Red Velvet Crush

by Christina Meredith

  I was jealous of her boldness, her shining blond hair, her ability to breeze away and leave us all behind without a second thought. How could she do that? I couldn’t. I stayed home and watched PBS, that awful show with that big red dog. To this day I hate that dog.

  “Isn’t it scary?” I asked her one night.

  She shrugged. “They have a kiddie pool full of rice. We dig in it.”

  It was that simple for her.

  I step back now, hating myself for doing it, and let Billie take my place again. The boys never miss a beat.

  It isn’t anything particularly spectacular, just a simple Stones song, “Paint It Black,” but I can feel all the pieces of the puzzle coming together, snap, click, and there it is, better than good. It is great. Perfect.

  Jay ends with a trailing note, and we all look at one another, collective breath held, and then Ty jumps up, knocking over his stool.

  “Hell, yeah!” he yells, and Ginger Baker laughs, the first sound I’ve heard him make.

  Winston clamps his lips around his cigarette and claps from the corner. He’d gone out looking for a drummer and ended up with an entire band.

  But my heart tightens as Billie squeals and hops around in a tight little circle, the microphone cord wrapping around her legs like a skinny black snake, all while I stand back and watch.

  3

  Our house is old. A fixer-upper that my parents bought when they first got married that never quite got fixed up. It’s dark gray, one story, with white trim and peeling paint on the front door.

  The garage is separate from the house: its own little building with a low black roof and a gravel driveway leading up to it. My dad calls the swath of grass between the house and the garage a side yard. He planted a peony bush there way before I was born, and every year we beat a path into that grass walking back and forth across the side yard between the house and the garage.

  The peonies bloom in the summer, when the grass is thick and the path almost disappears into the green blades, their sweet scent hanging in the air over the fat, drooping blossoms.

  Our yard is flat, and there’s no curb out here on the outskirts of town. The street starts where the ragged grass ends and our mailbox sits at the edge, stuck to a post.

  I’m standing inside by the side door after Ty and the boys leave that night, waiting and watching while my dad gets ready for work, stubbing my toe against the baseboard and avoiding Billie.

  She thinks that saving my ass earlier today in the garage makes her a permanent part of whatever happens next with the band. At first I was surprised when I figured that out.

  Then I was mad.

  Then I was mad at myself for being surprised.

  Why do I think she is ever going to be different?

  Why do I keep hoping?

  It’s always been this way. If I got asked over to a friend’s house to play, little Billie came along. If I was going to a party, she was there, waiting for a ride. She borrowed my clothes. Chased after my friends. Copied my hair and my homework. To this day, she takes bites out of my sandwich when she thinks I’m not looking.

  There are moments when Billie is good, when I think this is how having a sister is supposed to be, instead of feeling as if I were trapped with a tiny mental patient who escaped from the clinic down the road.

  Like the times she leans over and orders into the squawking box at the drive-through when we stop after school. She knows I hate to do it, and she always scores extra dipping sauce or a bonus order of fries, which she holds in her lap, carefully handing me one fry at a time as we fly along toward home.

  Or when she tucks down low into my passenger seat, fitting perfectly, her bare feet on the dash, stacking schoolbooks as we swerve into the student lot every morning, digging for a pen in the glove box if we need a note for being late. Not a single employee of our school district has seen my father’s signature since Winston started school. Billie has been forging it since she learned cursive writing.

  She does excellent harmony, too, never failing to join in—even for “Faith”—though she’s sung that one for me a billion times before.

  Things like that almost make me forget that she steals and lies and, not too long ago, cost me the only job I’ve ever had.

  I worked after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday morning last fall at Turner’s card shop downtown, selling cards and gifts and little figurines and other stuff that old ladies love.

  Lots of husbands dashed in, too, last minute, and bought whatever they could get their hands on. All I had to do was brush my hair and show up with a smile. The crystal vases and poem-filled cards practically sold themselves.

