Rock

by J. A. Huss

  “Do you remember?” Missy asks. “Because I never got answers, RK. And I know it was all a mess of what-the-fucks that night because she was the one who went to prom with you in my place. So I told myself I just had to wait until you were ready. But Jesus. It’s been killing me slowly ever since. If you remember, please tell me what happened.”

  I rub my whole face with both hands, the climbing tape rough and scratchy against my cheeks. I push Missy off me so I can look at her. She hides her face. But I know why she’s hiding it. I tip her chin up and see the tears falling.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

  “Do you remember?” she asks.

  I think about it for a moment. The images of Melanie in my head. She was wearing Missy’s dress, the one I couldn’t fucking wait to see her in. She was wearing the flower thing I bought Missy too. And the little silver necklace I bought Miss for her thirteenth birthday.

  I take Missy’s hand and lead her towards the back of the house. “Sit down and I’ll tell you what I remember.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Prom Night - Five Years Ago.

  Missy has been acting weird all night. Distant, distracted. She didn’t want to dance. She didn’t want to talk. This night is not going the way I imagined it.

  “Is there something on your mind, Miss?”

  “Why?” she asks in a sweet voice.

  “See, that’s throwing me,” I say as we walk to the car. “You’re not talking like you’re upset but you’re acting like you’re upset. Just tell me what’s going on. Did I do something wrong?”

  I open the door for her once we reach the car and she slips inside. I close it up and walk around the back of the car to get in, watching her fumble for her seatbelt.

  “Just tell me, Miss,” I say, getting in and closing my door.

  She sighs, then looks down at her hands in her lap, biting her lip a little. “I don’t…”

  I wait, but she never finishes. “You don’t… what?”

  She looks me in the eye and blurts, “I don’t want to sleep with you tonight, RK. I don’t think we’re ready.”

  I laugh. “Why would you think I’d pressure you into sex tonight? Jesus, Missy. We’ve waited for years. I’m not in a hurry. So if that’s all it is, then—”

  “That’s not all,” she says.

  I get a very weird feeling in my gut.

  “You’re leaving for school in a couple months. And you know I don’t want to go to college. I want to play music, sure. But I want to do it like our dads did. Juilliard isn’t how they did it, RK. They just played, you know? Why can’t we just play? Why can’t we just be rock stars?”

  I’ve heard this before, but I never thought she was serious. I mean, rock stars? I almost laugh. Who the fuck models their life on a couple of washed-up assholes like our dads? “You know I’m serious about the music, Missy. I don’t even understand why you’d bring this up to me. What are you trying to say? I should stay home?”

  She shakes her head and points to the car keys dangling in the ignition. “Let’s go to the hotel.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to sleep with me?”

  “I don’t,” she snaps. “But I’d like to see the room. And enjoy the lake at Frisco. Do you want to go home?”

  “No,” I say, so fucking confused.

  “Then drive, RK. Everyone is looking at us.”

  “Everyone,” I mutter. That’s a joke. “There’s thirty-five people here tonight, Missy. It’s hardly a mob.”

  “And they all know us. So now they think we’re fighting.”

  “Are we fighting?”

  “Just drive!”

  I sigh and put the car in reverse, then back out and make my way out of the recreation center parking lot and head towards the Village so I can get on the two-lane road towards Winter Park.

  We sit in silence as I make my way through the mountains. We pass through Granby, then Fraser, Winter Park. This is where the driving gets real. Thirty miles per hour through the switchbacks, no emergency lanes. And there’s guard rails.

  I hate the fucking guard rails. They only put them up to make people feel safe. They only put them up when they know, if you go over the side, you’re dead. You’re not living through that. I go slow as we get closer to Berthoud Pass. Eleven thousand feet in elevation means snow in May. Lots of it.

  “God,” Missy says. “This is taking forever.”

  “Sorry, Miss. Just trying to be careful with you.”

  “I think you’re too drunk to drive this road, RK. Pull over.”

  “What?” I laugh. “I had two drinks over six hours. I’m not pulling over and letting you drive.”

  “Well, I didn’t have any. Pull over.”

