But the most amazing thing about Galaxe is her color. I don’t know who painted it, but it’s an airbrushed galaxy, all purples and teals, with swirling supernovas and twinkling stars. For a moment, I swear I see the stars shift and sparkle.
When Bruce told me it cost him ten thousand dollars, I nearly barfed. It took me three years to save up $599 for my Fender Strat.
“Wow,” Hannah says.
“Right? Check this out.” I ease Galaxe up and out of her case and loop the strap over my head. I flip the hidden switch that turns on the guitar’s built-in LED backlighting. A fluorescent halo radiates out from the guitar, turning my arms and clothes blue. The stars painted on the guitar look like they’re moving again.
“That’s gorgeous,” Hannah breathes.
It couldn’t be more metal.
We head back out into the heat and traipse over to the stage. In the wing, Hannah watches as I dig through stacks of cables, shifting amps and pedals and fiddling with the soundboard.
And she watches as I fail.
I can’t get this stupid sound system to work. The lights on the board are on and the tiny screens are lit up, but whenever I pluck a string, the metal sounds dead. The sound’s not feeding to any of the speakers.
“Here,” Hannah says, quiet at my side. “Let me see.”
She studies the soundboard for a minute, then starts sliding things around, twisting knobs, unplugging and replugging the cables that feed out of the back of it. She goes onstage and checks behind a few pieces of equipment, and I’m just standing stock-still in the wing, watching.
She comes back to me a minute later with a heavy black cable draped over her arm.
“Don’t think you needed this one. Now let’s see.” She reaches over to thumb a string on my guitar. I feel like she’s touching me.
The sound booms out of every speaker on the truss, clear and clean.
“How do you know how to do that?” I ask, dumbfounded.
“I picked up a few things watching the theater technicians. It just makes … sense to me.”
I suck at sound systems. Like, you should plug things in and they should just work, but when you have a real soundboard, it seems like there’s always something going wrong. At least for me. Hannah clearly doesn’t have that problem.
“You’re badass, you know that?” I say.
She blushes.
I shouldn’t have said that. Even if I think it’s true.
She lets the cable on her arm drop to the floor with a loud slap-thunk, and then she’s coiling it expertly into infinity loops—that’s something I do know how to do, but she’s fast and makes it look so easy, and it’s … something else. Watching the lithe muscles in her arms flex under her freckled skin—it’s making my head go light.
She lays the cable back on the pile and grabs a roll of black gaff tape. And she rips off a piece with her teeth.
Oh shit. That was hot.
Like. Really fucking hot.
I swallow. How am I supposed to play now, when my skin feels too tight and I’m so light-headed I feel drunk?
“You gonna play or not?” Hannah asks, that raw velvet voice of hers somehow even more alluring than usual. There’s a flicker of mischievousness on her face, and for a second, I swear she knows exactly what she’s doing to me, and that’s so unexpected that I just blink.
“Yes. Sure. Yes.”
I walk out into the middle of the stage, dazed. I can only hope that my wits come back when the backing track starts.
For the first time, I wonder if I’m in over my head.
A minute later, I’m strumming away on Galaxe, keeping up with Slydekick’s biggest hit, and the main stage’s speakers are amplifying me a million times louder than I’ve ever been amplified before. I feel like the whole city is throbbing with the notes I’m playing.
This stage is so different than the one in the bar where my band plays every Friday night. Shoelace is grungy and dim and it smells like beer and puke, but it’s my favorite place in the world. When I’m there, Asher’s always playing bass a few feet to my right, his white guitar covered in his signature skateboard-style doodles. Gage is on drums, in a sleeveless shirt that shows off the tattoos snaking up both arms. Oz is on rhythm guitar, slinging his man bun to the beat, and Rosalita’s on my left in fishnet tights and a leopard-print skirt, shredding it on lead guitar. We’ve all dreamed of playing on a stage like this, and here I am, doing it.
