He didn’t believe me, I realized with a sinking heart.
Nobody did.
What was new?
He pulled to a stop at a light, checked in the mirror and saw nobody was behind us, and turned his whole body to face me. I expected a lecture, and I was going to have to tell him where to go. This was what I got instead: “Bailey. You’re not still dating that guy, are you? You said you weren’t dating anybody, but now you’re referring to this shit as your boyfriend.”
“No,” I said rather desperately. The idea gnawed at the back of my mind that I’d unintentionally lost Sam before I even had him. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, and I didn’t want him to think Toby and I were still together. “Definitely not. My leg really hurt at first. It seems stupid now, but I thought it was broken. Water was seeping into the car. Toby wouldn’t get out. He wouldn’t let me get out. He tried to convince me to take the fall for him.”
“What?” Sam glanced up at the green light, then over at a car dealership, as if considering whether to pull into the lot and grill me on this further. Then he checked his watch, saw we didn’t have much time before the gig, and kept driving. “Take the fall how?”
“Tell the cops and his parents and my parents that I was driving. That’s when he admitted to me that he was high, which explained why he’d been so hot to leave the party all of a sudden, and so paranoid out of nowhere that the cops were coming to break it up. It was also the reason he’d wrecked the car and then screamed at me not to leave it. I was hurt, and he was scaring me. And then he said that I had to take the fall for him because he had everything to lose, a baseball scholarship to Vandy, and I had nothing to lose by taking the blame for the wreck. I was just a washed-up ex-musician.” And you’re never going to amount to anything. You’re just going to sit around and bitch about your sister like you have for the past year.
“And you agreed,” Sam said, “and lied to the cops, and that’s why you’re in so much trouble?”
“Oh, no. I was halfway considering it, honestly, because it would have pissed off my mother. Toby knows me pretty well by now. But then he made me mad with that crack about me being worthless. It’s one thing to think you’re worthless, and quite another for somebody else to tell you that you are. I’m like, ‘Fuck you,’ and I proceeded to ascertain that the car was not in fact sinking, and I called 911.”
Sam frowned out the windshield. “What an ass**le,” he muttered.
I nodded slowly, like I was still puzzling through it. “Pretty much.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t give in,” he said. “Besides all the trouble you would have been in for wrecking his car, the cops would have figured out you were lying to them. If they’d investigated at all, they would have seen that the bruise on your thigh matched up to the handle on the passenger side of the car, not the driver’s side.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “Impressive. You’re always thinking, aren’t you, Hardiman?” I tapped my temple with one finger. “Spoken like a true criminal.”
He laughed uncomfortably. Possibly he was realizing this outlaw chick he’d picked up was more genuine than he’d bargained for. “Did that guy get his ass handed to him by the cops?”
“No. They didn’t take him in. His parents got there before the cops did, and I didn’t tell anybody what he’d tried to pull, because he just would have denied it. I heard that his folks have already replaced his soaked Toyota. You know, some parents cover their eyes and would rather not know what their kids are up to. It’s only my parents who look forward to me screwing up so they can scream, ‘I told you so.’”
Sam nodded. “So why are you in trouble with your parents? You didn’t screw up.”
“It’s partly because I’d been at this wild party. A couple of other people who’d been there got in trouble, too, later that night. The parents started texting each other frantically. The party became infamous. And my folks are like, ‘How could you be hanging out with these people?’ and I’m like, ‘I’ve been hanging out with them for a year and you didn’t notice.’ They don’t enjoy hearing the truth about that sort of thing. And then my sister told me that since I clearly don’t have any respect for myself, she doesn’t respect me, either. She hasn’t spoken to me since.”
I’d been able to talk about my parents’ misplaced anger with a dry tone and an eye roll. But as I talked about Julie, my chest felt tight. I wished I’d never given Sam this window into everything that was wrong with me.
“Oh, Bailey.” Coming from any other teenager I knew, these two words would have been sarcastic, imitating an old person commenting on a terrible shame. Coming from Sam, they sounded sincere.
Swallowing, I went on. “Honestly, I think a big part of why my parents lost their minds over this was that they had to leave town the next day. They didn’t have time to stand over me and make sure I was sorry. Instead of letting me stay by myself at home, they made me move in with my granddad. And if I get in any more trouble this summer, they won’t pay for Vanderbilt.”
“You’re going to Vanderbilt? I’m going to Vanderbilt.”
He said it lightly. I wasn’t sure whether he meant we could hang out together there.
Anyway, to me it was still a long way to Vanderbilt, with no guarantee. “I’m not going if my parents find out about this gig.”
“Right, the bar thing.”
No, it was not the bar thing. I wasn’t supposed to play any gig at all. But that wouldn’t make sense to Sam, so I only nodded.
“I’m not trying to get you in worse trouble with your parents. . . .” He frowned at himself. “Okay, I guess I’m asking you to play in a bar and that would seem pretty bad to them, plus lying to your granddad. I’m guilty. But besides getting along with them, what would it hurt if they decided not to pay for Vandy? I certainly don’t have perfect pitch, and I got a full scholarship from the music department. I can’t believe you didn’t.”
I shrugged. “My grades were good, but I didn’t do any extra-curriculars or community service work when I was in high school. None. I told you. I never did anything but tour bluegrass festivals.”
Exasperated, he opened his hands on the steering wheel. “Yeah, but didn’t you audition? Didn’t they hear you?”