“The rejects,” she says quietly, pulling out a record and holding it up, trying to catch a bit of light to see it better.
“I like to think of them as the survivors,” I reply.
Annabel turns around to face me, cradling the record against her chest, biting down on that bottom lip of hers, and for a second I forget the reason we’re here. It’s a strange thing being alone with Annabel Lee. She’s changed in ways that the man in me can’t help but notice. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel a bit like a dick for checking her out. That’s not why I sought her company.
“You have a very poetic view of the world,” she says, and I’m not sure if she means it as an insult or a compliment.
I take a few steps toward her, mostly ’cause I’m an idiot and all, and tug the record from her hands. “Bean’s Little Catherine,” I say, reading the band’s name. “This one sounds like a real treat. Shall we take a listen?”
“OMG. If you suddenly make a record player appear out of thin air, I will be fully and utterly convinced you’re a wizard. If the fact that you convinced me to come on this joyride wasn’t proof enough…”
“Your grandma convinced you to come out tonight,” I reply, unable to resist a bit of good old-fashioned ribbing.
“You just love reminding me of that, don’t you?” She laughs.
“She called you a pussy. It was epic.”
“I prefer Le Chat,” she quips with a quick wink, and I full-out laugh. It’s nice that she’s actually having a little bit of fun instead of worrying if I’m going to straight-up dismember her. Not that I haven’t given her every reason to mistrust me.
“I’ll make sure to remember that,” I reply. “As for the record player, I bought one a few years back. I hid it under the containers of rat poison in the storage closet.”
Annabel’s eyes go wide as they dart around the room. “Rat poison? As in there needs to be poison because this place has rats?”
“Most places have rats, or at least mice. Some even have cockroaches,” I singsong as I turn on my heels and head toward the closet. It takes everything in me to stop from teasing her again. Even without seeing her, I know she’s back to counting the number of steps it would take to make it to the exit.
When I return holding the record player in my arms, Annabel is curled up so inside herself she’s practically disappeared. Hands folded under her arms. Arms wrapped around her chest. Feet turned in. Shoulders up to her ears. I’m about to tease her, but then I realize just how hard all of this must be for her. It’s so out of her comfort zone. And staring at her, looking at me wide-eyed, trying to force a smile, I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for her. How sad that she’s so scared of life.
“I promise to protect you from all four-legged creatures,” I say, bumping my shoulder into hers as I set the record player on the counter she’s leaning against. My toes briefly touch hers in the process, and her eyes dart quickly away from mine as her cheeks turn the craziest shade of pink. Almost like the cover of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane.
I clear my throat, which has suddenly gone a bit dry. I make a mental note to protect her from all two-legged creatures as well. This is just the sort of scene I could totally get into. Dark room, surrounded by music, and a pretty chick to boot? But Annabel Lee isn’t that type of girl. Or at least I don’t think she is. Besides, that’s not what I brought her out here for. I have to keep reminding myself.
Staring at her, her laugh still ringing in my ears, I realize I want us back. It’s not just about penance for the way I treated her. God, I missed this. The ease of talking with her. How much fun we had. I missed her. The moment I figure it out, I realize it will suck if she won’t let me back into her life. She’s not my Annabel anymore, and yet she is. It’s a puzzle. She’s not a girl, and she’s not a woman. It’s like living in Superman’s Bizarro World.
“How about we listen to this bad boy?” I say, carefully reaching behind her to grab Bean’s Little Catherine without accidentally grabbing anything else in the process. Though to be honest, I do take a peek, and the girl’s got a nice backside. Even if it is covered in a T-shirt that’s nearly drowning her.
Damn. I was wrong. She’s def a woman now.
While Annabel doesn’t verbally answer, I think she nods. At least I sense some sort of movement next to me. I pull the record from its sleeve and place it on the player, hoping to Kanye it isn’t some song about the hippity-dippity. If it is, I’m pretty sure Annabel will head straight for the hills. Rats and sexual innuendos are just asking too much.
