by Ginger Scott
“Ha, you mean you get right to whatever it is you need from me,” Houston laughs.
“Whatever, same thing—the point, needs. Blah blah, blah,” I say. “Dude, I’m at the mini on Fourth and June. I’m starving. The car is dead. Like…deeeeaaaad. And I have a gig, so can I borrow yours for the night? I’ll bring it to you in the morning.”
I keep talking, because I’ve learned if I don’t give him a chance to say no right away, then my odds are drastically higher for him saying yes to whatever I need. I’ve been using this technique on Houston since we were kids. It worked on ice cream pops at the Little League field when they were down to only one flavor of each; it worked on girls in junior high when we both liked the same one, and it works with rides when my shitty-ass car breaks down. I talk until he’s overwhelmed, and eventually he just agrees to get me to stop.
I hear the sigh. It’s coming.
“I’m working now, so you’re going to need to sit tight for about twenty minutes until I can take a break. And you’re going to need to hang out with me at the store until I’m off so you can take me home. And I want the car back tomorrow morning,” he says with that parental tone.
I’m older than he is—by a month, but older still. He’s really a parent, though, so I guess that gives him the right to be the more responsible adult between the two of us. Houston had a kid in high school, and now he’s a single dad. I’m not sure how he does it. On top of everything, he’s still a solid friend. My best, really. He’s probably the most family-like person I have in my life.
“Deal. I’ll be kickin’ it on the curb,” I say, tossing my change on the counter for my drink and tucking my phone in my back pocket.
I wait while the cashier digs through the drawer to give me back my seven cents. She makes a face when she drops the coins into my palm like I’m a douchebag for actually waiting for my change. Whatever, I’m not in the business of rounding up my mini-mart purchases to the nearest dollar just so whatever corporation owns this joint can have a fatter bottom line. I want my seven cents.
When I get to my car, I reach in through the broken window and drop my change in the center console. I squat down until I’m sitting on the curb, my feet facing the road so I can see Houston pull up. My phone dings as soon I get comfortable, so I lean to the side and pull it out again, hoping it’s not a text from Houston about how he can’t leave, or how I can’t use his car. I hate that I have to depend on him so much. It isn’t fair to him; I know it isn’t. But I call him every time I’m in trouble anyway.
Best friend code.
I slide my phone on and open my messages to find one from my roommate, Eli. I’d ask him to pick me up, but he rides a bike everywhere he goes—a bike with a banana seat. Hipster with a Schwinn.
ELI: Dude, check this link out.
He follows up his text with another, and it’s only a link. It’s a short link; I bet it’s spam.
ME: Do you get money if I click this? Or like…points in some app where you’re building a world?
ELI: Am I really that lame to you?
I pause for a breath and mentally run through the things I know about Eli.
ME: You might be. Yes.
ELI: Click it, fuckhole.
After shaking my head, I give in, because I have time to kill, and maybe this will be a good source of entertainment. A video pops up, but it’s dark and grainy. It looks like someone filmed this from a bar or something. I can see tables with drinks on them, and the viewpoint keeps moving around. The motion is making me a little sick, but eventually, I can make out just enough of a form to tell there’s someone sitting on a stool on a backlit stage.
“This one’s called ‘In Your Dreams, Casey Coffield,’” a chick’s voice says suddenly over the uneven background noise.
What the fucking hell?
I hit the pause button out of panic and pull my feet in closer to my body while my fingers push into the volume tab on the side, turning it up as high as it goes. I look around, and nobody’s near me, so I slide the video back to the beginning and hit PLAY again.
The same background sounds of laughter, talking, and clanking glass; then, there she is again. “This one’s called ‘In Your Dreams, Casey Coffield,’” she says again. I don’t know why I thought it would be different. Though, I do have vivid fantasies. But still…
A few people applaud, and the lights go even dimmer. I can’t see her face, only a vague form. I think she’s in a dress, but I’m not even sure of that much. She could be just about anyone, but I swear I don’t know this girl.
The strumming of the guitar starts soft, and then her voice comes in.
“Shadow of a girl, lurking in other people’s shadows…let her go by, let her dance all alone…”
I hit pause, and play that first part back a few times, trying to get a hint of familiarity in her tone—some clue with the lyrics, anything. The info under the link just says: WEDNESDAY SINGER SONGWRITER NIGHT AT PAUL’S. Where the fuck is Paul’s? I need to be on a computer, because now I’m opening more windows—Google searching for “Paul’s” and sifting through a list of seventy-some-odd options of places in Oklahoma, one a feed store, so I eliminate that right away. Shit…this might not even be in Oklahoma.
I go back to the video and play from where I stopped.
“Wonder what she sounds like, wonder if anyone’s ever seen her...would they watch her in a spotlight, or bother casting stone.”
Goddamn she can sing. It’s like that quirky kind of style—her voice a little soft and jazzy, but with these raspy breaks that sound like crying, even though she’s not. She isn’t crying, but damn does this song feel sad. And it shares my name.
Who is this girl?
I text Eli: Where’d you get this?
Thank god he writes back immediately, because I have a lot going on with the phone now, and I can’t juggle this much. Just Google searched your name and this came up. Weird, huh?
