Chapter 17
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Nate
While we wash the shampoo off Moose, he decides to try to crawl out of the tub. The poor guy isn’t very strong though, so he collapses back, which causes bath water to tidal wave out of the tub.
I’m leaning back, but Bev is leaning in. She’s drenched.
She shrieks in surprise, and then we laugh.
We don’t want to leave him in the water longer than necessary, so as we’re laughing, we finish the shampoo rinse and then scoop him out. We dry him in one of my fluffy towels, which makes him very squirmy.
We finally get him dry, and I look at Bev like, “Now what?”
“Well, he’s had a long day. We should probably bring the crate, with his comfy blankets, into the kitchen while we cook and let him get cozy in there. We don’t want to over-stimulate him.”
I’ve been so focused on Moose that I notice for the first time, Bev’s tank top is completely soaked, revealing the outline of her bra. Her skin glistens with dampness. A few droplets gather in that little cup at the base of her neck, between her collarbones. I have an intense desire to lick them out. I harden beyond belief. I think too much time has gone by between the last thing she said and all this time I’ve been gawking at her. “The cage thing?” I choke out.
“The crate.”
“But isn’t that bad?” I ask, scrambling for something to say. “To lock an animal in a cage?”
“Dogs are den animals,” she says firmly. “They find it comforting. Obviously, don’t leave them for hours on end, but when a dog feels overwhelmed, it can help. I mean, he’s probably rarely been in a car, never felt grass, and he’s definitely never met us. He’s had a crazy day.”
I look down at Moose who sits on one of my feet. He’s still doing the cowering thing, but he’s looking at us more, and not always averting his eyes, which is great. “Okay,” I say.
We set up his crate with his dinner in it. We watch as he eats a few bites, but then he looks at us and stops. We exchange “eek” expressions like we hope we weren’t the cause of him stopping. We both seem to realize we should let him be, so we wash our hands and set out to cook. Even though I don’t know what’s happening between us, I want to show her a nice night.
“Want to put on some music?” I ask as I wash the only vegetable I have—a red pepper.
“Sure.”
I give her my Bluetooth info, and she types it into her phone.
I’m halfway through dicing the red pepper when I recognize the opening chords to a song. Is that a cover of my song? Or did she hook up my phone instead of hers ?
But then I realize…I don’t put my songs on my mixes, so even if it is my phone, it doesn’t explain why it’s playing.
She dives for her phone, and the music stops.
“What was that?” I ask.
“What?” she asks as if it weren’t obvious.
“My song.”
“Was it your song?” “I know my songs.”
“Maybe it’s a cover of one of your songs?”
“I think I know my voice.”
She nods as if to say, “Very funny.”
“Are you sure you’re not the president of my fan club?” I can’t help but add, “Which really exists by the way.”
“I have one song.”
“Bev, you can admit you’re a superfan.”
She pretends to read the pasta sauce instructions like it’s not just pour into a saucepan and heat up.
After enough time has passed for her embarrassment to die down, I ask, “Honestly, how long have you been a fan?”
“I’m not a fan.”
“Fine. A casual listener then?”
She carefully pours the sauce into the pan as if looking for a reason not to meet my eye. “A few years,” she says.
I raise my hands in victory.
She doesn’t seem to notice because she’s focused on cooking. “That song you performed for the bunny guy,” she says. “I like that song.”
I run through the lyrics in my mind. “What do you like about it?”
“It seems very…you. Like there’s more of you in it. ”
An unexpected answer, although she’s right. There is more of me in that song. I wrote it after the producer incident.
“You know the bunny guy posted the video of you playing it, right?” she asks.
I remember the texts from Arjun and my sister, but it’s still hard to believe. “ That video of all things? It doesn’t make sense.”
“The bunny guy posted it on his socials, and everyone was wondering why you were there. Then, one of our volunteers explained in the comments section why you were playing, which made the video go viral. Because it’s not every day a rock star plays one of his songs to keep a man from eating a bunny.”
“Shit.” I don’t even know what to think. “I pay people to do my socials,” I say out loud, probably more for myself, as I try to make sense of it.
As she tells me about reactions to the video, dread cuts through me, cold and metallic. I don’t even know why. All the reactions are great.
But I’ve learned over the years: Attention like this is never good if you’re a money cow because the label will just want to milk it. Even though I don’t know what the change will be, I know it’s coming. But why? Why can’t life be boring ? Expected? Things I thought I’d never say.
And then I look at Moose, his mangy fur and big wounded eyes, and I wonder if I’m asking the wrong questions. How is it that I’m so lucky? Can I spread that luck around a bit? Especially when I look at Bev.
