“I need to hear that at practice tomorrow,” she says.
“I’ll tell Reed,” I say.
Her expression falters, and she begins to fidget with her fingers. “Don’t… don’t tell him I came here tonight. He gets all weird, and I don’t want… I don’t want him to think we’re anything more than friends,” she says.
I want to fall into the deep end of the pool and never come up for air.
I know she’s right, and I fucking hate it.
I take a sip of my drink and watch her a second longer. “What else could we be?” I ask.
I know it’s a gamble.
I know even mentioning it is stupid.
Being with her could ruin everything. The only family I’ve ever known. My best friend. The band. My career. It could fuck up everything I’ve worked for.
Looking at her, I don’t know that I care.
Andi sits her cup on the coffee table, and I brace myself for the pain she’s about to inflict.
However, the thought of whatever this is goes amiss when the next song comes on.
Andi looks like she can’t believe her own ears. Her bright eyes lift to mine, the sorrowful haze that had just been present in them a moment before completely gone.
“Stop it,” she says. “This… You havethissong on here?”
It’s an older song, and as the first few beats play, I know why she’s in disbelief that I would keep it on my playlist after all these years.
Behind my eyes, all I see is a memory at least thirteen years old of Andi trying her hardest to get Koen and Kamden to dance and rock out with her in the basement of their old home. It’s a bittersweet memory, one that makes me fall down the rabbit hole as I look at her and see the same fucked up nostalgia in her eyes.
In a blink, we’re back at the old house.
Randall and Tina are shouting upstairs with Andi’s mom, Alice, on one of her determined outbursts and episodes as she tries to take Andi away from them.
There’s a chair beneath the basement door handle that slides every time someone forcefully rattles the knob.
The boombox is at its very loudest to drown out the noise, to distract the youngest members of the Matthews family, and to protect their innocent ears from the pain happening just above them.
And despite the tears in her bloodshot eyes or the ones silently rolling down her cheeks, Andi is spinning Koen and Kamden and forcing a smile on her face and laughter to sound from her throat. She’s moving their arms and playing the air guitar with Reed while I sit on the back of the couch and turn the music up louder and louder.
Anything to drown out the suffocating horrors that eventually cause the neighbors to call the cops.
And Andi… she’s trying everything she can to rescue the rest of us from the things she can’t save herself from.
I see the same memory swimming behind her now glistening eyes, and I rise to my feet.
“Come here,” I say with a gesture of my hands.
She gives me a confused look. “What?”
“It’s time someone danced with you.”
Something between a laugh and a sob chokes her, and when she doesn’t rise immediately, I take her by the wrists and pull her to her feet.
I’m a terrible dancer.
For her…
