Dirty Little Secret

by Jennifer Echols

  “I’m sorry I made you admit that,” he said. “I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I just worry sometimes. Last year I was in counseling for worrying.”

  I winced. “You were?” Sam was so candid about his dark side, and it always took me by surprise. It was so easy to forget when he sang, and when he smiled. When he’d told me his whole family had been in counseling because of his dad’s problems, I’d assumed that was long ago, not last year.

  “Yeah. It was a group of sad and depressed teenagers. That’s how I knew there was something wrong with you as soon as I met you at the mall. You act like those girls sometimes. It’s like you want to laugh, but it gets caught here.” He touched my chin. “Or maybe here.” He touched the back of my head. Then, because of the way I was looking at him, he slowly put his hand down.

  “Are you still in counseling?” I ventured.

  “No, I got kicked out. I asked a girl on a date.” He laughed. “We weren’t supposed to do that. They said they’d told us that up front, but I never read the fine print. What kind of crazy group is it if there are girls in it but you can’t date them?”

  “The world has gone mad,” I said.

  He pointed at me. “That’s what I told them!” He gestured down the steps through the yard, toward his truck parked at the bottom of the hill. “So, I’m driving you to your appointment.”

  “Oh.” I wrinkled my nose. “You’re not going into the exam room with me.”

  “Oh, God, no!” he exclaimed. “I would pass out.”

  “Well, the doctor isn’t going to—”

  “No,” he cut me off. “I’ll just be there for you in the waiting room.” Walking down the steps in front of me, he hugged himself tightly.

  “You don’t have to go, Sam,” I protested. “You look so uncomfortable right now.”

  “I like doing things that make me uncomfortable. I try not to have a comfort zone.” He stopped on the stairs. “You know what? It might get late, and we need to leave early enough to make it to Chattanooga even if there’s traffic. We can’t be late to a gig. Why don’t you go ahead and get your bathing suit?”

  “Bathing suit!” I exclaimed.

  “It’s a pool party!” he reminded me, exasperated. He leaned in and whispered, “And get your fiddle.”

  I galloped back inside, tossing to my granddad that Sam was taking me to a pool party. Technically, not a lie. I stuffed my bikini and a towel and my fiddle case into my beach bag together and ran down the steps to Sam’s truck before my granddad could get suspicious.

  No, I was the one suspicious. After I explained where my doctor’s office was and Sam started down the tree-lined street, I said, “I have a theory.”

  “What’s your theory?” Sam asked gamely.

  “You don’t really have a burning desire to go with me to the doctor’s office. Boys are afraid of anything having to do with the inner workings of girl parts. I’ve seen them go out of their way to avoid touching brand-new, unopened boxes of tampons. You just want an excuse to hang out with me until the gig tonight.”

  He gave me a devilish grin. “That’s a good theory.”

  “And it’s not because you like me. It’s because you’re deathly afraid I’ll change my mind and I won’t show up. You’ve got better stuff to do than hang out with me, but the gig is worth it.”

  His face fell. “Bailey. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a l—Well, I take that back. I guess I am a liar.” He turned to look at me across the truck cab, sunlight filtering through the leaves of the trees overhead and playing across his face as he drove. “But not to you.”

  A song popped into my head about that, along with the perfect melody and even an unusual chord structure for the chorus. He was a liar but not to me, or so he said, and that made me feel special. But Toby had lied to me about the drugs he was doing and the girls he was messing around with on the side. I knew I had my flaws, but I didn’t make a habit of lying. I was no match for a flat-out liar.

  That was the message of the song. The words kept changing, and I worked through them in my head. During the rest of the drive and wait in the doctor’s office, Sam kept asking me what was wrong. Every time he spoke, I lost a piece of my song. Finally I asked, “Don’t you ever feel the need to practice guitar in your head?” That gave me an excuse to finger the imaginary notes in my lap. Connecting them to my imaginary fiddle helped me remember them.