Beverly, I whisper in my mind, concentrating on the twists and turns of her name like a climbing vine, encircling my heart .
“Do you have garlic powder?” she asks. By her expression, it seems like she asked multiple times.
I sheepishly gesture to the spice rack.
In no time, the pasta is done, and as a joke, I set the plates on opposite ends of my family’s ridiculously long dining room table. She smiles as if to say, “Very funny.” Then, we move closer.
The realization she’ll leave soon enters my thoughts like a scream.
“Does your family really eat at this table?” she asks. “It’s so formal.”
“Yep.” I shovel food into my mouth.
“Our voices literally echo.”
“Hollowness is a core family value.”
I expect her to half-laugh, but she narrows her eyes as if she sees something. “I thought you and your family were close.”
“I am close with my sister.”
“But not with your parents?”
“I do what they want.”
“They want you to be a rock star ?”
“Doesn’t every parent?” I joke because I feel uncomfortable. I never talk about my family. Not with Arjun. Not even with Lucy, my sister.
“But a rock star? Why not a concert pianist or opera singer—especially with a formal dining room table like this?” She puts her fork down and takes a sip of wine.
“They wanted me to be famous,” I say in a low voice. After I speak the words aloud, I can’t quite believe I did it. Every family has a list of things—or at least one thing—they don’t talk about. Grandma’s affair, dad’s gambling habit, whatever. This is ours. Well, one of ours.
She wrinkles her nose. “Why? ”
I lean back in my chair. I’m too far in to stop now, but it also feels surreal talking about this—let alone here, at my parent’s house, the house I bought for them. “Well. My dad wanted to be a musician when he was younger. Didn’t work out. So.”
She leans forward. “He’s living his dreams through you?”
“And resenting me every minute for it.”
“Why?”
“They’re his dreams.”
“You don’t want to be a musician?”
“I do.”
“Is it the stage fright?”
I’m surprised she remembers. Another thing I don’t like to talk about. I shake my head.
“Then what?” she asks.
“I do want to be a musician. I just wish there was a little room in there to be me as well.”
She stabs a piece of rotini a few times to get a good hold on it with her fork. I want to comment on it, tangent into talking about her recalcitrant pasta, but before I can open my mouth and sidetrack us, she says, as if knowing what I’m about to do, “You don’t think you can be yourself and a musician at the same time?”
“I don’t know if I can be myself and what my dad wants me to be at the same time,” I correct.
She sits on this, savoring it. “Have you talked to your dad about it?”
“My dad isn’t one for conversations.”
“What does that mean?”
“He tells you what to do. And then you do it. No conversation.”
“What if you don’t do it? ”
I feel a sudden confusion, or maybe it’s a panic, a bit of heat, itching around the collar of my cotton shirt. “You have to do it.”
She shrugs. “What if you don’t?”
I sit there in our echoey dining room, listening to the words circle, hoping they’ll make more sense as they boomerang back to me. “You have to,” I repeat, but more quietly this time.
She doesn’t say anything, which strengthens her point even more.
“What about you?” I ask, wanting to change the topic.
“What about me?” she asks cheerfully.
“Do you do what your dad wants?”
She stares at the table as if considering. Her expression pinches as if she doesn’t like what she realizes. “Nope.”
“Are you sure about that?”
She gives me a look of surprise. “Why? You don’t believe me?”
“Your expression.”
She gets that self-conscious blush again—one I remember all too well from high school.
“What does he want that you don’t want?” I ask, prying.
Her expressions darkens.
“C’mon,” I nudge.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Of course, I want to fucking know.”
“He thinks I need to be careful of you.”
Wow. It stings. It’s like a piercing arrow right into my heart. No, that’s not even graphic enough. It’s like a lead pencil. Like she stabbed me with a lead pencil right in the heart, but then I miraculously survive the stab, only to get lead poisoning, and then die a long, painful death, wishing I’d just died from the initial stab. “Careful?” I repeat.
“Because of high school.”
“The suspensions?”
“And other things.” It seems like she regrets it as soon as she says it.
“What other things?” I wrack my brain. “The saran wrap incident?” I’d placed clear saran wrap on the women’s one-stall toilet closest to detention, so when she used the bathroom…well, use your imagination.
She shakes her head, staring at the table again. I glance down to see if there’s some kind of spill or nick in the wood. There’s not.
“Well, then what?” I ask.
She breathes out a deep sigh as if she’s been holding her breath since high school. “The kissing thing.”
“What about the kissing thing?”
