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by Nia Stephens

  Suddenly Kiki’s heart was slamming against her ribs with no kind of rhythm.

  “Yeah. A lot of things have changed since we were thirteen.”

  Was he blushing? Yes, definitely blushing. But was it a good blush, or a bad blush?

  He cleared his throat. “Not everything, though. Still best friends?”

  He held up a fist that might have been a little shaky. Kiki made a fist and bumped his knuckles gently. Whatever he was really thinking or feeling, he wasn’t going to say it. Not yet.

  “Of course we are, stupid,” Kiki said. “Let’s go over to Franklin’s.”

  Franklin’s mother, Jade, let them in, but she told them that Franklin was gone.

  “Gone where?” Kiki asked Jade’s back as she and Mark followed her through the house. It was a gorgeous home, but it could not have been more different from Kiki’s. Kiki’s house was crammed with her mother’s books, prints by the Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee, and her father’s collection of African tribal masks. Her own room was probably the least cluttered, except for the living room, on a good day. Even the bathrooms were packed with old issues of Neurosurgery Today that had been crowded out of her father’s office, and battered paperbacks by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker that Kiki’s mom liked to reread in the tub.

  Franklin’s house was the complete opposite. There were no bookshelves, no framed photos of Franklin growing up, not even the warm tones of old leather couches with cozy throws for taking naps. Everything in Franklin’s house was white. There were white walls, white carpets, white sofas. The first time she came inside, Kiki wondered how a place like that survived Franklin, who spilled sodas on absolutely everything at school except himself. She soon discovered that when Franklin was home he stayed in his bedroom, in the music room, or in the kitchen.

  Jade didn’t answer Kiki at first, possibly because her arm full of bangles and her belled anklets made so much noise that normal conversation was basically impossible until she sat down, which she finally did, in the kitchen. Jade always dressed in black, and dyed her long hair a flat shade of black even darker than Kiki’s.

  “Well, I’m not sure where Franklin went,” she began, sipping from a chipped coffee cup that had a faded image of a young Michael Jackson on it, back when he had an afro. “Diet Coke?”

  “No thanks,” Mark and Kiki answered together. Jade lived on Diet Cokes. She was so thin it scared Kiki a little, though Franklin said she had been like that his whole life. Jade had fronted a band herself a long time ago, married a music producer in LA and wound up in Nashville. Jade had expected Nashville to kill her—she’d told Kiki and Mark all about her early fears during the summer tour, more than once. It never seemed to occur to her that Kiki and Mark were from Nashville, and liked it. Jade had thought moving here was the end of the universe, until she actually got to know the city.

  “Did you know that Michael Jackson has recorded here in Nashville?” Jade mused, returning to her favorite subject. “Say what you will about the man’s private life, but Thriller was one fine album. The Jackson Five was good, too. Everyone has recorded here—the Beatles, Ray Charles. Did you know that Hendrix got his start playing in the blues clubs north of town, back when he was still in the army?”

  Of course Kiki and Mark knew all this perfectly well. Both of them had been born well within Nashville’s city limits. But they always listened patiently to Jade’s lectures, since they didn’t have much of a choice about it either way.

  “Yes, we’ve heard about Hendrix. Do you have any idea where Franklin went?” Mark asked. “We’re supposed to be in the studio on Saturday afternoon to record ‘Every Angel’ for that soundtrack, and we really haven’t arranged anything but the melody line.”

  “I think he said something about a party. I don’t know. Is somebody having a party?”

  Kiki glanced at Mark, who just shook his head slightly. They knew of at least three Monday-night-football parties starting right after school, but if that’s where Franklin went, he would be in no shape for rehearsing by the time they kidnapped him and brought him back home.

  “I don’t know, Jade. Probably. I guess we’ll see you tomorrow,” Kiki said.

  “Yeah,” she answered, and took another sip of her drink. Kiki was not convinced that it was just diet soda. But Jade was a weird woman regardless—she seemed unable to focus on anything but the music business, and she focused on that with the same intensity Kiki saw in her own father when he was examining brain-tissue slides. If it weren’t for Jade, they definitely wouldn’t have a deal with RGB Records. Unlike Franklin, who cared about Temporary Insanity but cared more about having fun, Jade didn’t care about anything but the business side of the band, and Kiki knew they owed their success to her obsession.

