by Leah Johnson
I try not to think about Olivia, but every thought circles back to her. I can’t help myself. In less than seventy-two hours she has become this magnificent cacophony, and without her around, the silence feels suffocating. Just as I thought allowing myself to open up to somebody besides Peter or my mom would hurt, it does. Even more than I imagined.
We reach the doors to the bus and Mack puts a hand on my shoulder and it’s only then that I realize I’m crying. I’m now the kind of person who cries in front of other people without even noticing. Great.
“You okay?”
I look to the side and close my eyes to the incoming tears.
I can feel Mack’s thin arms wrapping around me from the back, and she holds me for as long as I need to be held. And when I’m done, I get it. What my dad’s Truths mean. Why we return to music for the answers when we can’t find them ourselves. In that moment, there’s only one thing I can do.
“Can I borrow a guitar for a second?” I wipe my eyes. Mack immediately maneuvers around me to grab the acoustic just sitting on the table.
“I have a song I need to write.”
Finishing a song for the first time in eight months feels like someone has removed a brick that’s been resting on my chest. I knew my breaths had been coming in shorter, but until it was gone, I couldn’t remember what it was like to exhale without it.
It takes about an hour, all together, to try to find language to capture the way I feel. The notes come easily though. That part has always been the most natural for me—finding the right chords to match what I’m trying to say. It reminds me of Olivia matching those almost-lyrics to her photos. But now the thought doesn’t feel like a weight, it feels a bit like a light. Like I can see more clearly what I couldn’t before this afternoon, before this weekend, at all.
The bus is currently empty, and I feel like an interloper, an intruder, sitting here with I-don’t-know-who’s guitar in my hands, but Mack keeps assuring me it’s okay.
Most of the guys from the band are apparently out and about on the grounds, joining in the volunteer effort to clean up what was damaged in the chaos after the misfire, while Teela and Davey are at the Farmland on-site office having conference calls with their manager, agent, and the festival organizers to work out how best to move forward. Mack has been on FaceTime with her girlfriend for most of the time, holed up in one of the bunks in the back, trying to get her to believe that she’s safe.
She plops down next to me while I plunk out some notes, trying to figure out if I’ve got the bridge right or if there’s just something slightly off about it. “You should try an A minor there instead of the F,” she says. I try it, and she’s right. The difference is minute, but just enough. It finally sounds right.
“Teela wants to get the other headliners to join them tonight. Sonny Blue, Pop Top, Odd Ones—everybody who’s still here—to play a massive, all-night set.”
It sounds like the type of thing my dad would’ve stood behind. If live music was the altar that he laid himself prostrate before, then he’d be damned before letting fear of what could have been desecrate his house of worship. The way Teela and Davey are working on reclaiming the festival feels more like a memorial than his own funeral had.
“You think people are going to stay through the end of the night?” I ask.
“Yeah, I really do.” Mack nods too hard and one of the drumsticks that she has lodged through her topknot slips out and clatters on the floor. She picks it up and starts spinning it through her fingers so quickly it’s clearly second-nature to her. “I overheard—”
Someone bangs at the door so loudly, both of us jump to our feet. Mack holds the drumstick in her hand like a baseball bat and approaches the door slowly. She looks through the window before deciding to open it. I set the guitar down and stand, just in case whoever’s coming in is the type of person I might need to fend off with my aggressive stare or surprisingly strong left hook.
But the person who trails Mack inside isn’t someone I want to punch at all.
I may have, two hours ago, but now seeing Peter just makes me sad.
“Toni, Jesus, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You wouldn’t answer your phone!”
“How did you even get back here, Peter?” I cross my arms and lean against the table as casually as possible.
“You’d think the security would be a little more careful with checking the inside of the trash bins they haul in and out of VIP.” He shakes his hair a little so it’s out of his face, and a piece of lettuce falls out. He puts his hat back on. “I had to find you, dude. You have to know I would never—”
“How exactly did you find me?” I interrupt.
He holds up his cell. “I have your Find My iPhone information, remember?” He at least has the decency to look a little embarrassed as he adds, “I wouldn’t have done it unless this were an emergency, okay? Also I have got to know how you ended up on Kittredge’s tour bus, but whatever, that’s a story for another time.”
I look over his shoulder to where Mack is standing. It was cool of her to invite me to camp out here and let me cry without asking any questions, but this is a conversation I should probably have in private. She squeezes my shoulder in support and backs herself into the bunk area while pushing in her AirPods.
“I don’t care, okay?” I say, sitting down on the edge of the couch. “Just … I don’t want to hear it.”
“No but T, please. I need you to hear it. You’re my best friend. You know that. I—” He stops. He pulls his hat off and twists it around in his hands. “Everything was all over the place. I was still angry, and scared, and then Imani texted and I was just … I shouldn’t have even gotten that close to kissing Olivia. I know that.” He sits down next to me and his face is more serious than I’ve ever seen it. “I’ll never stop feeling like the lowest of the low garbage for even letting it go as far as it did. I’m sorry, T.”
