Sam watched the road. I watched his chest. He was holding his breath.
“And I threw it—” Flexing my wrist, I tossed my hair onto the table. I wasn’t aiming really, but I meant for it to land right smack between my parents. Instead, it skidded across the slick tabletop and into Julie’s lap.
I winced. “I meant to say something to go along with it. ‘You want me to disguise myself, too, so nobody will recognize me and embarrass your precious Julie, is this what you wanted?’ But I didn’t get any words out, because Julie was crying.” Screaming, really, on what should have been the happiest day of her life, and the night she’d always waited for.
“And then I slammed out of the RV, and my parents have hated me ever since.”
The roar of the truck filled the silence between us. Sam was breathing again, blinking against the interstate lights, thanking God he didn’t have a brother.
“Where did you go?” he asked quietly.
“Oh, there wasn’t anywhere to go. I walked over to the bonfire that the festival had built for overnight campers and sat there for a long time and thought about throwing myself into it.”
He eyed me uneasily. “Would you have?”
“No. That would have hurt.” I laughed. Laughed too loudly and choked a little, trying to quiet myself. Laughed until my sides hurt and I winced with the pain.
He put his hand on my ankle, unintentionally mimicking Ace and Charlotte. “You laugh when you’re uncomfortable. You laughed Saturday night when you told me about your wreck with your boyfriend and I got so mad at you.” He ran his thumb back and forth across my ankle bone. “I can tell you’re not happy.”
I snorted at that understatement.
“And you haven’t been happy for a long time. You blame yourself. You feel like your whole life hinges on that one night, that one incident you can’t take back.”
“Yeah.”
He licked his lips. “What if you hadn’t done that? How would your life be different now?”
“Julie would still be speaking to me, for starters,” I said, “because she and my parents wouldn’t have gotten so furious with me about Toby’s wreck and the party last week. I wouldn’t have set that up all year as the way they expected me to act. I wouldn’t have spent the year trying to live up to that stupid show of defiance.”
“Right, but what would you have done?”
Confused, I thought about it, and then I saw his point. If I’d accepted Julie’s success and my parents’ decree that I remain a failure—if I’d stayed blond—they would have involved me more in Julie’s meetings and travels. I would have been a pillar of strength for Julie during her climb to the top. I would have kept that bond with her.
But what was in it for me? I’d loved being Julie’s responsible older sister who took care of her. I wanted to be that person again. But that’s not all I wanted to be. If I’d still had that, but I’d given up the tumultuous but certainly colorful relationship with Toby, and the wreck, and the parties, and the failed experimentation with drugs and alcohol and sexy times, and countless hours of defiant practice on my fiddle, and five notebooks full of wistful songs, my senior year would have been an uneventful blank—except for the adventures of Julie.
“You wouldn’t have gotten your job at the mall,” Sam pointed out. “You wouldn’t have played with this band for the past three nights.” He wagged his eyebrows at me. “You wouldn’t have met me.”
I giggled.
Realized I was giggling.
Felt a huge weight lift off my chest and slip through the roof of the SUV, into the Tennessee night.
“This is self-serving,” he said. “You know I want you in the band. I think you’ve had such a bad experience with your family that you’ve left them, as best you can, and you refuse to join any other group. The problem is, as long as you won’t form any other ties, the only ones you have are the ties to the very family you’ve tried to leave. Without even knowing, you’ve become a little kid who acts up to get attention. You can’t even live your own life because you’re so totally focused on whether and how your parents are going to see every move you make, and what they’ll think.”
Distasteful as that sounded, it rang true.
“But now you are living your own life by playing in this band. You’re finally breaking their first commandment.”
“Yeah.”
“How does it feel?”
The roar of the wind filled the silence again, and I blinked at the brightening interstate ahead as the exits and billboards crowded closer together, leading into Nashville. “It feels lame,” I said, “because if they catch me, my mother will run after me screaming, ‘How could you do this to yourself? How could you embarrass the family, doing something we trained you to do?’ They’ll probably stage an intervention.”
“Fiddlers Anonymous.”
“Exactly. At meetings we’ll go around the room sharing how we’ve disappointed people. When it’s my turn, I’ll admit I started by playing with Elvis at the mall, and I thought I could handle it, but it led to harder stuff.”
Sam wasn’t laughing anymore. I was afraid he thought I was making fun of his dad, and I’d offended him. It was weird that he seemed so friendly and open, yet I kept feeling I had to tiptoe around him. I’d never had a friend with real problems, life problems, an addict for a dad. My so-called friends for the past year had problems of their own devising.
But that didn’t seem to be what he’d been thinking about after all when he said, “You know what my dream is. To make it big with this band.”
“Yes.”
“And I think you should try it with us. Then you wouldn’t need to go to Vandy. You wouldn’t have time. Your parents’ opinion wouldn’t matter anymore.”
Not true. Caring about their opinion was a part of me, like an ID chip implanted in a pet dog.
“But I don’t think that’s your dream,” he said. “What is it?”
The lighthearted feeling had left me. Wishing I could have it back, I rolled my head against the window. “This isn’t going to happen. But for the past year, I’ve had a fantasy that my parents and the record company crawl back to me and tell me Julie can’t go on without me. They made a mistake. Julie and I should get the development deal together after all. They need me, desperately. And then they beg.”