I crept over the creaking floorboards of the kitchen to the open door to my room, still trying to place the song.
I poked my head through the doorway to find Sicily sitting cross-legged in front of my closet. She held a fragment of paper and had more in her lap, Post-its and notebook pages, all of it covered in my handwriting.
And my battered Frye boots on her feet.
20
“What thehell, Sicily?” I was across the room in an instant, whipping the paper out of her hands. “What part ofdon’tdid you not understand?”
“Sorry.” She scrabbled to gather all the bits and pieces from where she sat. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“And get my boots off your feet,” I said.
She’d been singing one of my own song fragments.Allmy songs were fragments, of course, just soft-furred baby critters still nuzzled up against me for survival. They couldn’t walk on their skinny, shaking legs yet! But this one, the one I’d taken from her hands, was my most recent failure. The melody still hung out in the air, defenseless.
“Sorry.”Sicily pulled off one boot by the heel. “We wear the same size. I wasn’t stretching them out or anything.”
“That’s actually not the point,” I said, grabbing up the other sticky notes and mouth-wiped cocktail napkins from around her. I smoothed them, poor orphans, into a neat pile. “I assumed the blanketdon’twould covernotsnooping into my private things andnotputting my clothes on your body.”
I’d been stuffing pieces of potential songs into the Frye boots like asavings account, a private one, and now I had nowhere to stow them. I held them to me helplessly. A Post-it fluttered to the ground. It wasn’t a lyric or musical notation but a phone number—and I didn’t remember whose.
“I’ve just always wanted…” Sicily said.
I felt myself stiffen. I wasn’t ready for this slumber party.
“Do you call them cowboyboots?” she asked. “I bet they were expensive.”
“They were secondhand,” I said. “As all of my stuff is.”
“Wow,” she said. “Anticonsumerism.”
“Anti spending money I don’t have,” I said.
But it was probably more than that. I wore other people’s clothes and lived in other people’s homes and sang other people’s songs. I put on other people’s lives. It was easier than living my own.
“Those aren’t secondhand, though,” she said. She had slipped out of the second boot, and now put them side by side near me, retrieved the fallen Post-it, and put it on the upturned crate next to my mattress. She stood, bashful now, in mismatched socks. “The songs, I mean. You wrote them, right? That’s my number, in case you ever… you know. Feel like texting?”
“I don’t have a phone right now,” I said. “And don’t be impressed by that. It’s just my poverty.” I gazed down at the stack of my song notes, my scrawl completely indecipherable—or so I had thought. “You were singing one of the songs. You can read music?”
“I took piano for, like, ever,” she said. “I liked that one.”
“It isn’t finished.”
“Duh,” she said. “It could use somewords.”
It had some lyrics—about the dogs and how wiggly they were. They were very wiggly.
“Areanyof them finished, though?” Sicily said.
I took my stash of songs to my bed and put them under my pillow, then sat on the edge of my mattress and swapped out my red show boots for the Fryes, now that they weren’t being used as a piggy bank. They were warmer.
“Sorry,” Sicily said. She replaced her own boots—the silly suede ones with bows at the back—and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I shouldn’t have… you know. Are you mad at me?”
I sighed. “I’ll get over it if you stop asking me about it.”
“Okay,” she said. “You look… upset. Like you’ve been crying?”
I didn’t want to talk about it. The two streams of my life did not need to cross.
