I slide off the bed and grab my guitar again. “You’re our manager now? I thought you were my therapist.” Actually, Kristen’s father is a psychologist, but she’s been reading his books for years. She claims it’s to help me survive my post-Jared high school life without gratuitous amounts of bloodshed.
“The best managers are probably both.” Kristen presses a couple buttons on my laptop. “Ta-da! Here we are, from last week’s talent show.”
I brace myself as I watch, but Kristen’s right—Stabbing Shakespeare kicks ass, especially on those driving I-hate-Jared songs. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have room to improve.
As she gleefully points out the audience reaction, I concentrate on our performance. The sound is crappy, thanks to Kristen shooting the video on her phone, but even so I can hear how we rushed through the beginning of our first song until our nerves calmed down. So typical.
I turn my attention next to my band members, looking for ways we could improve our visual performance, too. We’re an odd mix. Tiny Alex is lost behind her drums in the auditorium’s poor lighting, but Nate is jumping all over the place, a crazy ball of energy with his bass. Erica, in contrast, serenely strums away, lost in her playing. Every now and then I peek at myself, stuck between Erica and Nate, pretending I have the charisma and stage presence to pull off this act.
I’m pretty sure I don’t. I’m the front person for the band only by default.
Yet despite these flaws, I know we’re good. Really good. Too good to just play at stupid school talent shows or at drunken parties. Good enough that I am determined that one day, one of the songs I write about Jared will get as much play as his songs about me. Only unlike his nasty breakup songs, my songs will be truthful. After all, the truths I have on Jared are so scathing that I don’t need to make up lies about him.
Speaking of which, for the record, I did not dump Jared for a new car. That’s just the most blatant lie on his stupid lying album.
The video ends abruptly and Kristen closes the laptop. “Not bad.”
I bite my lip. Kristen might make an excellent wannabe therapist, but she doesn’t have a trained ear like I do. She didn’t notice how Erica’s high E was slightly flat, or how Alex skipped a beat during the intro, or how I timed my breath badly on the bridge and couldn’t extend the vocals long enough.
She doesn’t want to notice, either. She wants to be our cheerleader, which is yet another reason she rocks and why I need her around. I can be critical enough for both of us. But we will never, ever excel if I’m not. Never, ever be able to compete with Jared.
It’s ridiculous of me to even try. I know. What are the odds of two musicians from the same small town both making it to superstar status? My band will never catch up to him, yet I can’t shake the dream. The sting of his success is all the more painful since it comes at my expense.
But I’ve been over this territory so often that talking about it bores even me, and I soften my thoughts so Kristen doesn’t start on me about the perils of perfectionism. “No, it wasn’t bad, but we can always improve. And I still think we need new, quality material. We’ve been playing mostly the same songs since Erica and I started the band. We’re not going to get better if we don’t stretch ourselves.”
I don’t know when I turned into my piano teacher, but that’s what she always says whenever she challenges me with more difficult pieces. It frustrated me when I was younger, but I get it now.
On that thought, my fingers crawl back to their respective frets, trying to work through this mother-daughter song again.
Kristen chucks the other slipper at me. So much for hiding my thoughts. “Okay, Ms. Morose, let it go. Have you considered that maybe the one-year anniversary of your mother’s death is not the best time to be working on a song about her? That maybe you need a time when you can be more emotionally distant?”
“News flash: there will never be a time when I’m more emotionally distant.” I glance down at my wrist and the diamonds on it sparkle in the late afternoon sunlight.
When she’d decided to go off the chemo, my mom had insisted on giving me and my sister each one of her beloved tennis bracelets. She had two that she used to wear together all the time. Now we wear them all the time.
The bracelet works for April because she’s a lot like my mom was. But it doesn’t really work for me. It clashes with my style the way, well, the way I clash with everything and everyone in my family. Be it the vinyl record albums decorating my bedroom walls, the bright purple-and-green polish on my nails or the collection of band T-shirts in my drawers, everything about me screams that I am the un-Winslow child—the bad seed, although no one says that aloud. No, it’s far more proper to just fret about my wasted potential.
But if I take my tennis bracelet off before April takes hers off, it’s like me finally admitting that I really was the worse daughter, a public acknowledgement of the knowing glances exchanged by the rest of my family behind their closed doors.
Of course, if I were half the rebel everyone thinks I am, I’d have tossed the bracelet by now. But I can’t. I won’t. I miss my mom. So it stays on, and five thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds shimmer on a wrist that doesn’t appreciate them.
“I’m sure your mom didn’t expect you to wear that every day for the rest of your life.” Ever astute, Kristen swats my bracelet.
“We don’t know that, and it’s just as likely that she did. I mean, she expected my bed to be made every day so I wouldn’t embarrass her in front of the housekeeper. Reasonable expectations were not my parents’ forte.”
Hence, why my mom also once expected me to dump my boyfriend, and oh-so-rebellious me went ahead and did it. Eventually. Because when your mom has cancer you will do whatever it takes to make her happy, even if you’re the “bad” daughter. You will remember the effort she made to ensure sure you got the cupcakes with the blue sprinkles on your birthday, and how she once spent an entire day with you at the library helping you research that awful term paper you had to do in eighth grade. You’ll think about the gross homemade chicken soup she forced you to eat when you were sick, and how she held your hand when the ER doctor stitched up your busted lip. You will do anything to make that woman’s life easier, even if it means overlooking all the ways she made your life difficult.
And then, if you’re like me, the boyfriend you dumped for your mom’s sake will write a nasty song or two or three about what a bitch you were for doing that, and you’ll realize your mom was right and you made a good decision.
That alone is reason to keep the bracelet on—as a reminder that maybe she knew what she was talking about on occasion and I should have listened to her more often.
“Claire?” Kristen snaps her fingers in my face and I nearly hit the ceiling.
“Did you say something?”
She laughs, but her face is filled with concern. “Are you okay?”
I blink and force a smile. “Yeah, sorry. I spaced out thinking about the song. What did you say?”
“Just that I have to go. The parental units texted.”
I check the clock and realize it’s nearing dinnertime. “Right.”
As I watch Kristen drive off a few minutes later, April appears in the foyer, clearing her throat. Two years younger than me, she’s already my height. Plus, she’s mastered the art of the oh-so-superior expression. As a result, most people assume she’s actually the older one.
She thinks that’s awesome. I think it means she’ll get wrinkles first.
“Yes?” I cross my arms and mimic her look.
April tosses her long hair over her shoulder. “You need to lay off the noise making. Gayle and I are trying to finish our group project upstairs. Can’t you take your guitar to the basement or something while you still can?”
I