Dirty Little Secret (26 page)

I struggled back from sleep,
then started upright, sure something terrible had happened to wake me. The SUV droned along the interstate. The wind whooshed through the open window, and the forest spun by at the edges of the headlight beams.

Sam looked over at me and smiled, shadows long across his face and bare chest. “Sorry. I woke you up on purpose. I didn’t mean to startle you. Lie down.”

I peeked over the seat. Ace leaned against the side of the SUV. On the opposite side, Charlotte had her back to the door with her knees bent and her bare feet up on the seat, nearly touching Ace’s thigh. Ace was most definitely touching Charlotte, with one big hand on her ankle. I studied them for a moment, weighing whether their positions were random or “accidentally on purpose” touching, and on whose part. In any case, they were definitely asleep and unconcerned what they looked like. Both snored softly with their mouths open.

I obeyed Sam by settling back down on his T-shirt between us. “Are you falling asleep?” I asked softly enough that I wouldn’t disturb Ace and Charlotte over the white noise of the wind.

“No.”

“Why’d you wake me up, then?” I grumbled.

“I don’t like to be alone.”

I stared out the window, so low in the seat that I could see only the tops of the trees racing by. I murmured, “I like it, mostly.”

“What do you do when you’re alone?” he asked.

“Practice fiddle.” I wrote music, too, but that was none of his business. “What do
you
do?”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “I start thinking, and I drive myself crazy.” He moved one hand into my hair and twisted it gently. “You’ve said you can’t be in this band because you’ll get in trouble.”

“I will.”

“But you don’t want to be in it anyway. You don’t want to major in music in college. You want to do anything but. Which doesn’t make any sense to me when you’re practicing fiddle so much.” He worked his fingers farther into my hair, down to the nape of my neck. “What happened to you when Julie got discovered?”

“Nothing happened to me. I did it to myself.”

“Tell me.” His fingers stroked the skin beneath my hair that no one ever touched.

“We’d been at a bluegrass festival all weekend,” I said. “Before our last performance, my mom told us there was a scout in the audience, so we’d better do our best. Afterward, she and my dad had a meeting with him. Julie and I waited in the RV and watched one of those singing contests on TV, because we liked to critique the job the singers did and guess whether we could do better under that kind of pressure. We didn’t seriously think anything would come of our parents’ meeting. They’d had meetings before that didn’t pan out.”

I wondered if he could feel my muscles knotting up underneath his fingertips.

“My parents came in somber, like they had before. I figured we’d lost out again. But they made us all sit down together around the little dinner table. They said the record company was taking Julie and not me. Julie would be traveling for the next year. I would
stay home, and my parents wanted me to stop pursuing my own deal. They said it would be better if I quit music altogether. They couldn’t back me anymore, anyway, because they couldn’t help two daughters in two different places. It would be no fun for me to live my life in competition with someone I loved.”

“And you bought that?” Sam asked skeptically.

“I think you’d agree this situation doesn’t sound like fun.”

“Only when you’re on the losing end.”

“Which I am.”

Sam’s hand stopped on my neck. “I don’t understand,” he said so loudly that I thought he would wake Ace and Charlotte. At least he realized this. He lowered his voice before he asked, “I don’t mean to insult you, but what kind of people
are
your parents?”

“I don’t blame them,” I said quickly. “They’re normal.” My mom came off as mean sometimes to people who didn’t know her well. In truth, she was only ambitious, and she never let anyone get in the way of her drive—not even Julie and me, when her drive was on our behalf. My dad was the opposite. He hung back and let her make the rules, then supported what she said. But if it weren’t for him, my mother would have gone off the deep end a long time ago. He consoled me after she screamed at me, cleaning up the mess she’d made. He kept her stable so the friction generated by her own body didn’t tear her into pieces. In public I could always find him a pace behind her. At home or in the RV he would rub the knot in her neck—

I sat up faster than I had when Sam woke me.

“What is it?” he asked sharply.

I slouched against the door and curled my legs on the seat, rubbing my own neck with one hand. “You know what? I’m
not
normal, and you’re a nice person, and I don’t want to tell you this story.”

His mouth quirked sideways in disagreement. “Girls tend to think I’m a nice person because I’m polite and I may make you feel good, but you have no idea what I’m thinking.” His tone was so dark that sparks raced across my skin.

I hesitated. When we’d first played together at the mall, I’d thought we had a lot in common. I was thrown for a loop when I told him about Toby’s wreck and he acted holier-than-thou. I didn’t want to feel rejected like that again.

But I’d never shared with anyone what happened with my family that night. It had eaten away at me in the form of a song I was trying desperately to write, like Sam had said, playing on an endless loop in my head. And if anyone would understand my jealousy, it would be him.

I sighed. “My parents didn’t intend to hurt me. I’m sure they just wanted to get all the news out of the way at once. I’d always been responsible before—believe it or not—and they thought I could handle anything they threw at me. It wasn’t their fault they were wrong.”

“Mm,” Sam said as though he doubted my explanation but wasn’t quite willing to say it out loud.

“After they told me, I sat there a minute, and then I left the table and climbed to the upper deck of the RV, where Julie and I slept. They let me go. I guess they figured I wanted to be alone to sulk, and I would get over it soon enough. I found my scissors, and I pulled my hair back into a high ponytail and started to chop through it—”

Sam gaped at me. Quickly he put his eyes back on the interstate, but he kept his mouth open, horrified at me.

“—and the smaller bits of hair were falling down around me, glinting golden in the lamplight, and I knew I should not be doing this, that I was angry, that I would regret it. Maybe I didn’t quite
realize it would be the worst thing I ever did in my life. Regardless, I was halfway through it and I couldn’t stop then. I kept hacking until I was holding my ponytail.” I made a fist. I could still feel the long, heavy skein of hair in my hand. “Of course, the way I’d cut it off, it had fallen longer around my face, and I was almost bald in the back. That’s how I climbed down the ladder.”

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.”

“That’s why you felt so awful when your family got all over you about your wreck,” Sam said. “Julie told you she’d lost respect for you, and you were as far away as you’ve ever been from that fantasy coming true.”

I closed my eyes, but through my eyelids I could still see the lights of the interstate passing overhead, closer and closer together. And I felt like Julie was watching me, judging me. In that fantasy I’d had for the past year, I’d wanted my parents and the record company to beg me to come back to them. Julie was always standing to one side, though, because my downfall had never been her fault.

Now I realized Sam was right about my trip to the bottom nearly a week and a half ago. I’d told myself I still didn’t blame Julie—but ever since then, in my fantasy, she had begged me, too.

Slowly I opened my eyes, which stung with tears. My vision was blurry but . . . Julie
was
watching me. Looming ahead, placed near the interstate so several hundred thousand cars a day could see it, was an enormous billboard with Julie’s picture on it. Ten-foot-tall letters proclaimed “Julie Mayfield” with the date of her Grand Ole Opry debut tomorrow.