Hippity-dippity song it is not. Instead the song feels like home. Every fall, Belltown holds the Highlander Festival. A three-day excuse to drink in the name of honoring our Scottish relatives. The town invites in musicians from the motherland to amuse the drunken bastards with songs lamenting the evils of whiskey and the English. Bean’s Little Catherine reminds me a bit of this, except less commercial. Not the standardized “Scottish sounds” that play everywhere that is “Scottish” except Scotland. We live off amusement park renderings, and Bean’s Little Catherine sounds like the real thing.
“It’s so simple, but so complex at the same time,” Annabel pipes in, breaking my inner monologue. I’m sort of a dick about listening to music. The whole world falls away when I first dive into a song, and I tend to forget if there are other people in the room, but Annabel’s words seem to come straight from my own head, pulling me from my Kenneth Branaghing.
“The instruments are what’s simple. Simple chords. Simple rhythms. But her voice is so powerful…where she chooses to take her pauses says as much as where she chooses to push through the notes,” Annabel continues.
In that second, I think about shoving my deadlines up my editor’s ass and kissing Annabel Lee. I can say with 100 percent certainty it’s the first time the thought has ever crossed my mind. I can’t be blamed. Not entirely. ’Cause if ever a girl gave me a hard-on by simply talking about a song, it was in this moment. I’ve been around a lot of girls who said they dig music, but they never talked about it like that. Annabel saw what others didn’t.
I shift my body so I’m leaning against the record stand, staring down at her profile. She looks straight ahead, slowly bouncing her head up and down to the tune. The moon shines through the window of the shop, blasting off her red hair like a copper penny lying on the road on a blazing summer day. Suddenly, her head turns slightly and her eyes find mine.
In all the years I’ve known Annabel Lee—granted, most of them at a distance because I was afraid she’d rip off my balls for what I did—I’ve never looked at her like this. Nor have I ever seen this particular expression on her face. It’s hard to describe. It’s like a record I’ve listened to my whole life played backward.
And with one damn rat, the moment is gone.
I’m not sure if I want to catch the damn thing and drown it in poison or give it a kiss. “Please tell me that was not what I think it was,” Annabel demands, pointing to where we both know a rat scurried by.
“How about those photos?” I suggest, quickly stepping away from her to grab my camera from its bag.
Hero. The rat is a hero. I was going to kiss this girl, and it would have been a nuclear mistake.
“What do you want me to take pictures of?” Annabel asks, pulling tight on her ponytail.
“Anything. Everything. Whatever you want,” I say, holding the camera toward her.
Annabel reaches forward but quickly pulls back. She bites on that dangerous bottom lip of hers and looks up at me. “I don’t know. It feels kind of weird using someone else’s camera.”
“Come on, a camera is a camera,” I reply.
“Would Jimmy Page say a guitar is just a guitar?” she counters, raising an eyebrow.
Really? A Jimmy Page reference? That’s like a metaphorical nip slip. I grab her hand, place the camera in it, and take a step away from her. “I would have told you to bring your own camera, but I thought it might have tipped you off that I was planning on kidnapping you
and murdering you, or that I wasn’t just there to give you back your picture. One of the two.”
If Annabel noticed my need to put distance between us, she certainly doesn’t show it. She goes to work examining the camera. Her hands move around it, adjusting and playing, and it’s not long before I have to turn and begin to examine the decaying posters on the wall. How gentle she is with the camera, and yet there isn’t an ounce of shyness about her. She is confident with it. Despite her pleas otherwise, Annabel is the master of it.
This is the Annabel I remember. Zero fucks given about things like fear.
The click of the shutter makes me jump, and I pray to Kanye that she didn’t notice. I’ve escaped full schmuck status too many times tonight, and soon I know she’s going to figure me out. Fate gives a guy only so many chances.