I don’t want to forgive him. I still feel the sting of betrayal, and I don’t know if I’m ready to let it go.
“I’ve never lied to you, right? Like, you know me better than that. I’m not lying now. Okay?”
I allow my eyes a second to really examine him, this guy that I thought was my best friend. Peter has always been painfully earnest, almost to the point of causing me secondhand embarrassment. He cries openly at romantic movies when we have FaceTime Netflix nights. He stops to pet every dog he meets on the street. He didn’t think twice when I asked him to come to this festival with me because I just knew it would change my life.
Peter Menon, I realize, is the most consistent thing in my life.
I think about my new song, about the Truths I’ve collected this weekend between sets and stolen moments behind barns. I think about what I want from my life, and the people I want in it. And I say, “Okay.” I swallow the lump in my throat and say it again, more firmly. “Okay, Menon. Pull shit like that again—or almost pull shit like that again—and I will go full ’04 Van Halen and take my guitar to your face. Deal?”
“Yes! Oh my God, thank you! I’ve never been happier to have someone threaten my bodily autonomy.” Peter falls forward and bows dramatically instead of hugging me like I know he wants to. Still giving me space when I need it, even without me asking for it. “I was so worried I was going to have to send back those matching denim jackets I got airbrushed with our faces on them for your eighteenth birthday. They cost me, like, a semester’s worth of minimum wage at the Java Hut.”
I laugh, because I can’t help myself. But it only takes a second before I remember why I sunk so low before. So even if Peter didn’t kiss Olivia, it sure as hell looked like she wanted to kiss him, and that’s a whole separate issue.
“Can I say something?” He moves to sit next to me on the couch.
“When has permission ever stopped you before?”
“Good point.” He looks at me seriously for a second. Outside the bus, I can hear the gentle plink plink plink of rain hitting the siding. “You know why I like memoriz
ing facts about dead presidents?”
“Because you’re odd.” I shrug. I’ve never really wondered why Peter does the things he does. I learned to accept all his spots just like he learned to accept all my cracks, without question.
“Okay, yes, sure, that’s not entirely wrong.” He rolls his eyes and grins. “But more than that, it’s a way to make sense of things. This country was founded by weirdos and jerks and the dullest knives in the drawer.” I think back to some of the facts he’s shared about all those white men over the course of our friendship, and he’s right on every count. “And yet, they managed to convince the world that this country is some kind of global superpower.”
“I think racism is also to blame for that,” I add.
“Oh, for sure.” He laughs. “I guess what I’m saying is, I like knowing that these guys were train wrecks. If they could be trusted with this whole”—he circles a finger in the air—“thing, why shouldn’t we trust ourselves with all the other stuff?”
I close my eyes and shake my head. I should have known he’d find a way to therapize me before the weekend was over. His face is serious when I look at him again.
“You saying I should trust myself with someone’s heart, Menon?”
“No, I’m saying you should trust her with yours.” He bumps his shoulder against mine. “You really like Olivia, right? I mean, whatever happened earlier aside and everything. You want to keep her around?”
There’s no use lying to Peter. He knows the answer anyway—I’m sure it’s written in the very line of my body, the way I can feel myself go more alert at the sound of her name.
“So what? You’re a mess sometimes. We all are. Does that mean it’s not still worth a shot?”
Peter is a perpetual optimist, so I usually take his advice with a grain of salt. But on this point, I have to concede. The fact is, no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise, I can’t bring myself to stay angry at her.
I’m mostly angry at myself for even thinking that breaking up this morning would be enough to turn off the part of my brain that had fallen for her. I’m angry because I waited so many years to allow myself to feel the way that I felt around her because I thought that loneliness was somehow the antidote to heartbreak.
But I know better now than I did before: loneliness only begets more loneliness—it doesn’t protect you from hurting. Maybe that’s where love comes in. The risk of the hurt is offset by the rest of it. By the nights you spend dancing in barns, by the afternoons you spend shouting along to your favorite band’s lyrics in an audience of ten thousand other people just as passionate about them as you are, or by the mornings you wake up nestled against each other in a too-warm tent.
When my dad said I was going to be big one day, maybe he was talking about music. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he meant that I was destined to love big, to care about another person and have that care be mutual. The idea of that still frightens me to my core.
“What if one person can only lose so much before they fall apart completely?” I ask.
“I don’t know, man,” he says. “But I’ve gotta believe the people I have left will love me enough to try and put me back together again.”
I nod. I think this is what it means for music to give us answers. Olivia is some kind of melody that has made a song of my universe, and I realize I want to spend whatever time I may have trying to figure out all the notes. I don’t want to rearrange them, but I can’t think of many things better than appreciating their beauty.
“So.” He nods to the guitar on the table and the hastily scrawled lyrics next to me. “You gonna pick those pieces up now or what?”
“Peter,” I say. “I’m going to need your help making a plan.”
