“I mean, I know you’ve heard of it. Have you seen it?”
“Yeah.”
He said this so flatly that I suspected there was more to the story. “Have you done it?”
“No. I don’t . . .” He shook his head, suddenly looking way too serious for his lighthearted cowboy hat. “My father is an alcoholic. Sometimes that’s genetic. I might be one, too. If I never have a drink, I’ll never have a problem. Same goes for drugs. If you inherit that addictive personality, that problem with obsession, you’re going to have a harder time kicking than your average Joe. I’m like, live and let live. I don’t judge people. I’m just not going to do it myself.”
“You don’t judge people, except your dad.” And me, for being involved in this crash. Sam’s smile, his animated body language, every-thing I’d liked about him had shut down the instant I mentioned it.
He and I had seen eye to eye on so much already. I’d assumed he would understand what had happened to me, too, and sympathize, if only I explained it right. But he looked truly horrified—at the wreck, okay, but his horror seemed to extend to me, and the coke, though I’d told him I wasn’t the one at fault.
He didn’t believe me, I realized with a sinking heart.
Nobody did.
What was new?
He pulled to a stop at a light, checked in the mirror and saw nobody was behind us, and turned his whole body to face me. I expected a lecture, and I was going to have to tell him where to go. This was what I got instead: “Bailey. You’re not still dating that guy, are you? You said you weren’t dating anybody, but now you’re referring to this shit as your boyfriend.”
“No,” I said rather desperately. The idea gnawed at the back of my mind that I’d unintentionally lost Sam before I even had him. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, and I didn’t want him to think Toby and I were still together. “Definitely not. My leg really hurt at first. It seems stupid now, but I thought it was broken. Water was seeping into the car. Toby wouldn’t get out. He wouldn’t let me get out. He tried to convince me to take the fall for him.”
“What?” Sam glanced up at the green light, then over at a car dealership, as if considering whether to pull into the lot and grill me on this further. Then he checked his watch, saw we didn’t have much time before the gig, and kept driving. “Take the fall how?”
“Tell the cops and his parents and my parents that I was driving. That’s when he admitted to me that he was high, which explained why he’d been so hot to leave the party all of a sudden, and so paranoid out of nowhere that the cops were coming to break it up. It was also the reason he’d wrecked the car and then screamed at me not to leave it. I was hurt, and he was scaring me. And then he said that I had to take the fall for him because he had everything to lose, a baseball scholarship to Vandy, and I had nothing to lose by taking the blame for the wreck. I was just a washed-up ex-musician.” And you’re never going to amount to anything. You’re just going to sit around and bitch about your sister like you have for the past year.
“And you agreed,” Sam said, “and lied to the cops, and that’s why you’re in so much trouble?”
“Oh, no. I was halfway considering it, honestly, because it would have pissed off my mother. Toby knows me pretty well by now. But then he made me mad with that crack about me being worthless. It’s one thing to think you’re worthless, and quite another for somebody else to tell you that you are. I’m like, ‘Fuck you,’ and I proceeded to ascertain that the car was not in fact sinking, and I called 911.”
Sam frowned out the windshield. “What an asshole,” he muttered.
I nodded slowly, like I was still puzzling through it. “Pretty much.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t give in,” he said. “Besides all the trouble you would have been in for wrecking his car, the cops would have figured out you were lying to them. If they’d investigated at all, they would have seen that the bruise on your thigh matched up to the handle on the passenger side of the car, not the driver’s side.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “Impressive. You’re always thinking, aren’t you, Hardiman?” I tapped my temple with one finger. “Spoken like a true criminal.”
He laughed uncomfortably. Possibly he was realizing this outlaw chick he’d picked up was more genuine than he’d bargained for. “Did that guy get his ass handed to him by the cops?”
“No. They didn’t take him in. His parents got there before the cops did, and I didn’t tell anybody what he’d tried to pull, because he just would have denied it. I heard that his folks have already replaced his soaked Toyota. You know, some parents cover their eyes and would rather not know what their kids are up to. It’s only my parents who look forward to me screwing up so they can scream, ‘I told you so.’”
Sam nodded. “So why are you in trouble with your parents? You didn’t screw up.”
“It’s partly because I’d been at this wild party. A couple of other people who’d been there got in trouble, too, later that night. The parents started texting each other frantically. The party became infamous. And my folks are like, ‘How could you be hanging out with these people?’ and I’m like, ‘I’ve been hanging out with them for a year and you didn’t notice.’ They don’t enjoy hearing the truth about that sort of thing. And then my sister told me that since I clearly don’t have any respect for myself, she doesn’t respect me, either. She hasn’t spoken to me since.”
I’d been able to talk about my parents’ misplaced anger with a dry tone and an eye roll. But as I talked about Julie, my chest felt tight. I wished I’d never given Sam this window into everything that was wrong with me.
“Oh, Bailey.” Coming from any other teenager I knew, these two words would have been sarcastic, imitating an old person commenting on a terrible shame. Coming from Sam, they sounded sincere.
Swallowing, I went on. “Honestly, I think a big part of why my parents lost their minds over this was that they had to leave town the next day. They didn’t have time to stand over me and make sure I was sorry. Instead of letting me stay by myself at home, they made me move in with my granddad. And if I get in any more trouble this summer, they won’t pay for Vanderbilt.”
“You’re going to Vanderbilt? I’m going to Vanderbilt.”
He said it lightly. I wasn’t sure whether he meant we could hang out together there.
Anyway, to me it was still a long way to Vanderbilt, with no guarantee. “I’m not going if my parents find out about this gig.”
“Right, the bar thing.”
No, it was not the bar thing. I wasn’t supposed to play any gig at all. But that wouldn’t make sense to Sam, so I only nodded.
