3. Chapter 3
Swing Life Away
Rain
In my haste, or because the universe really is fucking with me, I burst through the back door and nearly trip over Resa. She’s on her knees giving Trey a very sloppy, very public blowjob.
“What the fuck! Treyyyyyyyy??!!” she screeches as I shove her out of the way.
“Rain? What the hell?!” he shouts behind me, but I’m already gone. I run out of the alley and down Beacon Street. It’s nearing last call, and people are spilling out onto the streets. Or joining the folks who were already there. My feet hammer against the wet pavement, but I don’t stop.
Calder is the rainiest city on earth. I swear, it rains all the goddamn time. Someone told me once, or maybe I learned in school a million years ago, that it’s because of how the city sits smack bang between the mountains and the ocean.
All I know is that when you’re trying to run away from the record producer who was part of ruining your relationship, your career and your whole damn life, it would be nice to do it without also getting soaking wet.
My scrawny legs give out a few blocks later on the edge of McDonald Park.
I’m huffing and puffing like I’m a pack-a-day smoker, when really, I’m just in terrible shape.
Hard to prioritize a gym membership when you’re scrambling to feed yourself.
My stomach wakes up on that thought, snarling to remind me I haven’t eaten anything all day.
I ignore that bitch and drag my ass to the swing set so I can sit down and catch my breath.
The playground here is just as sad as when we were kids.
There’s only one working swing. All the others are missing their seats.
The City of Calder stopped replacing them long ago, after neighbourhood teenagers just kept taking them.
Now who would do a thing like that, I think to myself with a small smile.
The metal slide is still intact, if a bit rusted, but all the other play structures are falling apart.
The first time I ever set foot in this park, I was thirteen, and it wasn’t in quite such bad shape.
Gram’s old house, if I was brave enough to go look at it, is less than five minutes’ walk from here.
That was the week my deadbeat parents finally split for good.
Mom dragged me there on a Saturday morning and made me sit on the front porch swing while she and Gram had a muffled argument.
One that ended with her running off without so much as a goodbye.
Haven’t seen her, nor Dad, since. When they didn’t even come to the funeral, I assumed they were dead. Small blessings and all that jazz.
A week after they abandoned me with my grandmother, I was kicking rocks on my way home after school and stumbled upon this place.
The first thing I did was start swinging.
It’s an impulse that’s still there. My feet didn’t touch the ground then, and they barely do now.
Unlike certain others, I never got that teenage growth spurt.
Always a little runt of a thing, probably because my parents were too busy getting high to feed me properly.
Drugs will stunt your growth, kids, even if you aren’t the one taking them.
With my hands on the chain links, I start to rock back and forth, letting the momentum build slowly.
It’s still raining, only now, I don’t care because each drop rushes through my hair, and each swing brings a refreshing bite as the night wind rushes through my damp strands.
Even the chill that’s setting in is freeing, a reminder that a girl can still just swing her problems away, if only for a second.
By the time I slow down again, I really am shivering.
The freedom I felt a second ago has given way to longing.
Longing for that day when I only stopped because a fierce whistle cut through the air.
The noise had come from two boys watching me from the far side of the playground.
They couldn’t have been more different. The taller one was already waving, dark coiled hair, a wide smile that stood out against his skin, while the other boy was smaller, skinny, like me, with white-blond hair and blue eyes that were almost too big for his face.
He was almost hiding behind his friend, or as I would soon learn, his brother.
Ahhhhh, the Kelly brothers. Brothers by choice and circumstance rather than blood.
They ended up in the same foster home in The Neck when they were like four and five and had stuck together ever since.
Dutch, the taller and older one, was quick to laugh, quick to joke, quick to smile.
He was the funniest boy I’d ever met. Dallas, the slight, skinny one, was quieter, slower to warm to me.
But after a few weeks of running into them at the park every day, he came around, especially after I made Dutch laugh by doing an excellent impression of my stupid seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Coulter.
Maybe it was the fact that we all sported second-hand ill-fitting clothes. Or maybe because we didn’t have one good parent between us, but the Kelly brothers became my best friends. My only friends.