I’m going to call in every favor I have. I’m going to make good on the first lesson my dad ever taught me: that anything could be solved with live music. I’m going to do what I’m most afraid of.
I’m going to get Olivia back.
SUNDAY EVENING
“What are you doing here?” Imani stands up from the cooler she’s sitting on when I arrive. I freeze where I’m standing. She doesn’t look as enraged as she was before, but she certainly doesn’t look happy to see me. I immediately feel cowed, even though I didn’t even come here for her. I came here because I was asked.
“Peter said he needed me to meet him here.”
I look down at the text from Peter that asked me and Imani to be back at camp in a half hour. It sounded urgent, without its usual emojis and memes, so I fired back a response.
“I’m sorry.” I sent an audio iMessage so he could understand I thought this was worth a longer conversation. “I was completely out of line earlier. That wasn’t fair to you. Or to Imani, although for way different reasons, and … I just, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“I know it won’t, friendo. I was off my game too,” he sent back quickly. “It’d be pretty awkward if we kissed, since you and my sister from another mister are gonna get back together, you know?”
I didn’t tell him that there was no way that was going to happen, that me and Toni were well and officially done before I tried to kiss him.
Standing before Imani now though, I wish Peter would’ve just told me whatever he needed to tell me earlier. Either that, or I wish I’d had the foresight not to show up five minutes early. Imani is always fifteen minutes early. It’s the Capricorn in her.
“Same. I wish he’d just texted whatever he wanted to say instead of all these cloak-and-dagger theatrics. Kittredge goes on in a bit and I want to get a good spot.” She looks at her phone to double-check the time. She adds under her breath, “And then I can finally leave this germ-infested wasteland.”
She sits back down on the cooler. Well, more like plops down, like her body is too heavy for her to hold up anymore. She doesn’t even look angry now, she just looks … depleted. The sight breaks my heart. And even though I know it’s not nearly enough, I have to tell her the truth.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out.
Welp. There goes my heartfelt speech.
She rubs her temples. “Seriously, Olivia. We don’t have to do this. I get it.”
“How could you when I didn’t even get it until, like, an hour ago?” I rush forward and sit on the small space next to her. I think belatedly that it might be too close for comfort, given the circumstances, but Imani doesn’t shove me onto my ass right away, so I take that as a good sign. “I have been a nightmare person since the day we met.”
She looks over at me and drops her hands into her lap. I keep going.
“You’re the best person I know. And I know that’s maybe a massive thing to say to someone, but I mean it. You are the first person I think about calling when I have news. The last text I send every night before I go to bed.” It’s not a struggle to come up with things I love about Imani, or reasons why I want to salvage this friendship.
“You’re a literal, certifiable genius. It’s proven. You have the second-highest GPA in Park Meade history, I checked—second to only my big sister, by the way, which I can work out in therapy when I get back home—but you don’t make other people feel small or stupid with how big your brain is. It’s just, you know, another thing that makes you you.” I search Imani’s face for some sort of understanding. “But …”
“But you don’t love me like I love you,” she finishes.
I shake my head sadly. At the end of the day, that’s just the heart of it. I can’t show up for Imani like that, because I just don’t feel it.
But I can show up for her as the best friend who ever friended, which I plan on doing until we’re both old and gray and marching in Pride parades side by side as those iconic old ladies with the best signs and fabulously tacky rainbow outfits. We have a lot we need to figure out about how to navigate this new dynamic between us, the both of us moving forward completely honestly for the first time ever, but I think we can do it.
She shakes her head and looks up at the sky before sighing one
of those signature Imani sighs.
“I’ve been thinking about how you leave your dirty socks in my room sometimes when you sleep over, and how you think pineapple on pizza is an acceptable topping.”
“It’s criminally underrated, Imani, and you know that,” I say.
“No, it’s literally just criminal, but that’s not the point.” She smooths down her hair and sweeps it all over one shoulder. “The point is: I think I may have been unfair to you too. I elevated you to this, you know, pedestal—looked at you like a thing that I deserved to obtain one day. Like I earned it because I waited or was a good friend. And I’m sorry for how I handled it today.
“I just think”—Imani starts, pulling back to look me in my eyes—“neither of us were seeing each other for who we are. And that’s not fair.”
She’s right. Maybe neither of us have been seeing each other clearly for a long time, but I’m hoping this is the beginning of something new between us. Something better. She hasn’t forgiven me yet, but I have hope that she will. That we can fix this. That this is a relationship worth fighting for.
“Hey.” She looks down at my hands in my lap and runs her index finger across her ring. “You grabbed it.”
When she raises her head, I take in her face: eyes soft, lips turned up just a little at the edges. I nod, but don’t add anything. I want to give her the space to say everything she needs to right now.
“I saw what you posted on Confidential, by the way,” she adds. She brushes a blade of grass from my shoulder. “You were really brave. I’m proud of you.”
I don’t know what’s going to happen with the video, or with Troy. But now it’s out there. At least I was honest. I read a Zora Neale Hurston quote once that said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
