The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  I lifted the tambourine.

  The Endless West and I had only practiced together once, that first Sunday after Christmas, but no one would have been able to tell. I made sure of that. Cameron had given me the Endless West’s most recent EP before I left the studio that day, and every night, outside in the driver’s seat of my mother’s car where I thought no one could hear, I practiced along with the gruff recording, bellowing against the cool evening wind until I knew every lilt and creak of Alex’s tone, every dip of Cameron’s harmonies. Now, Alex’s voice came barreling through the speakers. Cameron’s guitar wailed. I struck the tambourine against my palm, and as the first chorus approached, I stepped toward my own mic stand. I opened my mouth and began to sing.

  How to explain the fluster in my chest, the unconscious motion of my hands, the way a slight upward tilt of my chin expanded my entire range? With my father I always held back, but that night, I offered the crowd everything I had. Without my guitar I could still create urgency as I shook, banged, pivoted my wrist in rapid whirls, the tiny brass cymbals that circled the tambourine’s crescent clanging. And at the conclusion of each song, a barrage of cheers erupted. The whooping howls sent a rapturous chill down my back once the knowledge finally settled: those cheers were, in part, for me.

  We ended the set that night with “Don’t Look Back.” With the full band behind it, the song became faster, heavier. I embellished Luke’s drumbeat with swift rolls on the tambourine, grinning as Alex vigorously delivered my lyrics and Gabriel’s bass broke out of its background riff. The shadowy crowd danced as we drove into the chorus:

  This can’t be as far as it goes

  (this can’t be, this can’t be).

  Let’s bury our woes, and

  go back to the beginning.

  Our three voices trilled together, sometimes overlapping, sometimes in tandem, galloping forward as the song approached its penultimate shift. And when the final strum of guitars faded into feedback, the crowd exploded; their cheers echoed into the night, drowning out the sound of illegal fireworks crackling down the street, and I was filled with euphoria like nothing I’d ever experienced.

  I had finally done it. The crowd’s reaction was proof. “Don’t Look Back” was my first great song.

  Afterward, everyone wanted to know me.

  While I was walking across the yard, a girl with black discs in her ears and tattoos spiraling down her arms leaned forward, across the conversation she was having, to say to me, “Hey, that was awesome.”

  “Sick beats, Stevie,” quipped a boy nearby.

  Near the patio, another guy stopped me to ask, “Who’d you play with before?”

  I didn’t even hesitate. “The Midnights,” I said, “out of LA.” I paused before adding, “I played guitar with them, too.”

  “Cool,” he said, nodding vigorously as though he’d heard of us. I waited for him to inquire further about the Midnights, perhaps even hoped for it. Instead, he said, “The harmonies on that new song were killer.”

  I found Lynn draped in a rusty patio chair, her slender legs stretching lavishly from the hem of her dress. Next to her sat Josie, with newly dyed turquoise hair.

  “There she is,” Lynn announced when she saw me, raising a red cup in salute. “We can say we knew her when.”

  “How’d it sound?” I asked them.

  “Fucking incredible,” Josie said.

  “Fucking incredible,” Lynn repeated.

  “It looked like you were possessed or something,” Josie said. “In a really good way, though.”

  “Maybe she was,” Lynn said, raising an eyebrow.

  A girl I didn’t recognize came up behind Josie then and the two hugged. Josie twisted around in her chair, and as they talked, I saw the girl’s focus bouncing curiously off me. A thrill zipped across my skin. I wondered if this was what fame felt like.

  “That last song,” Lynn said to me. “That’s the one you were working on with Cameron?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s going to be a big hit.”

  “You think?”

  “I know,” she said. “Your pops would have been real proud.”

  “I just wish . . .” I began, but I was no longer sure what I wished, was not certain that I would want to go back and risk changing anything that had happened to me since he died. I wouldn’t want to risk changing tonight. “I just wish he could have heard it,” I finished.

  “Maybe he did. If you believe in that kind of stuff.”

