“What part of ‘no’ didn’t you understand, Sam?” I asked.
He eyed me steadily. “The part where you were wrong.”
Infuriated, I nodded. “So you’ll do anything you want, you’ll lie to anyone about anything, if you think you’re right and they’re wrong.”
“Yes!” he exclaimed, exasperated, like this was obvious.
“Why do you keep trying to convince me to do this?” I leaned toward him across the table. “I’ve told you what my parents are going to take away from me.” I was half waiting for Ace and Charlotte to gasp and ask about this strange deal with my parents. When they didn’t, I knew Sam had already told them.
“Yes, but they’re wrong to do that,” Sam said levelly, meeting my gaze while he ate another fry.
“Just because you think they’re wrong doesn’t mean they’re not going to do it.” My voice rose. I had a fleeting thought that my parents’ ban on misbehaving in public probably included making a scene in late-night restaurants, but I was so angry that I couldn’t help it. “God, Sam! I swear the only way you would take anything like that seriously is if it happened to you. If it happens to anybody else, for you it’s like it didn’t happen.”
“Nothing’s happened, Bailey,” he said soothingly—except I knew he wasn’t really trying to soothe me but rather to make me feel crazy, because he never stopped eating French fries. “Your parents haven’t found out.”
“They will,” I insisted. “You keep telling me, ‘Just one more gig. Just one more gig.’ But I know what you really want. It’s like you’re saying, ‘Just let me touch it. That’s as far as we’ll go.’ ”
I’d meant it as an angry joke. We were eighteen years old, adults. We could make sex jokes to each other.
He didn’t laugh. His eyes widened. He looked cornered, like a tender fourteen-year-old boy overwhelmed by a forward girl. He put his elbow on the table and balanced his temple on his fingers as though he had a headache. Then he cut his eyes sideways at Charlotte, as if she had anything to do with the conversation.
“You obviously know what you’re talking about,” Charlotte said.
“What?” Sam asked sharply at the same time Ace turned to gape at her.
“Isn’t that what she’s doing?” Charlotte insisted. “Dressing like that”—she nodded to my tight NashVegas T-shirt—“acting like a tease, just to get a gig?”
“No,” I said so calmly I was proud of myself. “You’ve gotten me mixed up with Sam.”
Sam and Ace hardly seemed to notice my attempt to defuse her sharp comment. “Apologize,” Sam told her. That rare angry edge had entered his voice, the one I’d heard at the factory.
Her mouth opened and her eyes widened like she was astonished he’d betrayed her. Then she gathered her wits and said haughtily, “It’s true.”
“Apologize,” Ace repeated calmly but firmly.
Charlotte turned to look at Ace. Their eyes locked for a moment. Something passed between them.
She muttered, “Sorry,” but she wasn’t looking at me as she said it. She was rolling her eyes.
Still glaring at Charlotte, Sam sighed a huge sigh, shoulders sagging so low against the back of the booth that I realized how tight and tense he’d been before. To me he said, “I told you from the beginning that I wanted this audition video. In case the bar calls me, we need to figure out when we’re all available to play from now on.”
“There’s no ‘from now on,’ ” I said instantly, holding my ground. “I told you, I’m not in your band.”
“Are you quitting?” he challenged me.
As his dark eyes drilled into me, my adrenaline spiked, and for once it wasn’t because of the yearning that took hold of me when he offered me a glance. It was a fight-or-flight reaction to a threat: the threat of never being able to play with the band again. I couldn’t keep on playing with them, because my parents would find out eventually. I couldn’t stop playing with them, because my heart would shrivel up and die. There was no solution to this problem. The only tool I had was putting off the decision.
“I can’t quit the band,” I said. “I’m not a member.”
