Freefall (6 page)

She’d lost me somewhere in that persona garbage, but all the girls were nodding and looking like they weren’t worried about their super-duper secrets being blabbed around anymore, so that seemed like a good sign.

Then Mrs. Dalloway picked up the sheet of paper we’d written our fake names on and read us off in pairs. My partner was “Riley,” whichever one he was. In our class of twelve, only four of us were guys, so I just stayed where I was, figuring he would come to me.

But it was Flip-Flops who made her way over and plopped down in the chair next to mine. “You should go first because I don’t want to talk about this with you,” she said,
tapping the front of her journal. “I’m trying to think of a fake conversation to tell you about, but it’s kind of hard to come up with one.”

She
was Riley? Of course. Because Mrs. Dalloway would just
have
to pair me up with someone who hated me.

Discussing Daniel was not going to be happening here. I was sure Riley had some charmed life where her friends didn’t lie around on their living room floors and look dead. There was no way she could understand.

“I don’t have anything ready to talk about either,” I said.

“Great.”

Then she started writing. I sat there staring at the clock on the wall, wishing the hands would move faster. After two minutes and seventeen seconds, Riley poked my arm. “She’s watching us,” she said.

I looked at Mrs. Dalloway, and, sure enough, she kept glancing over at Riley and me while jotting notes behind her podium. Everyone else was talking to their partners while
we
were failing to communicate.

I needed this easy good grade, and I wasn’t going to let this Riley chick screw it up for me. “Then we should probably wing it so we don’t lose points for not participating or whatever,” I said.

Riley put her pen down and crossed her arms over her chest. “Fine.”

I wouldn’t have minded if she’d chosen something to talk about, but she was clearly expecting me to start.

I pointed at her name tag. “Why did you name yourself Riley? Isn’t that a guy’s name? Or a last name?”

“It’s both. And it’s a girl’s name. I wanted something unisex because the name I’m stuck with in real life came from a romance novel.”

“You mean, like, Lusty Lucy?”

She rolled her eyes. “I said, ‘romance novel,’ not
porn
. Why did you name yourself after your genitals?”

Her Rich Bitchiness was coming through again today, so I decided to mess with her. “Actually, it’s a name that goes back generations. In my family, Dick is the name given to all the firstborn sons. My granddad was a Dick and so was my dad. But I’m the second-born son, so I missed out on getting to be a Dick in this life.”

She seemed interested. “Really? Is that a true story?”

“Not at all.” From what I’d heard, my dad
was
a dick, but it wasn’t his legal name or anything. “Well, except that I
am
the second son.”

Riley’s angry forehead lines were back. And her nostrils were flaring a little too.

That was easier than it should have been.

She slammed her journal shut. “I know that while we’re in this classroom we’re supposed to be pretending like we’ve never met, but it’s hard for me to even
talk
to you when everything you say to me is a lie.”

Now I regretted opening my mouth at all. Jerking a bitchy girl’s chain isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when you’re
stuck there to suffer all the dirty looks afterward.

“I was making a joke,” I said, trying to calm her down. “Maybe you’ve heard of this thing called ‘humor’?”

She lifted her eyebrows. “I’ve heard of it. Like the other night when you said you hadn’t been drinking and I totally fell for it. That was a pretty good joke. I wonder: If I’d taken you up on your offer, would you have driven me to the beach drunk?”

Yeah, we were communicating now all right. What a low blow, reminding me of that corny ocean-trip thing I’d said. Riley—or whatever her romance-novel name was—fought dirty.

I didn’t know how, but I needed to turn this around. It was going to be a long semester if we were going to be at each other’s throats every time we got stuck together. Telling the whole truth was looking like my best—and only—option.

“First of all, I didn’t set out to lie to you,” I said. “I’m not naturally a liar. Not really. You got the wrong idea about the drinking stuff and I didn’t want to have to tell you that you were wrong. Anyway, I ended up leaving my car behind and walking home that night. So I didn’t drive anywhere drunk. It’s not like a thing I do or anything.”