  “There’s nowhere to pull over, Melissa.” I’m annoyed now. “It’s a fucking switchback. Just calm down, we’re almost to the lookout and then we can stop and—”

  “Pull over!” she yells. They don’t keep you safe, they only make you feel safe.

  The tires hit a slick spot and swerve. Melissa screams so loud, it scares the fuck out of me. I press the brake, keeping both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road as I growl, “Knock it the fuck off, Missy!”

  She grabs the wheel and I overcompensate, swerving towards a car coming up the mountain. It honks and flashes its headlights at us.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I yell.

  “There’s a turnout up here, now pull over and let me drive or I’ll do it again!”

  “For fuck’s sake, Missy.”

  “Pull over now, RK. I swear to God.”

  I slow down and put on my blinker so the cars coming down behind me can figure out what the fuck I’m doing. There is a turnout ahead. Amazingly. So I break to almost a crawl and pull in, parallel to the guard rail and what is probably a hundred-and-fifty-foot drop down a fucking cliff.

  Missy is out of the car before I even get it in park. “What the fuck are you—” I stop talking. Because she’s climbing over the goddamned guard rail.

  “Melissa!” I yell, getting out of the car. “Get your ass back here right the fuck now!”

  She doesn’t even turn, just continues scrambling, her long blue dress gathering snow and water on the edges as it drags. She stands up on one of the posts holding the guard rail together.

  I’m losing my fucking mind. This is not happening.

  “Tell me you’ll stay with me in Grand Lake, RK. Tell me that or I’m going to jump off this cliff.”

  “Melissa! What the fuck—” But then I stop. This isn’t Melissa. “Melanie,” I say in a loud, clear voice.

  “I’m not Melanie! You’re such an asshole! You don’t even know the difference between us! You never did. She tricked you over and over again. You fucked her, didn’t you? That’s why I won’t sleep with you, RK! You fucked Melanie and you liked it!”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “No. You’re not Missy. You’re the crazy cunt of a twin. No wonder—”

  “Won’t you be sorry when you get home tonight and find out I was Missy?”

  “Was?”

  She looks down, teetering a little on the post.

  “Melanie—”

  “You better call me by my name, RK. Or I’ll jump.”

  I take a deep breath. What if this is Melissa? “Missy,” I say calmly. “Missy, get down—”

  Lights pass behind me as another car pulls into the turnout. Blue and red lights flash, and when I look back at Melanie/Melissa’s face, I know what’s going to happen next. I know.

  “She jumped,” I tell Missy. I’m staring at the family photo of me, Teej, and my mom and dad on the front hallway wall. It was taken when I was about eight. We were fishing on the lake every day that summer. It was a good summer. Lots of laughing. Lots of happiness. Lots of love. We were whole back then. “She fucking jumped right in front of me. I can still see her face. The panic from the approaching deputy as he came towards us. There was snow that night. Not a lot, like maybe it was just blowing off th
e trees in the wind. But it was in her hair. That’s the last thing I remember of Melanie Vetti. Standing on the post of a guard rail, that blue dress flapping in the wind and the snow.”

  Missy rubs my arm. “It wasn’t your fault, RK. She was crazy. Cray-zee.”

  “I know that. I do,” I say, taking a deep breath. “But I should’ve known it wasn’t you. I should’ve known right away. Should’ve taken her home.”

  “I should’ve stood up to her, RK. Or at the very least, understood her sickness for what it was. Understood how serious the repercussions of letting her have her way all those years were. If I had, none of us would be here right now. But what happened, happened. We can’t change it. We just have to deal. Forgive ourselves. Maybe even forgive her, although I will tell you, for me that hasn’t happened yet. I hate her, RK. I hate her for so many things. Not just the things she did to me, but the things she did to this town. To you. She changed your whole life. She changed TJ’s whole life. Mine too.”

  My mind is racing with the memories. The sheriff in the car, who saw the whole thing. My mind blanking out. So fucking confused as to what just happened. Melissa? Melanie? Which girl just killed herself in front of me?