“I’m not trying to get you in worse trouble with your parents. . . .” He frowned at himself. “Okay, I guess I’m asking you to play in a bar and that would seem pretty bad to them, plus lying to your granddad. I’m guilty. But besides getting along with them, what would it hurt if they decided not to pay for Vandy? I certainly don’t have perfect pitch, and I got a full scholarship from the music department. I can’t believe you didn’t.”
I shrugged. “My grades were good, but I didn’t do any extra-curriculars or community service work when I was in high school. None. I told you. I never did anything but tour bluegrass festivals.”
Exasperated, he opened his hands on the steering wheel. “Yeah, but didn’t you audition? Didn’t they hear you?”
“No. If I auditioned and got a scholarship, they’d want me to major in music or at least be in the orchestra, and I don’t want to do that.”
“You don’t want to major in music? What is the matter with you?”
A loaded silence settled between us. The truck zoomed on through the night. He watched the road. I couldn’t give him my go-to-hell stare effectively when he wasn’t looking.
Then he glanced over at me and let out a huge sigh. I hadn’t realized how tense he looked, hunched over the steering wheel, until his broad shoulders relaxed. “I’ve been giving you hell, Bailey. I have no right to do that. You just caught me off guard. I had a good friend who died driving drunk last year.”
“Oh!” In my own short exclamation I heard surprise, sympathy, and relief that he was as much like me as I’d thought when we talked at the mall. He only acted different because he’d gone through something lots worse.
He cupped my bare knee under his hand—just long enough for fire to shoot across my skin—and took his hand away. “I’m really sorry. The third degree about your boyfriend—”
“Ex,” I reminded him.
“—and your family, and Vandy . . . I’m sorry. That was none of my . . .”
Business. It was none of his business. If he didn’t finish the sentence, I would finish it for him.
No, I didn’t have the heart. He’d seemed so driven when we played at the mall today, when he upstaged his dad, and when he came to my granddad’s house to rescue me. Now he was still driving toward downtown Nashville, but the fire had gone out of his eyes. He seemed lost.
He shook his head as if to clear it, then flashed me a grin. Just like that, he was back to the glowing Sam I’d met that afternoon. “We’re going to have fun tonight, you’ll see.”
“What’s the name of this band, anyway?”
“The Sam Hardiman Band, but don’t look at me like that! Believe me, I’ve already caught plenty of flak for that from the other members. I had to write something down when I sent in the audition video, and we hadn’t discussed a name before. We need to think of something else.” Pulling to a stop at the next intersection, he thumbed through the MP3 player plugged into the dashboard. When a funky beat began, he drove on. “I wanted to play this for you. Have you heard it before?”
I listened for a second. “Yeah, but it’s been a while. Justin Timberlake?”
“Exactly. What key is it in?”
“F minor,” I said without thinking.
“Wow,” Sam said. “That is amazing.”
I didn’t think it was amazing. It was more of a nuisance. But after years of my mom telling me my miraculous ear was a hindrance rather than a help because of how much I complained about pitch problems she couldn’t even hear . . . if Sam wanted to call it amazing, I would let him.
“Hear the disco violins?” he asked. “The band’s been playing this song for a while without that part. It’s almost like I knew you were coming. I was hoping you could give the song a listen and pick up those licks after one hearing. I’ll bet you can do that, can’t you?”
“Yeah,” I acknowledged.
Admiration evident in his voice, he said, “Like a machine.”
Yes, that’s exactly what it felt like.
5
Parking in downtown Nashville was always crazy, but the biggest country music event of the year, the CMA Music Festival, was coming up next week, and the tourist area was even more crowded than usual. We parked near the riverfront in a dark deck that I would have thought twice about if I’d been alone.
“There are Ace and Charlotte.” Sam lifted his hand to an African-American guy driving by in a minivan that looked brand-new. “Good. They’ve unloaded Charlotte’s drum kit and the amps at the gig already.” Watching the van search the packed deck and finally stop in a space several rows over, he said, “I know this is kind of awkward, but if you would act like we don’t like each other very much when we’re around them, that would really help me out.”
As we pulled our instrument cases from behind the seat of the truck, I said, “Okay. Around my granddad, I’ll act like we are on a date, and around your band, I’ll act like we’re not.” I eyed Sam closely, wondering which scenario he thought was the truth.
“Great.” He flashed me a conspiratorial grin, revealing nothing. Then he took a few steps across the concrete to bump fists with Ace. Gesturing to me, he said, “This is Bailey Wright. She’s going to play fiddle with us tonight.” He turned to me. “This is my bud Ace Hightower.”
“Nice to meet you.” I shook Ace’s huge hand, looking way up into his deep, melty eyes.
“Pleasure,” Ace said. Maybe Sam had given him the speech about looking older, too, but unlike Sam’s shadow, Ace’s beard was carefully groomed into a goatee. If he was supposed to look like a rockabilly hipster, like Sam and me, he hadn’t gotten that memo. But if Sam was counting on a female record company executive discovering his band someday, between himself and Ace, they probably had that base covered. Ace wore tight jeans that hugged his muscular thighs and a tight red T-shirt with a chemical formula on it, a joke for nerds who’d paid attention in high school and forged a career path.
No, he hadn’t grown the goatee for the bar’s benefit. He’d had it for a while. I recognized this guy, and his last name. “Your dad owns the car dealership.”
“He does,” Ace acknowledged with a wry smile.
“You’ve been in some of the TV commercials.”
“So have I!” Sam called, waving.
Ace told him, “You were dressed up as a dinosaur.” Ace turned back to me. “Sam was convinced that if we put him in a commercial, he’d get discovered, and somebody would hire him for their big-time band.”
“I was kidding about that,” Sam protested. “Nobody would discover me if they hadn’t heard me sing and they hadn’t seen this face.”