Dirty Little Secret (10 page)

I nodded. “From the time I was seven years old until last year, that’s pretty much all I did. No Girl Scouts, no sports, no . . .” I stopped myself before I said it, because I would sound pitiful. Then I couldn’t think of anything else to say instead, which made me seem addled. I finished, “Friends.”

“No boyfriends?” This time when he looked over at me, I could see his face clearly in the streetlights. There was no lust there,
or jealousy, only curiosity. He wasn’t romantically interested in me. He only wanted to use me for his band. I was okay with that. I just needed to get that message through to my fluttering heart.

“Well, not then,” I admitted, “and not now. I dated in the past year.”
Dated
was a term I used loosely to mean getting drunk at Farrah Nelson’s Halloween party and letting Liam Keel and then Aidan Rogers feel me up in the guest bedroom. And then, of course, at a party several months later, Toby.

I realized I’d been staring at the dashboard in miserable silence when Sam leaned over to see where I was looking. Putting his eyes back on the road, he asked, “What made you quit the bluegrass circuit in the past year? Does it have something to do with why your granddad won’t let you out of the house?”

“No,” I fudged, “that’s just because he didn’t want me playing at a bar.”

Sam wasn’t buying it. “Fess up. It’s more than that. He was acting like he wouldn’t have let you out of his sight if he hadn’t known me and I hadn’t been so charming.”

“And if you hadn’t bought a guitar from him before,” I said dryly.

“There’s that.” He glanced over at me, looked at the road, eyed me again. As he drove, his face and his soft brown eyes brightened under a streetlight, then faded into the darkness. “You’re sure you’re eighteen?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Why does an eighteen-year-old let her granddad treat her like a child? Why is he so strict?”

I turned away from Sam, letting my gaze settle out the window. My granddad’s house was south of downtown, near Music Row, a quiet neighborhood where all the major record company offices were nestled. He lived so close to them, in fact, that some days this week I’d thought
I could smell the smoke from the shriveled souls and dashed dreams burning in the record companies’ incinerators out back, wafting a few streets over on the morning breeze. Now Sam and I had steered out of the tree-framed streets and hit West End Avenue through the Vanderbilt campus, where stylish stores and hip bars lined the sidewalks.

Girls and guys strolling hand in hand were dressed a lot like me, and like Sam without the hat. They’d lingered after exams were over, or they lived here full-time because they’d broken away from their parents and no longer spent the summer at “home.” I would be one of these people in August, God willing. Sam was right. It made no sense that my parents had collared me like a dog and tied me to the side of my granddad’s house with a bowl of water and a dirty rawhide bone.

I sighed harder than I’d meant to, then stopped myself right before I rubbed my eyes and smudged my mascara. “I got in some trouble after graduation last Saturday night.”

“Uh-oh. What kind of trouble? Trouble, like, you sprayed Silly String all over the high school auditorium? Or trouble, like, the police came?”

“The police came.”

After the bright college campus, before the even brighter downtown, Sam drove into a darker section of Nashville. Here, decaying factories and crumbling houses waited on the edge of urban renewal. I could tell he was looking at me again only by the way the silhouette of his hat changed shape as he turned his head. He asked quietly, “What did you do?”

“
I
didn’t do
anything
. That time.” My nausea over the whole incident lay exactly here. I was being punished unfairly for doing nothing. Yet I
had
done something that deserved punishment in the past, so maybe I deserved it now.

“I just—” I grabbed my wrist with my other hand and forced my fingers away from my eyes again. I needed one of those rubber dolls whose eyes bulged out when you squeezed it, anything to keep my fingers busy when I wasn’t playing fiddle. “I went to a party after graduation, like everybody. I didn’t drink because I’ve kind of stopped doing that, and my parents were home for once, and I didn’t want to get in trouble.” With my hands I made boxes and graphs on my thighs. “Note all of the ways I was trying to stay
out of trouble
.

“The crazy thing is, this time last year, I wanted so badly to get in trouble. Every time I tried, I didn’t have the heart. I smoked a joint and I was so paranoid about what it was going to do to my singing voice, on the off chance I ever needed it again, that the high turned bad on me.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I haven’t gotten that far, for the same reason.”