  I look down and realize I’m still wearing my climbing harness. That I stink like fucking sweat. That I’m as lost as ever because Mo, and Elias, and Ian are still dead. I got Missy back, but my best friends are still gone. My band is gone and I haven’t talked to Kenner yet. Why the fuck haven’t I talked to Kenner yet?

  My life is a fucking nightmare I can’t wake up from.

  “I need to take a shower,” I say, prying Missy’s fingers off my arm. She stands still as I walk off to the front bathroom and close the door, everything about this day running together until it feels right and wrong at the same time.

  There’s a soft knock that jolts me out of my thoughts. “Yeah?” I ask.

  “Are you hungry?” Missy asks from the other side of the door. “I promise not to burn it if you let me make you lunch.”

  “Yeah,” I repeat. “That would be nice.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Missy is making me lunch when I finish up my shower. The climbing tape is so sticky, I leave it on so I don’t have to shave the glue off my hands. I can’t smell anything cooking in the kitchen yet, so when I pass by the music room on the opposite side of the foyer, I stop.

  “Just a look,” I say, creeping into the room where I spent all those years obsessed with music. “Not an intention,” I mumble.

  The center of the piano bench is worn from all the people who have sat on it over its hundred years of life. There’s a small chip on the edge of the ivory of middle C. A torn edge from a sheet of music is peeking out from under the bench lid. I lift the lid up and take the music out. I smile. Minuet in D Minor. I’m not a fan of D minor, but there’s another song stuck to this one, and I am a fan of Waltz by Clementi.

  I look over my shoulder. Missy is still busy.

  So I take a seat and once that first step is over, my fingers just play. The piano is slightly out of tune, but I don’t care. I’m just fucking around.

  The waltz is lively and fun, so not what I’m feeling right now. But soon enough I transition into Spinning Song by Ellmenreich. Another light one, but fuck it.

  “Oh, my God.” Missy laughs behind me.

  I look over my shoulder to find her leaning against the wall with a giant smile. My fingers keep playing. “What’s so funny?” I ask. But I smile too. “Should I play this instead?” I start the familiar parts of the Funeral Song by Chopin.

  “Ack,” she says, walking all the way into the room. “No.” She bumps my shoulder with her hip, making me screw up the song, and then slides in next to me. “We played that duet once.” Her fingers find the keys and music pours out. “Remember this?” The melody for Love Song. I jump in with the harmony and she laughs.

  “I missed you,” I say, my eyes down on the keys. “I missed this.”

  “I’m here now,” she says, her fingers still picking out the notes. “You’re here now. We can do this for the rest of our lives, RK.”

  “I feel like there’s a catch,” I say, picking up the tempo. She matches me, her fingers flying along the high notes while mine complement her on the low notes.

  “There’s not, RK. I promise,” she says, slowing down the music so I have to match her now. “All we have to do is finish what we started.”

  I stop playing and it takes her a few notes to catch up. “Yeah,” I say, giving her a sidelong glance. “But a lot of shit has happened between then and now, Miss.”

  She sighs and grabs hold of my bicep, leaning her body against mine. “I know it feels that way, RK, because you like to take the long way around. But if you just went in a straight line, we’d get there a lot faster.”

  I roll my eyes and then I sniff the air. “Something’s burning.”

  “Ah, fuck!” Missy jumps up and runs to the kitchen.

  I start playing Love Song again and call out, “I’ll still eat it, don’t worry.” But then I stop playing and start thinking about what she said. The long away around is definitely the way I like to do things.

  I mean, no. I don’t like to take the long way. But it is typically the way I get places. Except for that climb down into Grand Lake the other day, I chuckle silently. One mile as the crow flies, quite literally.

  Why do I climb? How do I know how to climb? Why did I place those bolts in the cliff that first weekend I was home? Why am I blacking out and driving myself over to the medical offices? Hell, maybe I wasn’t there to see Chancer that first time at all? Maybe I knew Margie was the therapist who talked to me after Melanie jumped off that cliff? Maybe I was there to see her, but Chancer found me first?

  I realize I’ve started playing something else while I was thinking. The song. Why did I write it if I never intended on finishing it? Why did I play it at the funeral if it was for Missy and I knew the girl in that casket was Melanie?

