“Bailey.”
I looked up at Ms. Lottie in the mirror.
She put her hands on my shoulders and asked my reflection, “Do you have a gig with Sam tonight?”
I nodded sadly.
She fingered my black hair. “I see the look you’ve been going for. Do you want me to help you do it better? Like a real country star?”
I pictured Goth-country, rebel-hearted me, but better. Just as Julie had looked like herself at the Grand Ole Opry, but better. That’s what a professional like Ms. Lottie could do for me.
And whether Sam only thought it would help the band’s reception, or his heart raced because his latest ex looked so beautiful, he would take notice.
I told her, “Yes, ma’am.” And then, as she got to work with her comb, I whispered, “Thank you.”
When I got back to my granddad’s house, with my makeup dramatically perfect and my hair in a glamorous version of itself like I was headed to the Grammys, my granddad had already left to fight the CMA Festival traffic and take his VIP seat for Julie’s performance on the Riverwalk stage. It was easy for me to dress in an outrageous country getup to go with my starlet hair and slip out of the house for one last gig. Picking up Charlotte at her run-down apartment complex made saying good-bye to my life as a performer a little easier, because I didn’t have to ride with Sam and talk to him, or drive alone and obsess about him. I’d had a couple of song ideas since last night, but I hadn’t written them down.
Because we’d made it up the musician pecking order to a Broadway bar, the city had reserved a parking space for me in back. We pulled into the place in plenty of time before the gig so Sam didn’t have a stroke. The summer solstice was approaching, and the sun hadn’t quite gone down. Sam leaned against the wall outside, pretending to focus before he sang, but actually making sure we showed up. Ace stood on the other side of the door, with his back to Sam, talking to a group of college-age girls.
I cut the engine, but neither Charlotte nor I made a move to get out of the car.
“Maybe we could find a way to make the band work with none of us dating,” she mused, eyes on Ace.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Maybe we’ll have such a great time tonight that we’ll forget what we were fighting about before.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, because she wanted to believe there was still hope for her and Ace, and she wasn’t listening to me anyway.
“I guess we’d better get out,” she said, and I was about to agree when my phone rang. The ringtone signaled the call was from Julie.
I pawed through my purse so violently that even clueless Charlotte knew to ask, “What’s wrong?”
Ignoring her, I said breathlessly into the phone, “Julie?”
“You have to get down here to the Riverwalk stage,” my mother said. “Julie has her first CMA Festival performance in just a few minutes, and she’s refusing to go onstage.”
I stared through the windshield at Sam. He was still pretending I wasn’t here, but I knew he was hyperaware of me and was dying to go onstage. What my mother was saying did not compute. “Let me talk to Julie.”
“She’s not allowed to talk to you,” my mother said. “Not while she’s refusing to go onstage. She’s grounded from her phone. You come down here and talk to her right now.”
“Mom,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on and how serious it is. I’m in the middle of something.”
“You’re in the middle of something?” my mother shrieked. “You’re spending the summer sanding guitars for your grandfather, and he’s here. What could you possibly be in the middle of? What could be more important than your sister?”
With a pointed look at me, Sam slowly pushed off from the wall, crossed in front of the door to the bar, and laughingly joined the conversation with Ace and the college girls.
“I’ll be right there.” I clicked my phone off and turned to Charlotte. “I have to go. I’ll try to be back before the gig, but no guarantees.” I jumped out of the car.
“Then you can’t go!” Charlotte exclaimed, jumping out, too.
“Go where?” Suddenly I had Sam’s full attention. He and Ace forgot all about the other girls, meeting Charlotte and me at the back of the car.
“Julie’s playing at the Riverwalk stage in a few minutes,” I told Sam, “and she’s refusing to go on. She needs me.”
“You can’t go.” He repeated Charlotte’s words as though they were obvious, spray-painted on the back of this row of nineteenth-century buildings.
“I promise you I can,” I said, taking a step in the direction of the river. I could have assured him, as I’d assured Charlotte, that I would try to be back in time for our gig. But I didn’t even care when he was ordering me around.
He stepped in front of me. “No, you can’t!” he shouted. “We have a gig, Bailey! There is nothing more important than this gig right now.”
I put my hands on my hips. “There are a lot of things more important than this gig. My sister is more important. I am more important. You are more important. But you’ll never understand that, and that is your whole problem.” I walked around him.
“This is not your fantasy that the record company and your parents and Julie decide she can’t do this without you, Bailey,” he called after me. “She’s been doing it without you for a year. There is no way they’re scrapping a year of work and deciding at the eleventh hour that they need you.”
I turned around backward and called, “That’s not what I think.”
“That is what you think, or hope. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be going.”
Oh. We’d known each other less than a week, but he sure knew how to keep me around—at least as long as it took me to tell him off. I stomped all the way back to him on the uneven pavement of the alley. “Yes, I would be going, because I’m not you. Just because you don’t care about anything but performing doesn’t mean you should judge everybody else by your own low standards.”
He blinked, but his jaw was set. “If you walk away from this gig, that’s it for us. Don’t come back to the gig, and don’t come back to me. Ever.”
I looked at him. Really looked him up and down—the cowboy hat mashing his dark hair, his handsome face half-hidden by now with dark stubble, his chocolate eyes—because I knew I might not see him again. I made sure I took in what I was leaving, and then I turned.