She looks up at me, and there’s something about the intensity of our eye contact that makes my heart skip a beat.
“Do you remember?” she asks.
The best kiss of my life, sure. We were at a party freshmen year. I had a crush on her since I saw her eating pizza one day at lunch. “What part of it?” I ask.
“After you ignored me, I cried that night.” Her face twists. “My dad kept asking what was wrong, and I told him I wished my mom was there.” She swallows hard as if a sadness is trapped in her throat. “It was the first time I’d brought up my mom since…you know. She’d left us. So we just tried to…anyway, we didn’t talk about her. And that was the first night I brought her up. I just felt like I needed her so bad. Like she could have explained it to me. Like she could have made it make sense. ”
I get why her dad wouldn’t like me after that. But moreover, I hate seeing her like this. I hate hearing that she cried. That I made her cry. “I’m so sorry, Bev.”
“And then I heard what you said the next day at school…” she trails off like she can’t bear to say the words.
“What do you mean?” I ask, although I’m afraid I know the answer.
“Derek told me what you said,” she says quietly. “That I was the worst kiss of your life.”
My brain buzzes with regret. Stupid, stupid, I was so stupid. I want to shake my former self. What I’d give to undo what I’d done. “He swore he wouldn’t tell.”
She shrugs sadly. “But he did tell.”
I need to explain. It’s scary though. I’ve been avoiding it all these years. My heart starts thudding so loudly I can feel it in my temples. “It was a lie,” I say. “What I told him.”
Her eyebrows knit together in confusion. “You lied to him?”
I nod, gravely. “I had a crush on you. Big time. Like insane . And he did too.”
“You had a crush on me?”
“Oh yeah.”
“And Derek had a crush on me?”
“Yeah, he talked about it with all the guys. So I told him you were a bad kisser, hoping it’d kill his crush. Then, I wouldn’t break bro code and could ask you out.”
“Bro code?”
“He said he liked you first. Which meant he got dibs to ask you out before I could.”
“Dibs? Like I’m a front seat in a car?”
There’s a bitter taste in my mouth. I swallow. It doesn’t help. “I was so stupid. The whole thing was so stupid. Men are so stupid. Boys are so stupid. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
“So you told him I was a horrible kisser?”
“Do you understand the agony? We’d just kissed. It was amazing. Mind blowing. I wanted to ask you out right then. The thought of having to wait…it was…I couldn’t. So I came up with this plan. I thought…I thought I was being clever. But I was a teenager. I didn’t know better. Being young…it’s not an excuse though. I’m really sorry, and please believe me: I never wanted to hurt you.”
She looks down at her plate as if digesting my words, but when she looks back up, her face radiates with hope. I want to lean across the table and kiss her. But I know that’s off limits.
“So all this time…” she trails off.
We sit for a moment in silence, taking it all in.
I don’t know how to describe it, but something between us changes. It sounds cliché, but the dark cloud hanging over us lifts. Our energy is lighter. Full of possibility. Which is both terrifying—I don’t want to fuck up this newfound space—but also a huge fucking relief.
She picks up her fork and plays with a rotini as if she’s debating whether to say something. “That’s why I didn’t want to kiss you,” she finally says. She looks up at me, and her eyes nearly level me again.
“At the motel?”
“Yeah.” She cuts the rotini in half. “When we kissed, it was the best kiss of my life. It was my first kiss, but I knew—even then—that it was my best one.”
I swell with pride. “It was mine too.”
“Really?” Her bourbon eyes light up.
“I compared everyone after to you.”
“Me too,” she says shyly .
I grab her hand, and her skin is silky and warm. Pleasure shoots up my arm.
Ding! Her phone.
“It might be my dad,” she says softly.
I reluctantly let go of her hand, and she reads her text.
I know that she’s going to stand before she does. I can see it in her face, and then she’s up from the table, making the room feel echoey and empty once again.
I stand and pile our plates on top of each other.
“I’m sorry.” She takes the time to stop and look at me like she means it.
“I know he’s not doing well,” I say. “I understand.”
“You’re good with Moose?”
I nod, although I’m uncertain, afraid I might kill him by giving him a grape or some other food you’re not supposed to give dogs. In the car, she made me recite “the no-no food list” a few times, but it’s many foods I wouldn’t expect. I mean, why chocolate of all things? Is the universe that cruel? It’s because chocolate contains caffeine though.
“Call me if you need anything,” she says.
“Believe it or not, I don’t have your number.”
She tilts her head. “Oh yeah. You don’t like to give your number away.”
I grimace like, “Let’s forget about that.”
