The Sound of Us (8 page)

Roman Montgomery, probably the sexiest, strangest man in the world, called
me
beautiful.

And he doesn’t tell me to keep it a secret.

The Strand smells like old cigarette smoke and greasy fair food. Vendors hawking painted conch shells and oriental fans litter the boardwalk in front of old retro diners and ice cream shops, beach museums and gaming pits. The entire boardwalk is built on rotten planks of wood hovering precariously over the waves. I used to be scared one of the planks would break and I’d fall into the ocean, but I think they replace the rotten boards with fresh ones every so often.

“Didn’t there used to be a roller coaster here?” Roman asks, frowning at the expanse of weeds and dirt that takes up an entire block.

“Yeah,” I reply, shrugging. “They tore it down. Owners couldn’t afford to keep it open...but I think the roller coaster moved to another amusement park down the street.”

“The really small one with the weird kid rides?” He makes a face.

“I know, right? Ghastly.”

“I hate that everything changes.” He shoves his hands into his pockets, looking across the hills of grass and dirt where a theme park once sat. “Sort of unfair, you know? Everything changes and suddenly you feel like one of those bent puzzle pieces.”

“Yeah,” I reply.

At night, the boardwalk turns into a whirling, twisting stream of lights and colors. Carnival bulbs and neon lights illuminate everything as the pops and hisses and boings and whirs of games and cooking grease and children playing skeet ball crash together in idiosyncratic harmony. When was the last time I came to the Strand? I can’t remember.

Maybe it was when the magic of deep-fried Oreos wore off, or maybe it was when I realized that the carnival games were rigged, and the moving statues that line the boardwalk are really out-of-work actors.

Everything is achingly familiar, as if I can just turn around and Dad will be right behind me, asking to dance to the beach music playing at the bandstand or share a corndog. It was on this boardwalk that he taught me how to dance, my feet atop his, as we shimmied to “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “Brown Eyed Girl.” Do they even play beach music on the Strand at night anymore?

I rub the ache in my chest, hoping Roman doesn’t notice, and lean against the railing. Waves knock against the boardwalk, trash mixed with the foamy yellow-white waves, as a flock of seagulls fight over an abandoned French fry a few feet away.

He leans against the railing next to me, and spits over the edge. Like a kid, I swear.

I turn around and gather my hair over my shoulder. “What’s it like singing in front of a crowd?”

“Odd question. What brought this up?”

I shrug. “My family owns a bar—the Silver Lining. Bands play there sometimes, and I’ve just wondered. I’m a shitty singer, and I can’t play an instrument worth my life, so I’ll never know.”

“That’s an odd name for a bar,” he comments.

“Roman Holiday’s an odd name for a band.”

He tips further over the edge of the railing, giving in. “Imagine being blinded by stage lights. Not knowing where anyone is, but you can feel a million eyes on you, staring at you, like you are the middle of the universe. And the noise...it
roars
.” He pulls himself straight again, closing his eyes, as if he’s there, imagining the sound. “It drowns out everything—absolutely
everything
. This sound...it’s transient and consuming. I feel
alive
when I’m up there, Junebug, like my blood is on fire and every note just consumes me. It’s crazy.”

I cock my head. “Then why don’t you go back? You and Boaz? Start over? The Madison Square gig, I’m sure you could still play.”

He finally opens his eyes, and his eyebrows furrow. For a moment, I don’t think he’ll answer me, but then his shoulder slump a little and he shakes his head, as if even entertaining the idea makes him tired. “You can’t always get what you want.”

“Rolling Stones, 1969, in the album
Let It Bleed.
”

He shakes his head with a chuckle. “Radio heart.”

I timidly place my hand on top of his on the railing. His hand is warm and soft as I curl my fingers into his palm. “Maybe you’ll get what you need.”

He looks down at my hand and smiles, bringing it up to his lips, and kisses my knuckles. A thank you. Warmth blooms in my belly, and flushes against my cheeks. “Maybe I will. How about some pizza?” he asks, letting go of my hand.

“We definitely need pizza,” I reply, trying to not sound too disappointed. I don’t even know what I’m disappointed about, but I rub my knuckles where the skin still tingles from his lips.