I storm though the song, putting a little extra oomph into the last riff to impress Hannah. I grab the microphone and ham it up. “Rock on, H-town! Peace out and good night!”
Hannah pauses the backing track and comes out onto the stage. “That was incredible,” she says, the corner of her mouth quirked up, like she can’t believe me.
“Thanks,” I say with a bow.
She looks out over the empty field, rubbing her sneaker in a perfect arc across the floor. “You’re really good. Is that Bruce guy your teacher?”
“Oh, no. He lives in LA. I don’t have a teacher. Learned everything on YouTube. I’m not the best, but there aren’t many people who are willing to get up on a stage wearing skintight pants and eyeliner and make a fool out of themselves, you know? Glam metal isn’t exactly the biggest scene these days.”
Musically, this is kind of as good as I’m going to get. It’s not like I have money for guitar lessons or singing lessons. And I don’t have the discipline for college.
“What’s your band called?” Hannah asks.
“Rat Skillet.”
She laughs. Ooooh, that smile was so close to being a power chord.
“Asher came up with it,” I say, giving credit where it’s due.
“Is Asher the really tall one? You’re always with him in the hallways at school.”
“Yeah. We’ve been best friends since third grade. He doesn’t talk much, which works because I basically never shut up.”
He was a big kid even back then, a gentle giant with sleepy eyes. He used to hang out at skate parks, doodling cartoony monsters on people’s skateboard decks with fat permanent markers. Now he’s in charge of making all our Rat Skillet flyers and album art, using the same whimsical, smiley monsters that he’s drawn on his white bass guitar.
Thinking about him feels like a guitar string twang in my chest. Asher’s such a good fucking guy. Everyone thinks he’s just a dazed stoner, but his slowness is just him taking everything in stride, considering shit so he can drop the most insightful advice. He’s talked me down from lots of panicked cliffs.
“So is this what you want to do?” Hannah asks. “Be a musician?”
Usually people ask me if I want to be a rock star, not a musician. And there’s always a sneer hiding in there somewhere. But Hannah is completely genuine.
“Nah, Rat Skillet isn’t going anywhere,” I say. “My band members all have real jobs planned out, so we’re just playing for fun.” Which is fine with me. If I got serious about making it big, it would stop being fun.
I walk to the front of the stage, past the big fluorescent yellow strip of tape that you’re not supposed to cross for safety reasons. It’s a ten-foot drop down to the grass. I sweep one toe out over the edge experimentally, and because it’s me, I lose my balance. Hannah’s fingers are at my elbow, tugging me back before I teeter off the edge. I stutter at the softness of her fingertips on my bare skin.
“Sorry,” I say sheepishly. “Am I allowed to cross the line if I’m sitting down?”
She nods, and her hand slides away.
I sit down and scoot across the yellow line until I’m perched on the edge of the stage and dangling my feet over the edge, Galaxe heavy on my lap. After a few seconds, Hannah comes and sits by me. She’s close, but there’s still a healthy few inches between our legs.
I shouldn’t scoot over. I should definitely not wiggle around so I can pull a fresh guitar pick out of my back pocket, and I should definitely not let my leg settle back down right against hers.
But … I do.
<
br /> Now we’re touching, hip to knee. Her muscles are firm and warm. Her legs go on for miles, and I have to stop myself from imagining what I can do with that information.
All we’re doing is sitting next to each other. Friends sit next to each other all the time. It’s totally normal.
What’s not normal is how aware of her I am. She’s so willowy and graceful and the way she moves—
She’s throwing me off balance. I feel like a skittish colt, like I’m new at this whole girl thing. Which I am definitely not. I’ve got to get my shit together.
I’m just excited I’ve got a friend now. That has to be it. Of course I like it when she touches me, because it felt nice and I like to be touched. The small things like her fingers on my arm, the brush of her shoulder against mine, it’s a language I understand. It feels like she’s saying I’m here, don’t fall off the edge, I’m glad you’re here.
