I was a fool to look for more. I was a fool for thinking the thrill ride would be enough—and it had been, in the moment. I was a fool for hoping it would never end.
I relive so many of those moments as tears keep trickling down my cheeks.
I’m sure I’ll be memorable now. I’ll be that girl who got so starry eyed that I couldn’t tell night from day, seduction from dating, player from gentleman.
Dawn slowly changes the color of the ceiling from charcoal gray to stuff that’s way too bright and cheery. I’m no closer to pulling myself together than when I stood on trembling legs and forced myself to walk with Jude away from that bar. Side by side. A wall between us.
End of story.
Only, my epilogue is still in the making. I find a new refrain to drive myself crazy with.
Now what?
When Janissa wakes up, she smiles over at me. “Hey, you. How’d it go?”
I’ve held it together long enough. I can’t answer her. I just double over and hug the pillow to my face, letting hours’ worth of sobs take over. She’s perched on the edge of my bed in no time, her arms around both me and the pillow.
There’s really no telling how long I cry. It feels like a week before I’m finally able to tell Janissa what happened. She helps me out of the dress and into some pj’s, then makes me my favorite peppermint tea.
“You told me so,” I whisper over the rim of the mug I clutch like a lifeline. I’m propped up in bed, where Janissa stacked some extra pillows against the wall. She even closed the curtains halfway so the sun doesn’t hit me full in the face. “You said he was too dangerous.”
Janissa is sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her mug of hot chocolate. “Yeah, but what I never told you is that a little part of me was jealous. I’d have done just what you did. In a heartbeat. You’d be the one popping open a second box of Kleenex for me.”
“I’m glad that isn’t how it went. You’ve been so good to me.”
“You’re my friend,” she says simply.
I start to cry again, but softly. “Thank you, Janey.”
“Did you just call me Janey?”
My cheeks heat up. “Sorry.”
“No, I like it.” She sips her cocoa. “I’ve always thought Janissa was too formal, but I didn’t want to be the dork who starts insisting on a nickname. You just gave me one spontaneously.”
“I goofed. That’s all.”
“Too late. I’m Janey to you. Maybe it’ll catch on.” After standing up, she stretches. “So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to get dressed and go work at the chem lab. You’re going to take a Unisom and sleep until dinner. I’ll bring us back a bunch of stuff, from crackers to chocolate bars. Then more sleep. If he doesn’t call to apologize by then, fuck him.”
I feel my eyes go wide, but she stands even more resolutely.
“I mean it, Keeley. No one has the right to treat you that way.” She gathers a change of clothes and starts getting dressed. “Next chance we get, we’ll stay in like hermits. You’ll work on your sonata and store up more strength. We’ll eat too much, refuse to get dressed, and pretend the Internet was created just for Twitter.”
“You’re so bossy,” I say with a little smile.
“It’s my way of coping. I really want to make fliers and post them all around campus. ‘Beware This Handsome Dickweed.’ ”
I nod to my mug. “Peppermint tea and Unisom are a lot better.”
“Mission accomplished.”
• • •
Janey is great, and so is the familiar pattern of my classes, but I need my parents. When I’m this desperate for some safety and affection, I stop thinking of them as Clair and John. They’re my parents, way more than the two people who shot me into the world. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to ask John to drive down and get me. I don’t have a car, and it’s three hours round trip down I-10. Guilt about being treated how they insist I deserve being treated is a hard thing to get over. Six years, and I’m still trying.
He makes it easier by showing up late after his shift at the supply company, where he manages a company that imports and distributes things that make things: sheet metal, ball bearings, rivets, screws, rebar. Stuff comes in from China, and then gets shipped out to all the places across the planet that need the basics for their own manufacturing. His job is mostly about people and keeping them happy and productive—more of that he’s our rock personality—but it’s always been a job that helped me make sense of a crazy world. I mean, who thinks of where hinges come from? How they get to houses so that doors can open and close? The little details are cool. They ground me.
It’s late when he bundles me and my duffel in his ten-year-old Accord. He and Clair are frugal and they work hard. They just couldn’t ever have kids of their own. A few tries at adoption, and even fostering babies, had broken their hearts. Instead they wound up with me. I guess it was a good tradeoff, no matter how hard I was to handle in the early years, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave them.
“You planning on telling me what this is about?” John asks, about ten minutes out of the city. We’re surrounded by green and green and more green. I’m convinced Louisiana is about fifty percent water and fifty percent blinding foliage. “Clair and I made a lot of guesses, but we’d rather hear it from you.”
“Can we talk about it when we get home? I don’t . . .” I swallow an unexpected sob and look back out the window. “I don’t think I want to say it more than once.”
“Sure.”
He says it so plainly, and he means it. No offense taken. Instead he turns on the radio and listens to the sports recap before turning it over to a classical station that lulls me to sleep.
We arrive in Denham Springs just after ten. Clair is swinging softly on the porch and has the light on above the front door, as well as the one over the one-car garage. Gravel crunches beneath the tires as John pulls up. Bugs think the light is the best thing ever, but they’re fewer in number now. I’d never seen so many bugs before moving to Louisiana. You can’t have that much water and greenery without the inevitable result.
