Dirty Little Secret

“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.

I’d known this was coming, more or less, for an entire year. It had seemed a lot more real by last Christmas, when the dates for her first single and her album were set in stone, and more real still when she was scheduled for the Grand Ole Opry tomorrow and a huge single release party on Wednesday and the CMA Festival on Thursday and Friday, four of the biggest gigs she could have gotten short of her own sold-out stadium tour.

But I hadn’t actually seen ads for her appearances or her single or her album, either in magazines or online. For the past month I’d purposefully stayed away from the media because I’d known what was coming. Now, for the first time, she was so big I couldn’t avoid her. As I looked up at her sweet grin, her blue eyes enhanced by professional makeup, and her blond hair arranged by her own personal version of Ms. Lottie, my first thought was how pretty she was. Her looks wouldn’t have substituted for talent, though. In L.A., maybe. Not in Nashville. Luckily she had both.

My second thought was amazement that my first thought was pride in Julie, not jealousy of her, for the first time in a year.

My third thought was that if Sam had seen the sign, too, after I’d just told him what had happened between my family and me, he might have realized how much this huge monster girl would have looked like me if I’d still had long blond hair. In that case, I was in trouble.

Yesterday at my house, I’d half wished Sam would notice one of Julie’s star-studded photos, realize what was up, and put me out of my misery. Now that he’d helped me past some kind of barrier in my life, and I was free on the other side, this was the worst thing that could happen.

I didn’t dare glance over at him. If he hadn’t seen the billboard, he would want to know why I was looking at him funny and what was wrong.

I stopped wondering when I heard the blinker switch on. He raced down the exit ramp. After our long conversation and two hours of high winds, the SUV settled into an uncomfortable silence as he stopped at the light, then pulled into the parking lot of the nearest gas station, which glowed weakly, closed for the night. He parked the SUV directly under Julie’s sign, killed the engine, and bailed out, slamming the door behind him.

Ace started awake at the same time Charlotte yelled, “Oh!” In the rearview mirror, I watched them glare at each other warily as they backed away to opposite ends of the seat. Judging from their expressions, I wasn’t sure who’d been the first to touch the other, and who blamed whom.

“What’s happening?” Charlotte asked. At first I thought she was caught up in her tangle with Ace only, but she was looking at me in the rearview mirror. She wanted to know why we’d stopped.

“Well, I’m not sure, but I’m guessing Sam found out my sister is going to play at the Grand Ole Opry tomorrow night, and he’s upset that I haven’t told him.” I pointed through the ceiling of the SUV.

Charlotte and Ace exchanged a quizzical look, then opened their doors and got out.

The noise of the interstate rushed in, like the noise of the wind before, but more distant, just a dim rush in the background. My heart raced so fast that it hurt. My relationship with Sam was probably over. But I didn’t feel anything. I was back to that place where I’d spent the past year, with no emotion at all. Just panic.

Sam startled me by jerking open my door. He scowled at me for a moment with his fists on his hips. Behind him, Charlotte and Ace gazed up at the sign and whispered together. The sign was directly above the SUV, so close I couldn’t see it myself, but I knew it was there.

“I think this goes without saying, Bailey,” Sam barked. “You’ve got to get us an in with your sister’s record company.”

I responded without hesitation. I’d known for three days this was bound to happen sooner or later, and how Sam would react when it did. “I think this goes without saying, because I’ve already told you. I’m not allowed to be in a band. Julie’s company doesn’t want me to. They’re afraid it will ruin her PR. They’re not going to give a contract to someone defying a direct order. That’s not the way to make a good first impression.”

“Then, a different company,” he said. “Surely your sister and your parents have other connections, after a year preparing for her freaking album and Grand Ole Opry debut!” He balled both fists like he wanted to hit the side of the SUV, but that would injure his guitar-playing hands. With a groan he backed away from the SUV and walked across the clearing under the sign, past Charlotte and Ace, with his hands on his head.

I got out and called after him, “I can’t ask them to do that. They’ll take my college tuition away.”

Ace and Charlotte turned to stare at me with resentment and no understanding whatsoever. Over their heads, Sam yelled, “Your parents threatened you with that when they thought you were going to end up in a tabloid magazine for crashing into a lake with your cokehead boyfriend. If you disobey them by playing with a kick-ass band, your punishment won’t be the same. That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“We’ll never find out, because I’m not going to ask them.”

Charlotte stepped close to me, wearing a sour look. “You’d give up a chance at a recording contract, for all of us, just to get your parents to pay for your college? My mom isn’t paying for my college.”

“Maybe if she was, you wouldn’t be so desperate to get a recording contract.” I felt ugly saying that, but I just wanted them all off my back now, because I wasn’t going to do what they were asking me to do.

“Wow,” Ace said flatly. That’s when I knew I was beyond hope. I’d expected Charlotte to get emotional, and Sam. But Ace had more sense than both of them put together. If he was disgusted with me, I deserved it.

“Even if my parents weren’t threatening me,” I spat, “I would never ask them for anything else again.”

“That’s really the problem, isn’t it?” Sam yelled. “You’re just too stubborn to ask for help, or forgiveness, or anything.”

“Oh!” I cried. “You were just asking me what is wrong with my parents. You understood perfectly well then where I was coming from. It’s only now that you want something from them that you suddenly can’t fathom why I wouldn’t apologize to them.”

Face dark with anger, Sam stalked toward me. As he passed Ace and Charlotte, Ace reached out and put one hand on Sam’s chest to keep him back. Sam brushed Ace off and kept coming for me, holding two fingers an inch apart. “We’re that close, Bailey.”

“If you can’t get any farther without me groveling to my parents, it looks like you’re going to stay that close.” I measured an inch with my own fingers.

“You—” Sam started, taking another step toward me.

Ace shoved him backward. “Man, come on. We’re arguing under a billboard at two o’clock in the morning, and you don’t have a shirt on.”