  I sat on the arm of her chair. “And I wish I knew what happened.”

  “To what?” Lynn asked.

  “To my father. To his band. I have all these pieces, but they don’t completely fit together. I just want to know the truth.”

  “The truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Lynn said, her tone hard.

  “It has to be better than not knowing.”

  She opened her mouth as if to argue further. Perhaps if she had let the words formulate, had tried to express the fear that sat, rotting, inside her, everything would have turned out differently. But she just took another drag of her cigarette, and after a while said, “So what’re you going to do?”

  “I actually found one of them,” I told her. “One of my father’s bandmates. He lives in Pasadena. I was planning to go see him, but then we moved here, and I got sent back to school, and for a while my mother was watching my every move. And now . . .”

  “Now what?”

  I shook my head. “Pasadena is so far away.”

  Lynn laughed. “It’s really not. I mean, yeah, traffic’s a bitch. But if we go early, like on a weekend morning, it wouldn’t be too bad.”

  “We?” I asked.

  “Well who else would drive you?”

  I grinned, and threw my arms around her. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  She said, “I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”

  Up onstage, the next band was setting up and I watched as the boys filtered out across the yard—Cameron, I noticed with a jolt of pride, heading straight toward me. My mind buzzed with excitement. I wasn’t sure what would happen next with him or the band, but I knew this for certain: with Lynn by my side on the drive up to Pasadena, fear did not stand a chance. Maybe that’s all I ever needed, a friend, some support. I was finally going to meet Kurt Vaughan.

  Driven by blissful audacity, I picked up Lynn’s cup (she was drinking straight that night, no chasers), and took a long sip.

  For a few minutes after Cameron joined us, the conversation floated around the table, loose and untethered. Only after the next band had started playing did he come stand next to me, saying something indiscernible.

  “What?” I yelled.

  He placed one hand on my back and leaned in closer. “You were amazing tonight,” he said into my ear. His breath was hot, sultry. My heart jumped sideways. I set my focus on the stage.

  This time, when I saw Cody Winters, there was no uncertainty. His voice cut into me, that sandpaper snarl I knew so well reverberating through the yard the way it used to ring out in the hallways of my old high school. His hair had been cropped around the ears but it was still long in front, curtaining his forehead with a thick, familiar swoop. Every now and then, between the jaunty melodies jangling from his Les Paul, he’d shake his head to clear his eyes, but the hair fell right back into his lashes. I wondered what it would be like, brushing those stray hairs away.

  Two songs passed before I noticed that Cameron’s hand was still pressed against my back. My breath tugged at my throat, but whether it was because of Cameron or Cody, I couldn’t tell.

  The yard was packed as the final minutes of the year ticked down. All the quick, chattering voices created a drone that made me sleepy, but I forced myself to stay alert. I looked around, trying to find Cameron, but sometime after Cody’s band (which Lynn told me was called Fire Society) finished, Cameron and Alex went inside to get more drinks. And though Alex had returned, Cameron still had not.

  The tempera
ture must have dropped because I saw a number of girls throughout the backyard shivering, but I no longer felt cold.

  “My resolution,” Josie was saying, “is to go on a road trip this year. A real one.” Her arm hooked like a boomerang around Alex’s neck. “Just get in the car and drive.”

  “You always just end up wanting to go to Salvation Mountain,” Alex said, his eyes glassy. “And then you want to come home. You can’t handle being in a car for more than two hours.”

  “That’s why they call it a resolution, Alex, and not a fucking unassailable fact.”

  “Resolutions are bullshit,” Lynn said to me, her voice barely audible over Josie and Alex’s argument. “You always think that your life’s going to be different this time, but then you make the same mistakes.” She fished a pack of Camels from her purse. “It’s the human condition, to be stuck in cycles.”

  “Yeah,” I said, though I didn’t fully agree. I could hardly even remember the girl I was last New Year’s Eve.

