18. Emory #2
Gerard visibly considered this before going to the cabinet and producing a glass Emory’d dried off earlier.
“I’d be more on board if this weren’t a dry island.
We have nothing strong enough to combat the inevitable embarrassment of hearing back my twenty-one-year-old self.
” He brought the still-empty glass to the table.
“You made a lot of fans. People obviously enjoy the way you sounded.”
“Other people, sure, but … I guess the only way I can describe it to you is like when you’re going through an old family scrapbook and someone points to a picture of you as a kid and they coo over how cute you were, but all you can see is the gap in your front teeth and your era-appropriate-but-still-indubitably-bad haircut,” Gerard explained.
While Emory certainly deduced the complex series of emotions that could arise from that situation, he hadn’t the heart to tell Gerard he’d never experienced it.
There were no scrapbooks of him with bad haircuts or otherwise.
If there were childhood photos of him, they were taken for his case file, not for keeps. “Understood.”
“If I plug my ears,” Gerard said, clearly assuming Emory was on the same page, “you’ll know why.” He smiled that off-center smile as he grabbed the iPod from a bag and positioned it inside the glass to amplify the sound.
Emory crossed to the table and leaned over to inspect the album art, which showcased the three brothers wearing white T-shirts, white aprons, and silly paper hats, leaning out the window of a banged-up food truck on which WE THE WELLS was spray-painted.
“There was a menu board on the back, but instead of food items, it was the track listing.”
“What does the music have to do with food trucks?” Emory asked once he’d hit Play, keying into the driving guitar and moody drumbeat of the opening track.
Gerard scrutinized the grainy cover on the partially cracked screen like he wasn’t even in the photo.
Current Gerard had longer hair, a bit of a beard, and more filled-in cheeks, but he possessed the same sparkly eyes and impeccably full lips.
“Originally, we’d wanted to call the album Medium Well, but the label thought that that would give the snobbish music critics too much ammo to call the album middling, so we dropped the title but kept the packaging. ”
As they listened, the songs blended together in a not-unenjoyable way.
Tuned in to both the music and his body, Emory felt his heart rate decrease.
His anxiety got swept under a rug somewhere in the back of his brain as it picked apart the instruments and harmonies instead of the faults in his research and his tenuous living situation.
His invisible muscles unwound until he was fully sunk into his seat. Relaxation felt foreign in his body.
More than once, Emory caught his toe tapping along to the consistent 4/4 time signatures.
Each track had a similar pop-rock production propping it up and lyrics about loves won and loves lost. During the love-hormone song—which was aptly titled “In My System”—Emory asked, “Were you writing about someone specific?”
I’ve got you in my system,
Oxytocin, think I need some,
Kiss it better every night ’n’ day
“Not at all,” Gerard said, clearly amused by the question.
“I’d ‘dated’—and I do say ‘dated’ loosely—maybe two girls tops at this point.
My brothers were mostly providing the inspiration.
The two of them had this, like, revolving door of girlfriends all through high school and college, so they had plenty to pull from. ”
“Didn’t you say this was the most fun album for you to write, though?” Emory asked, trying to understand. Also, sort of relieved to hear none of these bombastic love anthems were about any guy Gerard still held a flaming torch for.
“I think these songs were the most fun to write because I could still throw myself fully into the fantasy of romance and all I thought it was or could be,” he said. “You can afford to be really starry-eyed when you’ve never had your heart broken.”
Confusion flapped through Emory. During the previous night’s library break-in, he had cautiously booted up one of the desktop computers.
He only intended to check on deceitful Dr. Anderson Cuss, but once nothing of note came up in his search, he couldn’t bring himself to exit out of the Web browser.
Especially when his traitorous fingers typed Gerard Wells into the search engine.
He qualified his sleuthing as a precaution; it was only right he knew everything about the person he was living with.
But as one hour ticked into two with his fingers clicking and eyes scanning various blogs and news sites on autopilot, he confronted the terrifying fact that maybe he was genuinely interested in Gerard Wells.
“In My System” faded into the penultimate track, and Emory, who prided himself on having a photographic memory, could not recall a single photo of Gerard cozied up to anyone.
Even in Gerard’s journal, which he still regretted reading without permission, he couldn’t conjure a paramour’s name despite the mentions of sex and dates.
By the time he started attentively listening again, the album was nearly over.
The final song cued up, and its differences took Emory by surprise.
A simple, timeless-sounding piano line was all that rivered out of the speaker.
After so much upbeat pop, it was a balm to his ears and yet a shock to his senses.
“They say seeing is believing, but I still swear that you’re unreal,” a younger, higher-voiced Gerard sang sweetly and without ornamentation. “I rub my eyes and count to ten, can’t shake the way I feel.”
Emory leaned over. The track was titled “See You Sometime.”
“When we turned in the album,” present-day Gerard said, shaking Emory out of his unexpected trance, “the label kept telling us, ‘You can’t end on a ballad. It’s a nice song, but you just can’t do it.
’ They kept trying to get us to replace it with some half-baked party track we wrote for shits and giggles, but I knew there was something honest about this one that would resonate with people.
If they listened to the album in order—which I know a lot of people don’t do these days, what with streaming—this is how I wanted to leave them.
I wanted them to feel how I felt when I was writing this, hopeful that there was somebody out there for me and that someday our paths would cross at the exact right time. I ended up being right.”
“That you’d meet somebody?” Emory asked.
“No,” Gerard said darkly before glancing away. “About the song. This is the fan favorite, the one they always request when we do VIP sound checks.”
As the final turns of the melody caressed Emory with pleasure, his limbic system powered down from overdrive. By the final resonant chord of the song, he was left nearly breathless.
He understood why this was the fan-favorite song, and why those women in college put up posters of We the Wells on their walls, and why listening to music was such a ubiquitous human behavior.
Because as soon as Gerard disappeared into the bathroom to shower before bed, Emory stole his wired earbuds, popped them into the iPod, and replayed “See You Sometime.”
When the key change in the bridge hit again, Emory’s invisible skin was overrun with chilly goose bumps of a foreign kind. An experience he could only describe as decadent frisson.