Chapter 9
Hannah
The dawn birds are singing when I yank open my front door, take a step outside, and trip over Theo, curled on the welcome mat. I rebound, gripping the doorway. “What the hell?”
“Excellent,” Ginny says from behind me. “They invented Door-Dash for hot guys.”
Theo blinks sleepily at me for a second before his eyes go wide. He scrambles up, scrubbing the sleep from his face. “You’re home.”
“And you’re sleeping on my doorstep.” He’s wearing the same clothes he wore yesterday at practice, except now his carefully pressed T-shirt is rumpled. The whole of him is rumpled, from head to foot.
“I tried calling and texting and knocking. I figured you weren’t home.
I wanted to catch you as soon as you were.
” He cracks his neck and stretches out his arms. I try not to notice the way his shirt rises to reveal a sliver of his waistband, and the hard, planed stomach above it. “Again. Why are you sleeping here?”
Regret shines out of his eyes, his exhaustion evident in the dark shadows that line them.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t know Ginny was your sister.
Everything I said to you . . . asking if you were really this upset over your manager.
” He winces. “It was my job to know, and I failed.” He shakes his head. “Please forgive me.”
The surprise of hearing Ginny’s name in his mouth hits me like a physical blow. I turn my back on him and lock the door. “So you’re here because you feel guilty,” I say. I’m proud of my flat tone.
“Of course I do.”
I walk past him to the street. It’s another cloudless day in Long Beach, where I’ve stuck around since college.
It’s close enough to LA to feel plugged into the industry, and far enough from Bonita Vista to keep visits from my parents to a minimum.
But I wish it would storm for once. Give some sign that the world is fucked-up and angry, instead of this relentless cheery sunshine.
“Next time, feel free to send flowers. No need to camp out like some tragic Shakespearean hero.”
“It’s a little sweet, though,” Ginny says, matching my strides. “You have to admit.”
“Where are you going?” Theo calls.
I answer without turning. “To get my head straight before tonight’s show.”
“Where?”
“None of your business, Suit. Feel free to go back to your hotel and take a nap. Or a shower. That last one is strongly encouraged.”
Heavy footsteps sound behind me and suddenly Theo’s at my side. “I think I’m going to tag along.”
I turn to Ginny and roll my eyes. I’m starting to think this man is a masochist.
“Says the woman talking to her dead sister,” she says.
“I told you, no reading my mind.”
“What?” Theo frowns.
I wave a hand at him. “Nothing. Come if you want. It’s a free country.”
“You guys still need to practice before tonight,” he says breath-lessly. “You didn’t even finish rehearsing ‘Family Fruit.’”
I arch a brow at him. “Shop talk so early?”
“I’m still your manager.”
I keep hustling. Soon we’re out of the neighborhood and coming up on the quaint cluster of shops and restaurants near the beach.
The streets are lined with palm trees, fronds swaying in the breeze.
In the distance, early morning beachgoers drag umbrellas across the sand.
A rock song drifts from someone’s portable radio.
I take a deep, steadying breath. The air smells like salt, sunscreen, and a dash of herbal weed.
The real reason I stayed in Long Beach is that ever since Ginny moved here with me in college, it’s felt like home.
“Rilo Kiley’s on the radio,” Ginny says. She’s fitter than Theo, so not out of breath. “That’s a sign it’s going to be a good day.”
“I would kiss Jenny Lewis’s feet if she’d let me.”
“You and every other perv with good taste in music.”
“Again, what?” Theo follows me around a turn.
I must’ve said that part out loud. I’m doing a poor job of keeping myself in check this morning.
My destination appears ahead of us. Alamitos skate park—our sanctuary. We get to the chain-link fence and I wipe my hands on my jeans.
“Wait.” Theo eyes the fence. “That sign says private property. What are you doing?”
“Letting myself in,” I say, and start climbing.
“Jesus. What is it with you and rules?”
“What is it with you and rules?” When I drop to the grass on the other side, I wave goodbye through the chain-link.
“Stop! You’re going to get arrested for trespassing. And when you do, I’m going to have to bail you out. Do you know how much paperwork that will mean?”
I face him. There’s something about the way Theo’s staring back at me from the other side of the fence that reminds me of Ginny’s face when we were young and I would run off to play with other kids at recess.
“He’s staring at you like a lost puppy,” she says.
It makes me feel guilty, but not enough not to turn my back on him.
“Wait,” he calls again, and by the time I glance over my shoulder, he’s already climbing. He reaches the top of the fence and slings one long leg over. For a moment, he grins at me, triumphant, then loses his balance and tumbles the rest of the way down.