  Maybe I wrote it to help me with the confusion? Take away the uncertainty of who died on the highway that night? Maybe I didn’t write the lyrics because I knew Missy was still alive?

  “RK?” Missy says, once again behind me.

  “Yeah?” I answer, my fingers never stopping the music.

  “You should finish the song. I think it might give you closure.”

  “I’m not sure what it means. I’m not sure I can finish it. I’m not sure it’s relevant anymore.”

  “You didn’t write the song for me, RK. Or Mel. You don’t write songs for people or make music for people. You didn’t start playing music because your dad wanted you to. You didn’t write all those songs and play in front of hundreds of thousands of people because they wanted you to. You did because you wanted to, RK. You wrote the song for yourself. You write every piece for yourself. That’s how art is made, RK. For the soul. Not my soul, or Melanie’s soul. Not your dad’s soul or the world’s soul. Your soul, Rowan Kyle. Your soul.”

  God, she’s right. I stop playing. I don’t need to take the shortcut, but why do I always take the long way around?

  “I want to show you something,” Missy says. “Stay here for a second. Don’t move.”

  It’s so much quicker to just move forward in a straight line than it is to wind my way down the mountain like a switchback road, doubling back on itself to make the descent easier.

  Missy comes back a few minutes later with a mirror I know she got off the wall in my dad’s bedroom. She balances it on the piano where the sheet music should go, then sits back down and adjusts it so we can see our reflections.

  “That’s her,” Missy says.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Melanie. That’s Melanie these days. Sometimes, RK, I look in the mirror and I don’t know who I am. I look in there and say to myself, ‘You’re Melanie.’”

  “You’re not Melanie, Miss.”

  “I know,” she says, smiling at herself. “I know I’m Melissa. But…” She lets the pause hang for a m
oment. “But she told me so many times that she was me and I was her, I might’ve lost track. And after she died, even after that horrible, heinous trick, I missed her, RK. I missed her every moment of the day. So I’d look into the mirror and talk to her. Ask her questions. And because we’re twins, I could answer for her too. We were the same person at that point. All the good and all the bad. All the right and all the wrong. All the past and all the future.”

  “Miss,” I say, putting my arm around her.

  “I’m just saying. I know who I am, but when a person looks exactly like you, that person”—she points to herself in the mirror—“that person morphs into you, you know?”

  I think about this a little. “That’s kind of how I feel about Rock, now that you mention it. I mean, he’s me, so it’s different. But that’s you too, Missy.” I nod my head to her mirror image. “That’s not Melanie.”

  “I know. I know that’s me. And I know you know that Rock is you. But she was my clone, you know? In the very strictest sense of the word. We shared the same DNA. So why was she so hateful and angry? Did I do something wrong? Did I not love her enough? I asked myself these questions over and over after that night. And I blamed myself. She wanted to kill me that night, RK. Kill. Me. Like dead. And sometimes I wonder, when she jumped off that cliff… I wonder… did she say, ‘Finally, that bitch is gone?’ Did she really think she was killing me by killing herself?”

  Fuck. That is some deep hate.

  “Because she so truly believed she was Melissa and not Melanie?” Missy shakes her head. “God.” She laughs. “Talk about the long way around.”

  I chuckle a little too. But it’s freaky.

  “You know what the saddest part of all this shit is, RK?”

  I turn my body so I can see her head-on instead of the reflection. “What, Miss?”

  “I don’t think she ever loved me.”

  “Aw, Miss. She was just sick.”

  “I know,” Missy says. “I know that. But I loved her so much. I worried about her so much. I wanted her to be happy and live a long life fulfilling her dreams. And I don’t think she felt the same way about me. I think the day she decided to be me, back when we were six, she had already fostered a deep resentment and hate. Something that couldn’t be undone. She hated me, RK. We came into this world equal in every way, and it wasn’t enough. She wanted to destroy me just for being born. Just for taking up space. Just because I had your heart and she didn’t. She ruined us that day, RK. But we have a second chance now. To put the past behind us, stop taking the long way around, and just move forward like the crow flies.”