Chapter 6
Chapter Six
“Are you sure there isn’t bat crap in my hair?” Alice leaned forward for Doris to give her a look.
Again.
We’d left the cave tour an hour ago, and when we’d gotten back to Bertha, Alice had found a cobweb on her jacket. It had sent her into a tailspin with worry that she was covered in creepy crawlies.
Doris poked through her hair. “You’re good, Alice. I promise.”
Marge glanced at them in the rearview, snickering. “You look like a monkey when you do that, Doris. Good thing we aren’t on that zipline tour or you’d definitely attract a monkey mate again.”
“Marge!” Doris swatted a hand at the air. “Stop it!”
Marge rolled with a belly laugh as Doris pouted behind her, Alice still obsessively sweeping a hand through her hair.
I sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window as the Indiana countryside began to give way to the neon-lit fringes of a mid-sized town.
A nagging sense of failure tugged at my insides.
The only thing I could find in southern Indiana in a pinch had been a local cave tour.
The caves had been fine. A nice walk. But they weren’t bungee jumping.
They weren’t the face-your-mortality moment I’d promised myself.
I wanted to give Alice something epic. Something that felt as big as the mountain she was about to climb. Instead, I’d given her a damp walk through a limestone crevice... and apparently a new OCD symptom of being covered in bat shit.
I tried not to be too hard on myself. Picking a captain’s wish on the fly was like trying to find a needle in a haystack while the haystack was moving at sixty-five miles per hour.
When we’d had the wish basket, we had thought long and hard about our greatest dreams before we wrote them down.
Now I was supposed to conjure magic out of whatever happened to be alongside whatever highway we were on, and the honest truth was that most things alongside most highways were not magic.
They were gas stations and chain restaurants and, apparently, nudist colonies if you didn’t read carefully enough.
“I’m starving,” Alice announced from the seat behind me. “And don’t say ‘eat some Funyuns,’” she quickly added, peering up at Marge.
“You’re missing out on the Funyuns,” Marge answered. “Those things are damn good.”
“What’s not damn good? How your breath smells after eating them.” Alice pulled a face. “I’d rather stand in a cave and let bats shit on me than stand across from you and smell that rancid breath.”
“Can we please find a real restaurant tonight?” Doris asked. “Cooking out was fun last night, but I don’t want to risk another raccoon run-in. Maybe we can find something in this town?”
“I’m in full support of that,” I said. “No cooking out tonight.”
“No cooking out ever again, if you ask me.” Alice peered into a compact mirror to apply a fresh coat of lipstick.
“I want a drink. A real one. Something with an umbrella or enough proof to strip paint. I need to celebrate the fact that I survived the Great Raccoon Uprising of Indiana. I have learned my lesson about eating alfresco in the wilderness. The wilderness does not want us there.”
We were rolling through a small town—one of those Main Street places that still had its bones intact, old brick storefronts and a water tower and a bar on the corner with neon beer signs glowing in the windows.
The kind of town that felt like it had been the same for forty years and was fine with that.
I watched the storefronts go by, half looking for a restaurant, half lost in my own thoughts, when I saw it.
A handwritten sign in the bar window.
KARAOKE TONIGHT—8 P.M.
I stared at it as we passed.
Something moved in my chest. Something that felt distinctly like the universe waving a sign in front of me.
“STOP THE RV!” I yelled.
SCREECH.
The world tilted. The smell of burning rubber filled the cabin as Bertha’s nose dipped violently while she shuddered to a screeching halt. A bag of Funyuns flew off the table behind us, hitting Marge in the back of the head.
“Marge!” I screamed, clutching the dash. “What the hell?”
She panted beside me, knuckles white as she gripped the wheel, her eyes darting left and right. “What happened? Where are they? Did I hit them?”
“Hit who?” I rubbed my chest where the seat belt had locked up.
“You yelled stop like I was about to run someone over! Did I? Did I hit something?”
“No!” I said quickly. “I saw a sign back there and wanted to go in. I didn’t mean lock up the brakes and cause a ten-car pileup. I meant stop normally!”
Marge whirled around in the driver’s seat, her face purple. “Then don’t yell ‘STOP THE RV’ like there’s a herd of schoolchildren under my chassis! I thought I was about to commit vehicular manslaughter, Sylvie! My heart just did a backflip!”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m with Marge on this one. What the hell, Sylvie!” Alice panted from behind me. “I thought we were crashing!”