Clair darts off the porch and squeezes me into a big hug. She looks the same as when I left for Tulane in September. Maybe because I’ve changed so much, I expected the same from her and John. But her hair is still coppery red and wiry, a holdover from her Cajun roots, and her skin smooth and freckled. She’s only forty-five and sometimes acts about half her age. Her vivaciousness reminds me of Adelaide—or vice versa. No wonder I’ve tried so hard to get along with the girl. It’s not wildness so much as sucking up life with every breath.
John kisses Clair and gets my bag. Soon I’m slouched on the sectional in the living room, where a big wall of books and a flat-screen TV take up the whole thing. The windows are open a little and the ceiling fan is a gentle whirr of sound. Everything is pinewood, from the ceiling panels to the floors, except for the marble-wrapped fireplace they barely use except during the holidays, when crackling flames add to the hominess. It even smells like home, with lemon wood polish and the remnants of what must’ve been a roast. I bet if I sneak into the kitchen later, I’ll find homemade cornbread. Cornbread plus honey equals comfort-food heaven. I feel tension leak out of me, down into the couch upholstery, down into the marrow of the wood.
Clair brings me sweet tea and settles in beside me. John sits on his recliner, a little distant, but still all ears.
I tell them what happened. Well, almost all of it. A rehash of Yamatam’s. How I didn’t play the second time I went. Jude. Janissa. Adelaide. More Jude. Not a word about our seduction plans. My classes.
And finally, the nondate that ended with me in tears.
John only shakes his head, mumbling something about a shotgun. Clair, though, has bright green eyes full of sympathy. “Oh, baby, you didn’t deserve that! To have him just . . . dismiss you? If he was anything
like you’ve described, he should’ve stood you up and put your arm through his and introduced you with a smile on his face—lawyer be damned. Has he called?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Then I have to say it, even if you can’t, but screw him. He doesn’t get to treat you like something to be ashamed of.”
She’s got her full tiger going, which means there’s no room for me to break in and defend Jude. I shouldn’t. There’s no reason to. But the urge is there. I think it’s because I’m still in shock and disbelief, hoping what happened is a misunderstanding. I tried playing that game. Maybe he was just startled because of the area of town we were in, or because he was wearing such casual clothes. I never win at guessing. If the lawyer was in that area of town, then he had no reason to judge Jude for it, and I was dressed in that pretty black dress I’d borrowed from Janissa.
No reason to defend him. Just a lot of reasons to be heartsick.
“I know that,” I say. “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.” Not even what we did in his Mercedes and what we’d planned on doing. “But it almost felt like he could tell about . . . about the old stuff. I’ve been struggling with it a lot lately. The nightmares and all. The change from here has been harder than I thought. More pressure. New friends to try and make. My music. And now this. It’s stirring up a whole bunch of crazy. I thought I could handle it, and I was doing good. But that was because things were going good.” I wipe my eyes. “Now, not so much.”
“You still have all that,” John says quietly. “Your studies and music, even the new friends.”
“We’ve been concerned.” Clair gives my hand a quick squeeze. “Jude Villars? Really? It’s so impossible to believe. And I’m not saying you don’t deserve a guy who’s practically Louisiana royalty, baby. That’d suit you just fine. But he’s not stable. He can’t be, with all that’s happened to him and his family business. Now he’s proved he can’t handle it. Otherwise he’d have stood up and been a man about you two.”
“So that’s it,” I whisper to myself. My throat is parched. Not even the tea helps. Hearing it from Clair is like shutting it all down. No more me and Jude. Clair hands me a box of Kleenex and hugs me when I start crying again.
“How long can you stay?” she asks.
“I emailed my profs that I had a family emergency,” I reply between sniffs.
“Good. A little R and R.” She touches what must be huge bags under my eyes. “I think you could use it. And maybe you can play us the sonata you’ve been working on.”
“Maybe.” But I know I’ll dodge that like flying bullets. Too much of it is bound up and tangled with and inspired by the man I can’t have.
Twenty-Four
The following Sunday, sometime in the early afternoon, I finally catch up on the classwork I missed and get around to putting away the clothes Clair washed. I even drag together enough energy to fire up my Mac. Janissa’s hard at work at her desk. I try to get up my nerve twice before finally tapping her on the shoulder. She’s jumps, then yanks out her earbuds.
“Sorry,” I say. “You got a minute?”
She spins on her desk chair, then stirs a half eaten yogurt, giving it a sniff as if it might’ve spoiled since she got it out for breakfast. She must decide it’s okay, because she spoons some into her mouth. “You’re going to distract me, aren’t you?”
“Yup.”
“Thank God. Go for it.”
My hands shake as I click the track pad to hit Play. The Sibelius program is awesome because it plays back the music you feed it. Out from the Bose speakers Clair and John gave me as a September going away present comes the music I made—music that originated that night onstage.
Janissa takes her glasses off. Her eyes go soft as she listens. She’s barefoot, wearing a gold striped tank top from PINK and a pair of capris. Her hair is barely brushed and loose. It looks great on her, all wavy and auburn. She’s too pretty to hide behind her glasses, but she tries.