  “So what do you want to do?” Mark asked on the way back to his car. The sun was already setting, though it was just past five o’clock.

  “Get dinner, I guess.”

  “Loveless Café? Come on, it’s great!” he promised when she groaned. The Loveless Café made the must-see list of every tourist who hit the city, but Kiki had never gone. Her parents were from New York, and their idea of comfort food was greasy pizza or take-out lo mein, not hash brown casserole and red-eye gravy. And by the time Kiki was old enough to go out without them she had become a vegetarian, and she had heard rumors that the Loveless put lard in everything.

  “I’ve heard that even the biscuits aren’t vegetarian!”

  “Biscuits don’t eat meat, Kiki.”

  It was an old argument, and they both laughed on cue. Mark had been making fun of her vegetarianism since the day she stopped eating meat two years ago, on the way to a show in Athens, Georgia. They had stopped at a little country store so Jade could get some more Diet Coke, and Kiki had wandered around back, wondering if they had an outhouse—it was her first visit to a really small town. The little towns outside of Nashville were more like suburbs, and when they visited other cities, Kiki’s family always flew. She thought that the town, called Butler’s Grove, was cute.

  There wasn’t an outhouse in the back, but there was a chicken coop full of silky white hens and little yellow chicks. They all rushed up to Kiki, hoping she was there to feed them. She didn’t have any food, obviously, but she managed to pick up one of the chicks anyway. It was the softest, fluffiest thing she had ever held. She had not eaten a single McNugget since that day, or a burger either. This was tough on the road, when Mark and Franklin inhaled every cheeseburger they could find, but Kiki was as stubborn about her vegetarianism as she was about everything else.

  “How about Waffle Hut?” Kiki suggested.

  “As the lady commands.” They both got in Mark’s car and shut the doors gently, so that they didn’t fall off, and bounced on non-existent shocks all the way to Waffle Hut, their favorite twenty-four-hour diner. There were locations all over the South-east, but none in nice suburban neighborhoods like Franklin’s, so they went to “their” Waffle Hut, in the heart of downtown.

  Early in the evening the restaurant was always deserted, though it was a madhouse after 3:00 AM, when the clubs closed. The waitresses were always glad to see Kiki and Mark, because they had never skipped out on a check and were more than generous with their tips. Since a full dinner came to no more than five dollars, it was easy to add a little more than twenty percent, even on Mark’s budget. Of course, he now had more than one hundred thousand dollars in the bank from RGB, but his parents wouldn’t let him spend a penny until after college.

  They split a plate of hash browns drowning in cheese and fried onions, and joked about the terrible country songs playing on the radio in the restaurant’s kitchen. It was, Kiki thought, as if that morning had never happened. But that wasn’t quite true. Everything was a little too intense—funny stories funnier, the lights a little too bright. It was almost like being drunk, or wired from too little sleep. There was something a bit different, and not just the relief she felt because she and Mark were not fighting anymore.
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  “So I said, ‘Franklin, A&R stands for Artists and Repertoire, not Arts and Recreation. He’s supposed to represent us to the label, not plan our vacations!’”

  “Oh my God!” Kiki almost slid out of the booth, she was laughing so hard. “Bill’s been our A&R guy for three years! What was he thinking?”

  “Bill? He was probably thinking that Franklin does too many drugs.”

  “You know I meant Franklin,” she said, laughing. “He can’t possibly be as dumb as he acts. He can really play the guitar, for one thing, and that has to take some brains.”

  Mark snorted. “It doesn’t take that much. You remember the lead singer of the Darlings? Leela, or Lulu, or whatever?”

  “Oh, Layla! She was amazing!” Before RGB had assembled the Darlings, Kiki, Mark, and the pianist from another RGB group had backed Layla up on a few showcase pieces. The Darlings had more or less imploded within a year of signing, and Layla was still in rehab, but Kiki had loved working with her.

