Sam looked over at me and smiled, shadows long across his face and bare chest. “Sorry. I woke you up on purpose. I didn’t mean to startle you. Lie down.”
I peeked over the seat. Ace leaned against the side of the SUV. On the opposite side, Charlotte had her back to the door with her knees bent and her bare feet up on the seat, nearly touching Ace’s thigh. Ace was most definitely touching Charlotte, with one big hand on her ankle. I studied them for a moment, weighing whether their positions were random or “accidentally on purpose” touching, and on whose part. In any case, they were definitely asleep and unconcerned what they looked like. Both snored softly with their mouths open.
I obeyed Sam by settling back down on his T-shirt between us. “Are you falling asleep?” I asked softly enough that I wouldn’t disturb Ace and Charlotte over the white noise of the wind.
“No.”
“Why’d you wake me up, then?” I grumbled.
“I don’t like to be alone.”
I stared out the window, so low in the seat that I could see only the tops of the trees racing by. I murmured, “I like it, mostly.”
“What do you do when you’re alone?” he asked.
“Practice fiddle.” I wrote music, too, but that was none of his business. “What do you do?”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I start thinking, and I drive myself crazy.” He moved one hand into my hair and twisted it gently. “You’ve said you can’t be in this band because you’ll get in trouble.”
“I will.”
“But you don’t want to be in it anyway. You don’t want to major in music in college. You want to do anything but. Which doesn’t make any sense to me when you’re practicing fiddle so much.” He worked his fingers farther into my hair, down to the nape of my neck. “What happened to you when Julie got discovered?”
“Nothing happened to me. I did it to myself.”
“Tell me.” His fingers stroked the skin beneath my hair that no one ever touched.
“We’d been at a bluegrass festival all weekend,” I said. “Before our last performance, my mom told us there was a scout in the audience, so we’d better do our best. Afterward, she and my dad had a meeting with him. Julie and I waited in the RV and watched one of those singing contests on TV, because we liked to critique the job the singers did and guess whether we could do better under that kind of pressure. We didn’t seriously think anything would come of our parents’ meeting. They’d had meetings before that didn’t pan out.”
I wondered if he could feel my muscles knotting up underneath his fingertips.
“My parents came in somber, like they had before. I figured we’d lost out again. But they made us all sit down together around the little dinner table. They said the record company was taking Julie and not me. Julie would be traveling for the next year. I would stay home, and my parents wanted me to stop pursuing my own deal. They said it would be better if I quit music altogether. They couldn’t back me anymore, anyway, because they couldn’t help two daughters in two different places. It would be no fun for me to live my life in competition with someone I loved.”
“And you bought that?” Sam asked skeptically.
“I think you’d agree this situation doesn’t sound like fun.”
“Only when you’re on the losing end.”
“Which I am.”
Sam’s hand stopped on my neck. “I don’t understand,” he said so loudly that I thought he would wake Ace and Charlotte. At least he realized this. He lowered his voice before he asked, “I don’t mean to insult you, but what kind of people are your parents?”
“I don’t blame them,” I said quickly. “They’re normal.” My mom came off as mean sometimes to people who didn’t know her well. In truth, she was only ambitious, and she never let anyone get in the way of her drive—not even Julie and me, when her drive was on our behalf. My dad was the opposite. He hung back and let her make the rules, then supported what she said. But if it weren’t for him, my mother would have gone off the deep end a long time ago. He consoled me after she screamed at me, cleaning up the mess she’d made. He kept her stable so the friction generated by her own body didn’t tear her into pieces. In public I could always find him a pace behind her. At home or in the RV he would rub the knot in her neck—
I sat up faster than I had when Sam woke me.
“What is it?” he asked sharply.
I slouched against the door and curled my legs on the seat, rubbing my own neck with one hand. “You know what? I’m not normal, and you’re a nice person, and I don’t want to tell you this story.”
His mouth quirked sideways in disagreement. “Girls tend to think I’m a nice person because I’m polite and I may make you feel good, but you have no idea what I’m thinking.” His tone was so dark that sparks raced across my skin.
I hesitated. When we’d first played together at the mall, I’d thought we had a lot in common. I was thrown for a loop when I told him about Toby’s wreck and he acted holier-than-thou. I didn’t want to feel rejected like that again.
But I’d never shared with anyone what happened with my family that night. It had eaten away at me in the form of a song I was trying desperately to write, like Sam had said, playing on an endless loop in my head. And if anyone would understand my jealousy, it would be him.
I sighed. “My parents didn’t intend to hurt me. I’m sure they just wanted to get all the news out of the way at once. I’d always been responsible before—believe it or not—and they thought I could handle anything they threw at me. It wasn’t their fault they were wrong.”
“Mm,” Sam said as though he doubted my explanation but wasn’t quite willing to say it out loud.
“After they told me, I sat there a minute, and then I left the table and climbed to the upper deck of the RV, where Julie and I slept. They let me go. I guess they figured I wanted to be alone to sulk, and I would get over it soon enough. I found my scissors, and I pulled my hair back into a high ponytail and started to chop through it—”
Sam gaped at me. Quickly he put his eyes back on the interstate, but he kept his mouth open, horrified at me.
“—and the smaller bits of hair were falling down around me, glinting golden in the lamplight, and I knew I should not be doing this, that I was angry, that I would regret it. Maybe I didn’t quite realize it would be the worst thing I ever did in my life. Regardless, I was halfway through it and I couldn’t stop then. I kept hacking until I was holding my ponytail.” I made a fist. I could still feel the long, heavy skein of hair in my hand. “Of course, the way I’d cut it off, it had fallen longer around my face, and I was almost bald in the back. That’s how I climbed down the ladder.”