Faces give away a lot. It’s like how I watched Brandon, feeling a little off about him. A hint of something beneath the surface. And damn it all, I was right. Too bad I wasn’t able to read Jude that way. Especially after how things turned out, I would’ve been happy to have Brandon as a nice, good-looking fallback. He clearly isn’t.
Two disillusionments for the price of one. Only, the way Jude disillusioned me hurts a helluva lot worse, like having my eyes burned out. Crying for most of a week will do that to a girl.
So I watch my roommate’s face. After a few minutes, I know she loves my budding sonata.
A soft smile tips her full lips. She’s tapping a gentle rhythm on the armrest. Her posture has relaxed. Then the music picks up tempo where I launched straight into a legato-on-speed section, full of fast minor chords and a restless melancholy that moves me even more than Janissa’s wide, bright eyes. When I get goose bumps about my own music, it makes me feel pretty silly.
The computer goes silent. Janissa blinks. “Wow.”
“Wow?”
“Yeah.” She blinks again and shakes her head, then runs her fingers through her hair.
I duck away, save the work, then close the program.
“Is it going to be your December recital piece?” she asks.
I shrug, wanting to fold into myself. I’m so tired. “Maybe? I like it, but something’s still missing. It’s just not there yet, and even when it is, it won’t be pretty. Too wild. I’m trying to get a job, not blow their hair back.”
“That sounds exactly how to get a job.” She tosses the empty yogurt container in a bin. “You’re really gifted, Keeley. I hope you realize that.”
My impulse is to take a nap, but it’s not even lunchtime. The day is hot as hell, even though it’s the second week of October. The whole residence hall is keeping fans on and praying the air conditioning keeps going. The heat adds to the fever in my brain. I want to be magically clearheaded about all I have to do and all I’m scared of and all I’m working toward . . . and free of Jude Villars.
Who ever said we’re dating?
“So, look at us,” Janey says. “Sunday and stuck in here.”
“All work and no play . . .”
“. . . makes Jack Nicholson put an ax through a door.”
“Sounds about right,” I say with a thick sigh. “I’d rather scream in terror than cry anymore.”
Her face is overwhelmed with sympathy, but—thank you, thank you, thank you, Janey—she doesn’t say anything. She blinks and puts on a cheeky smile. “We reinforce each other’s negative habits, you know.”
My head feels thick and cottony. “How’s that?”
“I stay in to work, so you stay in. Or vice versa. We eat leftover takeout and barely leave the room. The best we do at socializing is leaving the door open and hoping for a bit of gossip to walk past.”
“Look how well that turned out the other night.”
Janissa makes a sour face. “Yeah, that wasn’t cool. But now the door’s shut. We don’t even get the chance to hear more reasons why we should be disappointed with the male species.”
“I don’t want another reason.”
She slumps heavily onto her bunk. “Yeah, but I want a life.”
“You sure? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“I’m a junior taking eighteen credits plus lab hours. I work four nights a week at the student outreach center, just to keep my loans down. You sure I can’t have a little bit of a life?”
Her expression becomes more imploring. My heart heats up, knowing she’s trusting me with this personal talk. It feels good to know things aren’t totally one-way with us. She’s put up with a lot from me since waking up to me curled into sobs.
“When does the fun stuff happen?” she asks. “I’ve had one disastrous relationship, a few friends, and one r
oommate who wouldn’t stop eating goddamn cheese. I’m surprised she could take a shit.”
“Oh my God. Did you just say all that?”
She nods emphatically. “Freshman year. I thought everybody went through that hazing stuff, you know? Getting lost and feeling overwhelmed. Or bad luck with roommates. Eventually she moved off campus when she was dumb enough to get pregnant by her grad assistant. We don’t have much ‘let’s get out of here’ between us, and then with you meeting Jude . . .”
“You don’t need to worry about that so much anymore.”
She stares at our industrial walls and sighs. “We need posters. Mine got ruined this summer when my parents’ basement flooded. You?”
“I have one of . . .” Ah, screw it. She won’t judge—especially as long as I keep it on my side of the room. “I have one of Doctor Who.”
She actually gives a little clap. “Which Doctor?”
“Number Ten. I love David Tennant.”
“And you’ve been hiding him in the closet? You’re mean and terrible.”
So I dig out the poster and we hang it at the head of my bunk.
“He’s like a dream catcher,” Janissa says. “For good dreams.”
“I wish.”
“You know what this means.” She nods at the Doctor, then grabs her purse and heads to the door. “We need to hit the union. Our room needs personality.”
“The union? You think they have anything other than LOL Cats and Imagine Dragons?”
“We. Have. To. Then we’ll keep walking ’til we find something worthy of our discerning eyes.” She makes toodle-oo fingers at the Doctor and then waves me along to follow.
Possessions. Things I can lose in a heartbeat. That meltdown with Jude took only a moment or two. A reactor core gone critical.
That I’d eventually make love with Jude had been a certainty that night. A scary, wonderful certainty. Now it was gone. How could any experience with a gropey, inexperienced coed be any more disappointing?
Blue Notes Page 16
