Red Velvet Crush (13 page)

He grabs his T-shirt from the dresser top just inside the door and pulls it on over his head.

“Get down here, man!” Jay is yelling this time.

Winston shrugs at me like “Well, what you gonna do?” and pulls his door shut to brush past me.

I finally look down at the key in my hand. 208. Billie will be between us.

I stick the key in the door and wiggle it, glancing down at the pool. Ginger is watching me.

Jay paddles over to the edge of pool as Winston walks toward it.

“I need your lighter,” Jay says.

Winston tosses it to him casually, the way boys do, not even worrying that it might get wet, and sits down under the crooked umbrella. Ty thumps back into the pool, doing
a cannonball that drenches Billie and the surrounding cement.

I step inside my room and stop, leaving the door open a crack, waiting, the conversation from the pool drifting in with the breeze, wiping out the tired smell of carpet freshener and long-haul truckers.

But there is no more talk about new songs, just the click of the lighter, the splash of the pool, and Billie's giggles. My songs are forgotten.

That kind of bothers me, but kind of not. When Ginger finally stretches back out and closes his eyes, I shut the door.

My last note is settling in over our hotel room that night when Ty walks in. I have the blackout curtains drawn, the lamps glowing, the plastic ice bucket filled with melting ice that I have no use for.

Ty crawls in behind me and lies flat on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. I set my guitar next to him.

“Beautiful,” he says. “All your songs, they're beautiful, you know.”

My breath catches in my throat, and I turn toward him.

“I don't disbelieve that,” I say.

“But?”

But I thought he would be more careful. I thought he would know how much my songs mean to me, without my ever having to say it.

“But I can't let Billie have everything,” I say.

“But it's not just for Billie. It's for the band.”

“I will not be demoted to singing harmony,” I say. “Not for these.”

Ty rolls onto his side, props his head on his hand, and looks at me.

“What?” I ask. “I should just stand there, ooohing and aaahing to songs I have written?”

I cross my arms and look down at him. He doesn't understand. Ty is an only child. He doesn't know the hate and love and entanglement that come along with a sister like Billie. He doesn't see the burden and promise of it, the weight of being connected to someone in a way that can never be cut.

He doesn't feel the strength that it takes to keep her even at arm's length when it would be so much easier to give in and give her everything, to light the way for her and lose myself completely, until I am nothing but Billie's heavy conscience, Billie's bad habits, Billie's broken heart.

He reaches up and pulls me down next to him. Smooths my hair across my forehead and tucks it behind my ear.

“Trust me?” he asks.

I roll onto my back and let my arms fall flat.

When does a crush turn to love? Officially? When you've slept together a couple of times? Eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner together all in the same day? Seen each other pee? How
do you let go of the fear of falling and just fall? Not fearing the bottom or the inevitable crash? I am there, dangling.

I nod. Maybe this is what faith is supposed to feel like.

Ty breathes out. He smiles down at me as I turn over and slip under him, angled in and protected, tucked into a warm cove of muscles and the spicy smell of Speed Stick.

L
ed Zeppelin wakes me up. I open my eyes wide and look out the van window. The sky above us is thin and blue with clouds that crack like desert sand. Where exactly are we?

The highway rolls by, flat and black. Scrubby little bushes dot its edge. There are hills in the distance, probably covered in scrubby little bushes, too.

Billie is curled up next to me. Her chin rests on her arm along the back of the bench as she stares out the side window. Her eyes move as we pass mile marker 252.

Ginger is driving, and Jay is manning the passenger seat up front. Jay has all of his gadgets—his phone, his extra GPS, and his laptop—spread out on the dash in front of him, at the ready for any detour or wrong turn or a possible career in espionage.

Ty is out cold in the backseat, sitting up with his arms crossed over his chest and his legs stretched out in front of him so far that they almost look as long as Winston's, who has been demoted to the backseat for once.

When I pictured us on the road, I thought only about the good stuff. I thought about the jokes, the time spent together, the fun and adventure and new sights and places. I thought it was going to be a never-ending joyride on carpeted seats.

I didn't think about the absolute boredom, the oh my God, if I have to sit next to you and listen to you breathe for even just one more hour, I might have to kill you moments.

I didn't think about the in-between places like this, where there are no radio stations at all, unless you love country or have religious fervor. I grew tired of everything every one of us had brought along days ago—especially Winston's classic rock collection. It took only about four weeks on the road for those songs to wear thin.

I didn't think all the new sights and places would be parking lots and gas stations and holding your breath in rest stop bathrooms—or holding it until the next stop altogether. Which is always just another gas station, because boys never have to go. Even after a jumbo soda and a cup of coffee.

“Do we need to stop?” Ty asked hours ago as we blew by another way station at sixty-five miles per hour.

“I'm fine,” Winston said. “You?”

“Fine,” Jay said over his shoulder. “You?”

Ginger gave the thumbs-up. He was fine.

Jay checked the GPS, and Ginger took the van to a shaky seventy miles per hour, and I fell asleep with my legs crossed.