  The nurse called me into the examining room. In the pause between taking off my clothes and talking to the doctor, I snatched my notebook out of my purse, my paper gown crackling on top of me, and managed to dump the whole song onto the staffs. By the time the doctor came in, which usually stressed me out because I didn’t want to be touched, I was so relieved and relaxed that I could have taken a nap.

  The exam went almost exactly like the first time. The difference was that instead of prescribing the pill, the doctor asked me how I felt on it. But just as before, she made a studied point of not letting her eyes linger on my heavy makeup or punky hair. Cheerfully she examined me and then felt me up. She asked me if I was sexually active—I said no, but she hardly waited for my answer, like she didn’t believe me anyway—and she made me promise promise promise that if I did become sexually active, I would make my partner use a condom to protect us both from STDs because that’s not what the pill was for.

  I got a little annoyed with the whole lecture. She was acting like I’d learned nothing from watching television. I didn’t snap at her, though, because I wanted her to give this speech to other girls. To Julie. I had given it to Julie, though the way my parents watched her, she’d probably be a virgin until she was thirty. Regardless, I wanted the doctor to give her the speech again.

  I buttoned up and escaped into the waiting room. What with the lecture and scribbling down the song about Sam, I’d almost forgotten about Sam himself. He was curled up in a chair, half his normal size, with his elbows on his knees and his hands in his dark hair. When he saw me, he jumped up and beat me to the door.

  “Are you okay?” I asked sarcastically in the parking lot. “You act like you’re the one who got examined.”

  He chuckled uneasily. “I felt very uncomfortable. Everybody in there assumed I’d gotten you pregnant. The guys were looking at me sympathetically, giving me the bro nod. The women were accusatory.”

  “I said you didn’t have to come.”

  “It’s okay.” He slid his hand along the bed of his truck, then suddenly spread his hand in the air. The sun-heated metal had burned him. “I’ll channel that emotion and use it.”

  I considered him from the other side of the pickup. “You don’t look well. Do you want me to drive?”

  “Sure.” He sighed. We both rounded the truck, switching places.

  We had an hour until we were supposed to meet Ace and Charlotte, so I drove to the outskirts of the Vanderbilt campus and led Sam into an ice cream shop. He still looked lost, stuck on something in his head. I almost asked him if he’d gotten a girl pregnant and it had ended badly, but I knew that wasn’t the problem. He’d told me he was a virgin, and he’d told me he didn’t lie (to me). And I couldn’t really complain about the way he was behaving. He looked like I felt when I was writing a song.

  I bought myself a scoop of vanilla. I loved the taste, cool and clean with no other flavors or lumps to mar it. I bought Sam one of those junky flavors with everything but the kitchen sink mixed in—pretzels and chocolate and gummy worms. He didn’t seem to get my joke about our contrasting personalities, didn’t even hear my order, just accepted the cone and followed me until I sat down on a shady patch of grass in Centennial Park.

  “Your ice cream is melting,” I prompted him after he’d sat unmoving for several minutes.

  He blinked, took a huge bite, and made a face as he crunched. Then he swallowed and laughed. “What is this?”

  “You should pay closer attention.” I took a nibble from my spoon. “Explain something to me about the band. Yesterday you said you didn�
��t want to try out for a music talent show because you’d have to take their contract if you won, and you’d lose control of your career.”

  “Right.”

  “And part of the control you wanted was picking out your songs.”

  “Exactly.” He licked his ice cream, more tentatively this time, not sure what he would find inside.

  “But I don’t see how you’re putting that into practice, because nobody in the band is writing original songs. Is your ultimate goal to get the band a gig on Broadway, or to get the band a recording contract?”

  “A recording contract,” he said firmly.

  “If that’s what you want, that’s what you need to act like. A gig on Broadway is a great first step to get attention. Once you get the attention, you need original songs to back it up.”

  “I know that. I guess I was just waiting for it to happen.” He took a thoughtful bite. A warm breeze tossed a curl back and forth across his forehead.

  The band’s lack of new music worried me. I’d wanted to bring the subject up the night before when we discussed the playlist, but I figured Charlotte would rightfully point out that I was not an official member of the band and this was none of my business. Now was my chance to talk to Sam about it, but he wasn’t even here.

