The Beauty That Remains

by Ashley Woodfolk

  “Well, it looks like you’re having a great time with Connor. Which is awesome considering we still don’t have a song, a band name, or a drummer.” He squints at me and continues, “I only started this up with you because I thought you’d take it seriously. My friends warned me not to start a band with someone still in high school, but I told them all, ‘You don’t know Logan, he’s legendary.’ ”

  Aden frowns, like he’s kind of concerned or suddenly suspicious. “Are you just stringing me along because I’m in college and here you have easier access to this kinda shit?” He kicks an empty beer can and then points at the roach Connor is still holding.

  I think about Bram then. About how we would smoke together and how weed turned his fingertips into something cool and smooth against my skin, like he was frosting a cupcake every time he touched me—which is exactly not what I should be thinking about right now.

  “Logan?” Aden says again. He widens his eyes, and I realize he asked me a question that I haven’t answered.

  “My bad. I just have a lot going on.” I figured out a way to talk to Gertrude about Bram, but I still don’t know how to say anything true about him in front of anyone else.

  Aden picks up his keys like he’s about to leave again, and I’m not sure how to redeem myself. So I lie.

  “I have good news,” I tell him.

  “What?” he asks, sounding like he doesn’t believe me at all.

  “I found a drummer.”

  He smiles super wide. “Seriously?” he shouts. I nod and open his laptop to show him some of Nico’s videos.

  “Holy crap! This guy is amazing! Where’d you find him?”

  “Believe it or not, he goes to my school,” I say.

  Aden lifts me up in a hug because he’s so damn happy, and I kinda want to kiss him, but I hold back.

  We order pizza because Aden can see that both Connor and I have the munchies. But Aden eats his fair share of the three pies, shoving almost whole pieces in his mouth at once. He invites a couple of kids from down the hall to join us, and an impromptu party starts, just like that. I turn on music and dance with Aden—a continuation of my apology.

  I whisper, “Tonight almost makes me want to go to college.”

  And when he says, “But what about doing music full-time?” I kiss him, his lips still greasy from the pizza, because he’s the only person besides Bram and my old band members who has ever taken my music seriously.

  I try to sneak away when he and Connor start playing video games. But as soon as I shoulder on my jacket, Aden looks at me and says, “Stay. We can work on the song. I have a few ideas.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t,” I tell him, trying to push away the guilt I feel about lying to him about Nico.

  “I’ll text you later,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  “Hey, Nico.” I walk from the train station to his car, where he’s sitting with his window rolled down, music turned all the way up.

  “Logo!” he shouts. I’d forgotten about the dumb nickname he gave me. He jumps out of the car, tosses an arm over my shoulder, and wrestles me into a headlock because Nico is fucking annoying. But I guess that’s part of his charm.

  He lets me go, and I raise my eyebrows and press my lips together. He has crazy-blue eyes and smooth dark skin, so I get what Bram saw in him. He’s wearing a leather jacket that I kind of want to steal. Unraveling Lovely is spilling from his speakers, so the closer I get to his car, the more my voice seems to be everywhere.

  “A little show before the show,” he says. “Sing to me?”

  And as I duck into the passenger seat, I can’t help but smile and fulfill his request.

  When we get to The 715, it’s packed inside. Rohan’s band, Our Numbered Days, is one of the first to perform tonight, even though Nico tells me they headlined a few shows last month.

  “That’s the great thing about Ro,” Nico says. “He’s unpretentious, you know? He doesn’t care about status and all that. He cares about the music.”

  I nod and wonder if Nico knows that he’s touching a still-sore-as-hell spot when he asks me to sing Unraveling Lovely songs on the ride over and then tells me how awesome Rohan is. I know how great he is. I miss making music with him almost as much as I miss Bram.

  But I’m not here to wax poetic about my failed attempt at fame. I’m here to listen to music, to ask Nico about Bram, and, if I can grow big enough balls to do it, maybe even ask him if he wants to join my band.