“Don’t. It was unpleasant. I got drunk a couple of times when my parents weren’t coming home until later and wouldn’t find out. But before I go to bed at night, I always . . .”

I was about to admit to him that I wrote songs, but I stopped myself just in time. He’d already dragged me on this adventure I wasn’t sure I wanted to join, just because I played fiddle. If he knew about the songs, I might get myself in deeper trouble with him.

“I always write in my journal,” I said, which was sort of true, if a notebook printed with music staffs could be called a journal, “and I have time for myself. I need that every night. This time my brain didn’t work right. I missed my brain. Whenever I drank, I walked around the whole next day wishing I had those hours back. The more I tried and failed to be a bad girl, the angrier I got. The final injustice was that my parents had ingrained the desire to be a Goody Two-shoes so deeply in me that I couldn’t even shake it at a party after my own high school graduation. I was aware of this
and scared of being caught at this crazy party, totally absorbed in myself.” My usual state of mind lately. “I had no idea my boyfriend was high as a fucking space station. And when I rode home with him, he wrecked his car.”

Sam didn’t make a supportive comment like I’d thought he would. He sped on down the boulevard, which was nearly empty in this sparsely populated section of town with no open stores. The driving should have been stress free, but he held the steering wheel tightly with both hands.

Finally he asked quietly, “Was your boyfriend killed?”

“No!” Maybe I shouldn’t have said this like the idea was so ridiculous. We
could
have been killed, as my parents had said over and over.

“Was anybody hurt?”

“No. Well . . .” As the fluorescent lights of a gas station flashed by out the driver’s side window, I pulled up my dress to show him the ugly green bruise on my right thigh. It was some grade school instinct to show off a nasty scar. As I was doing it, I realized I shouldn’t be showing my upper thigh to a guy I’d just met, or my unattractive bruise to a cute guy no matter how long I’d known him.

He peered over at it. “Ouch!” he exclaimed. “Why did you say no at first? You said nobody was hurt.”

I flipped my skirt down. “Well, you meant was anybody
else
hurt, right? You were asking if he’d run into anybody. He only drove into a pond and totaled his car.”

Sam gaped at me.

“I know,” I said. “We had to wade out, and there was a big scene. Get this. He was high on coke and he didn’t even tell me.” I started laughing, remembering how shocked I’d been. I’d tried so hard to be bad in the past year, but even
I
couldn’t fathom snorting
coke. The more I thought about it, the harder I laughed, until my sides hurt. I shut myself down with difficulty. It was strange that Sam hadn’t said anything the whole time. I prompted him, “Have you ever
heard
of such a thing?”

Sam wasn’t looking at me now. He was staring at the road like the San Andreas Fault had just opened up in the middle of West End Avenue. “Well, yeah.”

“I mean, I know you’ve
heard
of it. Have you
seen
it?”

“Yeah.”

He said this so flatly that I suspected there was more to the story. “Have you
done
it?”

“No. I don’t . . .” He shook his head, suddenly looking way too serious for his lighthearted cowboy hat. “My father is an alcoholic. Sometimes that’s genetic. I might be one, too. If I never have a drink, I’ll never have a problem. Same goes for drugs. If you inherit that addictive personality, that problem with obsession, you’re going to have a harder time kicking than your average Joe. I’m like, live and let live. I don’t judge people. I’m just not going to do it myself.”

“You don’t judge people, except your dad.” And me, for being involved in this crash. Sam’s smile, his animated body language, every-thing I’d liked about him had shut down the instant I mentioned it.

He and I had seen eye to eye on so much already. I’d assumed he would understand what had happened to me, too, and sympathize, if only I explained it right. But he looked truly horrified—at the wreck, okay, but his horror seemed to extend to me, and the coke, though I’d told him I wasn’t the one at fault.

He didn’t believe me, I realized with a sinking heart.

Nobody did.

What was new?