I didn't think about how Billie would spit a wad of gum out of the window one day, and it would be so hot and windy outside that it would blow back in and land next to me, a sticky bright pink wad stuck to the carpeted seats.

Staring at it now makes me hungry.

“Where are the snacks?” I ask, digging for the wrinkled paper bag that usually holds our stash of chips and soda.

“This is all we have left,” Winston says, tossing two packs of cheese and peanut butter crackers at me.

“Don't they set rat traps with these?” I ask.

They are fluorescent orange with an industrial sealant brown filling.

“It's possible,” he says, tearing his pack open with his teeth.

Like a rat, I think.

I didn't think that sometimes it would feel like this is just mile after mile and gig after gig, piling one on top of another, layering up like a soft mountain of ash.

“I'm not so sure a night off was a good thing,” Winston says, chewing his crackers and watching me rub the second set of carpet wrinkles of the day from the side of my face.

We hit a bump in the road, a pothole or something that makes the fake crown swing from the rearview mirror. Jay
holds his hands up, protecting his gadgetry, while he gives Ginger a nasty sidelong glance.

Ty finally stirs. He stretches his arms out and flexes his fingers.

He opens his eyes and winces.

“Is it always going to smell like french fries in here?” he asks.

He drops his arms.

“I told you not to let her eat in the car,” I say, looking at Billie.

Somehow Billie dropped an order of fries—not just one or two but an entire small paper sleeve full—behind the shag bench two days ago. Now every time it heats up inside the van even a little bit, it smells like a deep-fat fryer.

Jay tried to fish them out with a long screwdriver, but it didn't fit into the crack. He wanted to disassemble the whole bench, his eyes measuring and hungry, but Winston said we didn't have the time.

How the fries made it down into that crack was a mystery to all of us, including Billie. It was like the van was hungry that day.

Oddly enough, the wad of Billie's gum landed right where the fries live. The smell is strongest there, almost directly under Billie.

“She's a food nuisance,” I say.

My car has enough broken corn chips and straw wrappers
stuck under the passenger seat to attest to this fact. No jury or deliberation necessary.

“So says the girl who orders her cheeseburgers well done,” Winston says.

He leans over and cracks the triangular window next to him.

“I like things a bit roached.” I shrug. No big deal.

Winston tsks at me and flicks his ash out the window.

“It's a shameful waste of perfectly good meat,” he says.

He turns toward Ty, and they bow at each other, like two warriors having defeated an enemy in a kung fu movie. Medium rare: 2. Well done: 0.

“Are we talking about dinner?” Jay turns around and asks.

Eat. Meat. They do sound the same. But he probably thinks he missed out on a high-five opportunity and feels the need to jump in.

I check my phone.

“It's only two-fifteen,” I say.

Jay reaches back and turns the radio down. He's rigged his iPad into the antique dashboard. Robert Plant only whispers to me now about cloaks and clocks and threads with no end.

“Late lunch?” he asks.

“I don't care what you eat,” Winston replies, “but Teddy Lee and Billie only get fifteen bucks for the day.”

Normally Winston buys everything with Marlboro points. His future lung cancer is sponsored. He has the duffel bag
(seventy-five points), the shot glass set (fifty points), even the baseball cap (sixty-five points) to prove it. He's not used to having actual money, and it turns out he is quite tightfisted.

“Does that include beer money?” Jay asks.

Winston nods.

Jay reaches into his front pocket and pulls out a crumple of bills. He picks some pocket fuzz out from the wrinkled money and lets it drift down into the carpet to join forces with the seventies shag.

He smooths and counts, then twists back toward us with a grin.

“Lunch it is then,” he says.

Ginger Baker eats with a knife and fork, British style. I've seen it dozens of times by now, but it still makes me want to dress him in a little suit with shorts and a striped tie and send him off to school.

His egg, sunny side up, splits open and oozes yellow. He has very long fingers. Nice nails. Not ragged and bitten like Jay's. Jay is so impatient he can't even wait for his nails to grow. He chews them off before they get a chance.

I stare at Ginger's hands, trying to ignore the paper next to Ty's plate, its torn edges, the words that are coming at me.

“Just let Ginger take a look,” Ty says, reaching over to slide the paper toward Ginger. “I let him in on what we've been up to,” he tells me.

I am sandwiched in a booth between Ty and Ginger, my Monte Cristo growing cold, the cheese becoming sweaty and solid. Jay and Winston and Billie are outside, leaning up against a car the color of lipstick, smoking.

The paper between us is filled with my curved words and Ty's straight lines, a song we have been working on during one of our late-night sessions.“Which one is it?” I ask, avoiding his eyes and the new hole in my heart, a sore, empty spot that didn't exist before that day at the pool.

I can't be mad at Ginger about this. That would be like thinking that Mozart was going to wreck your musical career. Ty knows that, so I've been outmaneuvered.

“It's the one about making out in the morning,” Ty says, sliding the page toward Ginger.

It does say that, scrawled in the upper corner. Ty is smart. It is one of my favorites. Ginger pulls the paper closer to him and slides a pencil out of his jacket pocket. He scans the page and starts penciling notes, intense and fast. Squinting, I try to read as he writes. I swear, with that handwriting Ginger should be a doctor. His first procedure should be fixing my wobbly, bruised heart.