  I scanned the yard again for Cameron but did not see him. Cody, too, was gone. Next to me, Lynn started typing something into her phone and all of a sudden I was consumed by a fierce, brimming sadness that I didn’t understand. Already, this had been one of the best nights of my life. I’d performed on a real stage, and “Don’t Look Back” was a wild success—far beyond what I’d imagined it could become last summer in my father’s studio. So why did I feel this ache of loneliness in my gut? I swigged from a cup of whiskey. My thoughts zipped to Nick.

  Just that morning he’d messaged me about my plans for New Year’s, to see whether I’d be coming into town. So I told him briefly about Lynn and the boys, my songwriting and impending stage debut with the Endless West. Being one of the few people who had witnessed the evolution of my music, he was thrilled for me. But don’t forget about the little people back home, he added at the end of our conversation.

  Now, glancing at my phone, I saw that I had received another message from him, over an hour earlier. Good luck tonight! I know you’ll be great. Then, a few minutes later: Happy New Year, Hayes. Wish you were here.

  I smiled, felt the sadness abating, and wrote, Another year has disappeared between us / but I won’t accept regret / so let’s close our eyes and count backward / relive the memories that haven’t happened yet.

  Happy New Year, Nick.

  I put my phone away then, glancing up just in time to see a sliding glass door open near a gloomy back corner of the house. From the darkness, Cody Winters emerged. He was alone, removing a cigarette from the top buttoned pocket of his jean jacket. A bolt of energy tore through me. I stood up, not knowing what to do, but knowing I had to do something.

  “Can I bum one of these?” I asked Lynn, picking up her cigarettes.

  “Go for it,” she said, swooping her thumbs over her phone’s keyboard, and I was already heading across the yard before I’d even figured out what to say.

  When I reached him, his face was cupped in his hands, a tiny firelight flickering across his jaw.

  “Hey,” I said. Lynn’s cigarettes dangled from my shaking fingers.

  “Hey,” he mumbled, glancing briefly up. “Nice set. That last song was pretty epic.”

  The stampede beneath my rib cage quickened, and I thought for an instant that I might spontaneously combust. “Thanks,” I said. I reached my hand into my purse, feeling around for the book of matches, but just as I reached them, I let them go.

  “Can I borrow your light?” I asked.

  He struck the flint twice before it sparked again. I had only ever been that close to him once, at the Last Bean, and then I was nothing more than a barista pouring his coffee, pocketing his change. Now, the small glow of his lighter warmed my face.

  When the smoke hit my throat, I coughed. I was sure he would laugh at me, or worse, that he would leave. But he didn’t even seem to notice.

  “You look familiar,” he said. “We met before?”

  I thought about all the lunch hours I’d spent trailing his voice and the airy pluck of his acoustic guitar, the way my name slid from his tongue that day at the Last Bean. What satisfaction I would have had if he’d recognized me. But too much had changed since then; I was no longer the girl hiding in hallways.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  He nodded, unaffected. “I’m Cody.”

  “Susannah.”

  For a few minutes we just stood there, leaning against the sliding glass door and looking out into the yard. Though the stars had seemed electric an hour ago, they were hazy now, as if a thin layer of gauze had been pulled over the sky. Not even Orion was visible. From the corner of my eye, I tried to watch Cody, but I couldn’t see anything more than the wispy tendrils of his smoke. Still, I had that feeling—that prickling of the skin when you know someone is watching you. I tapped my cigarette the way I’d seen Lynn do it, an index finger lightly on top. People started counting: “Ten! Nine! Eight!”

  That’s when I noticed Cameron, perched on the edge of the stage, chanting the diminishing numbers with a group of people (mostly girls) I didn’t know. And that was the problem—I didn’t know anyone yet, did not know their histories or intentions. I didn’t know if those girls had boyfriends or had interest in Cameron, didn’t know if Cameron, perhaps, had interest in one of them. In that moment, all I knew was what I saw in front of me: Cameron, with his breezy, crooked smile and eyes that glistened beneath the backyard twinkle lights, was not looking for me, and Cody Winters was the only person at that party whose history converged with mine.

