The second song ended with a big buildup. Though I hadn’t heard it before, I could tell she was supposed to hit a money note. She took it down a fifth, like a spooked figure skater at the Olympics attempting a double axel rather than a triple. As the tune wrapped up, my self-absorbed thoughts assaulted me. I’d never wanted Julie to fail. But I did feel a bit self-righteous. If my family hadn’t shut me out, I might have prevented this fiasco by pointing out how crappy the songs were, or just by standing in the wings, supporting her, when she went onstage.
And I was bitter. Bitterness and I were old friends by now, but at the moment bitterness was trying to go down my bra in public. I had spent the last year so depressed that Julie got this opportunity when I didn’t, yet this was the upshot of it? It was an opportunity squandered, a year of bitterness over nothing at all.
Sam and I sat through the entire show without getting up, hardly moving. Neither of us laughed at the jokes. We were movie critics, sports writers, record company scouts, leaching all the joy out of watching a performance. And after the heat between us over the past few days, we each stayed in our own cold personal space, never touching.
Finally the show was over. The lights turned up. The audience en masse edged along the narrow rows and up the stairs to the exits. Only Sam and I stayed in the uncomfortable bench seats built to imitate the church pews in the Ryman, staring at the blank screen where Julie’s pretty face had been.
“What’d you think?” I asked.
He sighed. “I’m eaten up inside with jealousy. I don’t like myself very much right now.”
I felt him looking at me. I met his gaze. In his eyes I saw that he understood what I’d been going through for a year. Not that this helped us now.
“You think you could have done better than her,” I guessed.
“She was nervous,” he said diplomatically. “We want to think we wouldn’t be scared shitless if we ever got this opportunity, but we wouldn’t know for sure until we got here.”
I nodded. “You think her songs were duds.” I thought her songs were duds. Any second the music notebook in my purse would begin to glow, and we would see the light escaping around the edges of my purse’s leather flap.
“I can’t write songs,” he said, “so I’m in no position to judge.”
I wasn’t sure why I’d expected Sam to be honest with me, now that he and I had no plans for the future. But I was annoyed that he would flake out on me for the sake of politeness after days of brutal honesty. I baited him, “You think if you got a contract, you would make damn sure your songs were better than that.”
“Her songs are . . .” He paused and eyed me, searching his mind for a truthful adjective that wouldn’t offend me. “Cute. They have pop crossover potential.”
“But not blockbuster potential,” I mused.
He said nothing, letting his silence pass for inoffensive agreement.
“What she lacks in catchy songs, she might make up for in pure bubbly personality,” I thought out loud.
“If she works on her stage presence.” With a huff of impatience, Sam turned to me. “I’ll be honest with you, Bailey. I don’t know if I’m supposed to try to make you feel better about her chances, or worse.”
“That’s fair,” I said. “I don’t know, either.” I squinted at the faraway stage, into the wings where Julie had disappeared half an hour earlier. “Her handlers aren’t going to like this.”
“Oh, you’ve met her handlers?” Sam asked in surprise.
“Yeah.” I added bitterly, “And before you ask, no, I’m not going to tell her handlers about you, or the band, either.”
He chose to ignore that remark. “Are they good, like Carrie Underwood’s handlers, or do you get the feeling she’s going to be like one of the also-rans on the singing contest TV shows?”
Since he was keeping the conversation mature and unemotional, I tried to do the same. “I think they’re okay in terms of the advice they give her, but they don’t actually talk to her. They talk to my parents.” In turn, I would bet money that my mother was giving Julie the lecture of her life right now. Don’t you want this? Didn’t your daddy and I give up our jobs and go on tour with you because you wanted this? You need to start acting like it. On a normal night, Julie would call me in tears at ten o’clock, wishing for her old life back. I would talk her down, reminding her that this was what we’d both always wanted.
Suddenly I realized I was hanging on to the edge of the bench with a death grip, and my fingertips had gone numb. Taking a deep breath and making a conscious effort to relax, I saw that Sam and I were nearly alone in the auditorium. Only a few ushers laughed in the far corner, wondering how long they should give us before they kicked us out.
I turned to Sam. “So, I wanted to come clean with you and show you everything I know about my sister. Her first single is out today. She has enormous record company backing. She may or may not drop the ball. It’s too early to tell, I guess. And I am persona non grata. I bought these tickets myself.”
“Regardless, you could still use your connections to get us an audition with the record company if you swallowed your pride and asked.”
Oh, so he wasn’t going to play nice after all. Hurt and shocked and insulted, I told him, “I knew it was going to be like this from the moment I met you. I wanted to show you this, and I was hoping we could save whatever we had. But the bottom line is, you don’t want to be with me now, and I don’t want to be with you.”
“I want desperately to be with you,” he said quietly. “I just know that I would be angry with you every second of my life, and it wouldn’t work.”
I met his dark, worried gaze. “You wear your heart on your sleeve.” I reached out and touched the heart I’d drawn on the soft cotton of his T-shirt. My finger slipped under the material and stroked his warm skin, then pressed his hard biceps more firmly. His arm didn’t give.
The feeling started small, tingles of awareness around my fingertips where they touched him. The feeling raced up my arm and across my chest. I knew my face was flaming, and I tried to figure out why. We’d kissed, after all. He’d put his hands pretty much everywhere there was to put them. There was no reason for me to blush with my ears burning just because I was touching his arm.
But as the strange warmth continued, I realized what was different this time. Instead of him touching me, propositioning me, coming on to me, I had touched him. He’d talked about my stand-offishness, that gulf between us. Without meaning to, I’d reached across it.