I wasn’t sure that was true. He’d gotten the first gig without me. I was quickly learning that Sam said what he needed to say to get people to do what he wanted. Judging from the force behind his words, maybe he’d even started to believe them himself.
“Look,” I said with a sigh, “I told you from the beginning that I can’t be in your band. I’m not allowed.”
“You’re not allowed?” he asked incredulously.
“No.”
He grimaced out the windshield, considering this idea. “That’s why you walked to Georgia to phone your sister. Or whoever you were calling.”
“It was my sister, and yes.”
“That’s why your grandpa didn’t want to let you out of the house. Why aren’t you allowed to play a gig, Bailey? That’s insane.”
I nodded my agreement. And I had to explain the insanity to him, or he would never leave me alone. “I’m staying with my granddad because my parents are gone with my little sister. They all came home for my graduation, which was when I got in so much trouble about the wreck. For the past year, usually one of my parents has been home with me, physically, because they don’t trust me. But when they’re here, their minds are with my sister.”
“Doing what?” he asked quietly, like he was sure by now he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“Touring with her while she opens for bigger acts, and letting her get a lot of practice.”
His mouth dropped open. “She has a development deal with a record company?”
Of course he would guess. He might even understand more about the music business than I did. I said, “Yeah.”
“Is it working out?” I could see in his eager expression that he hoped it was working out, like Mr. Crabtree was eager for another Elvis song to play at the mall, a dog waiting for someone to throw a ball. If Sam had his way, he would network with my parents and my sister, around and then right over me. And he would ruin me in the process.
“So far, so good,” I said, understating by several hundred thousand dollars.
“Did she get discovered on the bluegrass festival circuit?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“But you were on the circuit, too.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“So she got discovered, and you didn’t.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He sighed in frustration and gestured with his hands on the steering wheel as he exclaimed to the broad, dark street, “Too late. We’re talking about it, and you owe me an explanation.”
I almost said, I don’t owe you shit. But I thought back to my week at the mall. The anticipation I’d felt before I played with a group for the first time in ages. The way my hopes had been dashed when the group didn’t measure up to Julie. The elation I’d circled back to when I discovered Sam. The way the roller coaster had crashed to the bottom again when he and his father fought.
I knew how excited he’d felt when the band came together tonight. I’d felt that excitement myself. I was dashing his hopes now, as mine had been dashed repeatedly. I shouldn’t have agreed to play with him in the first place. I should have refused like a good girl and let his hopes lie there in the dust. So I did owe him an explanation now.
“The record company agreed to sign Julie,” I began.
He nodded his acknowledgment, face tight with barely controlled anger.
“My parents tried to get the company to sign me, too, and keep us together as a duo. The company flat-out refused. Single teen girls with pop crossover potential are what’s selling right now. But Julie and I had been playing together forever. We’d never played apart. The record company thought it would be terrible for their public relations, and for Julie’s, if it got out that they’d snatched her from an inseparable sister duo and shunned me.”
“It would.” Sam’s grimace had relaxed a little. He was beginning to see where I was coming from.
Not that I cared. I was offering him this explanation to detangle myself from this mess, not to involve myself further with a manipulative playboy.
“The record company told my parents I should disappear. They didn’t want Julie to mention me in any of her interviews, because reporters might come looking for me and discover that ugly past. They made me get off social media so I couldn’t post stabs at Julie that everybody in the world could copy and paste. And they specifically said they didn’t want me to pursue a music career that might distract from Julie’s, or embarrass her, or advertise the fact that they’d left me behind.”
Turning off the broad street and onto Music Row, Sam looked like he was squinting into the streetlights, but I could tell he was really thinking hard, coming up with a way to talk me down. “You say the record company wanted you to do this stuff. But their contract wasn’t with you, surely. It wasn’t even with Julie. She’s too young to sign a contract. Their deal was with your parents, so how can the record company tell you what to do?”
“They can convince my parents to say that if I get in any trouble, I can’t go to college.”
“Oh,” he mouthed, but no sound came out. He recovered from his shock to say, “And by trouble, they mean a gig.”
“They also mean going to a drunk graduation party and getting into a car with my tweaked-out boyfriend, who drives into a lake.” I was back in my parents’ kitchen, talking with them around the table rather than in the more comfortable den, because I was still wet from the lake and my mother didn’t want me dripping on the carpet. My thigh throbbed and swelled, the discoloration visible below the short hemline of my sequined dress. I hadn’t complained about it, and my parents hadn’t asked. They told me I had better be damn glad this had happened now. What if it had happened a week from now, on the day Julie’s first single dropped? Did I think the tabloids wouldn’t be all over me like stink on shit?
Julie had stared at me from the kitchen doorway, her face contorted with an expression so anguished that I couldn’t even read it. Julie and I loved each other. We were there for each other. And she walked away from me.
I caught myself rubbing my eyes and forced my hands down. “But yeah, gigs are included in the bad behavior, too. My granddad said he would work on my parents so I could keep playing at the mall. He is not going to work on them if he finds out I played this gig in the District tonight after I lied to him. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into it. This has to be the end.”