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Back in the waiting room?”

  He looked up at me and chuckled. “Yes, sorry.”

  “You could write a song about that terrible feeling you had,” I suggested. “There’s a whole genre of songs about guys getting their girlfriends pregnant and their girlfriends having an abortion. Tim McGraw. Ben Folds.”

  Sam shook his head. “I can’t write songs. All I can do is sing. You remember that gymnast who had to retire when she was twenty years old, before the Olympics, because she blew out her knee snow skiing?”

  I squinted at him, thinking. “Shawn Johnson?”

  “Maybe. Anyway, if you’re a gymnast with a chance of winning Olympic gold, you do not go snow skiing. You don’t take the chance of ruining everything for yourself. The only thing I can do is sing. I mean, I can play guitar, but so can every wannabe in Nashville, so it doesn’t even count. I wasn’t great in school. I wasn’t great at football. I can sing, though, and even I am not stupid enough to screw that up.”

  “I don’t see how writing songs would screw up your singing,” I said. “Writing songs is supposed to be therapeutic, like any kind of writing. Have you ever tried? It seems like you have something to write about.”

  He eyed me as he finished off his cone, and not like he was enjoying it. More like he was trying to get rid of it. Wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, he said, “I feel like I’ve been through a lot in the past couple of years, but I’ve kept pretty stable. That’s because I channel that emotion into performance. I can handle emotion, as long as it’s only a song. It works for me, and I don’t want to change it. I don’t have anything left for writing.”

  He looked past the swaying limbs of an oak tree, into the empty blue sky—the same stance he’d taken last night and Saturday night when he was trying to gather himself before going into a performance. I was beginning to understand how unstable he might be deep down. I had a hard time escaping my own reality. My only flights of fancy were writing songs and—just today—fantasizing about Sam. I’d wished it was easier to get away from myself, but Sam seemed to have the opposite problem. He got so caught up in a trip inside his own mind that he had a hard time fighting his way back.

  “If you’re putting your emotional energy into performance,” he said, “you’re also getting it back out again, right? You’re giving so you can receive.” He spread his arms wide. “If you were writing songs with it, you’d be holed up in your room in the middle of the night, scribbling them in a notebook and feeling self-important. You’d think you were getting it out, but really you’d be keeping it inside and quiet. You’d take what upset you and turn it into art, and now it would fester, because you would think other people ought to share your outrage at what happened to you.” He looked at me funny. “Do you write songs?”

  Until that point, telling him about my notebook had been in the back of my mind. I was scared to tell him because he would rope me into the band that way. But I’d been curious to talk to him about it, test him out, see if there was any possible way the band could play a few of my songs. I would have loved to hear them, if only once.

  Now that he’d made fun of songwriting, no way. He hadn’t even known he was making fun of me, so I shouldn’t be offended. It still hurt. I wasn’t going to walk straight into his stereotype.

  “No, I don’t write songs,” I said. “But maybe you’ll run across a girl who does. You can make out with her and convince her to join your band.”

  “You know what?” he asked immediately. I’d expected him to pause as my insult sank in, but he jabbed back as though he’d seen it coming. “You called me a tease last night, too, and I didn’t say anything because I was trying to draw Charlotte off you.” He glared at me, lips pursed, shadowed face gaunt. He was never more handsome than when I was pushing him away.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I took that too far.”

  He kept glaring at me, unmoved.

  My heart sped up as I realized he was angry, and I deserved it. I was no better than Charlotte, taking potshots at him.

  “I’m still mad about Saturday night,” I admitted, “and Charlotte, and all the girlfriends. I’d thought that—” Telling him I’d hoped we could be together . . . that assumed too much under the circumstances. “I don’t know what I thought,” I finished. “But Charlotte opening the door of your truck was a shocker.”

  He sighed, too, much to my relief, and leaned back on one hand in the grass. His anger was over. “There’s more to it than that. These past few days, I keep thinking you and I are going to do something, but you’re sending me mixed signals.”