Ginger sets the paper back down by my plate. I stare at the sharp, slanted notes that somehow stack together and make one of my songs better.

I nudge it away with my fingertips and look past the dirty plates lining the other side of the booth, past where Billie
has dragged her finger through a puddle of ketchup, past the dregs of Winston's chocolate milk, up to the gray summer sky outside the window.

There is more to playing my songs than the feeling that I am laying myself out flat for all the world to see or opening myself up and sharing what has been, until recently, all mine. There is Billie and how they will break her, because if we are really going to do this, I want to sing.

I sigh.

“You know I don't know how to do that.” I remind Ty, tapping the page on top of a skinny bass clef.

“Ginger'll help you,” he mumbles, his mouth full of burger, medium rare.

On my other side, Ginger is tucking toast points away at an alarming rate. He nods in agreement.

“And we'll need to practice,” I say, my brain skipping ahead to the logistics and the space and the little details everyone else will forget.

Ty pushes his plate away knowing he has won.

“Jay is going to be so stoked!” He pounds a rhythm into the edge of the table that makes Ginger's eggs wiggle. “Soon we won't have to be a cover band anymore!”

“Billie should start memorizing lyrics now.” He continues, looking out the window as Winston and Jay and Billie weave their way back across the parking lot, a tepee of cigarette butts left behind them.

“No, I want to sing,” I say, breaking the news in one big breath.

Ginger's fork freezes midair.

“You're sure?” Ty asks, leaning in close with his eyebrows raised.

I nod. “For these, for sure.”

Ty squeezes me tight, bumping me up against Ginger Baker in his excitement.

“It's gonna be
so
good,” he says, his voice as close to a squeal as a boy with arms like cannons can get.

“Yeah.” I laugh and untangle myself, saving the best for last. “But now you're gonna have to teach Billie how to play the guitar.”

Ginger smiles and raises his coffee mug, ready to seal the deal. I raise mine. Ty watches us suspiciously, shrugs, and then raises his, too. Clink.

For the past four mornings Ty has begged or borrowed or scammed a small meeting room in each of our hotels for the three of us to practice in.

Today's is called the Sunrise Room. A small easel stands on silver legs outside the doors announcing the big event: Marketing Concepts—Luncheon at Noon. We promised to be out by ten.

The carpet is dark blue with a tiny diamond pattern, and the tan walls are sectioned, so you can fold them up and roll them away, making an even bigger Sunrise Room if you need
one. I'm not much for navigation, but I am pretty sure you can't see the sunrise from anywhere in here. Small or large, the room faces the wrong direction.

We plug in but keep it low. So far we have been working on arrangements, piecing the songs together. Today I am going to sing for the two of them for the first time. Nerves are shooting through me: little bolts that make me trip over my guitar cord and drop my pick for the third time.

I stand up and hear Ty say, “Ta-ta-tee-tee-ta,” and suddenly I am last chair in the fifth-grade band again.

“Ta-ta-tee-tee-ta,” Mr. Beauregard said back then, and I scowled as he poised his arms in the air, readying us.

My feet dangled from a folding chair. The clarinet, the lamest of all instruments, rested between my legs.

Just count it off, I thought. That was what I had learned in my guitar book.

Mr. B was a sweaty pork rind of a man. His stomach bulged over the waistband of his pants while he swung that useless little conductor stick in the air endlessly, like any of us were watching.

We were eleven. It was the first day of school, and some of us weren't even sure how to hold our borrowed or rented instruments, let alone play them, and he was up there, saying ta-ta-tee-tee-ta like we were the goddamn philharmonic. I couldn't decide if that was severe optimism or complete ignorance. I quit band the next day.

But when Ty moves his fingers along in the air on an invisible fiddle or viola or something and says, “Bum-de-bum-de–bum-de-beyeeeooo
www,”
Ginger nods, completely fluent in the secret language of music geeks and middle school band teachers that eludes me.

Seconds later they are bouncing along and I am struggling to keep up.

How can Ginger already be better at my own songs than I am?

It's true: he is a musical genius. Ta-ta-totally. I watch his fingers fly and miss my cue to sing.

I drop my shoulders and shake my head. I've been here before, once in the garage when I tried to sing for the first time and again right now. Unfortunately I crashed and burned both times.

Ty and Ginger loop back around, playing me in. I have to jump. Now.

All the air is knocked out of my gut. I pump the dry squeeze box that is my abdomen and push the first note out of my mouth. It is good. Not as smoky and sweet as Billie, but damn good.

Distracting my shaky stomach with my fingering, I tap out the beat with my toes. I hold tight to my guitar, slowing my voice so it doesn't run away from me. My palms are sweaty. Fireworks burst inside my brain: I did it! I'm doing it! Keep doing it!

Ty smiles, and Ginger nods along.

I ease into the pocket and even out my breathing, my voice rising high into the open Sunrise Room, like liquid sunshine.