  Billie liked to stop by in the late afternoons and lean against the glass cases, spilling the news of the day and leaving fingerprints behind that I would have to clean as soon as she got bored and walked out the door.

  Turns out she was walking out the door with a few extra items, too. I honestly didn’t know, and I think Mrs. Turner believed my story, but she was unwilling to keep me on anyway.

  “I’m so sorry, Teddy Lee,” she said.

  She told me she wouldn’t press charges if Billie and I stayed away. Then she paid me, in cash, before locking the door behind me for the last time late on a cold Thursday night.

  Unable to look oncoming traffic in the eye, I slumped behind the wheel of my car all the way home. My little sister was a little thief. Sure, I had always known—there were way too many cheap wristwatches and lollipop wrappers on her dresser to ignore—but now somebody else knew, too.

  One of Billie’s secrets had spilled outside our house and splattered up onto my shoes. I stepped on the gas and squealed around the corner onto our street.

  “Damn it, Billie!” I yelled before the front door had a chance to bounce shut behind me. The living room was empty.

  Of course, I thought as I threw my bag into the corner of the couch, why would she be home? It was only a school night.

  I pushed our bedroom door open and pulled Billie’s secret shoebox out from under her bed. When I tore off the lid, everything inside sparkled in the light of her lamp.

  Billie had an entire collection of crystal creatures with Austrian gemlike eyes in there. Big sellers at the shop, they were expensive. She had every single one of them in that box. How hadn’t I noticed them trotting out the gift shop door?

  I sank down onto the rug, sorting through the tiny paws and cut-crystal manes. At the bottom of the box, wedged between a glass fawn and a glass pony, I found a small pink ballerina, wrapped up in its original tissue.

  That last Christmas before she bailed, my mom had given both of us, me and Billie, our own little music boxes. They were cheap dime-store things, made of paste and pressed paperboard covered in a spray of flowers with fake velvety linings.

  Billie flipped open the tinny gold latch on hers to reveal a dark purple inside and a blond ballerina twirling to“Send in the Clowns.” Mine was pink and played “Tiny Dancer.”

  My ballerina lasted only a couple of days. The tree was still up and balls of wadded wrapping paper still littered the living room floor when she snapped off at the toes, leaving behind a tiny boinging spring that rotated, dancerless, to mechanical Elton John music and a gold sticker that said MAY CONTAIN LEAD PAINT.

  I had wrapped her in Kleenex, whispered a made-up prayer, and laid her to rest in her pink velvet coffin, never to twirl again.

  Crossing my legs, I carefully unwrapped the tiny body. I hadn’t seen her for years, not since one morning in middle school when I tossed out everything that reminded me of my mom.

  Billie must have dug her out of the trash. I pictured her pawing through the papers and soggy pizza boxes of our life, rifling down, all the way to the bottom to find this buried treasure.

  Her ballerina was alive and well, standing in fifth position inside the purple music box next to her bed. It was one of the few things in her life that wasn’t broken.

  I twirled the pink ballerina on my fingert
ip, remembering.

  Billie trusts me with her secrets. Sure, she steals, she lies, she dips her dirty finger into the sugar bowl every chance she gets, but she also lay next to me, night after night after our mom left, listening to “Tiny Dancer” and reaching over to turn the crank on the back of my music box before the song could end.

  I wrapped the little ballerina up again and slid her back into the box and then slid the box back under the bed, safe and sound, protected by dust bunnies and a worn coverlet, storing my anger away for another day.

  That day has come. All that anger is boiling away inside me.

  A ballerina is one thing—but a band?

  My toe shoots out, and I kick the wall instead of stubbing at it. It leaves a mark.

  I resent the assumption that I am just going to bring Billie along, that anything I am ever going to do she is automatically a part of, forever and ever, amen.

  Especially this. Because an incredible tingling ran through my body the very first time I played. It started in my stomach and made its way out, through every passage and vein and corpuscle, to the very tips of my throbbing fingers.