I need some clear headspace to figure out a game plan, to get my feet back under me, because I’m a little bewildered by it all, but I don’t want to be apart from her in this emptiness. Not even for a second.
We sit there in silence for a while, looking out over the field. I tap the guitar pick against Galaxe’s body.
She breaks the silence first. “If your band was on board with it, would you want to make it big?” she asks.
I’m grateful for the conversation, even if it’s not my favorite topic. “If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen.”
She frowns. “I don’t really think that’s true. If you want something, you have to work to make it happen.”
I shrug. “Maybe that’s how ballet works, but rock star stuff is kind of subjective. It’s more about luck.”
“Really? I’m pretty sure rock stars have to put a lot of work in too. There’s probably a ton of things you have to do to be successful.”
She could have a point. But I tried putting in the hard work before and got burned. Life’s a bitch. Bad shit happens to good people, and vice versa. Just take my mom, for example. She sucks at adulting, but bad stuff hardly ever happens to her. She once quit her job at the mall food court because she didn’t like wearing ugly shoes, and the next day she won five hundred dollars in the lottery. Asher’s parents, on the other hand, work their asses off, and I swear something horrible happens to them once a month like clockwork. Last month it was their car breaking down, and the month before that his mom got laid off. Just when they thought they’d saved up enough money for Asher to go to community college, Asher’s dad had a fall at the construction site where he works. The company weaseled out of paying the medical bills, so Asher’s college money went down the drain.
The one time that both of our moms came to a gig, I saw them standing together. It shook me. My mom was all chill and smiley and Zen, waving her Jack and Coke around to the beat, and Asher’s mom was still in her work uniform, mouth drawn down from exhaustion. She looked so gray.
If working your ass off isn’t guaranteed to bring success, and flying by the seat of your pants can actually work out, why take the harder path?
“What are you going to do after graduation?” she asks, and I automatically stiffen at the question, but she’s not asking it like everyone else asks. There’s no sharp edge, no sarcasm. She genuinely wants to know.
“I’m not sure yet,” I lie. Right now, my plan is to just keep on gigging. I’m pretty sure my mom won’t make me move out of the house. The only difference is that there won’t be seven hours of school to suffer through every weekday.
“It seems like you want to do something with music,” Hannah says. “Could you do something in the industry? Work for Bruce maybe?”
“Maybe.”
If he hired me, I’d just disappoint him. I’m not really good at being dependable. But Hannah doesn’t know that. It’s interesting. I feel like I can say anything, because she didn’t meet me when everyone was around. There’s no one to tell her what they think about me.
There’s a bigger problem, though. I look out over the streets of Houston, Texas, bustling metropolis. Population: two.
“Anyway, none of that matters anymore. We’re dead.” I try to keep it light, but Hannah goes pale.
“Everything might snap back to normal,” she says quietly. “It’s still possible.”
I flick my hair out of the way so I can study her. She really believes it.
Maybe I can try believing that too. Maybe I can make a deal with this afterlife or evacuation or whatever it is. A bargain.
Here’s the deal, Houston: If we get back to our normal lives, I promise I’ll talk to Salina. I’ll tell her I wrote that song. SpandexFest ends in less than forty-eight hours, so clock’s ticking, world. If you don’t fix yourself before that, my offer’s off the table.
For a while, Hannah and I just sit there, watching the sun sink lower in the sky.
“It’s cooled down a lot,” Hannah says.
I grimace. “Mm-mm, no. You’re not allowed to talk about the weather.”
“What? Why not? Isn’t that what people are supposed to talk about?”
“Exactly my point. Talk about something you’re not supposed to talk about.”
She’s right, though. This morning, it was scorching. Way too hot for April. Now I’m starting to get goose bumps on my arms.
She’s quiet for a moment.
“Okay … what’s the last thing you remember?” she asks. “Before everyone was gone?”