Roman stops in mid-step in front of an airbrush parlor, and I run smack into the back of him. “
Oof
! Hey, at least gimme a head’s up when you stop—”

A man with inky black hair surfaces from the surf shop next door. The man from the stop-n-shop a few nights ago. The eagle feather is pinned into the ribbon on his gray fedora tonight. He picks into his bag of cotton candy for a blue puff and eats it.

Roman grabs my forearm. My eyebrows scrunch. “Do you know him?”

“Nope”—and suddenly he shoves me into the airbrush parlor and behind a clothes turnstile, grabbing a dorky Myrtle Beach hat from the top of it as we pass. He holds it up beside our faces facing the street, and we’re so close his hot breath warms my lips, too close for comfort.

Maybe he’ll...

Roman jerks me down below the clothes rack until the man finally passes. After a minute, he pulls away and returns the hat to its proper place as if nothing happened. I turn to the cashier to make sure she’s giving us a funny look, and sure enough, she is.

Okay, so that actually happened.

“Roman?” I go to grab his shirt but my hand comes up empty. I pale. “Roman?” The orange of his hair hangs a right out of the store. “ROMAN!” I run out of the store after him and catch up on the sidewalk. “What was that for?”

“What was what for?” he asks flippantly.

“Please, don’t do that.”

“Do what? I’m starving. Where’s this pizza place again?”

“You’re impossible.”

“Impossibly
possible
,” he corrects. “Ah-hah! I knew it was over here somewhere.”

I scowl and follow him into the nearby pizza joint. It’s a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant with cheap beer and free smells. Locals scatter across the dry-rotted booths, watching some soccer team at the World Series on the small TV in the corner. We order two sodas and a large olive and mushroom pizza, and sit down at one of the cracked vinyl booths. The lighting is low, and terrible, and the walls are this horrendous eggshell white with kitschy Italian pictures and signs strung up with duct tape. The pizza is the sort you can fold in half, and watch the grease trickle down onto your plate like water.

Roman takes another slice, popping a fallen mushroom into his mouth. “How the hell do you like mushroom and olives?” he asks between chews.

“I should be asking you the same thing. Weirdo,” I tease.

“Oh, yeah we are.” He lifts his soda and we clink glasses. “It’s a wonder you’re single—you
are
single, aren’t you?” he adds, more curious than nervous.

I shrug, eating another olive. “I dunno. I’ve been too busy for a relationship. I mean...there’s this guy, but it’s nothing serious. He’s about to go off to college, and I’m about to stay put. When we started seeing each other I was...in a bad place. But to him, I was enough.”

“Enough...I like that. The whole notion of it. My manager told us to be perfect, to be examples. We weren’t good enough. We had to be better. What a different world I’d live in if he just wanted Holly, Boaz, and me to be
enough
.”

I look down at my uneaten crust of pizza. “Too bad it’s a faulty notion. Because being
enough
is never good enough.”

“I think your hair is pink
enough
,” he offers.

“And I think your hair is orange
enough
. But it’s not good enough, right? You can’t honestly say you were aiming for that color.”

His nose scrunches. “You’re right. I wasn’t. Were you aiming for that pink?”

“I wasn’t really aiming for anything,” I reply, picking another olive off my next slice. I can only eat half of it while he devours the rest of the pizza. “Must be nice, not having to watch your weight.”

“Are you kidding?” he downs the last bite with a gulp of soda. “I ate nothing but salads for three years straight. I had to buy new jeans four months ago. Living on Ramen noodles is killing my figure.”

“Isn’t that a shame. You had such nice abs too,” I joke, but he just gives me this pained look. “Mag’s has that poster, yeah,” I clarify, “then one where you’re all, you know...ripped.”

“That really doesn’t surprise me. Ready to go?”

“Whenever you are.”

He takes my hand, fingers lacing into mine, and pulls me out of the booth. We blend into the swelling evening crowd, and follow them across the boardwalk. A sign pointing toward the beach is lit up, and we follow the arrow onto the sand. The beach at night reminds me of those old grainy black and white movies, the moon painting everything in monochromatic colors. The stars shimmer as if they’re fireflies stuck in a vat of molasses.

He flunks down on the sand, spreading his legs wide. “I always thought I’d retire to the beach, but that hasn’t worked out so far. What do you think, this a good enough spot to start?”