Charlotte raised her hand. “I don’t like this game.” She still wasn’t looking at me. This time she wasn’t looking at Ace or Sam, either. She stared above Ace’s head at the far wall. But in the stubborn set of her jaw and the hard look in her strange blue-green eyes, I saw what I was doing to her. I wanted desperately to play with the band. So did she. She’d enjoyed the comfort of stability with the band before I showed up. I had thrown the band into a tizzy and ruined everything for her.
And I realized she was right. While I was in this limbo, so were they.
Echoing Sam, I sighed and relaxed my shoulders against the back of the booth, directing my gaze above his head at the Hatch Show Print poster of Johnny Cash so iconic that every business in town displayed a copy of it. “I can’t tell you when I can play from now on,” I said, “but I can tell you for . . .” I held up my hands while I thought about how long I might safely play with them without ruining my future. I was so deep in limbo that I couldn’t even answer my own question. If they’d asked me two days ago, I would have said I couldn’t play with them at all. The deeper I fell in love with the band’s gigs, the longer the safe time stretched.
“A week?” Sam suggested.
I shook my head no.
“Five days?” Ace asked, exasperated. His words moved me more than anything Sam had said. Sam lived life in a constant state of near-exasperation, whereas Ace rarely showed any emotion at all. If even he was exasperated with me, I deserved it.
I owed him better. I owed them all better.
“Four days,” I negotiated. Julie and my parents would be coming back to town tomorrow, but I would still be staying with my granddad so he could keep tabs on me, theoretically. They would be busy with concerts and parties for Julie’s single release and the CMA Festival. That meant my parents would be even angrier if they found out I’d disobeyed a direct order right under their noses, when Julie’s record company was so concerned about her image and theirs.
It also meant my parents would be totally preoccupied with Julie, my granddad would likely go with them to her concerts, and nobody would be watching me. If they cared so much about what I was doing, they ought to be monitoring me more closely. This would serve them right.
But there was one night I wasn’t sure about. “Maybe not Tuesday.” That was the day Julie’s single was scheduled to hit stores. It was also the night of her Grand Ole Opry debut. The venue wasn’t the biggest in Nashville. It certainly wouldn’t get her as much exposure as her CMA Festival concerts on Thursday afternoon and Friday night. But it was the stage every country musician dreamed about playing on, and Julie had scored it for her single debut day. No matter how big her career got and where her tour took her, she would always remember this concert.
And I was still holding out hope that my family would invite me.
“Today’s Sunday,” Sam reminded me. “You can’t say, ‘Maybe not Tuesday.’ Either you’re in or you’re out.”
“Okay. Not Tuesday.” Clearly Sam wasn’t going to let me back out of a gig once I told him I was in. And I couldn’t miss Julie’s debut if I actually got invited. I could add that to my long list of items I would never forgive myself for.
Sam pushed his plate of fries away and turned his paper menu over. He looked around the table and then asked, “Anybody got a pen?”
I reached for my purse to pull out a pencil—carefully, without revealing my music notebook inside. Before I could open the flap, Charlotte produced a black permanent marker. As she handed it to him, I realized the marker must be how she was achieving the strange see-through effect of her scribbled black nail polish. I decided then that if we ever reached the point that she no longer pissed me off every time I looked at her, I would take her for a proper manicure.
Sam drew a calendar on the menu. “Not Tuesday,” he muttered in grudging agreement. “But we already have something for Monday.” He scribbled the gig on the calendar, then looked up at me. “It’ll be fun. It’s a surprise birthday party, a pool party! It’s in Chattanooga. Though—Uh-oh.”
“What?” Ace asked.
Sam’s eyes never left me. “Are you working at the mall tomorrow? Could you get off a little early? Or if you’re with Elvis, just walk out on him.”
“I work there Tuesday through Saturday,” I assured him. “Not tomorrow.”
Slamming down Charlotte’s marker, Sam put one hand on the edge of the table and one over his heart like he’d just averted a stress attack. Charlotte patted his shoulder in a way that made me want to pinch her.