“Next question,” I say.
She shoves me with her shoulder.
“Okay, okay, fine,” I say. “I don’t remember anything. It all seems like it’s really far in the past. Like how you can’t remember what exactly you ate for lunch last Tuesday, you know?”
“Yeah. Same for me,” she says.
What was my last clear memory? Stumbling out of bed and hauling myself to school? I really have no idea.
Beside me, Hannah stretches her legs out straight, then drops them with a sigh. Oh, Ballet Chick.
I sling my arm around her shoulder. It’s supposed to be buddy-buddy, like a reassuring hey, we’re in this together. But then she leans into me and all I can smell is fresh pear and all I can feel is the arch of her collarbone under my fingertips.
Somehow, for all her composed, perfect straightness, she fits against my side just right. I’m getting the strangest sense that we’ve sat like this before, her tucked up against me, warm and comfortable and in sync.
She looks down at our feet. “That song you played back at the store … did you write that?” she asks.
“Yes, indeed. Hey, maybe I should write a song about today.”
When I say today, I really mean her. What notes would she be if she were a song? I unplug from the speakers and play raw, assembling a melody as I study her.
She hugs her arms around herself and looks out over the field, seemingly unaware of the way I’m staring at her. Her deer eyelashes dust against her cheeks with every blink.
That small thing—her blinking—makes me feel like I’ve been stabbed in the gut with an electric fork. Desire climbs up my throat. Oh no. Crap, crap, crap. This is not how just friends think.
It’s fine. She doesn’t like me like that—I saw the way she first looked at me in the bookstore. So I’m safe. As long as she doesn’t reciprocate, as long as she keeps thinking I’m a useless, washed-up stoner, I can keep myself under control.
But then she closes her eyes and tilts her head back to soak up the sun, and something about the long, pale stretch of her exposed neck and blissed-out look on her face puts a visual into my head that I can’t shake. My mouth, on her neck.
What would she do? Would her breath catch? Would she lean back and let me?
Suddenly my whole body feels electric-hot. Dizzy and almost nauseous with want.
And then she’s not looking up. She’s looking right at me.
Her feet stop swinging, and mine do too.
Oh shit.
This is going to be a much bigger problem than I thought.
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A second ago, I was looking out across the field while Leo worked through a melody of stuttering, delicate notes, and now—
Now we’re looking right at each other. The intensity of his stare has heat spreading across the whole right side of my body.
Something balloons up inside me. A swollen happiness. For a moment, I’m filled with one thought: I’m so glad he’s here.
I want to lay my hand on his shoulder, to feel the heat under his soft, holey T-shirt. I want to feel the warmth of his pulse where I can see it jumping on his neck, just beside his Adam’s apple. He smells of old cloth and incense and something else—like how it smells when you blow out a candle. It’s rustic and warm and makes my head spin.
The corners of his eyes crinkle and his mouth curves in the smallest of smiles, but his stare is piercing.
Oh crap.
I’ve felt this warm rush of admiration before. I press my mouth and eyes shut for a second, trying not to think the actual words, but I fail.
I like him.
And that is the absolute last thing I need.
I’m only feeling this sappy fondness because we’re the only two people left. The glow inside me is just a product of his stupid charisma and us being stuck together.
But … he’s so different than how I thought he’d be. And the way he’s looking at me has the stupidest of all stupid thoughts flickering through my head.
Maybe he likes me too.
God, how pathetic am I? I’m reading it all wrong. He’s got a reputation for being an incorrigible flirt; this is probably just how he is with everyone. I really am just like all the other girls fawning over him because of his art-gallery beautiful face and his stupid messy hair and the guitar case that’s always on his back. After Astrid told me his name, it seemed to pop up everywhere, in whispered rumors of girls crying in bathrooms or of exes throwing things at him in the cafeteria in fits of rage.
You & Me at the End of the World Page 6