She stared at me with her eyes open wide, but she didn’t say anything, so I kept going: “Now I’m supposed to be telling you about a recent interpersonal exchange I had that didn’t go well, right?” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, I talked to a girl at a party and sort of got
caught in a lie. A few days later, I was having a bad morning and almost ran that same girl over with my car. And then, like a real bastard, I yelled at her. I suck.”

Riley put her hand over her lips, but not before I’d seen that she was covering up a small smile. “Tell me, Dick. Why do you think those exchanges might not have had your desired outcome?”

I shrugged. This was pretty hard actually, analyzing why a conversation went to shit. It had always seemed like a thing that just happens sometimes. Riley didn’t offer any clues, so finally I said, “Maybe because I was being a jerk?”

She smiled at me in a strange way. Like she was getting over being pissed at me, even though she wasn’t sure she was ready to be.

“I’ll take my turn now.” She opened her journal and read aloud. “We’re supposed to give everyone a clean slate and not think of them or judge them as the person they are outside the class. But yesterday I ended up being really rude to . . .
someone
. . . because he’d been a jerk to me earlier and I was holding a grudge.”

I was pretty floored that she’d written about me, but I didn’t want to say anything about it and accidentally make her mad again.

She closed the journal and looked at me, biting her lip. “The exchange
did
have my desired outcome at the time, but I think I regret it now. A little bit, I mean.”

A little bit was enough, I supposed.

“So what now?” I asked. “Mrs. D. said we need to talk
about what we could have done or said differently?”

She nodded. “Yes. And we can do that if you want. But we both already know, so what do you think about giving that clean-slate thing another try?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Smiling, she put out her hand to shake mine. “Hi, I’m Riley.”

“Nice to meet you, Riley. I’m Dick.”

7:59
P.M.

I pulled into the storage-unit lot, parked between Mikey’s new truck and Daniel’s motorcycle, and rushed to unit 43. I was late for band practice, which meant my brother was going to be pissed. He was never on time for anything—except band stuff—since he had to bum rides everywhere he went after his DUI arrest and losing his license. But that didn’t stop him from taking other people’s lateness, and especially mine, very personally.

The retractable door to our rehearsal space—which Mikey paid for, and we called Studio 43 to make it sound cooler than the ten-by-twenty-foot storage unit it was—was open about three feet when I got there, but there was no rowdy music coming from inside. I couldn’t guess if that was a good or bad sign.

I reached for the door.

“
We need to hurry up and decide on a name,” Jared was saying. “It’s going to be hard to advertise new shows without one.”

I stopped short. Not
this
again.

Jared had recently decided that the name he chose when he was fifteen and just starting this band almost four years ago—the Real McCoys—had to go because there are too many others out there with the same name. The big debate had been going on for enough months now that only Jared was taking it seriously.

Daniel spoke next. “I’m telling you, I think we should go with the Fake McCoys.”

Then Mikey. “And I’m all about Potts, Jackson, and the Motherfucking McCoys.”

I knew he didn’t seriously want that as our new band name, but I cringed anyway. And him not saying “Thomas” bothered the hell out of me. The rest of the guys seemed to be used to Isaac being gone, but I sure wasn’t.

“Speaking of motherfucking McCoys,
where
is my brother?” Jared asked.

“I had him scheduled to get off at seven thirty,” Mikey said. “But maybe my dad needed him to stay later?”

“Maybe you should call,” Jared said.

Time to go in. Since I
had
to.

I slid the door up high enough to fit through. “I’m here,” I said, ducking inside and pulling it shut behind me.

As always, the room—dimly lit by two small lamps and
strings of red Christmas lights snaking around the walls—smelled like pine-tree air freshener and stale cigarettes. Everyone was just hanging out and drinking beer: Mikey behind his drums, Jared at the mic, and Daniel on the ratty green couch we’d rescued from the side of the road at the start of summer.

“You look like shit,” Jared said to me.

He was right, but Jared always thought I looked like shit. Compared to him, I usually did, I guess. It isn’t like he got the better genes or anything. We look a lot alike: same medium build, dark hair, and sad excuse for an eye color that Mom called hazel. But I just threw on whatever decent clothes I could find, while he was always dressing in some retro James Dean way.

