Two weeks went by before I finally heard music blaring from the open garage at the end of my street. I’d seen Jesse at school, though, when we started back after break. He was quickly labeled the “new guy” and had a table of fawning girls that rotated with a different set every lunch hour. He didn’t talk much. But when he was done eating, he would pull out his guitar and play. Never a song, and never anything someone begged him to play for them. He was working out melodies and trying to find something special. A few times, I thought he did.
It didn’t matter to his new legion of fans. Sitting on top of a lunch table with a guitar propped on his thigh and his tongue caught between his teeth was perfection. He played nothing but starts and stops of strings of notes, his fingers sometimes just fumbling around in frustration. To every girl in my senior class, he was a rock god. To me, he was thoughtful.
Sam tried to force me over to his table a few times, partly to be a little more interesting to him than the other girls, but mostly to push me because she could tell I was gone. That’s not how I want to be with him, though. I’ve already set the rules up that I’m not easily impressed, so I can’t get weak when I hear him borrow bits from Clapton or Zeppelin and try to rearrange them for his own sound.
But tonight is different. I was starting to give up on ever hearing what he promised—an invitation. So when it finally came, I texted Sam to meet me in my driveaway. She pulls up on their third run-through of a song I’ve somehow already memorized.
“Are we finally doing this?” She sounds a little buzzed. I tilt my head, and she gives it up quickly, flashing the water bottle she’s switched out with vodka. She’ll be spending the night, and we’ll be climbing in through my window.
“Courage?” She takes one more sip and holds the uncapped bottle out for me. I consider it for a moment, but I’m not really a drinker. Sometimes, at house parties in the Valley, but never much. My job is usually to keep Sam out of trouble and make sure we both get home.
I shake my head and she shrugs, tucking the bottle back inside her leather jacket. She pulls it tight as we start to walk down my street toward the sound, her boot heels clicking along the sidewalk. We’re both wearing the same color of dark, skinny jeans, but she’s rocking a runway look while I had to steal a bootlace from my dad for my Docs. I changed a dozen times, trying to find that perfect combination of flannel shirt, torn sweatshirt, classic band T-shirt, ripped jeans, shorts. I ended up with the first thing I tried—the outfit that makes me look just like Jesse. The closer we get to his house, though, the more I regret that choice.
We step in at the side, and I lean into the wall while Sam tucks her thumbs in her pockets and nods her head to the beat. I don’t know any of the guys playing with him, but they all look like they’re our age. The guy on drums has really long hair that’s tangled and sweaty, a mess that gets worse every time he bangs his head forward as he swats at the cymbal. He’s trying to look the part, but so far, he plays like shit. The bass guitar player looks like a guy applying for Harvard, a faded polo shirt and cuffed khakis that amuse me. He’s a solid player, though, so I give him a break. Jesse and another guy play guitar facing each other, not as in sync as they should be, and I can see the growing frustration on Jesse’s face.
He finally breaks their jam, slinging his guitar to his side and waving his hand while he shouts “Stop, stop!”
“Dude, this has to be good. Come on!” He throws his pick at the other guitar player, hitting him in the chest with it. The guy slaps it against his shirt, missing, and it falls to the concrete floor. His friend nods our direction and Jesse glances over his shoulder.
“Oh yeah, hey,” he says. The most disinterested and unimpressed welcome ever.
Your band isn’t even that good. My eyes lower with my inner thought, trying to act vicious, but Sam just flips him off when he turns his back. It amuses the Harvard boy, but his laugh is short enough to go unnoticed by anyone but me.
“Let’s sit, yeah?” Sam points to an old couch pushed against the wall, flanked by two stacks of boxes still left to be unpacked. Maybe it’s stuff that’s meant to just live in the garage, “forever storage,” as my mom calls it.
I walk behind my friend and sit on the end farthest away from the band, sinking in deep enough to feel the missing springs under the couch cushions. Sam swings one of her long legs over the other, and I attempt to do the same, only my jeans feel a lot tighter than hers must because the inside of my knee slides down the length of my thigh and to the boney part of my other knee cap. I hold the position for a few seconds so it doesn’t look like I missed at crossing my legs, but I have to give up when it starts to hurt. I opt to bring my feet up and cross them crisscross style.
“Let’s go again,” Jesse says, snapping a few times for what I guess is a count, and his drummer picks up and starts the same sloppy rhythm as before.
For a few seconds, Jesse’s eyes meet mine, and everything about it squeezes my chest. Thin lines make parenthesis to the right side of his lips, and I smile in response. I feel singled out somehow, even though I know Sam and I are their only real audience. I recognize bits and pieces of what he’s playing, the few bars he spent the week working out for his fans at lunch. They fit here, and he likes it. That dimple grows deeper as his eyes peel away, and I sink back into the sofa with a cleansing breath.