  “Seven! Six! Five!”

  “I’m not big on this shit,” Cody said.

  “Me either.”

  Our eyes met there in the shadowy corner. When he retreated back inside the dark room, I followed.

  It was midnight and the sounds of the party penetrated the wafer-thin walls. People were shouting “Happy New Year!” and banging keys against beer bottles, or clinking together cans. Down the street confetti poppers exploded. Inside, Cody and I were silent.

  The assured way that he leaned into me then was terrifying. It was not fierce and sudden, the way Cameron and I had grasped each other in the ocean, and it wasn’t comforting but clumsy like the night I spent in Cara’s guest room with Nick. Cody knew exactly what to do. He knew where my mouth was, where my hands would be waiting, how all the buttons and clasps flicked apart. His movements were quick and precise. And though I could not see much more than a shape in front of me, darker and fuller than the surrounding shadows of the room, every other aspect of him had heightened. I smelled the sweat that still dampened his shirt from the show, the tobacco coating his fingers. His hands, as they gripped my face, were rough from the friction of sinking guitar strings and beating on drums. I wondered if he could feel the weight of my breath before covering my mouth with his own.

  As he laid me on the bed, I realized I had no idea whose room we were in. Someone could have walked in at any moment. But Cody tasted like barley, like the smoldering cinders of a forest fire. His skin burned against my fingers. I opened my hands wide, splaying them across his back, and pulled him toward me.

  When it was over, we peeled apart and dressed and he left the room first. It was a small, unconscious act, but I was glad. The party still raged outside, louder and more reckless now that midnight had passed, and I sat on the edge of the bed, my dress half zipped, willing the room to stand still. I wasn’t sure what happened next, what I was supposed to do. My mouth was dry. His scent lingered on my skin. I kept waiting to feel different somehow, but I didn’t. The only change was the taste in my mouth—the remains of his tiny fires igniting on my tongue.

  This is the truth: After we were done I wanted nothing more from him. I had no desire to date him, nor did I harbor any misconceptions of love. I didn’t even know him. But for so long I had wanted him, had wanted him to want me, and for that brief moment, he was mine. It was that simple. All I had to do was take control.

  In the dark, I couldn’t find m
y tights, so I felt around until I located a light. Illuminated, the room seemed sad. It was mostly empty, the walls white. Locating my tights, I pulled the fabric up my legs and only then did I notice the bruises, yellows and blues blossoming on the outside of my right thigh. I couldn’t even feel them yet—there was too much alcohol in my system for that—but the composition was mesmerizing. My left palm had the same bud of color, too, and as I examined the patterns climbing toward my hip, expanding from thumb to pinkie, I knew that I would need to harden myself, build up new callouses; I was far too soft and pervious if a tambourine was enough to break the blood vessels beneath my skin.

  Sixteen

  SCHOOL RESUMED. AMID the flurry of the new quarter, Lynn and I made a plan to go to Kurt’s on the first Sunday morning we were both free. Until then, though, I was stuck waiting, wondering what it would be like to drive again on those streets. If it would feel sort of like going back in time.

  Even though we’d been living with Vivian for months now, my mother still hadn’t taken us to retrieve our stuff from the old house. I thought about it frequently, wavering between a ravenous urge to submerse myself in all my father’s possessions and an urgent need to not touch a thing. The knowledge that he was preserved back in our studio, in our home, gave me comfort. His scent would still be thick between the walls of shipping foam. His fingerprints would still perforate the dust that rimmed the record player. His T-shirts, each one adorned with its own unique constellation of holes, would still be hanging in the closet. And in these small ways, my father continued existing.

  At least I thought so, until the day I came home from school to find the front entryway cluttered with boxes.

  “What’s all this?” I asked my mother, navigating a path through the mess. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “The opposite, actually. We’re finally moving in.”

  “You mean this is our stuff?” I crouched down to decipher one of the labels. It might have said “Master” something, but the penmanship was almost illegible. It was not my mother’s hand. “When did you have time to go?”