  It’s still early, so we stake out a part of the wall closest to the stage. Nico grabs us drinks from the bar—he brings me a Cherry Coke—and I’m surprised by how much fun I’m having already. I thought it would be hard to be around him, knowing that he’d been with Bram, but it isn’t. I’d forgotten what it was like to have a friend.

  “So I wanted to apologize,” I say, because I do, and I also want to bring up Bram sooner rather than later. They’re doing a mike check, and the venue is filling up, so it won’t be long now before we’re pressed tight against the stage and it’s too loud to hear anything.

  “I heard about what happened at that party over Thanksgiving break.”

  Nico looks around and then straight at me, and his eyes are so blue that they feel dangerous in this kind of dark.

  “And after I heard,” I continue, “I was kinda pissed. Even though I hadn’t been with Bram in forever.”

  I can’t read the expression on his face, so I keep talking.

  “I know it was dumb,” I say, “so I’m sorry. It was shitty of me to disappear.”

  Nico bites his bottom lip and nods. He takes a sip of his own drink, something bubbly and clear, and he’s gone tight around all his edges. The drink could be sparkling water, Sprite, or spiked tonic water, since I know kids sneak booze in here all the time. I lean forward and sniff at the rim of his cup. He grins a little and shakes his head, but he still seems tense.

  He says, “I’m driving. Duh.”

  I swallow. Take a deep pull from my Cherry Coke, and I wish I had brought Aden’s whiskey with me. I wish I still had some of my high, but that buzz is long gone.

  Nico touches my fingernail where my hand is gripping the can. They’re painted midnight blue again, shimmering a little in the low light. Nico says, “They look like the sky.”

  “How can you even tell in here?” I ask him because it’s dim, and details are lost, not noticed, in rooms like this one.

  He shrugs. “I just can,” he says.

  “Were you and Bram hanging out a lot?” I ask, pushing for more while he’s still studying my nails. “Or was it like a onetime thing?”

  Nico looks away from me, unbuttons his jacket, and drapes it over his arm, and for a second, I worry he’s not going to answer at all. I pull up my jeans, and they feel too tight all of a sudden. I slip out of my jacket too. Then Nico levels me with those cobalt eyes, and I resolve to paint my nails that color next time.

  “I’ll tell you, just to get this conversation over with,” he says.

  He glances up at the stage, just as the lights get even lower, and everyone around us starts to scream. He leans into me so that his lips graze my earlobe as he says, “He kissed me at that party because he thought we were about to get caught.”

  “Caught doing what?” I ask.

  “We had pills,” he says. “A lot of them.” The music starts, and I think I see Dante, the drummer from Unraveling Lovely. We haven’t spoken in months because of what happened at Battle of the Bands, and I’m not ready to. I move closer to Nico in case Dante turns around.

  Nico cups his hand around my ear.

  “Bram was my dealer,” he says.

  BAMF // SASHA’S SENSES REVIEW…SUNSCREAM

  Looks like: GIRL LEAD SINGER!!!

  Smells like: a perfect day at the beach

  Sounds like:
screamy, girl-powered vocals. Powerful work on the keyboard with lots of synthetic sounds. Distorted guitar. So basically: ALL OF MY FAVORITE THINGS.

  Tastes like: an everlasting jawbreaker (you don’t want this album to end)

  4/5.

  I could almost feel it.

  * * *

  —

  Dancing is the best medicine.

  Maybe only next to listening to music while standing still. Or singing. Singing is really, really great, too. Also kissing. Kissing is good. I’ve done all these things tonight.

  Jerome is beside me, with his hand on the small of my back, and Deedee is right in front of us, her camera lifted over her head. She’s screaming and somehow still taking pictures of Sunscream, a band we’ve been hearing about for a while but have never seen live until tonight. I think Deedee is a little in love with the lead singer, a cute girl with blond hair and an incredible voice, who is wearing combat boots and a tutu. Sasha wrote a review for their album months ago. All night I haven’t stopped wishing she was here.

