudged my mascara. “I got in some trouble after graduation last Saturday night.”
“Uh-oh. What kind of trouble? Trouble, like, you sprayed Silly String all over the high school auditorium? Or trouble, like, the police came?”
“The police came.”
After the bright college campus, before the even brighter downtown, Sam drove into a darker section of Nashville. Here, decaying factories and crumbling houses waited on the edge of urban renewal. I could tell he was looking at me again only by the way the silhouette of his hat changed shape as he turned his head. He asked quietly, “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. That time.” My nausea over the whole incident lay exactly here. I was being punished unfairly for doing nothing. Yet I had done something that deserved punishment in the past, so maybe I deserved it now.
“I just—” I grabbed my wrist with my other hand and forced my fingers away from my eyes again. I needed one of those rubber dolls whose eyes bulged out when you squeezed it, anything to keep my fingers busy when I wasn’t playing fiddle. “I went to a party after graduation, like everybody. I didn’t drink because I’ve kind of stopped doing that, and my parents were home for once, and I didn’t want to get in trouble.” With my hands I made boxes and graphs on my thighs. “Note all of the ways I was trying to stay out of trouble.
“The crazy thing is, this time last year, I wanted so badly to get in trouble. Every time I tried, I didn’t have the heart. I smoked a joint and I was so paranoid about what it was going to do to my singing voice, on the off chance I ever needed it again, that the high turned bad on me.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I haven’t gotten that far, for the same reason.”
“Don’t. It was unpleasant. I got drunk a couple of times when my parents weren’t coming home until later and wouldn’t find out. But before I go to bed at night, I always . . .”
I was about to admit to him that I wrote songs, but I stopped myself just in time. He’d already dragged me on this adventure I wasn’t sure I wanted to join, just because I played fiddle. If he knew about the songs, I might get myself in deeper trouble with him.
“I always write in my journal,” I said, which was sort of true, if a notebook printed with music staffs could be called a journal, “and I have time for myself. I need that every night. This time my brain didn’t work right. I missed my brain. Whenever I drank, I walked around the whole next day wishing I had those hours back. The more I tried and failed to be a bad girl, the angrier I got. The final injustice was that my parents had ingrained the desire to be a Goody Two-shoes so deeply in me that I couldn’t even shake it at a party after my own high school graduation. I was aware of this and scared of being caught at this crazy party, totally absorbed in myself.” My usual state of mind lately. “I had no idea my boyfriend was high as a f**king space station. And when I rode home with him, he wrecked his car.”
Sam didn’t make a supportive comment like I’d thought he would. He sped on down the boulevard, which was nearly empty in this sparsely populated section of town with no open stores. The driving should have been stress free, but he held the steering wheel tightly with both hands.
Finally he asked quietly, “Was your boyfriend killed?”
“No!” Maybe I shouldn’t have said this like the idea was so ridiculous. We could have been killed, as my parents had said over and over.
“Was anybody hurt?”
“No. Well . . .” As the fluorescent lights of a gas station flashed by out the driver’s side window, I pulled up my dress to show him the ugly green bruise on my right thigh. It was some grade school instinct to show off a nasty scar. As I was doing it, I realized I shouldn’t be showing my upper thigh to a guy I’d just met, or my unattractive bruise to a cute guy no matter how long I’d known him.
He peered over at it. “Ouch!” he exclaimed. “Why did you say no at first? You said nobody was hurt.”
I flipped my skirt down. “Well, you meant was anybody else hurt, right? You were asking if he’d run into anybody. He only drove into a pond and totaled his car.”
Sam gaped at me.
“I know,” I said. “We had to wade out, and there was a big scene. Get this. He was high on coke and he didn’t even tell me.” I started laughing, remembering how shocked I’d been. I’d tried so hard to be bad in the past year, but even I couldn’t fathom snorting coke. The more I thought about it, the harder I laughed, until my sides hurt. I shut myself down with difficulty. It was strange that Sam hadn’t said anything the whole time. I prompted him, “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Sam wasn’t looking at me now. He was staring at the road like the San Andreas Fault had just opened up in the middle of West End Avenue. “Well, yeah.”
“I mean, I know you’ve heard of it. Have you seen it?”
“Yeah.”
He said this so flatly that I suspected there was more to the story. “Have you done it?”
“No. I don’t . . .” He shook his head, suddenly looking way too serious for his lighthearted cowboy hat. “My father is an alcoholic. Sometimes that’s genetic. I might be one, too. If I never have a drink, I’ll never have a problem. Same goes for drugs. If you inherit that addictive personality, that problem with obsession, you’re going to have a harder time kicking than your average Joe. I’m like, live and let live. I don’t judge people. I’m just not going to do it myself.”
“You don’t judge people, except your dad.” And me, for being involved in this crash. Sam’s smile, his animated body language, every-thing I’d liked about him had shut down the instant I mentioned it.
He and I had seen eye to eye on so much already. I’d assumed he would understand what had happened to me, too, and sympathize, if only I explained it right. But he looked truly horrified—at the wreck, okay, but his horror seemed to extend to me, and the coke, though I’d told him I wasn’t the one at fault.