Annabel is in her element now, and if I thought the picture was mesmerizing, watching her work is a full-blown acid trip. No longer does Annabel seem afraid of the record store as she moves about it like she owns the damn place. She crouches down between aisles and kneels in dusty corners as if the rats were unicorns. And she takes pictures of everything. The moon shining through the broken glass of a now-empty memorabilia display case. The spiderweb that drapes itself across a broken broom handle propped against the wall. And then she turns the camera on me, and before I know it, I hear the click of the shutter.
“What are you doing?” I ask, feeling my own face heat up. “I brought you here to get pictures of the store. Not me.”
“Shut up,” she demands tersely, and I’m back to remembering the time she told off the judges at the science fair. I can’t help but gulp. Annabel takes a step closer to me and the camera goes off again. I open my mouth to tell her to stop, but before I can get the words out, she drops the camera slightly from her eyes and gives me a look so deadly I’m pretty sure Gene Simmons would piss his pants at the sight of it.
Back to gulping.
“How did you find this place?” she asks, bringing the camera back up to her eyes.
Now, that’s something I’m not going to talk about. Not even if she let me suck on that cute little bottom lip of hers.
“Hello…I asked you a question,” she says in between clicks.
“Actually, you told me to shut up and then asked me a question. It’s all very confusing,” I joke, hoping to change the subject, but this is Annabel Lee, and I know she’s not going to let me off so easy.
“I bet some broad brought you here. That’s how you know about this place,” she says, pausing long enough to waggle her eyebrows at me.
“Who the hell says the word ‘broad’?” I ask, pretending to pick some lint off my shirt. It’s hard to look at her with that camera going off at me. This girl sees everything, and there are parts of me I don’t want seen. Like with one more click of the shutter, she’ll time-travel us both back to that moment I was too chickenshit to be by her side. That time I put all of my fears of loss before her. Then she’ll remember all of those things both of us haven’t been able to bring up, and she’ll remember she hates me. And then probably kick me right in the balls.
Annabel pulls the camera down and rests it against her hip. Her hips are also a bit nice to look at now that I examine them. “I spend hours every day talking to a seventy-year-old woman. You pick up a few things.”
“She’s sick?” I ask, remembering the rumor that Annabel didn’t go off to college because she had to help take care of an ailing family member, cringing inwardly that I had to hear about it from the town gossips and not from her. Even though my interaction with Grams was brief, the woman seemed like she was a real ballbuster herself, and it was a shame she wouldn’t be around much longer. The world needed more ballbusters.
Annabel quickly moves the camera back up, covering her face. “So, how did you find this place?” she asks again, avoiding my question. I get it. I do. I haven’t earned her trust, and who was I to blame her for her evasions of truth? Wasn’t I doing the same thing?
No one tells the truth.
But maybe we should.
I scratch at the back of my head, not really knowing how to say it or where to start. “My dad,” I say quietly. Her eyes go wide at the mention of him, but she quickly recovers. Annabel never once asked me about my dad. Probably because she already knew he walked out on us; everyone in town knew that. I think it was more than that. She just knew it was always the thing I couldn’t talk about.
“Your dad brought you here?” she asks, shifting to my left. Changing the angle at which she will totally dismantle me.
“No, my dad owned the store. The businessman. He was my dad,” I quickly explain, hoping that the faster I say it, the less it will hurt. The worst symbolic Band-Aid rip in history.
The clicking of the shutter pauses.
“Got word he had moved out here,” I continue, “so I came. Didn’t even recognize me. I kept coming around, and he just thought I was some kid who was super into music. And then one day the store closed, and he was gone. And this was all that was left,” I say.
Click.
Click.
Click.
“What are you doing?” I almost stutter, finding my throat suddenly thick with all the shit that thoughts of my father brought up.
“Ssh,” she whispers as she continues to take my picture.
“Stop,” I demand.
She doesn’t.
“Stop.”
“I dare you to stand still.”