“He’s pretty good, yeah?” Sam speaks out of the side of her mouth, her body moving with the music where she sits, the motion making me rock a little. It’s kind of annoying but we all feel things differently. Sam likes to move. I like to watch.
“He’s a’right,” I shrug. He’s more than alright, but saying so would go against that new version of me I invented the other night.
My eyes close in on his mouth, and his tongue swipes along his lips as he opens them and leans into the mic, putting his weight on one foot. It’s practically a kiss against the metal the way his lips hum a few indiscernible words into the microphone, and his eyes close to show how much he’s in love with this particular song.
He wrote it. I can tell.
“You left me ripped wide open, bleeding out for nobody to ever notice. All I am is tug-of-war and poison, dirty secret nobody’s chosen…”
His bottom lip hangs open at that last word. It might just be in my imagination, but I swear it trembles with genuine pain. His eyes slowly open with the tilt of his head, and I think it’s an accident that they’re set on me, but they hold their focus through the next verse, and I feel every wound that those words intend as if they’re personal.
“Burning bright and high as an eagle, falling to the depths of that evil, swallowed up and swimming in darkness, your lack of love is so fucking thoughtless…”
I’m no longer smiling. I don’t think I’m supposed to. That’s not the point of this song, and the fact that his drummer thinks it’s time to bang his head and thrash like a fool makes me want to choke him with his own, raggedy-ass hair.
“Fuuuuuuck, that’s good shit,” Sam whisper-shouts in my ear. The amps are reverberating the sound in the small garage, and I know everyone on our street, and in the few occupied houses on the next road over, is cursing the fact that of all people to buy here in Orson, it was this family—the one with a kid in a band.
I’m not cursing, though. I’m obsessed. If this were some small club in the Valley or LA, I would just be a fangirl, but this guy is my neighbor. He’s literally making the sounds that live in my heart and head, and he’s doing things I have dreamed of but been too chicken shit to try.
The same break comes in that stopped them before, and I can hear the beat slipping away before they even get there. Jesse hears it too, and he cuts it before he even has a chance to rock out with his friend. His jaw is tight this time, and his eyes roll just before he pushes the microphone enough to knock it down onto a dirty beanbag in the center of the garage.
“I need to walk away. I just…” His fingers flex with his open palm, then curl into a fist. He shakes it a few times then swings his guitar over his head and rests it on the beanbag with the abandoned mic before he walks past Sam and me and out into the dark street.
“He’s such a drama queen,” the preppy kid says. I smirk, amused, and he takes the invitation to introduce himself.
“Logan,” he says, taking a few long strides to close the distance between us.
“Arizona,” I say, taking his hand in mine. His lips pucker a tight smile, and his eyes glance to my right where Sam sits. I help him out. “This is my friend Sam. I live down the street, and Jesse said we could come check you guys out some time.”
He nods in response then takes Sam’s hand when she offers it.
“Nice to meet you both.” His eyes stick on her a little longer, but he’s not her type. She’s polite though, and compliments his playing, even though she doesn’t really know a thing about music other than how to swing your hips in a club.
“I’m Rag,” says the guy who was playing lead guitar with Jesse. He’s got the same look, his hair a little shorter and his build a little thinner. He also seems like maybe he’s in college.
“Rag,” I scrunch my eyes, shaking his hand then folding my arms as I wait for the story that no doubt comes with his name.
“Yeah, last name’s Ragglesworth, which is stupid-awful for a last name, so everyone started calling me Rag in fifth grade. Jesse’s my cousin.”
“Ah,” I nod, understanding the resemblance now. “So, Jesse…Ragglesworth?” I smirk, thinking maybe I can tease him about this, not that we have any sort of relationship that will create a reason for me to talk to him long enough to tease, but…fantasies, ya know?
Rag lowers his eyes and twists his head, studying me, as if he’s trying to decide whether or not I’m kidding.
“Jesse…Berringer…” he says like he’s giving me the answer to a test and pretending I already knew it. I didn’t know it. I had no idea, but that name…it means something. And that song he was just singing, it means something too.
“Alton Berringer,” I say quietly. Rag gives me a little nod, confirming. I lean my head back and let my mouth fall open. “I feel so stupid.”
“Don’t,” he says quickly. “He doesn’t tell people if he can help it. He’s not real proud of being the bastard son of the world’s most famous rock-star rehab patient.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” I say, instantly feeling sorry for Jesse, which I suppose he also probably doesn’t want people doing.