  When I play, I am alive. There is no gray sky. No half-assed attempt. No boring rerun or regurgitated speech or robotic, mindless following of the rules.

  Music fits into every empty spot in my brain. It fills it up and makes it swell. I thrum with it. Vibrate with it. Get lost in it.

  Billie can barely hold a guitar; forget about learning how to play one. That would require patience and focus and commitment, and she is allergic to all three. She fumbles; she strums; she smiles. The end.

  Music has been a single-minded, solitary pursuit that I didn’t have to share—until now.

  Billie walks past with a bag of chips in her arms as Dad stuffs his keys into his pocket and reaches for his scarf. I hear her crunching toward the couch. The TV turns on, and the sound turns up.

  “Maybe it’s time to consider putting her to sleep,” I say, my eyes following the trail of crumbs she’s left behind.

  Dad leans down to tighten the laces on his boot.

  “She just wants what you have, Ted,” he says as he stands back up with a little groan. “She always has.”

  That is the problem.

  I want this time to be different. I want this to be mine.

  I want somebody, anybody, to say to me, “It’s okay to hate your little sister. Everybody does. It’s normal. Expected. She is truly a pain in the ass. We voted, and you are right.”

  Where is that support group?

  How can I sign up for that after-school program?

  I’ll even bake the cookies.

  When it comes to Billie, though, my dad has a blind spot—about the size of the Grand Canyon. He always has. I wish that just this once he would look down into that crevasse and see the river snaking along the bottom, slowly washing me away and cracking the rock. But he doesn’t.

  Not tonight, with his thoughts glazed over by the many hours of hard work still stacked up in front of him. Bills are piling up; food is running low; the day is disappearing. There will be no arguing with him, no understanding.

  He is hardly even here.

  I watch him go, his dark boots tromping across the side yard, and feel my heart settling into me, down and deep, resigning like the sun.

  “Well,” I say to a closed door and a streak of pale peach sky, “I, for one, am tired of it.”

  Winston is throwing a party. I’m not sure what we are celebrating, other than the fact that my dad is working the late shift again and Winston had enough cash to buy a keg.

  Maybe we’re christening the new band. It has been official for a few hours now, and Jay and Ginger and Ty all have been invited,but so has every other person Winston has ever met and a few new ones he found at the liquor store while picking up the beer.

  Last time this happened, we had some dude named Tom living in our house for three weeks. He slept on the couch and cooked excellent scrambled eggs. I taught him how to play “Heart and Soul” on the piano, both parts. He preferred the top half ’cause he didn’t have to set his cigarette down to play it.

  Tonight our living room is full of Winston’s friends. Some of his buddies from the station are here, along with the leftovers from his karate club and most of my high school. Everybody in town knows everybody else, and everyone shows up at the parties. The beer is free, and there isn’t anything else to do.

  I hate parties. I hate having all these people in my house, in my space, looking at my things and making judgments and pretending that they know something about me because they have seen my stuff.

  The boys are always too grabby. The music is always too loud. I usually find myself a spot and stick to it. Watch the craziness from the sidelines and wait to rescue Billie from her latest misadventure.

  I take a seat at our piano, facing down a battalion of beer cups sweating white rings onto the wooden top. It is a battered upright that came our way when my grandmother died and my uncles cleaned out her house so they could sell it, quick.

  I didn’t know my grandmother that well, she wasn’t that close to Dad, but she stored some musty music books in the piano bench that opened up like a shallow coffin.

  It wasn’t exactly in tune when we got it, and the ivory was missing from a couple of the keys, but I could tap out “Heart and Soul” half an hour later. It was a vibratey, slightly cringe-inducing rendition, but somehow my dad hung in there, listening with his head cocked to the side.

  Now the keys are sticky with spilled beer. I trace over them, holding my fingers just above the cracked ivory, remembering my mother’s favorite song.