I ignored him and headed over to the wall to grab the doghouse bass. The sooner we got this rehearsal over with, the sooner I could get out of here. Away from my brother.

“Where’ve you been?” Jared asked.

“Tutoring, class, car wash, Good Times. Now band rehearsal,” I said. Honestly, I was feeling as run-down as Jared thought I looked.

“That’s too many places to be in one day, dude,” Mikey said.

Jared frowned. “Good Times? You stopped for dinner after work when you knew we were waiting around on your ass?”

When Jared spent fourteen hours straight doing something besides sleeping,
then
he could criticize me for taking ten
minutes to try to choke down some food. He seemed like he was in a mood to throw me against a wall if I said that out loud, though, so I focused on tuning instead of arguing.

Daniel got up and pulled another beer from the minifridge. “Hey, Dick!” he called out, motioning like he was going to toss it to me.

As a reflex, I started to put my hand out. But then I thought about the bullshit that had gone down at Daniel’s that morning and let it drop. “No thanks.”

“Really?” he asked.

“Yeah, I think I’ll just pass,” I said, looking straight at him. “I’m over it.”

Daniel shrugged and cracked it open for himself while Jared and Mikey exchanged glances I couldn’t quite interpret. My best guess would have been:
Right. Like
this
is gonna last.

Maybe they were right. But I wanted to try
not
drinking for a while and see where it went.

Jared finished his PBR and tossed the can in the direction of the already overflowing trash. “Now that we’re finally all here, I have some news,” he said. “Will at Good Times gave me a heads-up that the Rat Rodders are going on tour, and they’re talking about having us come along. I called up Owen to say we want to get in on it, so he’s going to get back with me about dates and all that. Sounds like it’s going to be cool.”

Typical Jared, saying “we”
would do it without asking the rest of the band first. The Rat Rodders were on an indie label and had a pretty good following, but they were also flaky with opening-band bookings. Their lead singer, Owen, promised us shows a few times before, but something always went haywire at the last minute.

Nothing could stop Daniel from getting caught up in it, though. Again. The crazy optimist, Isaac used to call him.

“Sweet,” Daniel said, grinning. “Where are we going?”

Jared shrugged. “Everywhere. California, lots of Southern states. Like I said, they’ll be getting back with me real soon.”

“Sounds good,” Daniel said.

It didn’t sound that good to me, to be honest. Swear to God, some of these dudes made it their lives to argue whether you can call your band “rockabilly” if you don’t play exactly the way they did in the fifties, if using an electric bass instead of an upright makes you the ultimate poseurs, if psychobilly is the crappiest subgenre ever to exist, and on and on and on. Basically—like most music scenes, I guess—rockabilly is overrun with know-it-alls.

“If it actually pans out this time, we’ll have a lot to plan,” Mikey said.

“Like our brand-new name,” Jared said.

The rest of us groaned.

We got in our places and played through a few songs for the next hour or so.

After almost a year in the band, I’d done only a few rehearsals fully sober, and all of those had been long before this past summer. I can’t say whether it was better or worse this way. Neither, maybe. Just . . . different. But it was kind of surprising how much the little screwups stuck out and how off Daniel’s timing was.

Just before nine, Jared started having problems with his mic and Daniel broke a string. It was about time to pack it in for the night anyway, so I put the bass away and started to leave. Before I got out the door, though, Jared looked up from the box of cords and shit he was digging through and asked, “Hey, Seth, have you seen my other mic anywhere?”

I shook my head.

From his new place on the couch, Mikey said, “You know, I think I remember Isaac letting Kendall borrow it a few months back, after she got that karaoke machine.”

“Well, I need it,” Jared said, standing. He looked straight at me. “Can you get it?”

“What? Why me?” I asked. “I don’t hang out with Kendall.”

“You see more of her than the rest of us do, right?”

“No.” The way he’d asked made me think he knew I’d slept with her or something. I hadn’t told anyone, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t gotten out. Crap like this always seemed to get out. “I only see Kendall when she’s with Mom.”