She rattles off her digits, and then I shoot her a text, so she has mine.
“I’ll be sure to sell this to TMZ,” she says.
I laugh. “That’s my girl.”
“Alright, bye.” She heads to the door.
“Bye.” I follow after her to make sure she gets out okay.
Out of nowhere, she turns and says, “Your dad should be thrilled with who you are.” She waves and is gone .
I stand for a moment, still holding the plates, and think that it all happened so fast, when maybe it didn’t. Maybe this is the way people say goodbye. But it felt like there was more to say. More to do.
Instead of focusing on how much I miss her, I try to focus on what she said about our first kiss. All this time, we’d been just alike. All those songs I’d written. If she only knew.
I set the plates down, and a fork clatters.
A whimpering sound catches me off guard. It sounds like an injured bird.
I realize with a start it’s Moose. Did he somehow eat a grape? Or was he just reacting to the fork clatter?
Please be okay!
I run to his crate, throw back the blanket overtop, but he doesn’t meet my eyes. Just does his cower thing.
“What’s wrong lil’ bud?”
He makes the sound again, so I open the crate.
He doesn’t seem to want to come out, and the more attention I give him, the more unsure he seems.
So I go back to the dishes and sing my favorite cover song as I load the dishwasher.
Thump, thump, thump.
At first, I’m not sure what causes the sound. I look out the window, wondering if it’s a branch knocking against the window—but no trees are planted close enough to the house.
Then, I look at Moose. His tail thumps against the ground as he sits. But then he stops.
I go back to the dishes, peering over at him occasionally, but his tail doesn’t move. I get back into my groove and sing to myself again.
Thump, thump .
Sure enough, I look over, and he’s wagging his tail again.
I’m ecstatic. What a night. Moose’s wagging tail and Bev’s kiss confession. A swelling emotion balloons in my chest.
Wait a minute. Is Moose wagging his tail when I sing?
I decide to test my theory.
I swoon the lyrics to my favorite song, and there goes Moose’s tail. Thumpthumpthump.
I stop. And he stops.
Theory proven. He wags his tail when I sing. And I have to confess: I’m a bit smitten by this. So if Moose wants a show, I’ll give him a show.
I hurry to my bedroom, grab one of the guitars, and head back to Moose.
I pull out a kitchen stool and sit in front of Moose’s crate.
I play a few chords hoping not to frighten him.
He peeks out of his crate, edging closer with each verse. Plus, he actually looks up at me with curiosity—he doesn’t even cower.
I finish the song, and his tail holds the beat, thumping against the floor.
I start a second song, losing myself in it, and before I realize it, I’m doing a full-on performance for Moose. I’m dancing; I’m singing; I’m playing; I’m working the crowd, i.e. Moose. And I’m not nervous. It’s fun. It’s care-free. I’m fully immersed in the present moment, not worrying about anything else.
In other words, no stage fright.
Now, obviously, a dog might be lower stakes than a crowded arena full of people who paid good money and are expecting to have their minds blown .
But I haven’t even been able to practice without the panic spiraling in.
Ding! I check my phone. A text from Xavier.
Sometimes I think good managers have a sixth sense as to when you’re thinking about the industry; they know when to strike while its hot, when you’re primed. It’s like they can feel it in the air like sailors feel a storm.
Xavier : Your bunny video has blown up.
Me : I heard
Xavier : The label wants you back on tour STAT.
Dread freezes in my veins like a roaring river coming to a sudden standstill. My fingers are clumsy with nerves as I type my response.
Me : I’ve got my court-ordered community service
Xavier : Not for much longer. The label is working to get you out of it.
Me : They can’t
Xavier : They can. Capitalism is alive and well. And the label wants to capitalize on that goddamn bunny video.
I set down the guitar, slide down the wall, and sit next to Moose.
Me : Can you get me out of it?
Xavier : Probably not.
Me : Try
Xavier : Of course, I’ll try. I work for you. Not the label.
Me : I need more time here. I need to work on some things in Melody Bay
Xavier : Look, I’ll do what I can. But you should know: They’re chomping at the bit. So hurry it up.
I lean my head back against the wall. The timing couldn’t be worse. There’s no way Bev would want to continue things if I left, especially if I left the community service early .
The irony is not lost on me: I would have done anything to get out of my court-appointed duties weeks ago, but now, it’s the last thing I want. I can’t help but wonder, why is life like that ? Why all the curve balls and chaos? Why all the mindfuckery?
Gears grind in mind as I try to figure out what to do—how to strategize—but I don’t get anywhere. I only feel sick from the rotini.