At the mention of a dare, my heart skips a beat. I’m overwhelmed with Bizarro World goodness, so I let her go to work. Even though I feel like she is slowly stripping off my clothes, and not in a sexy sex way, I don’t tell her to stop again.
I accept the dare.
When she’s finally finished, we’re both breathing a little harder.
“I couldn’t stop,” she explains. “The look on your face…I had to capture it. I’m sorry. It was terrible of me. I just couldn’t stop,” she says, quickly wiping a tear from her cheek. When had she started crying? I’ve never, ever seen Annabel Lee cry.
I clear my throat. “It’s all right,” I reply. “Want to get out of here?” I turn to place the camera back in my bag.
“Maybe one more record?” she asks quietly in between sniffles. I couldn’t say no to the desperation in that voice if I wanted to, so I don’t.
“Yes, Annabel, we can listen to another one.”
Chapter Eight
Annabel
Everything inside me is moving, buzzing, tingling. I can’t remember the last time I’ve stayed up this late, yet I’m not even a bit sleepy.
I want to break into the photo lab.
It’s literally the craziest thought that has ever crossed my mind since before the accident, but the want to do it—no, the need to do it—is so strong inside me that I can hardly sit still. After the accident, everything became about control and plans and safety nets…because life is one big chaotic clusterfuck, and I will never let it take me by surprise again. Kennedy senses the battle going on between reason and ridiculousness. He keeps sneaking peeks at me from the corner of his eye as he drives. He probably thinks I’m nuts. The irony is it’s the first moment of clarity I’ve felt in months.
I need to see the pictures. I know it broke every rule of decorum, my crazy picture-snapping fit, but I got lost in the moment. I recognized that expression because I live that look every day.
“You okay over there, Ansel Adams?” Kennedy asks me.
“Fine, but I would be better without the nicknames,” I mumble. Not only am I anxious, but I am mortified by my behavior. Kennedy was having a moment, and I totally took advantage of it. I didn’t want to add “parasite” to the long list of names people called me behind my back. It wasn’t always that way. The nicknames. It was hard for me to adjust once I returned to school. Everyone there, well, their lives kept going all those months I was gone. Before the accident, people were too scared to give me crap. They were afraid I would dare Kennedy to switch out their
Gatorade with cow piss. But I wasn’t the same girl after the accident. I kept mostly to myself, and like with most things people in this town didn’t understand, my otherness didn’t garner sympathy; it only got contempt. Freak. Weirdo. Those were the ones that rolled off me with ease. But the people who whispered that they wished God had saved my brother instead of me…those left scars worse than any on my back.
Besides, I was nowhere near the talent that was Ansel Adams. I was just a freak with a camera who happened to take one interesting picture once. I would be better off sticking to the plan: go to college, study history, and work at a museum someday. Far, far away from Belltown. I had forgotten who I was for a second back at the record store. I got swept up in whatever emotion had filled the room.
Always stick to the plan.
“And I thought we had finally agreed to officially change your name to Le Chat,” he teases, breaking me from my brooding.
I can’t help but crack a smile. “Only when we’re alone. If you ever call me that in public, I swear I’ll—”
“Rip my balls off, wrap them, and send them to me for Christmas? Don’t worry, I get it.” He laughs. “But I am surprised to hear you want to hang out with me alone again. I knew my charm would eventually wear you down.” My face flashes red, and I can feel the heat radiate down my neck to the tips of my fingers.
“What’s got you all crazy over there?” Kennedy asks.
I bite on my bottom lip and look up at him. I have two options here: I can tell him my cray-cray thought or I can make up some lie about worrying I won’t get enough sleep in order to be functional tomorrow…er, today.
“Annabel!” he exclaims with an air of mock shock. “Could you actually really be desperate to spend another night alone with me? Did I hit the proverbial sexual tension nail on its head, and by head I mean—”
Seven Ways to Lose Your Heart Page 6