It wasn’t until a year later that Cohen Brady came along. This well-dressed kid, in clean sneakers and a crisp collared T-shirt with a big fucking horse-looking logo on the front.
I’d spotted him first, lurking around the playground, watching us.
But it was Dutch, of course, who said hello, calling out to him, “Hey! We’re just about to see who can climb the highest.” He’d pointed to this very same swing set.
We were fourteen, and thought we were invincible, and I’d just sworn up and down that I could climb to the very top.
“Wanna try?” Dutch asked.
“Yes!” he’d called back, his voice about two octaves higher than Dutch’s, only to try and play it cool a second later: “You know, if that’s cool? Or whatever.”
We did, in fact, climb the swing set. All four of us.
Two weeks later, we broke the first swing.
Dutch took the seat home as a kind of trophy.
What started out as a funny game on the playground evolved into stealing street signs, so that Dallas and Dutch could use them to decorate their bedroom.
That swiftly moved on to tagging the playground with our initials, to Cohen stealing a box of violet hair dye because I mentioned wanting to dye my hair purple. Petty crimes, mostly.
We were hooligans back then. And a little bit toxic too. Even as kids, we behaved like the parentless heathens we were. All of us except Cohen, but his parents loved him so much that they mostly turned a blind eye to our wild behaviour. That, and they were busy as hell setting up their business.
Until the day the Bradys and Grams both got sick of bailing us out of trouble. It was my fault. I got caught shoplifting from a bodega, and when the cops found us chowing down on the chips, chocolate bars and a tiny bit drunk from the case of beer I stole, we all got arrested.
For real, that time, rather than being let off with a warning like every time before. Grams and the Bradys had to come bail us out. Oooh, boy, the lecture I got from her that entire bus ride home.
To this day, I am sure Cohen’s dad and Grams conspired to come up with some sort of distraction in the hopes of keeping us out of trouble.
The distraction they landed on was music.
Grams had my dad’s old guitar tuned and put it in Cohen’s hands.
Meanwhile, Mr. Brady gifted us use of the old garden shed in their backyard.
Grams and the Bradys sat the four of us down at their kitchen table one night a week after our arrest and said that if we fixed it up ourselves, we could have it as a practice space.
Turns out, music did what nothing else could. We spent a whole summer cleaning out that shed. Come fall, we moved our equipment in. Then we practiced, and practiced, and practiced.
At first, Dallas and Cohen took turns with the guitar. They were both so gifted at music, able to pick up chords and progressions at lightning speed. Dutch used old paint tins and a couple of sticks to mark the beat. At first, I just watched, until Dutch succeeded goading me into singing.
If the boys loved their instruments, it was no different to how I loved each note that flew from my throat. The quiet ones, the crescendo rising into the first chorus. All of it like a cloud that sent me floating away from that small garden shed.
At first, we’d just played the songs we heard on the radio.
Badly, I might add. But slowly, using money we got for Christmases and birthdays or, in Dutch’s and Dallas’s case, from their part-time jobs as cleaners at the Rothus Industries warehouse, we saved up and bought more gear.
A second-hand bass for Dallas, one drum at a time for Dutch until he had a full kit.
Eventually, some amps, a proper mic. The whole damn thing.
Meanwhile, I wrote. I wrote books and books worth of lyrics sitting on Gram’s front porch swing, often while watching the guys wrestle on the grass.
The next summer, without asking, Dutch posted the first video of us online. Dallas cussed him out, Cohen had a panic attack, Dutch and I just thought it was funny. Hilarious even.
For a week afterward, we would check the comments every day and laugh our faces off at all the people saying shit like “No way that’s her real voice.” Or “So obviously fake.”
On the second video, this time posted with our permission, even if Dallas’s was reluctant at best, there were more likes and more comments. Only, the tone was different.
Video by video, we gained followers, likes and comments. But it was the video of us covering ‘Spit Quick’ by Blue and the Graces that changed everything. It blew up. Not just a little. A fucking lot.
Like a few 100,000 views in the first two days. A million by the weekend. Those days, that was a rare fucking feat.