  I turn around and press my hands against Jerome’s chest, and my bangles slide down to my elbow. He fingers a few of the bracelets as he answers whatever question I guess my body is asking. Do you want to be closer? my palms ask him. Yes, he seems to say as he grips my hand before kissing me with his hot, soft lips.

  “Get a room!” Callie shouts as she squeezes by us, and Jerome laughs at first, but then he leans closer so I can hear him over the music.

  “We could get out of here, you know. I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”

  I think about where we could go at first—how I could kiss him against the wall in the back hallway of The 715, how we could sneak through the alley behind the club, how fun it would be to take Ro’s keys and make out in the Band Wagon. But then what Jerome actually said sinks in. He wants to ask me something. Which is just another way of saying he wants to talk. He might want to define this…whatever this is. But I like us as we are: Undefined. Uncomplicated. I pretend I didn’t hear what he said and turn away from him, toward our friends.

  Callie has two drinks in her hands, and one of them is for me. She’s forgiven me for missing the last show because I listened to her podcast, gave her two pages of notes, and told her I’d work the coat check with her to pay back her cousin. Ro’s band just got off the stage, and he’s posted against the wall with Jo, the drummer. He steals my drink, and I’m glad. I have a reason to step away from Jerome and wrestle the cup out of Rohan’s hands.

  The song ends. We all scream. And Callie leans toward me and says, “I know Sasha wrote a review of this band already, but we still don’t have one up for Our Numbered Days.” What she doesn’t say, but what’s totally implied, is that we need to find someone new to write BAMF reviews. But I don’t want to think about replacing Sasha right now. So I spin toward Deedee, dancing away from everything and everyone I want to avoid, to see if she took pictures of anything but the lead singer’s face.

  And there, across the room, near the opposite side of the stage, I think I see Dante, the drummer from Unraveling Lovely.

  “Is that Dante?” I shout in Rohan’s direction. He goes up on tiptoe and squints. But then his eyes go wide.

  “Holy crap, yeah. I think it is.”

  He pushes past me and Jerome, and as I watch the two pieces of Unraveling Lovely reunite, I think about Logan and the Battle of the Bands disaster. The audience had been screaming for Unraveling Lovely, and all their hard work went down the drain in an instant because Logan showed up drunk. They never played together again, and it was the last show Sasha went to before she got really sick. Rohan’s over it (because he can’t hold a grudge against anyone), but I’m still pretty pissed about it. The last time I saw either of them, it was Sasha’s memorial service, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood to talk to anyone about anything. But now, I wonder how Dante feels.

  I’m posting one of Deedee’s photos on BAMF, and still actively avoiding Jerome, when Rohan comes back over. He has the same look on his face he had that night in Sasha’s hospital room.

  I move away from Jerome, Deedee, and Callie, with Rohan’s hand clutched in mine. I pull him into the narrow hall that leads to the bathrooms.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “His sister…,” Rohan says.

  “Whose sister? Dante’s?” I ask.

  Rohan nods. He finally looks at me instead of the graffiti-covered wall in front of us.

  “You remember her, right?”

  I did. She came to every UL show wearing something ridiculous: glitter-covered T-shirts, hot pink scarves, light-up sneakers from the nineties.

  “Yeah, Tavia. She always came with her quiet Asian friend, Autumn. What about her?”

  Rohan looks stricken again. He frowns. Blinks.

  “She died,” he says. “In a car accident, a few weeks ago.”

  I stare at him blankly for about two seconds. I try to take a breath, but I can’t get any air. I feel like I’m floating away from Rohan, and my eyes fill with tears. The panic is so complete that the edges of my vision go blurry and then turn black. I double over and blink a bunch of times, but it doesn’t help.

  “Shay?” Rohan says, and it’s not so much that I can’t talk; it’s more like I never learned how. I pull away from him when he touches my back and elbow my way through the crowd until I get outside. The cold helps a little, but I don’t even try unlocking my bike. I wish I could go back inside with my friends because it’s not even close to curfew yet, but I can tell that’s no longer an option. I wipe away my tears and try to block out the thought that is marching through my head, the beginning of what I know will be an awful, endless spiral: Not her too. Not her too.