I sink down beside him and dig my toes into the sand. “My dad used to say the same thing.” It feels so strange to bring Dad into conversation, but in the good sort of way. Like when you can’t hold a sneeze in any longer.

“Yeah? I mean, who doesn’t love the beach, right? Sand, surf, beachside bars, girls in tiny bikinis...”

“Not necessarily in that order,” I mutter under my breath.

He chuckles, running the thick white sand through his hands. His orange hair glows like frozen fire from the light pollution on the Strand. After a moment, he tilts his head to the side, as if something flicked his ear. “Do you hear that?”

“The...waves?”

He rolls his eyes. “No, listen.”

I cock my head, but all I can hear is the roar of the ocean. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Yeah, you do.” Then he begins to hum. I recognize the tune immediately, and my ears prickle at the sound of faint, but real, music. A band, somewhere, is playing a song. The bandstand does play shag music at night after all.

I grin. “Van Morrison. ‘Into the Mystic.’”

He leans into me, his shoulder knocking against mine, and begins to murmur the lyrics in a soft and warm baritone, as sweet as honey. Caspian was never this romantic—this is romance, isn’t it? The way he looks at no one but me, his eyes filled with more than what his mouth can ever say. But I feel myself inexplicably drawn into him, like the opposite side of a magnet. We are so close, the heat from our skin hovers between us like a force the chilling beach breeze can’t sweep away, electrified a thousand times over. The smell of the sea mingles with his scent, so intoxicating it feels like a dream. Cinnamon and merlot. All I want to do is sink into him, my heart so full of sound and sea and sky it could burst.

His voice grows softer as the song finally winds to a close and my stomach dips because I don’t want it to end. I am in big, big trouble.

“Roman?” My voice is timid and foreign to my ears. His fingers brush lightly against my cheek as he pulls a stray strand of pink hair behind my ear. My face turns toward his hand to feel his warm fingertips against my cheek again. Caspian is ten thousand leagues out of my mind.

“Yeah, Junebug?”

“I’m glad I met you.”

Down the beach, a group of college kids light a squadron of fireworks into the night sky, sparks of white that, from a distance, look like shooting stars. They howl as the sparks fade into the darkness. I almost jump out of my skin, startled by the sound. Roman blinks and shakes his head as if snapping out of a daydream.

“It’s getting late,” he mutters suddenly, and jumps to his feet. “Aren’t your parents worried?”

Anger flushes over my cheeks. “I’m not a kid!”

“How old are you?” he calls over his shoulder as he begins to leave. “
Sixteen
?”

I fist my hands, marching after him. “Almost
nineteen
! Fuck you very much!”

“Same differe—” His foot catches a sinkhole and he faceplants into the sand. I squat down beside him. He props himself up on his elbows and gives a long, tired sigh. “Karma’s a bitch.”

“Apology accepted,” I reply, and jut out my hand to help him up.

You’d think Roman would drive a Bentley or a BMW, a sleek car with
way
too much money spent on the rims. Nope. He drives a crappy-ass apple-green hatchback. And when I say crappy, I mean that very modestly. This car looks like it runs on duct tape and prayers. Mid-90s. Rusted hubcaps. Tan pleather seats—
the works.
I glance into the backseat to make sure there aren’t any serial killers waiting under the massive amounts of fast food wrappers and dirty clothes.

“Are you sure there aren’t any...murderers? Rapists? Homeless people back there?”

He doesn’t even glance back as we get inside, and he pulls the seatbelt over his shoulder. “Nah. Just empty Taco Hell wrappers and my moldy socks.”

Because that makes me any less frightened.

“Charming,” I reply.

“Boaz contributed. I think he left some underwear back there, if you’re interested.”

“That’s gross.”

“And knowing my face is on your...” he flicks his gaze down to my lap, then back up again quickly, “is awkward.”

I calmly put my hands in my lap, my cheeks prickling with embarrassment. “Touché.”

He inserts the key and the engine whines as it tries to turn over. “C’mon baby...,” he begs until, after a squealing noise akin to the death of Wilbur, the engine roars to life. He kicks it into drive and we pull out of the parking lot. “So, taking you back to the condo?”

“Yeah,” I reply, like there’s any other place I could go.
Back to his place, maybe.
But wouldn’t that be super sketch? Or an invasion of privacy? “Where do you stay, anyway?”