“Now there’s a dissertation topic,” she said. “The impact of live music on prepster reformation. I’d read that.”
“Huh,” I said, my lip caught between my teeth. “That would be interesting.”
I decided that, if I was going to dominate all of Sam’s free time, I should at least see to his education in the fine arts. It was hard to believe that someone who knew this town inside and out was learning about an entirely new world from me, a relative newcomer. His knowledge of the area’s music scene was paltry at best, and he’d only been to a handful of painfully mainstream arena shows before meeting me.
It was shameful.
Before the month of September ended, I introduced him to all my hidden (and not-so-hidden) favorites: The Sinclair, Café 939, Wally’s, Great Scott, Paradise, Lansdowne Pub, and Toad.
It wasn’t contrived, this whole hanging-out-with-Sam-thing. Not exactly. I was always on the hunt for live shows, and though he engaged in an ample amount of grousing, he was a willing participant. When he wasn’t busy layering on the hand sanitizer or condescending all over the beverage options, he was rocking out with the rest of us. Feigning an adequate amount of snotty disinterest was how he kept his Cool Kid card.
We had fun together, and we enjoyed some tunes in the process. Keeping my eyes open for something new to broaden and deepen Sam’s exposure was part of my daily routine now, and that was how I ended up scrolling through show listings instead of grading a waist-high stack of papers.
My tastes were about as varied as they came, a collage of genres, artists, time periods, and my strategy with Sam was all about exposing him to a broad range of performances. There was some old-school funk, blues, low-key punk, and an assortment of my favorite new trend—rockish-pop-alt-folk.
The indie scene made more sense to me with its small-stage simplicity. The venues were tiny, carved into bars and pubs.
There was an incredible steel-drum band playing at a divey joint downtown, and even though I’d probably have to sacrifice my studio time to crank these papers out tomorrow, this was an event Sam could not miss.
He didn’t answer when I called, which meant he was in a meeting or tied up with one of his properties, or his phone was muted. Quiet was his preferred speed for most things, and it wasn’t unusual for him to spend the entire day with his phone set to silent. It turned tracking him down into a game of hide and seek.
16:09 Tiel:what r u wearing
16:09 Tiel:it’s important
I waited, staring at the pin-eaten bulletin board on the wall opposite my desk in the office I shared with four other adjuncts. It was a bland memorial to doctoral student life, with its outdated calls for research study participants, roommate requests, and jazz bands and string quartets advertising their availability for weddings, all ringed by a halo of well-loved delivery menus.
My essay-grading guilt won out when I couldn’t justify gazing at walls and liking everything in my newsfeed much longer, and dug in for another round. On the whole, I enjoyed teaching, and grading wasn’t bad either—I liked getting new perspectives on music therapy from students—but the volume of it stoked my natural tendency to procrastinate.
I blew through eleven papers before an incoming text sounded. Ringtones and other phone chirps usually annoyed me, but I’d discovered one that was like an old-fashioned bike bell and couldn’t help smiling every time I heard it.
16:55 Sam:I’ll ask those questions, thank you.
16:56 Tiel:No but srsly. Must see reggae. No 3 piece suits allowed
16:56 Sam:what did the English language ever do to you? And may I add: with the autocorrect features on your phone, you have no excuse to use loose combinations of letters.
16:57 Tiel:do you yell at kids to get off your lawn too?
16:57 Sam:you bet your ass I do, and that brings me back to the matter at hand:
16:58 Sam:what are you wearing?
16:58 Tiel:8 pm curtain. Want to get food first?
16:59 Sam:you’re terrible at this
16:59 Tiel:. . . . what?
17:01 Sam:What. Are. You. Wearing.
I gave my cobalt blue dress an ambivalent glimpse. It was cute but didn’t rise to the level of semi-sexting. Knowing that Sam ran hot and cold, toggling between being highly suggestive and tattooing “Just Friends” across his chest, I seized this burst of hot and snapped a neck-down selfie. The lighting was horrible and the faded chartreuse walls were the most noticeable element of the photograph, but I sent it anyway.
Reminding myself to keep it light and fun was complex. I wanted to analyze all these signals, dissecting his comments, smiles, touches into their microscopic parts and ascribing motivation to each, and I wanted a better title than friends.
But I wasn’t doing any of that. This hazy, ambiguous place was the best I was going to get from Sam, and even after a matter of weeks, I wasn’t walking away. We had a history of sorts, a bond formed under intense circumstances, and wewerefriends. I was also a little hooked on him.
Part of me knew I was getting the Sam Walsh Treatment: the panty-dropping smiles, the smoldery scowls, the well-honed lines. I knew the better portion of women in this town were probably familiar with it, too.
