I nodded mutely. He turned away again. “Char,” I blurted out. “Am I going over to your place later tonight?”
I sensed instantly, staring at Char’s half-turned shoulder, that I had broken yet another unspoken rule. To ask for what I wanted.
My question seemed to hover in the air between us, while I wondered what it would be like to have a real boyfriend. Someone who you could make plans with. Someone who called you when he thought of you. Someone who would say that he wanted you to come over. I wondered what it would be like to be Sally, and to have Larry Kapur tell you that he wanted to take you to a formal dance. Someone where you didn’t have to guess.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Char said. “Not tonight. It would just upset Pippa even more if we went home together.”
“You’re right.”
Char reached out and squeezed my shoulder briefly. “Thanks for covering for me, Elise. I owe you.”
Then he went to the bar to handle Pippa, and I went to the booth to handle the music, and that was the last we spoke all night.
I liked being up there in the booth, separate from everybody. Pete was right: I was good at it, and it was safe. But on a night like tonight, it was lonely, too.
When I was done, I walked home for the first time in weeks. When I reached my mother’s house, I eased open the front door into darkness and then closed it behind me as quietly as I could. I leaned back for a moment, resting my head against the door. Home safe.
Then someone screamed.
I bolted upright.
“Alex?” I whispered.
A pause. Then my little sister emerged from the shadows, brandishing an empty paper towel roll like a sword.
“Are you okay?” I asked softly.
“What are you doing here?” she hissed. “You scared me!” She didn’t quite lower the paper towel roll, like she still wasn’t sure whether she would have to physically fight me or not.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I just went for a walk.”
Alex stepped forward so I could see her better. “Now?” she asked. “It’s the middle of the night.”
It was much later than the middle of the night. “I couldn’t sleep,” I explained.
Alex blinked a few times, then asked, “You’re not sick again, are you?”
And I knew we were both thinking about September, when I was rushed to the hospital and then had to miss weeks of school, because I was “sick.” I felt a sudden surge of love for my baby sister. Even if no one told her what was going on, she was no fool.
“No,” I said. “I’m not sick.”
“So why—” Alex began, at which point I decided that the best defense was a good offense.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
Alex twirled the paper towel roll around in her hands. “Working on my poetry castle,” she said. “Come see.”
She led me into the sunroom. The cardboard castle sat proudly in the middle of the room, flags flying from its two turrets. Paper and markers were spread out all over the rest of the floor.
“It looks great,” I told her.
Alex looked at it critically. “I still need to paint the front,” she said. “And I need to finish writing the poems. I’m going to sell poetry, and I don’t know how many people will want to buy them. I need to be sure I have enough. Everyone in the whole school is coming, even the fifth graders. And all the parents. You’re coming, right?”
“Of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
“How many poems do you think people will want to buy?” Alex asked.
“Well, I’ll want to buy at least ten,” I told her.
Alex nodded like she had expected as much. “I need to write more poems,” she concluded.
“But, Alex,” I said, “you don’t have to write them now. You have two whole weeks. It doesn’t have to get done at three o’clock in the morning.”
“I know that,” Alex said, picking up a piece of paper and carefully setting it on top of the stack inside her castle. “I wanted to do it now.”
I looked into her gray-blue eyes and saw myself in them, as clearly as looking in a mirror. Building a miniature record player for my dollhouse long past bedtime. Teaching myself to code a Web site under the covers, so my dad wouldn’t come in and tell me to go to sleep. DJing alone in my bedroom in the dark. These things could always wait until daylight, but I wanted to do them in the night.
“I’m going to bed, Poet Girl,” I said. “Want me to tuck you in?”
Alex tapped the end of a marker to her teeth, considering. “Okay,” she said at last. She put down the marker and followed me upstairs.
“Alex?” I whispered in the darkness of her bedroom. “Can you not tell Mom and Steve that I went for a walk tonight?”
“Okay,” Alex said, snuggling into her covers. “Don’t tell them that I was working on my castle either.”
I wrapped my arms around her and she kissed my cheek. It wasn’t the person who I’d thought would be kissing me at the end of tonight. But it was better than ending the night alone.
14
By sundown the next day, I could barely keep my eyes open. I was curled up on the couch in Dad’s living room, holding a book but not really reading it. Mostly I was just staring at my cell phone, willing Char to call or text. I wanted to know what had happened between him and Pippa. I wanted to tell him that I was going to have my own Friday night party. I wanted to talk to him. But so far, nothing.
Of course, this was normal, I reassured myself. Char and I didn’t have a talking relationship. We had the other kind, the kind where you don’t talk. So his silence meant nothing.
My dad sat in his armchair, fiddling with his guitar. He strummed a few chords and mumbled to himself. It mostly sounded like, “Hmm, mmm, mmm. Yeah yeah yeah. Mmm la la. Yeah yeah.”
“New song?” I asked.
“Yeah. I was thinking the Dukes could play it at Solstice Fest, if I could figure out some lyrics. What do you think?”
What I thought, silently, was that no one at Solstice Fest, or anywhere for that matter, was interested in hearing a new Dukes song. They just wanted to hear “Take My Hand,” and they would put up with other songs if they had to.
I had traveled with my dad to a lot of his shows. The best destination concert was when I was twelve. I got to go on an oldies cruise to Jamaica with him. I got my hair done in dozens of tiny braids with beads on the ends, and I swam in the Caribbean.
But what I remembered most clearly about this trip was the Dukes’ set. They played a bunch of new songs and B-sides while the audience sat there politely. Then they played “Take My Hand,” and the audience went nuts for it, obviously.
Once the song was over, the lead singer said to the crowd, like it had just occurred to him, “Hey, do you want us to play it again? It’s only two minutes and twelve seconds long, after all.” The crowd roared its approval, and the Dukes started “Take My Hand” right back from the beginning.
Even as a twelve-year-old primarily focused on eating a pineapple popsicle, I felt that there was something heartbreaking about this. Because the Dukes knew the truth: that nobody at all gave a shit about what they’d been up to over the past thirty-five years.
The Dukes seemed just as happy to be playing their hit single the second time around, and the audience seemed just as happy to hear it. Somehow I was the only one who wasn’t happy.
After that, Dukes concerts just weren’t as fun for me. Mostly, I tried not to go at all anymore. It felt like watching a magic show after you’ve already learned how the magician does all his tricks.
“The song?” Dad prompted me now, as he strummed out the chorus again. “Do you like it?”