  He shook his head in astonishment. “She is about the best stupid guitarist on the planet.”

  “How would you know how smart she is?” Kiki teased. She knew his dating history as well as her own, and she knew that while Layla was in Nashville laying tracks, Mark was half-heartedly going out with a girl from his parents’ church. His parents seemed to think that the girl would keep him from doing anything too terrible with his friends in the music scene. In the end, Kiki thought that Mark had corrupted Sarah Jane a little. Not much, because he was about as conservative as a teenaged punk could be, but Kiki was pretty sure that Sarah Jane didn’t paint her nails black before she went out with Mark. The last time she saw Sarah Jane, three months after the breakup, she was standing in line at the Exit/In, touching up her manicure with a black Sharpie.

  “I have my ways.” Mark’s eyes sparkled like a swimming pool at night, one of the old-fashioned baby blue ones. There was something about the way the light danced in his eyes, streaks of blue and black. Sometimes his eyes distracted her so badly she forgot to talk. But not this night. Oh, no. She had a feeling that if it was ever going to happen, it would happen tonight.

  “No, really!”

  “Well, we were stuck at the studio one night, redoing the strings for, oh, I don’t know, some song, and we were playing Scrabble between takes. Layla never used a word with more than three letters.”

  “Come on! Maybe she had really bad letters.”

  He pointed a fork at her and said, “Kiki Kelvin, anybody who uses the word ‘cat’ in Scrabble needs to go back to school.”

  “Remember when Franklin discovered Boggle, and we had to play all the way from Chattanooga to Orlando?”

  He laughed so hard he knocked over his coffee cup, and was still laughing as he apologized to their waitress, Junie, while she mopped it up.

  They wrote a little song about Franklin on a Waffle Hut napkin, one they felt sure RGB would never let them record. The alarm on Kiki’s cell phone beeped while they worked on the break, reminding them that her curfew was thirty minutes away.

  “Okay. Let’s roll.” Mark was, of course, used to Kiki’s parents’ rules.

  The ride back to Kiki’s was quiet—all the giggles had somehow dissolved into a silent tension. Kiki knew that Mark was gearing up to ask her something. She recognized all the usual signs: the way he fidgeted with his left hand, tugging on his too-long hair. She could tell by the way his face went still, like someone with lockjaw.

  She thought he was going to let the moment pass when they pulled up in front of her house. Every light was blazing—Kiki’s parents always waited up on school nights—but she couldn’t see her father’s silhouette projected on the curtains in his office or the living room.

  “Well, it’s been fun,” she said. She unbuckled her seatbelt with the speed of a slow-moving glacier, then fidgeted with the lock, giving Mark as much time as she possibly could.

  “Um, yeah.” He drummed the steering wheel with his left hand. “I’ve got a question.”

  “What?” Kiki was amazed that her voice didn’t break, but she thought she sounded pretty cool. Better than Mark, who was practically stuttering, staring out the window at her mailbox instead of at her.

  “I was wondering . . . is . . . uh . . . is Jasmine seeing anyone?”

  Kiki’s jaw dropped. If she’d been capable of thought, she would have been glad that Mark wasn’t looking at her, but her brain was frozen. After a pause that might have lasted forever, she said, very calmly, “No, she isn’t. Should I tell her to expect a call?”

  Mark slowly turned to look at her. His face was oddly still. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t mind.” She managed a smile, but she didn’t think it was very convincing, so she scrambled out of the car at top speed.

  “I’ll put in a good word for you,” she said, then slammed the car door hard enough to rattle every window. She raced up the walk and let herself into the house so fast that anyone watching her would have thought she was being chased. She ran upstairs to her bedroom and slammed that door too. Kicking off her shoes, she wriggled her cell phone out of her back pocket, then collapsed onto her bed.

  “Hey, Sash,” she said as soon her call connected. Kiki’s heart was banging against her ribs arhythmically again. “I think I’m ready to try boy shopping.”

  The next day after school, Camille, Jasmine, and Sasha went to Kiki’s house to go online and browse the available boys.

  “What are the ground rules?” Sasha asked, setting up Kiki’s account.