Weird.
Yes, weird. I’m not even going to touch the fact that my roommate is Google searching me now, but this is what comes up?
I hit PLAY again and for several seconds listen to the guitar break. There’s nothing but she and some guy playing a snare with brushes. It’s soft and understated. Almost jazz, but not quite. Almost country, but not quite that either. These are real musicians. I’m a hack. I learned the shit I learned because I want to make riffs to fill in mixes. This girl—whoever the hell she is—she’s an artist.
I lean forward and cup my hands around the phone wanting to get a better view, trying to block out some of the light. Everything is still too dark though. All I can see is the rapid movement of her arm moving along the body of the guitar balanced on one leg. I can also tell when she’s about to sing again, because her form leans in toward the mic.
“In your dreams…Casey Coffield.”
Pause.
I play that last line again just to make sure I heard it correctly. I play it four more times. Then a fifth. And then, I turn it down and press the phone to my ear to play it once more, but quietly, because now there are people pulling into the mini mart and that line doesn’t sound like this girl likes me very much. Not that anyone knows my name, but it feels like they should with the bite in her verse.
After about the seventh play through, I let the music keep going and listen to the rest of the song. It sways back and forth…from sad lines about being invisible and liking life that way…to more defiant tones where her voice almost speaks the words. Those spoken things, I really pay attention to. It’s like the entire song is about how much better her life was before some guy showed up—before I showed up. Only…I didn’t. I have no idea who the hell this chick is!
“Are you watching porn in the mini-mart parking lot?” Houston kicks my feet.
“Dude, you have to see this,” I say, standing up and dragging the PLAY button back.
He quirks a brow at me, and I halt my stare on him, waiting.
“It’s not porn,” I sigh, shaking the phone.
I guess I do show him a lot of porn.
Houston purses his lips, but takes my phone in his hands.
“Start it from the beginning,” I say, but he’s already waving a hand at me like he’s got it and understands.
I stand to look over his shoulder, and just when my friend is about to lose interest it comes—my name.
“Holy shit, who is this?” he chuckles.
“No fucking clue!” I respond, my eyebrows almost in my hairline.
He plays it through the rest of the verse as I watch his expression shift from wincing to awe, just like mine did the first time I listened. He hands the phone back to me finally, and I rewind and pause when the lighting is at its brightest—still unable to make out the singer’s features.
“Dude, that is absolutely some chick you’ve screwed over. No way it isn’t,” he laughs.
I roll my eyes in his direction, but I keep my mouth shut, because I’m thinking the same damn thing. I follow Houston to his trunk and help him load my things from my car to his, then get in the passenger seat next to him. I prop my feet up on his dashboard and push the seat way back, but he smacks my legs to the floor just before he turns the motor over.
“Not your living room,” he says, looking over his shoulder and pulling out of the mini-mart lot.
I shake my head and mimic him, but pull my attention right back to the video on my phone. I text Eli and ask him what he searched, since somehow he found this video looking for my name. He says it was just the first thing that came up with my name and Oklahoma. Awesome—hundreds in advertising for my sound mixing and deejaying, and this comes up first. I check out the video stats and quickly learn why—more than sixty thousand views. Not bad for a poor-quality video from a dive bar in…shit…I don’t know where.
It doesn’t take long to get to the grocery store where Houston works, and rather than harass him for once, I turn to investigating the source of this video, sitting quietly in the back of the store with the laptop I usually use for gigs. I log into the store Wi-Fi. It would probably send Chuck—the store’s owner—into a fit if he knew I had the password, so I position myself to see his office door just in case.
My sister Christina calls in the middle of my search, so I let it go to voicemail. She probably wants to scold me for bolting from our parents’ house. This mystery is more enticing than rehashing a rerun of my family’s favorite argument. I put in the same search, get to the video, and open up the keywords—making a note of anything that might help. After about an hour of hunting online, I narrow it down to two possible “Paul’s” locations. I call the first one and ask about open-mic nights. The woman tells me they don’t host those, so I move on to my last option. I’m actually nervous when I call—I’ve made this into something important.
An older man answers, and his gruffness throws me off my game a little.
“Uh yeah, I was wondering…do you have open-mic nights or something called Singer Songwriter—” I start, but he cuts into me quickly.
“We’re all full. If you want in, see Cherry at the door before tonight’s performance, and she’ll let you know if anyone cancels,” he says, hanging up as soon as he’s done.
Rude.
But…informative.
If that’s Paul, I think maybe he and I could be mates.
“Houston!” I shout, leaning just enough that he can see me several aisles away through the open door of the back room. Chuck leans out of his office and furrows his brow at me. “Good afternoon, Chuck. Pleasure seeing you,” I say, saluting the grumpy old man. His heavy gray brows lower as his glasses fall down the slope of his nose, and he grumbles something as he walks back into his office.
“This is not your home, Case. You can’t just yell out for me like I’m in the backyard and you’re calling me in for lemonade or whatever. Jesus, you’re lucky Chuck tolerates letting you hang out here.”