He picked up the marker and tapped it on the calendar. “We won’t get paid as much for the party as we do when we work for tips. And obviously, playing in Chattanooga won’t do us any good when we’re trying to make a name for ourselves in Nashville. If it helps us pick up more Chattanooga gigs, though, we could use those to fill holes in our schedule.”
I stared at him, waiting for him to hear himself. He was doing it again, assuming I would play with the band permanently.
“What?” he asked when he looked up and saw my expression. Then he willfully misunderstood what it meant: “Yeah, you’re right. If we’re trying to fill holes in the schedule, Memphis would be better than Chattanooga, because there are so many record company connections over there.” He looked back down at his calendar and stroked a few more words with Charlotte’s marker. “I’m working on something here in town for Wednesday. And now we have the video. With any luck we’ll be playing on Broadway by Thursday.” It was hard to be skeptical when he beamed at all of us like this Broadway gig was a done deal. “Things are getting serious. It would be nice if we finally named the band something other than the Sam Hardiman Ego Trip.” He winked at me. “How about Death Wish?”
“No way,” Ace said. “Sounds like a heavy metal group.”
Sam shrugged. “Redneck Death Wish, for clarity.” As it rolled off his tongue, he grinned even bigger. “I like it!”
“No!” squealed Charlotte, wrinkling her nose.
He pointed at her. “We’ll change it if you come up with something better.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll give you a year.”
Ace put up his hand to high-five Sam diagonally across the table. Charlotte rolled her eyes again, which made me feel a little less like her eye roll while apologizing to me had been an attack. The ice was broken then, and our conversation eased into how our performances had gone the last two nights, and what we could improve for our next three gigs. It was the first time we’d ever talked together as a band. Though the fight-or-flight feeling returned and the hair stood up on my arms, it wasn’t as intense as it had been before. I made up my mind to enjoy the band while I had it, because I might never get it again.
At the same time, I wondered what effect my decision to join the band temporarily would have on my relationship, such as it was, with Sam. I’d told him we shouldn’t date if we were in a band together. He’d said we could do anything we wanted because I’d insisted we weren’t in a band together. And now that we were, at least for the next four days, the panicky feeling turned a sinister corner.
I picked up Charlotte’s marker from Sam’s menu-turned-calendar and reached across the table for Sam’s shoulder. He was deep in conversation with Ace about changing the ending of one of our songs, but he offered his shoulder to me.
Using the marker, I drew a heart on his sleeve. I started with the heart itself, then surrounded it with dots and swirls like a henna tattoo, the kind of doodle I drew to decorate the songs in my music notebook that nobody would ever hear.
Sam still nodded at Ace. But as I finished the heart and backed away across the table, he held out the edge of his sleeve with two fingers so he could see it better. His dark eyes locked on me. My panicky feeling morphed into something like the caramel sundae Charlotte had ordered, sweet and irresistible.
Charlotte stayed in the conversation about music, too, but she managed to give me a pointed look up and down, telling me telepathically that she might have apologized for her tease comment, but she wasn’t really sorry. She reached in front of me on the table and retrieved her marker.
Around midnight we all walked through the warm, heavy night to the lot where Sam’s truck and my car were parked. Two abreast, I took the lead with Sam on the sidewalk, but there was no opening for us to return to the personal conversation we’d had while we were alone. The four of us were brainstorming for songs we could add to our playlist. What I really wanted was not just to talk with Sam but to make out with him like I had the night before, twenty-six girlfriends be damned. I would worry about them later.
But as we reached the lot and leaned against Sam’s truck, chatting, I came to terms with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight. He’d proven to me by now that he wouldn’t risk angering Charlotte and tearing the band apart by publicly displaying his affection for me. Resigned, I stopped trying to make smoldering eye contact with him and even asked Ace, more than Charlotte, “Do y’all want a ride back to the van?” I didn’t want to give them a ride—awkward—but I figured I’d better, since Sam’s truck would be crowded with the three of them.