  “No, you—”

  He broke in, “No, you respond when I flirt with you. But then last night, when I was telling you good-bye, you just stared up at me and gave me a polite good night like I was the president of Vandy.”

  “No, you didn’t kiss me last night because you were afraid of what Charlotte would think.”

  “I’ve told you about that,” he reminded me. “She doesn’t have any claim to me. I also don’t want to be mean to her or piss her off.”

  “Because of the band,” I grumbled.

  “Yes,” he exclaimed, exasperated, “and I don’t think I’m wrong to try to keep the peace in the band, and I don’t think I’m being a tease.”

  “I don’t either,” I admitted begrudgingly, watching an ant crawl across my bare foot in my sandal. My voice sank lower as I said, “Jealous. Frustrated.”

  He nodded. “I can’t change the past, Bailey. Believe me, I would if I could.” He got that far-off look into the sky again but reined himself in before he got lost. He looked into my eyes as he said, “I can’t change that I dated her. I can’t change that I dated a lot of people. I’ve told you I wasn’t serious with those girls.” He moved his hand onto my bare knee, and the afternoon suddenly heated by twenty degrees. “Whatever’s wrong between us, I want to get over it, because I’d like to get serious with you.” His hand moved to cup my whole knee. “I wanted you last night.”

  I felt my face flush, and my neck, and my chest where he couldn’t see. So many times in the past year I’d made out with Toby or some other guy. There had been fewer of them than there had been of Sam’s girlfriends, but I’d been no better than him for going to that place with them when I didn’t really care.

  In those dark moments at parties, my body had gone electric for them. But not in the middle of the day, in an open field, with a boy’s hand on my knee instead of down my panties. There was no reason for Sam and me to share this look right now and feel this way about each other, except that we did.

  He glanced down at his watch and said in defeat, “And now we have to go.” Brow creased, deep in thought, he reached behind my head a
nd pulled me toward him.

  Without thinking, for once, I sat up on my knees and leaned forward, bracing myself on the grass with one hand as my lips met his.

  He tasted sweet, and the kiss was sweet and chaste, until his hand slipped under my shirt. His touch on my bare waist made me gasp and break the kiss.

  Eyes on mine, he said as if convincing himself, “I want to play this gig tonight.”

  I nodded. “So do I.”

  He moved his hand around my waist to the button of my shorts, a preview of what was to come. Then he backed away from me and stood, holding out a hand to help me up. “But it’s going to be a long night.”

  11

  Sam was wrong. The entire afternoon and evening seemed to flash by in a second, because we were having fun.

  Sam and I met Charlotte and Ace at his dad’s car dealership. We parked the truck and crawled into the middle seat of the SUV that Ace had chosen for the day. As Ace pulled into traffic, Sam said, “It’s like our Mystery Machine. All we need is a Great Dane.”

  Charlotte leaned around her front seat to say, “My drum kit is our Great Dane. Only it says ‘Crash!’ instead of ‘Rowr?’ ”

  Something about her Scooby-Doo imitation struck me as funny. I laughed uncontrollably for a few seconds. It felt so good that I kept laughing until Charlotte stared at me like I’d grown another head. I supposed my laughing was about as common as Charlotte doing impressions.

  Sam was watching me from across the SUV with a bemused look, like he didn’t quite know what to make of my laughter either. Finally he called, “Who gets to be Fred, and who’s Shaggy?”

  “I call dibs on Fred,” Ace said.

  “You’re totally Fred,” Sam agreed. “Stodgy.”

  “I guess we all know who gets to be Daphne, and who’s Velma,” Charlotte said bitterly.

  “I can’t see a thing without my glasses,” I piped up, quoting Velma and nudging my cat-eye glasses with one finger.

  Charlotte turned around one more time and blinked at me. Clearly she’d meant that she was fashion-challenged Velma. I’d thought at first she was mad at me for taking her self-deprecating punch line away. But her expression wasn’t angry, just surprised. She said something to Ace that I didn’t catch and reached forward to change the radio station.