  “No one younger than me.” Kiki was sprawled across her bed, trying to finish a physics problem set she had meant to do the night before, but after she’d got off the phone with Sasha she had cried in the shower for thirty minutes and gone to bed. Even now she wasn’t making a lot of progress. Any other day she would have just called Mark for help, but she had had a hard enough time dealing with him face-to-face all day at school. She would rather figure out the relative change in velocity of x on her own than talk to him again.

  “Well, obviously you don’t want to date a freshman,” Sasha said, “but would a sophomore be so bad? I’m putting sixteen and up.”

  Jasmine and Camille were squeezed into Kiki’s one armchair, supervising Sasha at the computer. “Young guys aren’t the scary part of online dating,” Jasmine commented.

  “Oh my God, this questionnaire is endless,” Camille said, amazed. “Kiki, what do you think are the three most important things you’re looking for in a guy?”

  “Not Mark, not Mark, and not Mark.” Kiki erased half of the equation she thought she had just solved, then started over.

  “You sure about that?” Jasmine said doubtfully.

  “Sure I’m sure. I’m one hundred percent over him,” Kiki lied. “Anyway, he wants to ask you out.”

  “I still think he was kidding,” Jasmine said, shaking her head wearily. “He knows I think he has the testicles of an earth-worm.”

  Sasha rolled her eyes. “I think we can safely say that Mark isn’t looking for love online anyway,” she said, typing away.

  “What are you writing? I haven’t decided what’s most important yet.” Kiki put down her graphing calculator and sat up on her bed.

  “We’re your best friends, except for a certain idiot whose name we’re not going to mention,” Camille said. “We know what you need.”

  “What do I need?”

  “Someone fun, who can help you forget Mark,” Camille replied. Her answer was total Camille: she thought dating was all about having fun.

  “Someone sexy,” Jasmine said, also typical.

  They looked at Sasha, who was chewing thoughtfully on a few strands of purple hair. “Someone clever,” she said after a minute. Jasmine gave Sasha a withering look, but Sasha just shrugged. “Hot boys are everywhere. Kiki needs someone who can help her with science homework.”

  Kiki shoved her books aside and joined the girls at the computer. “I’ll figure the homework out on my own, sooner or
later. But you’re right, I’ve already got enough stupid boys in my life, and it’s not like they’re going anywhere.”

  “Good point. You want someone who is smart enough to surprise you, make you laugh, keep you interested.”

  “Like Thomas?” Kiki, Jasmine, and Camille chimed together in a syrupy sing-song.

  Sasha blushed. “He’s pretty sharp, I have to admit. Not to change the subject or anything, but what about your personal statement and photo? I’ve put in all the favorite subject, favorite hobbies, favorite book stuff, but how would you sum up your view of the world in one hundred words or less?”

  That stumped Kiki. “I don’t know. What did you put for yours?”

  “A poem by Mary Oliver.”

  “Who?” Camille asked.

  “Just a poet. She writes about love and nature and death.”

  “Your profile was a poem about love, nature, and death?” Jasmine asked disbelievingly. “I’m guessing you got a lot of e-mails, huh?”

  “I didn’t post my profile, Jazz,” Sasha explained. “It was hidden. I just did the compatibility search and sent an e-mail to the three boys who looked interesting. That let them see my profile. All three of them wrote back, I went on two bad dates, and then I met Thomas. That was that.”

  “What does his profile look like?” Kiki asked.

  “A lot like mine, except his poem is by Langston Hughes.”

  Jasmine shook her head in amazement. “Love poetry? What century do you people live in?”

  “Stop it, Jazz. I think it’s totally romantic,” Camille said dreamily, almost swooning, dark-gold hair swaying over the back of her chair. She looked like someone who belonged on the cover of a romance novel, despite her faded gray Sonic Youth T-shirt.

  “You would,” Jasmine told her darkly.

  “I think my personal statement should be song lyrics,” Kiki decided, trading her science notebook for the journal she used for writing.

  “How about that Rolling Stones song, ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’?” Jasmine suggested, her eyes wide with fake innocence.