School had ended. Evie spent the last few weeks of it feeling blurred and out of focus, with classmates looking carefully to the right and left of her and speaking to the middle button on her blouse. Even Fay-Jean Lindsay seemed to have trouble finding things to say to her. On the final day, they autographed annuals out on the school lawn. They had overlooked Evie other years — reaching across her to pass their annuals to someone else, sending her home with only a few scattered signatures in her own. But this year, everyone wanted her autograph. They shoved their books at her silently, with lowered eyes. “Best wishes, Evie Decker,” she wrote. She felt awkward about trying the clever rhymes that other people used. Then, after signing for the twentieth or thirtieth time, she began marking the forehead of her photograph with 
and nothing more. When the bell rang, she cleared out her locker and left the building without a backward glance.
“What do you do with yourself these days?” her father asked.
“Nothing much.”
“Are you bored? Have you got a lot of time on your hands?”
“Oh, no.”
Time hung in huge, blank sheets, split by Saturday nights. She spent her days bickering with Clotelia or carrying on listless, circular conversations with Violet. In the evenings she sat at her window slapping mosquitoes, gazing into darkness so heavy and still that it seemed something was about to happen, but nothing ever did. She awoke in the mornings feeling faded, with clammy bedclothes twisted around her legs.
On Saturday nights she took hours to dress. Her hair would be limp from constant re-arranging, her black skirt and blouse shiny at the seams from too much ironing. She held up and threw down endless pieces of costume jewelry. She brushed her black suede pumps until little rubber spots appeared. “Oh,” her father would say, meeting her on the stairs. “Are you going out?”
“Just to Violet’s.”
“Have a nice time.”
Why hadn’t anyone told him where she went? He continued up the stairs, pulling keys and loose change and postage stamps from his pockets and stepping over the turned-up place in the carpet without even seeming to notice it.
She waited on the corner for the Jeep. Her arms were folded across her chest, as if, in this heat, she were cold. Sometimes her teeth chattered. What held her mind was not the time spent in the Unicorn but the rides there and back, the two half-hour periods in the Jeep. She thought of them as a gift. Someone might have said, “Do you want Drum Casey? Here is a half hour. Here is another. See what you can do.” For while she was at the Unicorn, she never exchanged a word with Drum. He was either performing or off in the back room. Bearing that in mind, she talked non-stop all the way over and all the way back. She went against her own nature, even. She shoved down all her reserve and from her place in the front seat she drilled him with words.
“Can you read music? Do you believe in drugs? What was it got you started playing?”
“Course I read music, what do you think I am,” said Drum, following a passing car with his eyes. “Marijuana gives me headaches. I won a talent show, that’s how I started.”
Oh, questions were the only way to grab his attention. She had tried, at first, declarative sentences: laying her life before him neatly and in chronological order, setting out minute facts about herself as if it were important he should know. Drum seemed not to hear. But she had only to say, “Is all your family musical?” for him to wade up from his silence and start framing an answer. “None of them’s musical, they just admire it a whole lot. My mama said she would give every cent she had into seeing me be a singer.”
“Doesn’t she come to hear you play?”
“At the rock show she did. All my family did.”
“Did I see them? What do they look like?”
“Nothing extra. Just a parcel of brothers and her and him.”
“Him? Oh, your father. What does your father do?”
“What have you got up there,” Drum said, “a questionnaire?” David, taking him literally for a second, glanced sideways into Evie’s lap. But then Drum said, “He works in a filling station. I help him out some.”
“I bet he’s proud of you. Isn’t he?”
“Oh, well.”
“He would have to be,” said Evie. “Anybody that plays like you, his family must just die of pride.”
His eyes would flick over to her, as sudden and as startling as the appearance of someone in a vacant win dow. If she spoke about his music he would listen all day, but what would he answer?
“Oh, well, I don’t know.”
She entered the Unicorn alone and went to her table, keeping her head erect, holding her stomach in. Eyes lit on her back. Whispers flitted across tables. “Oh, it’s you,” the proprietor said. “Budweiser?”
“Yes, please, Zack. Have you got a match for my candle?”
She thought of herself as a bait-and-switch ad. People came out of curiosity, bored by the long summer days. They figured they might as well go stare at the girl who had ruined her face. But after two minutes of that, there was nothing left to do but concentrate on the singer who had caused it all. Even Drum had to see that. People who returned came for the music alone; Evie was only a fixed character to be pointed out knowingly to new customers. “Will you be waiting?” Drum called. “Where will you be waiting?” Customers who were used to his speaking out began answering. “Yeah, man! Here!” A reviewer commented on him in the Avalice and Farinia Weekly. “Rock music of his own making, leaning toward a country sound, original at first although he tends to get repetitious.” Evie was not mentioned, any more than the color of his clothes or the brand of his guitar.
Evie always had to hang around for awhile before the ride back. The wait was nerve-wracking. It sometimes stretched on till after one o’clock in the morning, while at home her father might be telephoning Violet at any moment. She watched the customers gather their belongings and leave. The proprietor washed his glass mugs. The dance platform was dark and empty, and all she heard of Drum was fits of music in the back room. “David,” she would say, catching his sleeve as he hurried by, “are we going now? What’s taking so long?”
“Be just a moment,” David always said. But he would be carrying in a new pitcher of beer and a fistful of mugs. Eventually Evie gave up. She tucked her purse under her arm and left, sidling between vacant chairs and crossing the dim-lit, hollow-sounding floor to the door. Outside, the darkness would be cool and transparent. She took several deep breaths before she curled up in the back seat of the Jeep.
The slick surface of Drum’s guitar would jog her awake. “Move over,” he would say. “Here we are.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Until she looked at her watch she always had a lost, sinking feeling. Her sleep had been troubled and filled with muddled dreams; it might have lasted for minutes or for hours. Had her father called the police yet? She pressed forward in her seat, as if that would help them get home faster. Every pickup truck dawdling in front of them made her angry. Then she remembered Drum. On the rides home he sat beside her, with only the guitar between them. “Did you think it went well?” she asked him.
“Mmm.”
“They liked the Carolina Trailways song.”
No answer. David took over for him. “I thought so too. Why always that one? The walking song is a hell of a lot harder to do.”
He was kind-hearted, David was. Or maybe he just wanted to keep Evie’s good will. During Drum’s silences he picked up the tail of the conversation and moved smoothly on with it, rescuing her. For a while they would shoot sentences back and forth—”Oh, well, the walking song takes getting used to.” “Not if they had ears it wouldn’t”—but there was always the consciousness of Drum’s silence, which they played to like actors on a stage. Questions, that was the only way. Questions.