1
When the guy across the aisle on the crowded 56 bus gave me a wary look, I realized I’d been singing.
It happened, okay? Sometimes I caught myself acting out earnest Grammy Award acceptance speeches, too.
But I was hugging a bulging thirty-three-gallon garbage bag and I could suddenly see what I looked like hunched in my window seat, clutching my oversized go bag and dancing like no one was watching, as the country song goes. Except they were. Watching. Just trying not to, obviously. The other passengers on the bus were huddled into their own body heat, studying their phones, napping, surfing the bus’s movements, their heads bobbing as the bus hit another pothole. They all had Christmas shopping bags intheirlaps and the proper, calculated disregard of their fellow man that public transportation demanded.
“What’s your deal?” The guy had leaned toward me, smiling a little. He pulled the Bluetooth earmuff off his ear.
“My deal?”
He was going to have to befarmore specific.
“You in a play or something?” he asked. “Your… costume?”
The guy didn’t know how close to the surface my every emotion was. “Ibegyour Parton?”
“Dolly Parton,” the guy agreed, pleased with himself. He gestured a gloved hand, but generally, as though he didn’t know where to start pointing. With my hair, already backcombed and pinned into victory rolls for the show tonight, or my fringed-arm black leather jacket, much too thin and short for a white-cold Chicago winter day. At my silver toe–capped queen of the rodeo boots, probably, better onstage than on icy sidewalks. Or if he was one for details, maybe he’d picked out the faded picnic-basket gingham of my shirt showing at the collar of the sweater I had to borrow from Alex.
It’s complicated. I’ll tell you who Alex is later.
My deal was none of this guy’s business, but okay, here we go: I’d had bad roommates before and villainous boyfriends for sure—but until now, never at the same time, in the same person. Never had a guy take off, oh, hey, with therentmoney—and now here’s your girl, dead of winter in Chicago, evicted the week before Christmas and, trying to get that sorted, missing a shift at the music shop, strike three, and now unemployed, too.
Mydeal, and you are welcome to it. And none of it my fault.
Well, I guess the first two strikes at the shop were on me.
I looked away from the guy across the bus aisle just in time to catch the vintage neon of McPhee’s Tavern sweeping past. I reached for the stop request—admittedly, a beat too slow. The driver only glanced at me in her rearview and kept going, so I jumped up to make a big, party-sized nuisance of myself, swinging my bag over my shoulder and apologizing my way through some puffer coats to the back exit.
The driver still hadn’t hit the brakes. She’d caught a green light and sailed through the intersection.
“Can you stop before we hitWisconsin, please?”
She’d remembered how to brake, hallelujah, and was pulling to the curb. The bus came to a stop and the driver hit the hydraulics, a little passive-aggressively, I thought, to kneel the bus down. As soon as the light over the exit lit up, I pushed through, chin high. All dignity, that’s me.
The bag caught in the doors and all the other passengers would bepaying full, roadside-crash attention now, wouldn’t they? A familiar electric shame burned under my skin.
Outside, the wind hadteeth. The garbage bag was torn, sagging in the snow, starting to topple. The bus doors folded closed, a final judgment handed down, and I was left breathing transit exhaust, all my worldly possessions spilling to the frozen street.
All the worldly possessions I’d been allowed tokeep. I reached to scrape it all back, cringing at the sight of the blue-black vines tattooed down to my left-hand knuckles grasping at my secondhand clothes. Grasping, needing.
I’d already abandoned my self-respect, begging the landlord, Cam, for access to the apartment. He’d granted five minutes, like one of those money-grab games, except the big door prize in this case was my own crap. I’d already tossed the place for the rent money, of course, as soon as I realized Joey had packed a bag for his sister’s after our fight without paying Cam. I’d ransacked all Joey’s usual hidey-holes: backs of low drawers, tops of high shelves. The empty Brussels sprouts box in the freezer.
I’dreallybeen counting on those Brussels sprouts.
So with my five frantic minutes back in the apartment, I’d had to prioritize, nabbing up the sequined Western dresses I needed for the stage before Cam got any ideas and my square-toed harness boots, the Fryes, which were nonnegotiable for their own value to me as well as for what I stowed inside them. Beyond that, I’d only managed the basics, plus a few concert T-shirts I couldn’t live without. At the last desperate second, I’d grabbed three balled-up pairs of Joey’s thick wool socks—theleasthe owed me, after this week.
FreakingJoey.
What washisdeal? That was the better question. We’d been together three years and had fought plenty of times, mostly musician-to-musician stuff about who got which opportunities and how I never let his band open for mine, even though that was Squad Goal’s founding rule. We didn’t share the stage, even with boyfriends.
Especiallywith boyfriends.
Dating another musician should be an Olympicsport, the high beam of balancing competing egos. I’d really thought Joey and I had figured out how to keep things rock ’n’ roll, but it turns out we were country down to the dirt on our boots.
Overhead, a plane landing at O’Hare sliced through the frozen air.
I threw the trash bag onto my back again, tucked my chin into the collar of my jacket, and threw myself against the gale.
