“You’re in a band?” Julie shrieked at me. “Bailey, you didn’t tell me you’re in a band!”
“You haven’t been speaking to me,” I murmured against Sam’s chest. I never opened my eyes, just listened to his racing heart.
Suddenly I backed away and looked up at him. “Are you missing your gig right now? For me?”
He looked stricken. He said carefully, “I am willing to miss my gig for you.” Gesturing to the parking lot and the distant crowd around the Riverwalk stage, he said, “I am here, potentially missing my gig, for you.” He glanced at his watch. “If we hurry, we can still make the gig. But if you want me to miss it to prove how much I love you—”
“Bailey doesn’t need that proof, do you, Bailey?” Charlotte prompted me.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I didn’t mean what I said before, either. Missing a gig would be completely out of character for you. I wouldn’t love you if you weren’t you.”
He eyed me a moment more. “My God, you look gorgeous. You always do, but tonight you wanted me to eat my heart out.” Suddenly he shouted, “Okay, let’s go!” and dragged me by the hand down the sidewalk, toward Broadway.
As we ran, I turned around and called to Julie, “Good luck with your gig!”
“Good luck with your gig!” she hollered back.
The four of us hustled around the crowds and up the hill. I didn’t think about Julie again that night. I had a show to put on.
But late the next morning, I sat on the bed in my old room at my parents’ house as Julie asked, “Are you sure you’re not going to move back home?”
She and my parents and I had spent an hour talking our problems out. Now that Julie and I had retreated upstairs, she lay in my very old beanbag chair—she’d gotten a pink one and I’d gotten a yellow one for Christmas one year—with her blond curls spilling across the carpet, looking at me upside down. When she was in that position, I couldn’t read her expression, but her voice sounded pleading.
“I’ve hardly seen you for a whole year,” she said. “My tour kicks off in a few weeks, and I know you’ll still want to move to the dorm at Vanderbilt. But in the meantime, you and I can hang out here, like always.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on. Don’t tell me you’d honestly rather live with Granddad!” She sat up and spun around to face me, her mouth in a cute pout. “It sounds to me like you said in the family meeting that you’d forgiven Mom and Dad for the way they’ve treated you, but you haven’t really forgiven them.”
I pushed my glasses up on my nose—the glasses Mom had had the nerve to tell me didn’t become me yet again. “It’s not that I haven’t forgiven them,” I explained. “It’s just that I can’t live with them anymore. They didn’t think they were pitching me out on my own just by making me stay with Granddad for the summer. That’s what it felt like to me, though, and now I can’t come back. Just like you couldn’t go back after you put your foot down and told them you will have a say in your next album or else.”
There was one big difference between her assertion of independence and mine. Hers was likely to make millions of extra dollars for her and the record company—or lose that much—whereas mine mattered to nobody but me. A year ago I would have pointed out this difference, bitterly. Today I was able to put it in my pocket. I had learned to play in a group.
“Besides,” I said, “if I moved back here, we wouldn’t see each other that often anyway. You may be in town, theoretically, but I know you’ve got meetings and concerts and interviews lined up. I have a lot of gigs.” There was my mall job, which I planned to continue until conflicts popped up. And for the first time, I was hopeful they might.
I lowered my voice. “I didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad this unless something comes of it”—more residual bitterness, maybe, but my secrets were mine to share or not—“but the gig on Broadway last night went great. After our set, the owner asked us not to pack up just yet. She introduced us to a record company exec who’d been watching in the audience.”
Julie’s eyes widened with excitement. I’d intended to tell her this whole story soberly, because it was only a nibble, and maybe it wouldn’t pan out. But when I saw her expression, I couldn’t help grinning as I told her the rest.
“When the place closed, he went to get his guitar from his car. He played with us for another hour. Then he asked for Sam’s number and said he’d try to set something up for us.”
“What does that meeeeean?” she squealed under her breath.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But I’m glad I went.”
I cocked an ear toward the window. Two stories below, gravel popped in the driveway. Someone was coming. Much as I loved being in love, I wished my heart didn’t race into overdrive at the very thought that I might catch a glimpse of Sam. There was no reason for him to be driving up to my house this morning. It was probably the mailman.
But sure enough, moving to the window, I saw Sam’s truck parked in the driveway, dust settling around it. He got out of the cab and glanced toward the window where I stood, like he knew I was there.
“Who is it?” Julie asked. “Sam?”
“Yes,” I said. “Lucky me.”
As I bounded down the stairs, though, I remembered that he hadn’t met my parents. I’d put my foot down with them that morning, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t harbor some residual ill will about me joining a forbidden band. They might blame him. I sped up, hoping to catch him before my parents did, and nearly tripped on the last step.
I shouldn’t have worried. Yes, he was already in the kitchen, but he was doing the Sam thing he did so well, looking my dad straight in the eye as he shook his hand, and complimenting my mom on the scents of the big family lunch she was about to serve us.
“Won’t you join us?” my mom asked him.
“I would love to,” Sam said, “but I came over—I’m so sorry to interrupt—because I was hoping to steal Bailey away for a gig.”
My dad just raised his eyebrows, but my mom looked at me accusingly, like I’d known about this beforehand and hadn’t told her.
“What kind of gig?” I asked Sam.
He opened his mouth, about to tell me. Then his eyes darted sideways to my dad and back to me. “I need to talk to you about it.”