“I didn’t tell you, yeah?” Rag says with one eyebrow raised, and I nod, drawing an X over my chest with my finger to show my promise.
“Who’s hair band?” I ask, sparking a surprise laugh from the other two as I nod toward the drummer who’s cracking open an energy drink that he clearly does not need.
“He’s Chris, some guy we all sorta know. I don’t know how, really. We just started hanging out at our old school. Our drummer moved to Atlanta, and when Jesse’s mom dragged him up here from LA, choices became limited.” I fight against my desire to call their drummer out for his weak talent and offer my skills. I’m not great at set, that I know of. Maybe I would be.
“Yeah, he’s shit, but we can work with him,” Rag jokes. I laugh lightly, shifting my focus out into the street where Jesse is still standing alone.
“Should you maybe go chill him out?” I glance to Rag, and he shrugs me off.
“Nah, he’ll get himself where he needs in his head. He’s got a complicated mind, so it’s usually best to let him figure things out on his own.”
“Complicated,” I repeat.
My brow pulls in, but Rag only continues to stare at me, not giving away any more than he already has.
“Do you write any of the songs?” Sam takes over the conversation, clearly interested in seeing how she does with monopolizing Rag’s attention, and she does a decent job, getting him to sit on the arm of the junker sofa next to her. For a few minutes, I listen to him talk about some of their older songs that he wrote with Jesse, but the pull to the lonely boy out in the street gets me to my feet even against all warnings to leave him alone.
By the time I hop the wet gutter and am maybe fifteen feet away, Jesse’s lit a joint and is taking a deep inhale. He turns my way, the sleeve of his flannel covering half his palm as the shirt falls from his shoulder. “Yeah?” He lifts a brow and holds the joint out for me. I shake my head and he puffs out smoke with his short laugh.
“He tell you about my dad?”
I puzzle my expression, pinching my brow and preparing myself to lie, but for some reason, I just can’t.
“Kinda,” I shrug.
He chuckles to himself and takes another draw before licking his fingertips, twisting the end of his joint, and tucking it in his wallet and eventually shoving it in his back pocket.
“He tell you that I tried to kill him once?”
I huff out a laugh but my smile stops short when our eyes connect. He isn’t joking. I flinch a little, like a nervous tick rejecting something I don’t like.
“Yeah, well…” Jesse shoves his hands in his pockets and spins on his heels, smiling broad and wide up at the sky before leveling me one last time. “Guess he didn’t tell you everything”
Frozen where I stand, I blink at the image of Jesse’s back as he walks away. Everything suddenly feels like it’s happening behind a pane of glass. Sam is laughing with Rag where I left them on the couch. Chris and Logan are going over everything they think they must be doing wrong, both a little on edge and fidgety, their nerves becoming more physical as Jesse lifts his guitar and swings the strap back over his neck, stepping closer to them. He wipes the side of his hand from the corner of his mouth down along his chin in a slow drag, as if he’s clearing away the remnants of his most recent kill, and that small act seems to force his friends to attention.
I can’t hear him count, but I watch his head bob, his lips curve with words—one, two, one-two-three-four…
It’s a different song this time. It’s less painful, less of an echo blurring its way through the air. This song…it isn’t personal. The sound is sharp and fast, Chris does a better job of keeping up. The pounding bass seduces me back inside, but I’m too numb to sit. I can’t go back to the blissful crush I was nursing before, but I’m still obsessed. My fascination is different now. Jesse, he’s…different now. He’s a risk. He’s fucking beautiful. And I want more of him—to know more.
My fingers inch from my overly long sleeves and begin to tap along my hips on instinct. My eyes close and I feel it, the rush of a train and the clip of loose railway ties flapping against my chest, resetting my heart to skip in all the right places. The music chugs, or it should. I hear it how I want it, how I would perfect it, and my hands play it right. It’s smoother, fast but raw like jazz. It’s a little country, maybe a bit Johnny Cash. My head falls forward and my hair shadows my face as I nod up then down with a slower syncopation.
There’s a built-in break that I almost anticipate, and I smile and lift my chin when it happens and my fingers catch it, my palms freezing half bent at my wrists. I open my eyes just in time to catch Jesse’s gaze on me, one eye closed more than the other, the lines around his curved lip paying me a compliment. He saw that—he saw me get his sound.
I smile back faintly, and I narrow every ounce of my focus on his mouth, his lip hung open in a sexy breath that’s put there on purpose. He uses it all to create—even his sex appeal. And while the music is paused, my chest continues to pound out the rhythm, falling right in line when the band picks back up. I feel like I’ve been kissed—the kind of kiss that leaves you swallowing hard and confused.
I do, and I am.