I shower off the hot dog and humiliation and retreat to the garage to flatten some aluminum cans with a mallet.
Janie Lee is turning the screws on the bow of her violin, tightening the hairs to practice. When they are perfectly taut, she applies the rosin. I like to watch her complete this methodical process. It is the most disciplined thing she does, and has always told me so much about her.
She followed me home from the game like a puppy. We didn’t discuss the concern in her eyes, but I saw it there, leaning toward me like a conversation. “I don’t need to talk about it,” I said as I hung her borrowed clothes from the handle above the backseat window. But she probably did need to talk about it. Because any time I am not fine, or she thinks I am not fine, it pecks at her like a chicken.
She plays the sad, lonely notes from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major.
To make matters worse, she wears the same clothes from the night of the fire—the dream clothes. Pajamas and flannel and lips I tried to kiss off her face.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: Murdered by UGGs.
These feelings need sorting. Just friends is better, I think.
I am capable of mind-over-mattering anything. For instance . . . these cans. They were round beverage holders. Nearly forty of them have gone under my X-Acto knife and lie like thin sheets of aluminum paper on the worktable, ready to be Guinevere’s breastplate. After I make this, I will move on to the Beauty and the Beast costumes Davey says will win us a thousand dollars. The supplies are set up on the far wall. Maybe I’ll start tonight after Janie Lee goes home.
One long note rises from the violin. It is not part of a known song. I stop flattening the cans. “What is it?” I ask.
She cuts big clear eyes toward the driveway, toward something unseen. “I was just thinking about you standing up there tonight,” she says.
The aluminum can is as flat as my mallet will make it. “I was a disaster.”
“You weren’t,” she insists. “You were just yourself. The mayor was an asshole.”
We battle eye on eye, me knowing that if I say, Me being myself is the problem, then she has a best friend obligation to dispute me. Something sugary and sweet like, Woods and I thought you were perfect. Which A) discounts the praise entirely, and B) is utter bullshit.
“Regardless of what the mayor said, I looked awful.”
“You didn’t.”
I skip this praise too. “I was worried about Davey. His dad, man, he’s a ruckus.” Ruckus is the nicest word in my vocabulary for John Winters. “I couldn’t make myself go and get ready.”
“Fifty told me. Said Davey’s dad is pressuring him to move back to Nashville.”
“Yeah.”
She looks uncertain. She asks, “How will you feel about that?”
“I’ll miss him.”
Davey is Hexagon, but he does not specifically belong to her the way it feels that he does to me. She is sad on my behalf, but it only stretches so far. “Are you going to kiss him?” she asks.
Her fingertips idly touch the hair on her bow, so I’m aware that she’s very unfocused. She is very methodical about the oils in her skin and their relationship to all things violin.
I am honest with her. “I would like to. You know, just to see if anything is there. I’m not even sure if he’s available.”
“I have people like that.”
That’s when my heart starts its galloping. Pieces of the dream, ones that had drifted hazily away, come punching back to reality.
“You know the day of the Hexagon of Love?” she asks.
I set the mallet away. “Sure,” I say.
“I know you were hurt about Woods putting you on the guys’ side, but did you notice anything else?”
What else was there to notice? Woods picking Mary Dancy? Old news. He does not, nor did he ever like her, and we both know that. This was either a diversionary tactic or cowardly action. I remind her of this, and she plays three lines of a Lindsey Stirling song she’s been obsessing over. Then she says, “Did you see our names? How it almost looked like they matched?”
I take my mallet back. Banging it against the cans, over and over, I consider my options. To answer is to take a flying leap into dangerous territory. Her shirt is blue, and I am noticing that her eyes are bluer right now than they were when she was dressed up earlier. She is noticing I am not answering her.
With the larger end of the violin, she pokes my stomach. “McCaffrey?”
“Yeah, I saw,” I admit.
“And what did it make you think?”
She is opening a door. We both hear the hinges squeak. She told me a week ago that just friends is better. What has changed other than me wearing upchucked hot dog in front of the whole town? Nothing. And pity is a terrible reason to kiss someone you love.
I flatten my voice, remove every trace of passion like I am sweeping the corner of a dusty room. “I was pretty upset about the whole you’re-a-dude thing. I didn’t think about much else.”
With Woods, we decided to kiss the way we decided we would save the Harvest Festival or blow up a sock. Thoughtfully, strategically, antiseptically. It was simple because it was always somewhere I knew I might land. With Janie Lee, this is all so new. There are other barriers. Do we really want to go there? Risk changing the fundamental nature of our friendship? She isn’t Gerry. I’ll have to see her regularly. There could be residue if this shakes out poorly. And do two names, across from each other on Einstein, mean anything?
As far as she knows, I’m buying a hundred acres beneath Molly the Corn Dolly and living here until I have an actual tombstone. She specifically cited future plans in another city as a reason things with Woods wouldn’t work out. By her own ideals, I am a bad choice. Why do this now?
But I know why. We’re curious. I’m fixated on the idea of What if? We may never get another moment when we are this open. And although I am afraid it will change us, Woods and I are doing just fine. Courage begets courage.
“All right, Miller. Let’s do this thing,” I say.
Neither of us needs a definition. She does not give me a chance to change my mind. In a familiar way, she moves closer, pushes the mallet until it falls off the table and bounces under the saw. She twirls a piece of my hair around her finger.
I duplicate her action, touching her hair, and then her earlobe. She’s always touching, petting, stroking, and cuddling. I am none of these things.
The moment to bail arrives. She stares at my hand, aware. Stares at my mouth, aware. The tip of her tongue is poised on her bottom lip. The violin hangs between us. History is between us too.
“Billie?” My name is a question.
I carefully slip the bow and violin away and set them behind us. Her UGGs bump against my boots; her fingers, still tangled in my hair, touch my earlobe, once, twice, three times. “You love me,” I say, because that part of us is not in question.
Her cheeks are flushed. Mine must be too.
“I don’t know how I love you, only that I do, and I can’t not,” she says.
“Me too,” I say quietly.
My face is against her hand now. I am not the one who moved. I am not the one who has her thumb on my cheek.
“Kiss me?” I say, choosing to only move my boot a fraction closer to her.
I want her to make this choice so I will not look back at this moment and feel as though it was forced. And unlike Woods, she breaks the barrier between us first.
I am being kissed.
It is mostly mouth and no tongue—a quartet of lips and softness. She is all melody. My job is to harmonize. I hear the Irish ballad Davey played on the way home from Nashville. She has a merry and somber mouth. Just like the music.
We are still kissing.
I compare her to Gerry. Gerry kisses like the world will end soon. Janie Lee kisses like the world was born this morning.
We are still kissing.
I am living a moment the Spandex Junkwagons have gossiped about. That my father fears. That scares me. A lightning bolt from heaven doesn’t strike.
I am okay. I am grateful.
I am trembling. I am praying.
It is me who breaks away. Me who wipes her spit from my mouth.
Her fingers are stuck in her pockets; her hair is stuck to her lip. Casual as ever, I tuck it behind her ear. She half-grins, and rubs her cheek against her shoulders as if she can clean the red from her cheeks. Then she is busy dusting garage molecules from her violin and returning it to the case.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Someone clears a throat.
It is not me. It is not Janie Lee.