“Is everyone here drunk but me?” I asked Jamie.
Jamie laughed, a single honking ha! “Sucks to be you.”
She gave me a sidelong glance and, seeing my bewildered expression, burst into laughter. My shoulders dropped, releasing tension I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, and I laughed too.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie croaked. “That was beneath me.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say ‘sucks to be you’ since fourth grade.”
“I’m bringing it back.”
“Please don’t.”
She shrugged and took a big gulp of water, and for a minute we both scanned the room. Now that it was almost time for the lead act, Triple Moon was as packed as I’d seen it in months, if not years. I couldn’t wait to find out how much money Dee and Gaby had made, and to see how happy with me they were. Maybe they’d let us—well, them—have another show or three here. Maybe I could convince them to give me a dollar commission for every cover charge they collected. Or even fifty cents. It looked like there were probably sixty people here, which would translate to thirty dollars a show. Which wasn’t a lot, but after five shows, it would be enough for…one college textbook. Hm. Maybe we could compromise and do seventy-five cents a head.
I looked for and found Natalie Reid, easy to spot in her stupid neon beanie. She appeared fully engaged in conversation with Justin (trombone) and Becca (flute—why did I know this?), and I breathed relief in and out. It truly hadn’t occurred to me that anyone from band would be here, least of all Natalie. I imagined her as more of a gentle indie girl. Songs with ukuleles, and people who murmured more than they sang, so you couldn’t really tell if they had good voices or not. Then again, I was here. There could be other motives for coming here. Mine was a girl. I hoped Natalie’s was anything else.
Natalie Reid aside, everyone else I could see was more or less whom I’d expected: the burnout boys, helmed by Sam Perpich and Nick Weiss; Lara Hammond and Kaela Brown, the otherwise straitlaced popular girls whose interest in MDMA necessitated their friendship with Sam and Nick; the nervous-looking sceney sophomore boys, wearing lots of hair product and cologne, and the goth-lite girls they were trying to impress; a cluster of freshman and sophomore girls who were one hundred percent going to cry the second Sweets took the stage. As if reading my mind, Dee leaned over the counter between Jamie’s shoulder and mine and muttered, “I’ve never seen so many heteros in here at once.”
“You don’t know they’re all straight,” Jamie scolded.
I looked at her in disbelief, but evidently she was too tipsy to notice her hypocrisy. Now that Natalie was here, we weren’t supposed to assume anything about anyone. How interesting.
Dee squinted. “Mmm. Yeah. I do.”
I tried to distract myself, watching as some skinny freshman who looked about twelve in his dad’s jean jacket bustled onto the stage from behind the drop cloth hanging from the rafters and began arranging the instruments. I wondered if Sweets paid him part of their earnings for his services. Or, I thought, maybe he was planning to put this on his college application as volunteer work. Assisted local artists in presenting their work to the community. Or, maybe more likely, he was in love with Ruby too.
“Is she still dating that guy?” I asked suddenly. I knew, of course, that Natalie Reid’s college boyfriend, Ian, had dumped her in our junior year, just as I knew Jamie knew I knew. Just as I knew she knew who exactly I meant. All the many associated implications hung between us like cobwebs, and as a favor to each other we tried our best to ignore them.
“Who?” said Jamie.
“Natalie Reid,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “No. They broke up last year.” A pause. She couldn’t help herself. “Remember?”
I pulled my best perplexed face. “Huh. No.”
Jamie nodded, eyes firmly fixed to the stage. Again I tried to focus: the twelve-year-old, disappearing behind the curtain, the crowd perking up in response. You could feel it—the specific, restless energy of waiting for your favorite band to show themselves. One of Sam’s friends tried to start a slow clap, presumably ironically, but only a couple of others picked it up, and it died off, embarrassingly, within thirty seconds. Without the cue of dimming lights, it was hard to know when to start making noise. A girl shrieked, “WE LOVE YOU, DAVID,” and everyone else at her table immediately hunched over giggling. My heart thrummed with excitement. I was, quite literally, on the edge of my seat. I couldn’t wait to see Ruby. I couldn’t stop asking Jamie questions I didn’t want her to answer.
“Who’s she dating now?” I said, sounding as bored as I could manage.
“Natalie?”
I ground my teeth into dust so I wouldn’t scream. “Yeah.”
“She’s not,” said Jamie. I waited, and finally she glanced my way. “She was seeing this girl at camp, but they broke up.”
This is it, I thought. This is what dying feels like. I leaned an elbow onto the counter behind me to keep myself upright, but still the room tilted and swayed.
“What girl?” I asked.
“She goes to a different school,” said Jamie.
“Sounds made-up,” I said. I took a panicked slurp of my coffee, which was now mostly water, and raised my hand to my neck, surreptitiously feeling for my pulse.
“I mean, I know her,” said Jamie. “Her name’s Sami Lerner, if you wanna look her up.” She nodded at my phone, faceup on the counter, and I flipped it facedown.
“What instrument does she play?” I asked, absurdly.
Jamie raised an eyebrow. “French horn…?”
I nodded, like that explained everything. Jamie half laughed, half scoffed, and we returned to staring at everything but each other. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, and jabbed at my neck with my middle and ring fingers until I was satisfied my heart wouldn’t explode. So Natalie Reid likes girls too, I told myself. This doesn’t change anything for you, and it doesn’t necessarily change anything for Jamie, either. I was clutching my neck again, I realized. I wedged my hands into the crooks of my elbow, locking myself in place. Along with the hollowed-out-husk feeling spreading through my body, there arose a wrenching, not unpleasant satisfaction. You called it.
I sat up straighter, scanning the crowd for that telltale orange beanie, but Natalie was short, and the crowd was denser now, and I couldn’t find her, which was just as well. Finally the curtain came to life, puffing out and retreating like a wave as people scrambled into place behind it. A few seconds later, the entity known as Sweets emerged from backstage to whooping applause. David led the pack: floppy brown hair, tight jeans, tight T-shirt, an illicit under-eighteen tattoo of what appeared to be a cheeseburger on the forearm he now used to tune his baby-pink electric guitar. I had to give it to the shrieker: he was, like, totally dreamy onstage.