I got a little annoyed with the whole lecture. She was acting like I’d learned nothing from watching television. I didn’t snap at her, though, because I wanted her to give this speech to other girls. To Julie. I had given it to Julie, though the way my parents watched her, she’d probably be a virgin until she was thirty. Regardless, I wanted the doctor to give her the speech again.
I buttoned up and escaped into the waiting room. What with the lecture and scribbling down the song about Sam, I’d almost forgotten about Sam himself. He was curled up in a chair, half his normal size, with his elbows on his knees and his hands in his dark hair. When he saw me, he jumped up and beat me to the door.
“Are you okay?” I asked sarcastically in the parking lot. “You act like you’re the one who got examined.”
He chuckled uneasily. “I felt very uncomfortable. Everybody in there assumed I’d gotten you pregnant. The guys were looking at me sympathetically, giving me the bro nod. The women were accusatory.”
“I said you didn’t have to come.”
“It’s okay.” He slid his hand along the bed of his truck, then suddenly spread his hand in the air. The sun-heated metal had burned him. “I’ll channel that emotion and use it.”
I considered him from the other side of the pickup. “You don’t look well. Do you want me to drive?”
“Sure.” He sighed. We both rounded the truck, switching places.
We had an hour until we were supposed to meet Ace and Charlotte, so I drove to the outskirts of the Vanderbilt campus and led Sam into an ice cream shop. He still looked lost, stuck on something in his head. I almost asked him if he’d gotten a girl pregnant and it had ended badly, but I knew that wasn’t the problem. He’d told me he was a virgin, and he’d told me he didn’t lie (to me). And I couldn’t really complain about the way he was behaving. He looked like I felt when I was writing a song.
I bought myself a scoop of vanilla. I loved the taste, cool and clean with no other flavors or lumps to mar it. I bought Sam one of those junky flavors with everything but the kitchen sink mixed in—pretzels and chocolate and gummy worms. He didn’t seem to get my joke about our contrasting personalities, didn’t even hear my order, just accepted the cone and followed me until I sat down on a shady patch of grass in Centennial Park.
“Your ice cream is melting,” I prompted him after he’d sat unmoving for several minutes.
He blinked, took a huge bite, and made a face as he crunched. Then he swallowed and laughed. “What is this?”
“You should pay closer attention.” I took a nibble from my spoon. “Explain something to me about the band. Yesterday you said you didn’t want to try out for a music talent show because you’d have to take their contract if you won, and you’d lose control of your career.”
“Right.”
“And part of the control you wanted was picking out your songs.”
“Exactly.” He licked his ice cream, more tentatively this time, not sure what he would find inside.
“But I don’t see how you’re putting that into practice, because nobody in the band is writing original songs. Is your ultimate goal to get the band a gig on Broadway, or to get the band a recording contract?”
“A recording contract,” he said firmly.
“If that’s what you want, that’s what you need to act like. A gig on Broadway is a great first step to get attention. Once you get the attention, you need original songs to back it up.”
“I know that. I guess I was just waiting for it to happen.” He took a thoughtful bite. A warm breeze tossed a curl back and forth across his forehead.
The band’s lack of new music worried me. I’d wanted to bring the subject up the night before when we discussed the playlist, but I figured Charlotte would rightfully point out that I was not an official member of the band and this was none of my business. Now was my chance to talk to Sam about it, but he wasn’t even here.
“Where are you?” I asked. “Back in the waiting room?”
He looked up at me and chuckled. “Yes, sorry.”
“You could write a song about that terrible feeling you had,” I suggested. “There’s a whole genre of songs about guys getting their girlfriends pregnant and their girlfriends having an abortion. Tim McGraw. Ben Folds.”
Sam shook his head. “I can’t write songs. All I can do is sing. You remember that gymnast who had to retire when she was twenty years old, before the Olympics, because she blew out her knee snow skiing?”
I squinted at him, thinking. “Shawn Johnson?”
“Maybe. Anyway, if you’re a gymnast with a chance of winning Olympic gold, you do not go snow skiing. You don’t take the chance of ruining everything for yourself. The only thing I can do is sing. I mean, I can play guitar, but so can every wannabe in Nashville, so it doesn’t even count. I wasn’t great in school. I wasn’t great at football. I can sing, though, and even I am not stupid enough to screw that up.”
“I don’t see how writing songs would screw up your singing,” I said. “Writing songs is supposed to be therapeutic, like any kind of writing. Have you ever tried? It seems like you have something to write about.”
He eyed me as he finished off his cone, and not like he was enjoying it. More like he was trying to get rid of it. Wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, he said, “I feel like I’ve been through a lot in the past couple of years, but I’ve kept pretty stable. That’s because I channel that emotion into performance. I can handle emotion, as long as it’s only a song. It works for me, and I don’t want to change it. I don’t have anything left for writing.”
He looked past the swaying limbs of an oak tree, into the empty blue sky—the same stance he’d taken last night and Saturday night when he was trying to gather himself before going into a performance. I was beginning to understand how unstable he might be deep down. I had a hard time escaping my own reality. My only flights of fancy were writing songs and—just today—fantasizing about Sam. I’d wished it was easier to get away from myself, but Sam seemed to have the opposite problem. He got so caught up in a trip inside his own mind that he had a hard time fighting his way back.
“If you’re putting your emotional energy into performance,” he said, “you’re also getting it back out again, right? You’re giving so you can receive.” He spread his arms wide. “If you were writing songs with it, you’d be holed up in your room in the middle of the night, scribbling them in a notebook and feeling self-important. You’d think you were getting it out, but really you’d be keeping it inside and quiet. You’d take what upset you and turn it into art, and now it would fester, because you would think other people ought to share your outrage at what happened to you.” He looked at me funny. “Do you write songs?”