“Me too!” Doris rose from the floor, and I cringed when I realized she’d been unbuckled and thrown from her seat.
And that they were right.
I had shouted like there was an emergency.
“Sorry.” I sucked the air through my teeth. “I saw a sign and just got really excited.”
Marge pressed a hand to her chest, breathing hard. “What in the Sam Hill was so important that you gave us all whiplash?”
I pointed out the window. “That bar.”
Everyone looked.
“It’s a bar,” Alice said.
“It has karaoke tonight.”
A beat of silence.
“You made me perform an emergency stop for karaoke?” Marge said flatly.
“I have one evening left as captain. And I know what I want to do with it.”
“Sylvie,” Alice said slowly, “you hate karaoke.”
“I know.”
“You have said, on multiple occasions, that you would rather have dental surgery than sing in public.”
“I know.”
“You told me once that you made a vow—I believe your words were ‘a sacred and binding vow’—to die without ever having done karaoke.”
“I know what I said.” I looked at them through the darkness of the RV, only the faint lights of the town revealing the shadows of their faces.
“That’s why we’re doing it. My time as captain isn’t over yet.
I wanted to bungee jump because I wanted to face my greatest fear.
I wanted to prove that if you can face the scary stuff, it loses its power.
Well, I can’t throw myself off a bridge today.
But I can do this. And if I can stand on a stage and sing in front of strangers without dying, then we can face anything. ”
Marge looked at the bar, then at me. A slow, wicked grin spread across her face. “Oh man, if you’re comparing singing to jumping off a bridge, you’re going to be terrible, aren’t you? What is your voice like? Fingernails on a chalkboard or cat in a dryer?”
Bile lurched up my throat. “Ugh. Probably both.”
Her grin spread. “Well, I guess watching you embarrass yourself on stage will make up for this crap you just pulled making me think I was going to prison for mowing over some pedestrians.”
“I know,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”
Marge put Bertha in drive and found a large enough parking spot in a nearby gas station.
We filed off the RV, and when Alice stepped down, my mouth fell open.
“What?” she asked, her perfectly groomed brows pushing together.
I stared at her face… and the giant smear of lipstick starting at the corner of her mouth and heading up toward her cheek.
“Uh…” I knew if I told her, she’d throw a fit, yell at me that it was my fault for screaming at Marge to stop the RV while she was applying her lipstick, then stomp back inside to redo her makeup from scratch. So, instead of telling her, I just smiled. “Nothing. You look beautiful.”
Her face softened. “Oh. Thank you, Sylvie.”
Marge turned to look at us, and immediately her eyes bulged when she saw Alice’s marked-up face. I kicked her to get her attention, nonchalantly pointed to my lips, and shook my head.
Her eyes ignited with pure delight.
“You look amazing, Alice,” she said, grinning.
Alice smiled bigger. “Wow. Thanks, Marge.”
Doris was too busy fussing with her purse to notice, so as we started down the street, Marge grabbed her and pulled her aside, whispering something in her ear.
I walked beside Alice toward the bar, listening to Doris and Marge arguing behind us, Doris no doubt wanting to run up and save Alice from embarrassment.
But then Marge threatened something about raccoons, and Doris whimpered once before going silent.
“What are you two fighting about back there?” Alice asked, her stiletto heels clicking across the sidewalk as we reached the door of the bar.
“Nothing,” they said in unison, and I struggled to suppress my smile.
We stepped inside, and the place was packed.
Not just a few people at the bar packed—genuinely, thoroughly packed, every booth full, people standing along the walls, a little stage at the back with a mic stand and a DJ setup and a monitor screen.
Currently a man of about fifty-five was absolutely shredding “Don’t Stop Believin’” to the enthusiastic approval of the entire place.
He was good.
Too good.
My legs suddenly felt like Jell-O as I realized eventually, and soon, it would be me up there.
The Neon Moon was exactly what a dive bar should be: dim, smelling of stale hops and floor wax, and packed with people who looked like they knew their way around a pitcher of beer. Three songs in while we waited for a booth, I had heard good, excellent, and show-stopping, in that order.
I sat with my menu in front of my face and tried to remember how to breathe normally.
“These people can actually sing,” I said. “I thought karaoke was supposed to be, like… bad.”
“Oh, some people take this very seriously,” Doris said.
“There’s a local restaurant two towns over from the ranch, and Axel and I go there for Friday night fish fries sometimes.
They have karaoke there. This one girl? Someone said she got a record deal from her karaoke performance!
Some of these people are record quality. ”