Dirty Little Secret

“Then you can’t go!” Charlotte exclaimed, jumping out, too.

“Go where?” Suddenly I had Sam’s full attention. He and Ace forgot all about the other girls, meeting Charlotte and me at the back of the car.

“Julie’s playing at the Riverwalk stage in a few minutes,” I told Sam, “and she’s refusing to go on. She needs me.”

“You can’t go.” He repeated Charlotte’s words as though they were obvious, spray-painted on the back of this row of nineteenth-century buildings.

“I promise you I can,” I said, taking a step in the direction of the river. I could have assured him, as I’d assured Charlotte, that I would try to be back in time for our gig. But I didn’t even care when he was ordering me around.

He stepped in front of me. “No, you can’t!” he shouted. “We have a gig, Bailey! There is nothing more important than this gig right now.”

I put my hands on my hips. “There are a lot of things more important than this gig. My sister is more important. I am more important. You are more important. But you’ll never understand that, and that is your whole problem.” I walked around him.

“This is not your fantasy that the record company and your parents and Julie decide she can’t do this without you, Bailey,” he called after me. “She’s been doing it without you for a year. There is no way they’re scrapping a year of work and deciding at the eleventh hour that they need you.”

I turned around backward and called, “That’s not what I think.”

“That is what you think, or hope. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be going.”

Oh. We’d known each other less than a week, but he sure knew how to keep me around—at least as long as it took me to tell him off. I stomped all the way back to him on the uneven pavement of the alley. “Yes, I would be going, because I’m not you. Just because you don’t care about anything but performing doesn’t mean you should judge everybody else by your own low standards.”

He blinked, but his jaw was set. “If you walk away from this gig, that’s it for us. Don’t come back to the gig, and don’t come back to me. Ever.”

I looked at him. Really looked him up and down—the cowboy hat mashing his dark hair, his handsome face half-hidden by now with dark stubble, his chocolate eyes—because I knew I might not see him again. I made sure I took in what I was leaving, and then I turned.

He caught me by the arm. “We have to rely on you to make gigs, Bailey. Nobody will book us anymore if they can’t rely on us to be there. All four of us.”

“It doesn’t matter why,” I said. “You told me don’t leave or we’re over. And I’m leaving.” I turned one more time, but, aware of what I was putting behind me, I circled back around and stopped directly in front of Ace.

“It’s not that Charlotte doesn’t love you,” I told him in a rush. “She’s just so insecure that she can’t imagine you would love her. The only reason she’s hung up on Sam is, she didn’t have to guess how he felt about her. Once upon a time, Sam told her that he loved her and she was beautiful. You’re going to have to do the same.” I turned and flounced down the alley. When nobody called their thanks to me, I turned around, gave them a little curtsy, and called, “You’re welcome.” They were all staring at me, motionless, and I was a little afraid that I’d ruined whatever chance Ace and Charlotte had with each other.

But before the back door of the bar disappeared beyond the curve of the steep hill, I spun around one more time. Ace stood in front of Charlotte, hands on her shoulders, head bent, lips close to hers. She gazed way up at him, then inched closer. He kissed her mouth.

As I watched them, heat spread across my face, and my lips tingled. At least one good thing had come out of the past wonderful, horrible week.

Sam stood only a few feet from what must have been a shocking sight for him, his two best friends finally making out. But he wasn’t looking at them. He stood with his feet planted stubbornly far apart, like he was ready for someone to try to push him over, with his strong arms crossed on his chest, watching me go.

I put my eyes on the alley ahead of me and tried to think of the best way to cut through the crowded streets to the Riverwalk stage.

That’s when I started to cry.

14

I sobbed all the way down the alley, worried about what could have happened to change Julie’s mind about wanting to be a star. Wondering what was wrong with Sam that he wanted to be a star more than anything. Sad for myself.

In that short walk, I cried for everything I’d stopped myself from crying for over the past year: how unreasonable and unkind Toby had been. How cold everyone had been at school. How unfeeling my parents had been. How far I had fallen for Sam so quickly, with no rope or handhold to climb back out of that hole.

But by the time I reached the bottom of the alley and needed to cross the street and wind my way through the throngs of tourists to the Riverwalk, I was pulling Sam’s handkerchief from my pocket and dabbing the tears from under my eyes. I might not be the front chick in a rockabilly band anymore, but I still had a style to uphold. I wasn’t going to ruin Ms. Lottie’s hard work.

And I wanted to look like a million bucks when I saw my parents and Julie.

Near the stage, I shouted over the music for a guard to tell me where to find my family. They must have called ahead to him that I was coming, or I looked enough like hot new country sensation Julie Mayfield that he recognized I was related. He pointed me toward a line of country stars’ trailers lined up at one end of the parking lot. I walked along them until I found my parents’ RV. I stood at the door for a few seconds, wondering whether to just go on in, and then I knocked.

My granddad let me in. I passed right through the living area. My parents sat around the kitchen table where they’d told me Julie was going to be a star and my career was dead. My mother started yelling at me that Julie had come this far, and now she was going to throw it all away out of immaturity and stubbornness. Ignoring my mother, I climbed the ladder into the upper sleeping area.

Julie was watching for me. When she saw my head appear, she spread her arms wide.

“Bay!” she squealed.

I smiled. “Hey, Julie.”

We hugged for a long minute, sitting on the mattress, and then we lay down, staring at the ceiling only a few feet above our heads, and talked just like we used to when we dreamed of making it big. All the photos of stars that I’d taped to the ceiling on my side of the mattress were still there. I hadn’t crawled into this space in a year, but Julie hadn’t taken any of my stuff down.