  She used to open this same piano bench when we visited my grandmother’s house. She’d sift through those same books and wrinkled sheet music until she found the exact right one, the only one that she ever played. Then she would sit up perfectly straight, with posture I never saw her use in real life, and start to play.

  Her hands were beautiful. She had long, thin fingers with nails that were always shaped and polished, no matter how many hours she worked or how many days she disappeared for.

  Billie’s hands could be beautiful, too, if she’d stop biting her nails to the stubs and tearing at her cuticles with her teeth. They are a ragged mess, with glitter polish and stick-on decals like unicorns and hearts. It is all dime-store stuff, basically anything small enough to steal.

  I have my dad’s hands. Kind of squat and stubby; not feminine at all. I keep my nails short.

  My mom’s rings would glint in the sun as her fingers slid along, swift and true. She played only once or twice a year, maybe, and always just that one song. But she always found the keys without fault, without hesitation. It was magical.

  Billie and I would dance around like ballerinas, jumping and twirling and floating through the air with imaginary fairy wings on our backs, instead of worn Fair Isle sweaters and Winston’s hand-me-down sweatshirts, dust motes from Grandma’s carpet rising into the air to swirl around our arms and our hair while the song filled our heads.

  I can play that song by heart.

  I hear it in my sleep, memorized it the first week we had the piano.

  It is burned into my brain and comes through loud and clear, even now, with the guitars crashing in from the borrowed black speakers on my left and the game of Three Man rattling over in the corner.

  My fingers slide silently over the keys, note by note, as I lose myself in my memories.

  “What is that all about?”

  Ty nods down at my hands, and my face flushes as his fingers move in next to mine, hovering over the keys as if we were playing a duet.

  A dull roar comes up from the couch behind us. Jay has rolled doubles, and now someone else has to drink. Ginger watches the action from the corner of the couch: a sentinel.

  “Nothing,” I say, shaking the last few notes from my mind.

  “That,” he says, scooting me over on the worn bench with his hip as he stretches his hands across an octave each, “d
id not look like nothing.”

  His knuckles are banged up. He smells clean, like soap.

  “It looked”—he glances at me with a raised eyebrow and plays a low chord—“heavy.”

  He leans in and moves eight keys up the piano and says, “Complicated.”

  His arm reaches across mine, honing in on one last chord, high and light, and says, softly, “Bittersweet.”

  The word hangs in the inch of air between us.

  “Show me,” he says, his hands next to mine.

  I shrug and let my hands land in my lap. How did he find me here—past the people and the party and the chaotic jumble of mismatched furniture? Was he looking? And how did he know exactly how I was feeling? My fingers had hovered over the keys for only a few seconds, but somehow he had seen it all. I slump away from him, staring across the room.

  Billie is threading her way through the crowd. The fingers of some boy are hooked around her pinkie as she pulls him along, her eyes sloshing full. When she staggers, the boy slides closer.

  His arms wrap around her tight. A bit too tight for some boy she most likely met while buying a pack of cigarettes, probably just yesterday. Now I bet they are beyond best friends.

  Some kids pick up stray dogs. Billie picks up stray people.

  They become very territorial and protective, not realizing that in a short time she will become distracted or bored and move on, leaving them alone and lonely, until she runs into them in a parking lot somewhere and invites them to Thanksgiving dinner. They are usually stupid enough to show up. We have weird Thanksgivings. We have weird everything.

  Ty watches me watching Billie.

  “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” he asks, pressing his shoulder, warm, against mine.

  The room squeezes in small and tight when he speaks, the crowd around us disappearing, a blur of color and light in the periphery of my vision, unnecessary detail.

  ’Cause you haven’t asked me out yet.

  That’s what Billie would say. Then she would probably rest her hand on his package. But I can’t say that. I could never do that. I’m not like Billie. Boys don’t run into me in parking lots or bump up against me on piano benches. Tonight is turning out to be an exception.