“Uhm, he doesn’t tolerate me. But I don’t care. And…lemonade?” I chuckle, pulling my hands behind my head while I laugh at my friend.
“It was a bad analogy. What do you want?” he huffs.
“First, it was a terrible analogy. Maybe your worst,” I say, and he starts to leave, so I move right into the real reason I called out for him. “What are you doing tonight?”
He pauses and turns around, squinting.
“Depends,” he says.
“I have a gig. But this thing,” I say, twisting my computer and tapping a pencil end at the screen where the video is still paused. “I guess there’s open-mic or something like that tonight, and maybe, I was thinking, if you weren’t busy, you could…”
“You want me to ask my mom to babysit Leah, so I can go spy on some mystery girl who hates you so much she wrote a song about you?”
Yes, he gets it!
I nod.
He sighs.
“Please?” I say, leaning forward with my head in my hands, my lips pouty. His brow lowers more and he makes a sick face. This method isn’t working.
“I’ll pay you,” I say. His brow raises a tick. “I’ll give you half of tonight’s paycheck. It’ll be like when you have to come assist me with my equipment, only instead…”
“Instead, I’ll be stalking some Internet obsession,” he fills in.
“Exactly,” I say.
He leans back on the doorframe, and I know that means he’s considering it.
“I’ll have to borrow my mom’s car, because well…you’re borrowing mine, remember?” I didn’t think about that.
“Yeah, you’ll need to do that,” I agree. Better to just agree with his plan rather than open room for argument. He opens his mouth for a second then shuts his lips tight in a line. His eyes are closing. He’s on the fence.
“Five hundred bucks,” I lie, feeling my gut burn a little because I’m getting fifteen hundred tonight, and I promised him half. I hold it in, and eventually he agrees. I’m an asshole, but I need the cash.
“What do you want me to do when I’m there? You want me to talk to her or…I don’t know, get her number?” he laughs.
I don’t.
“Just listen, maybe record more of her set. And if there’s a contact card or something, or she’s selling CDs? I don’t know…pick something up. I just need to get more info, and if I don’t know her—she’s talented, and maybe she’s the first artist I could help or maybe…” I trail off, twisting my computer back around and slamming it closed.
Houston watches me for a few seconds, but eventually nods and laughs out an “a’right” before going back to his work. There’s something alluring about this chick, but I know it’s probably just the fact that she somehow knows me or there’s a really fucked up coincidence happening. But she is talented. And I do want to get into recording and producing. I didn’t get a chance to break the news to my mom today, because of my father, but starting Monday, I won’t be a student at McConnell any more. I’ve officially withdrawn. I know the fact that I’m walking away with only a semester left on my degree for some pipe dream will disappoint both of my parents, but it feels right. And maybe there’s some small part of me that sees the fantasy playing out to an end where I get to show my family how successful I am—and they’re proud.
John Maxwell heard me at one of my shows a few weeks ago and liked what I was mixing with some of his artists, so I’m taking an internship with his label. He said he was looking for ways to bring more of his indie folk vibe into the clubs, to reach the younger crowd with some of his quieter artists, and he thought I might be up for the challenge.
Quiet isn’t exactly what I do, but there was no way in hell I was passing up on a job with John Maxwell. Plus, it pays a little, too. And I can learn how to deal with quiet.
Mystery girl—she’s quiet. Yeah.
I pull my phone out to watch the video one more time and notice the message notification from my sister’s call earlier. I stare at it for a few seconds and consider putting it off, but she’ll just call back, so I press PLAY and settle into the metal chair, ready for my re
primand.
“Case…hey. It’s Chrissy. You’re probably in the car, or work or…whatever. Listen, you need to call me. Case, it’s Dad. He…he has cancer. And he doesn’t have long.”
Her message just ends.
Like a boot to my chest.
I wait to feel it.
For the next thirty minutes, I sit in the back room while my friend finishes his shift, my phone balanced between my thumbs and forefingers in the same spot it was when I played the message. I don’t play it again. I don’t need to. It was short. There isn’t much left to be said—no questions unanswered. Nothing more I need to know.
My father is dying.
It doesn’t change a thing.
It probably should, but it just…doesn’t.
Chapter 2
Murphy
I guess it was just a matter of time before someone I recognized turned up at one of my shows.
Shows—I say that like I put on shows. I sign up—for space at open-mic nights—on legal notepads with beer rings on them. I get to show off my talent. It’s good enough though. At least for now, until I grow my confidence and I figure out how to perform somewhere where people can see me while I sing.
That’s the other reason I picked Paul’s. It’s busy here, and the people are more interested in having date nights and enjoying a few drinks after the busy week. It’s kind of cosmopolitan for the type of music I play, but they keep letting me write my name on the sheet of paper every week, so they must not completely hate what I do on the stage. As long as it’s dim in here, and I can afford to keep this up, I’ll keep taking that open slot the second they put the paper down on the bar after the weekend show.
There’s that word again—show.
I wonder if Houston still hangs out with Casey? I’m sure that’s why he’s here. I was pretty freaked out when my brother posted that video on YouTube last week. I’m not ready for that much…public, I guess? I want to get better first. One more year.
That’s what I said last year.