“Even though the single’s only been out a day,” she said, “they can tell it’s selling well, and the album is racking up presales. They want to go back to contract with me right now for another album. I told Mom and Dad that I want something in exchange this time. I want some of your songs on the second album. They say that’s ridiculous and they won’t even approach the record company about something so childish. Therefore, I am not going onstage. My God, you look beautiful.”

I was flattered for about half a second, first about my songs, then about the hair and makeup Ms. Lottie had done for me so I looked as put together as Julie, but that quickly turned to annoyance. “You can’t just not go onstage, Julie.” I had walked away from a gig myself, for Julie. And that made me angry. “You don’t get it. My songs are something I wrote as a child. You have an adult job. You signed an adult contract to get on that stage and entertain the thousands of people who bought tickets.”

“No, you don’t get it,” she insisted. “You wrote those songs only a year or two ago. You were my age when you wrote them. If you were a child then, I’m a child now. And you know what that means? I can’t sign a contract. My parents can sign it for me, but nobody can make me perform. Not unless I get what I want.”

I was astounded that she seemed so sure of herself, so defiant. She scared me. All of a sudden, she was reminding me of me. “Why are you doing this?”

“It’s the only way I could think of to get what I want. I could go on a hunger strike, but I would get so hungry. Mom would make her chocolate chip cookies and I’d be toast.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Why do you want any of my songs on your album? You don’t have to do this to bolster my ego and keep me from riding with coked-up drivers.”

“That’s ridiculous. If I wanted to keep you from riding with coked-up drivers, I’d just ignore your calls for another week and a half. I can tell that’s been working, because your voice mails have sounded increasingly desperate.” She grinned at me, her blue eyes looking angelic and self-satisfied.

I said slowly, “You little devil.”

“Fact,” she said. “I want to sing your songs because they’re good. They’re different. They’re real. They’re about being a teenager. Mom and Dad didn’t care I was signing away all my rights to choose what songs I perform. Now the company is picking shit for me, and I have to put my name on it. I need you to help me get my career back on track. I wouldn’t want you if you weren’t good.”

I rolled over on the mattress—carefully, so my hair didn’t get crazy—and looked at her, as we’d gazed at each other up here a million times as children. Julie had understood me better than anybody. I thought I’d lost that in my life, and maybe I would never completely regain it. But as she grinned at me, I felt like I was getting a little piece of it back.

“Are you sure that’s the only reason you don’t want to go onstage?”

Her pretty face fell. “I screwed up at the Opry, Bay.”

I poked her. “Of course you didn’t. You looked a little nervous, but it was your first time at the Opry, for God’s sake! You’ll do better tonight, and even better when the Opry asks you back.”

She shook her head, and now her eyes were welling up with tears. “You don’t know how bad I sucked. You weren’t there.”

“I was there.”

She stared at me and sobbed once. “You were?”

“Yes.”

“Even after we didn’t invite you?” she wailed. “Even after I wouldn’t talk to you on the phone?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. I felt around on the mattress and took her hand. “Listen to me. Whatever happens between us, I will always come to your Opry.”

She squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek. “Thank you.”

I slid off the mattress and climbed down the ladder. I hadn’t even reached the bottom when my mother asked, “Did you tell her to get onstage?”

As I set my feet on the floor of the RV, my mother patted the seat beside her at the table. I kept standing and folded my arms. “I told Julie that she’s worked hard and she’s done everything you asked her to do for a year. If she wants you to fight for one item in her contract, she’s within her rights to withhold something you want until you promise her what she wants.”

“I knew you would pull something like that,” my mother sneered. She turned to my dad and asked, “Why didn’t you stop me from calling her?”

My dad opened his mouth, and my granddad moved toward the table, but I didn’t need their help this time. I said, “You can’t ask for my opinion, then say my opinion isn’t worth anything when you don’t like it. I am part of this family, too. You are one of the many reasons Julie is a success, but so am I. I worked hard and did everything you asked me to do, too, for seventeen years. The way you raised Julie made her want a career in music. You raised me that way, too, and you can’t penalize me now for doing what you raised me to do.” My mother took a breath. Before she could speak, I went on, “Granddad got me a job playing fiddle with those tribute bands that walk around the mall.”

“You did what?” my mother shouted at my granddad.

I continued in a louder voice, just as she’d yelled over my protests my whole life. I quoted her line that she’d used on me so many times: “Excuse me, but I have the floor.”

She stopped talking and stared at me with wide blue eyes. I’d been shocked in the past at some of the similarities between us. She was having that reaction now.

I said, “I’m in another band, too, that has a gig on Broadway tonight. Or, I was in a band. And it’s not right for you to take away my college tuition because of that. Parents pay for their children’s college if they can, and you certainly can. It’s not right for you to take that away because I pursue the career you taught me to pursue. But if that’s what you’re going to do, so be it. I will join another band. I will try not to embarrass you or Julie, but I’m not going to live my life denying this huge part of myself just because you want to keep me a secret.”

For once in her life, my mom seemed shocked into silence. It was my dad who said quietly, “We don’t have time to talk about this right now, sugar bear. We’ve got to get Julie onstage. We’re back in Nashville for the next few months. You can move back home, and we’ll have plenty of time to work it out.”

“You just made me move to Granddad’s,” I said. “I’m comfortable where I am, if he’ll let me stay.”

I felt my granddad’s hand on my shoulder.

“Well, come by tomorrow afternoon,” my mother said weakly, “and we’ll talk.”

“I can’t. I have a gig from two to six.” I looked at my parents’ forlorn faces. Standing firm had felt good, but I did want to work this out with them. I said, “I can come by your house in the morning.”