  I put on my headphones, the volume as loud as I can stand it, and I run all the way home.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, there’s a new post on Sasha’s blog.

  After I got home from the club last night, I checked Dante’s accounts, but he was never really big into posting online, which explains why I didn’t know about his sister—I followed him, not her. There wasn’t much to see. I went through Autumn’s accounts next, slowly circling closer, and then, finally through Tavia’s. The outpouring beneath her photos reminded me of what it was like right after Sasha died. Not that it’s been very long. But it’s slowed down a lot since the first few weeks. I wanted to text Dante. I stared at his name on my phone for a solid ten minutes. But I didn’t know what to say. So I talked to Sasha a little, and since Mom wasn’t home, I cried myself to sleep in my sister’s bed.

  Now Sasha’s comments are exploding again. When I went to bed last night, the wilting flowers image she posted a few days before she died was still at the top. But this morning, when I woke up, there it was: a post that said If you’re reading this, I’ll never turn sixteen.

  I would think that the blog had been hacked or something, but the message is too painfully true, too on-the-mark. Anyone who would know enough about Sasha to write that would never write that. It has a bunch of likes already, because sick kids all over the world follow Sasha’s blog. It was where she wrote about her treatments, where she proudly posted pictures of her bald head. She didn’t shy away from the hardest parts of having cancer, and people loved that about her.

  I look at some of the reblogs the post is getting. One blogger, whose avatar is a photo of a bald girl (her, I assume) with a pink ribbon tied around her head, has reblogged Sasha’s post and added the comment, What a BAMF. And I know she doesn’t mean to reference Badass Music Fanatics, but I like that the acronym works in two ways for Sasha. Another guy has added a reaction GIF of someone crying. A kid who has a character from one of my favorite TV shows as their avatar has written, I’m working on my queued posts now.

  Queued posts. So the post probably is from Sasha. I knew Sasha was afraid of being forgotten, of disa
ppearing without a trace—it’s why she wrote so many album reviews, sometimes more than one a day. She wanted people reading her words even after she was gone. So this makes sense. It just makes me sad that I didn’t know this about her—that there’s more I didn’t know about her than I ever realized.

  I lie in bed and stare at my phone for so long that I don’t realize I’m late for morning track practice until Mom sticks her head into my room. Crap.

  “You feeling okay, Shay-Shay?” she asks. She started using this nickname for me again after Sasha died. Before then, she hadn’t used it in years.

  “I think I’m sick,” I say. Even though I know I shouldn’t be skipping school if I don’t want Mom to worry. This queued post is a little too much to handle, but I don’t want to tell her about it.

  She gives me a look, like Who do you think you’re fooling, but when she walks into my room, she doesn’t say anything. She presses her hand to my forehead and then to my neck. She’s wearing a tight pencil skirt and a blazer, and her hair is smoother than usual. She straightened it. She always looks nice when she heads to work, but the blazer and hair make me wonder if she has a big meeting or something today.

  “You don’t feel warm.”

  “It’s not that,” I say. And I look at her. She can tell that I mean I’m the upset kind of sick, not the kind that would give me a fever.

  “Oh,” she says. “Well, I think we both know you’ll only feel better if you get out of the house. Why don’t you get dressed and meet me downstairs in twenty minutes?”

  “But, Mom,” I start, thinking of the queued post, of Tavia. But she puts her hand up, as if she’s directing traffic and my voice is a jaywalker.

  “Shay, I don’t want to hear it. You’re not ill. You’re sad. And I understand, sweetheart. I do. But the only way to feel better is not to wallow. And you can’t really afford to miss another day of classes this year. So get up. You’re late, so I’ll drop you off. We’ll grab breakfast on the way, how’s that?” I wait until she walks away; then I scream into my pillow.