“Ugh.” Theo examines his dirt-streaked hands. “Great.”
“You could’ve shown him the gate,” Ginny says.
“And miss that display of athleticism? I think not.” I walk the perimeter of the skating bowl until I get to a thick wall of hedges, drop to my knees, and pull out my hidden skateboard. The underside’s painted a gorgeous baby blue, just like my guitar.
“Of course that’s just there, waiting for you.” Theo sounds resigned. He’s picked himself up and brushed himself off, but there are ugly grass stains on his jeans.
“You want to skate?”
He crosses his arms. “A million times, no.”
“Let me guess. You only play . . . ” I size him up. “Lacrosse. No, polo!”
“I haven’t played lacrosse since college, thank you very much.”
“All right, Suit. In that case.” I tip over the edge and go soaring.
The high I get from skating is like the high I get from singing.
It comes from the heady push and pull between control and powerless-ness, when your body tangles with forces bigger than you, like gravity or the will of a crowd, and you don’t know if you’re going to be strong enough or loud enough or good enough to get your way.
I pick up speed, flying down the side of the bowl and soaring up the opposite wall.
I want to close my eyes, but instead, I breathe in as deeply as I can, hit the edge and grip the end of my board, then let gravity drag me back down.
Now that I’m coasting back, I catch Theo sliding carefully down the concave wall. Despite his cool, rumpled clothes, no one has ever looked more out of their element.
“Has anyone ever told you that you take your job too seriously?” I shout.
“Yes,” he calls back. “It’s kind of a running theme.”
I shoot past him and grin, feeling the air rush over my cheeks. And maybe it’s because I’m feeling so free that I say, “Ginny and I come here to unwind.”
Theo’s standing right next to Ginny, so it’s funny when he crosses his arms and says, “You don’t mind talking about her?”
“No.” I slow to circle him. “I love it. She’s my best friend. Goofy, brave—”
“Ridiculously hot,” Ginny adds.
I pull a quick kickflip. “The smartest person I know. That’s always been our big difference.”
I catch a bit of Theo’s frown. “I doubt that. I’ve read your lyrics. Who taught you how to write?”
It’s kind of fun skating around him. He keeps trying to face me, which means he’s slowly spinning in circles. There’s a hypnotic quality to our movements.
“My dad,” I say. “He’s a teacher, but he worked part-time at a guitar shop. That’s how I started playing.”
“My dad loved music too.” Theo’s tone is strangely melancholy. “He used to say that if he had one wish, it would be to be born again with talent.”
I lean my weight and twist the board in a new direction. “Yeah, well, mine had the talent. Just not the guts to be a full-time musician. And my mom had the talent but not the means to be a doctor.” I rub my fingers together. “No med school money, so she settled for being a nurse.”
Ginny grins. “And we wonder why we were born with chips on our shoulders.”
“They were strict growing up,” I say. “My mom was obsessed with Ginny and me being star students and getting scholarships.”
“And how’d that work out for you?” he asks, in a tone that says he knows the answer.
“Clearly not as well as for you,” I say, because Theo screams Ivy League tryhard. “My brain wouldn’t cooperate. But Ginny was the kind of smart Mom wanted.”
He watches me as I skate closer. “What exactly does that mean?”
I feel the familiar pangs of the wounds that predate Ginny, the seamed places in my heart where I had to sew the pieces back together. “One day, when I was ten, we were eating dinner—”
“Really?” Ginny complains. “You’re telling him this?”
I ignore her. “Our mom had this routine where she’d make us tell her three things about our day at the dinner table.
I could never remember three things. I know that sounds weird, but my brain .
. . I was always fixated on something that took all my focus.
Around then, it was my first guitar. So instead of inventing three things like I normally did, I told my mom the truth that I had nothing.
I figured she’d roll her eyes or something, but she got angry.
Like, irrationally angry. She kept insisting I had to remember, and I was being stubborn.
Like I was willfully defying her. She couldn’t wrap her head around the possibility that I was telling the truth. ”
“I tried to defend you,” Ginny points out.
I wind around Theo in a wide figure eight. “Your intervening kind of made it worse. No offense.” “What?” Theo asked. “Ginny made it worse,” I explain. “I was a shitty student, so I knew
I wasn’t making my mom proud, per se. But that was the first time I realized she thought there was something wrong with me. Like, my brain was defective. I shut down and refused to talk—”
“As one does,” he says.