He pulled to a stop at a light, checked in the mirror and saw nobody was behind us, and turned his whole body to face me. I
expected a lecture, and I was going to have to tell him where to go. This was what I got instead: “Bailey. You’re not still dating that guy, are you? You said you weren’t dating anybody, but now you’re referring to this shit as your boyfriend.”

“No,” I said rather desperately. The idea gnawed at the back of my mind that I’d unintentionally lost Sam before I even had him. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, and I didn’t want him to think Toby and I were still together. “Definitely not. My leg really hurt at first. It seems stupid now, but I thought it was broken. Water was seeping into the car. Toby wouldn’t get out. He wouldn’t let
me
get out. He tried to convince me to take the fall for him.”

“What?”
Sam glanced up at the green light, then over at a car dealership, as if considering whether to pull into the lot and grill me on this further. Then he checked his watch, saw we didn’t have much time before the gig, and kept driving. “Take the fall how?”

“Tell the cops and his parents and my parents that I was driving. That’s when he admitted to me that he was high, which explained why he’d been so hot to leave the party all of a sudden, and so paranoid out of nowhere that the cops were coming to break it up. It was also the reason he’d wrecked the car and then screamed at me not to leave it. I was hurt, and he was scaring me. And then he said that I had to take the fall for him because he had everything to lose, a baseball scholarship to Vandy, and I had nothing to lose by taking the blame for the wreck. I was just a washed-up ex-musician.”
And you’re never going to amount to anything. You’re just going to sit around and bitch about your sister like you have for the past year.

“And you agreed,” Sam said, “and lied to the cops, and that’s why you’re in so much trouble?”

“Oh, no. I was halfway considering it, honestly, because it would have pissed off my mother. Toby knows me pretty well by
now. But then he made me mad with that crack about me being worthless. It’s one thing to think you’re worthless, and quite another for somebody else to tell you that you are. I’m like, ‘Fuck you,’ and I proceeded to ascertain that the car was not in fact sinking, and I called 911.”

Sam frowned out the windshield. “What an asshole,” he muttered.

I nodded slowly, like I was still puzzling through it. “Pretty much.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t give in,” he said. “Besides all the trouble you would have been in for wrecking his car, the cops would have figured out you were lying to them. If they’d investigated at all, they would have seen that the bruise on your thigh matched up to the handle on the passenger side of the car, not the driver’s side.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “Impressive. You’re always thinking, aren’t you, Hardiman?” I tapped my temple with one finger. “Spoken like a true criminal.”

He laughed uncomfortably. Possibly he was realizing this outlaw chick he’d picked up was more genuine than he’d bargained for. “Did that guy get his ass handed to him by the cops?”

“No. They didn’t take him in. His parents got there before the cops did, and I didn’t tell anybody what he’d tried to pull, because he just would have denied it. I heard that his folks have already replaced his soaked Toyota. You know, some parents cover their eyes and would rather not know what their kids are up to. It’s only my parents who look forward to me screwing up so they can scream, ‘I told you so.’”

Sam nodded. “So why
are
you in trouble with your parents? You didn’t screw up.”

“It’s partly because I’d been at this wild party. A couple of other people who’d been there got in trouble, too, later that night.
The parents started texting each other frantically. The party became infamous. And my folks are like, ‘How could you be hanging out with these people?’ and I’m like, ‘I’ve been hanging out with them for a year and you didn’t notice.’ They don’t enjoy hearing the truth about that sort of thing. And then my sister told me that since I clearly don’t have any respect for myself, she doesn’t respect me, either. She hasn’t spoken to me since.”

I’d been able to talk about my parents’ misplaced anger with a dry tone and an eye roll. But as I talked about Julie, my chest felt tight. I wished I’d never given Sam this window into everything that was wrong with me.

“Oh, Bailey.” Coming from any other teenager I knew, these two words would have been sarcastic, imitating an old person commenting on a terrible shame. Coming from Sam, they sounded sincere.

Swallowing, I went on. “Honestly, I think a big part of why my parents lost their minds over this was that they had to leave town the next day. They didn’t have time to stand over me and make sure I was sorry. Instead of letting me stay by myself at home, they made me move in with my granddad. And if I get in any more trouble this summer, they won’t pay for Vanderbilt.”