And then vaguely I remember telling Brody about my volunteering that first time we went out for coffee, and we were talking about schedules, and I can’t fucking remember if I mentioned that I manned the chatline alone on Wednesday nights…
But then, this is also a symptom of my anxiety. This kind of paranoia.
The truth is I don’t even know what made me think of Brody. According to David, who spoke to the local detective, the investigation is still ongoing, but if Liz said he assaulted her then I have to believe he did, right? Why would anyone lie about something like that?
But why would Brody contact me at all, let alone anonymously like this?
David’s accusations of Brody being a “creepy stalker”—my own accusations—ring through my mind, and despite logic telling me it was more than likely just a stranger using the program for exactly the purpose it was intended, I can’t escape the gut feeling that there was something personal about it. Maybe even something sinister.
* * *
“Honey, I’m home!” I call out.
The sweet and sour aroma of delicious, greasy Chinese food fills the apartment, and my mouth waters. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.
I find David at the breakfast bar, book in hand, the counter topped with unopened cardboard containers. “You didn’t have to wait for me.”
David closes the book and sets it down. “Food just got here a few minutes ago.”
He’d have waited anyway, and we both know it. David, for all his zero-fucks-given attitude, can be thoughtful when he wants to be.
His phone starts buzzing a moment before Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” starts blaring from its speaker, and David silences it without so much as glancing at the screen, or acknowledging it, for that matter. He doesn’t even meet my gaze until I start laughing out loud, raising his eyebrows in question until he notices my attention on his phone.
“Was that your pimp?” I tease. “Do you have to go to work?”
David rolls his eyes, but his mouth twitches, and I don’t miss it. “Bogart programmed his own ringtone,” he explains. “Don’t ask.”
“You could change it, you know.” I try unsuccessfully to suppress my amused smile.
David’s eyes spark with mirth. “I did, actually. He changed it back. And technically he gets to—BEG rules, and he’s chapter president…” His full lips quirk up. “Why, Bea? Are you going to pretend like you still hate hip-hop?”
My cheeks burn with the strength of my grin but still, I shrug, messing with him. “It’s all right, I guess.” But my expression gives me away easily, and, of course, David knows the truth.
And the truth is I did hate hip-hop. I loathed it. I was a daddy’s girl, after all—the daddy he was when he hadn’t been drinking, anyway—and my dad had had me addicted to his favorite classic rock albums since before conscious memory. Literally, in fact, since my mother always swore he played them for me in utero.
The Stones, The Doors, The Who—they were the bands I fell in love with, the songs I learned to move to—to dance to. Music always had magical properties for me, and dancing is—was—one of the very few things in my life that has ever come naturally to me. And as I got a little older and found myself shying away from my classmates, struggling more and more to connect to kids my own age, I would increasingly turn to music instead. Because when my body moved to a song almost on impulse, all of the obsessive thoughts and worries that somehow seemed to both plague me constantly and attack at random were notably quiet. It was almost as if they, too, wanted to hear the music.
Music freed my soul, and dance, my body.
That is, until my father left.
But I couldn’t help what my subconscious had connected to that music—music that, no matter their melody or lyrics, would do nothing but slice open festering, unhealed wounds. My loyalty to my father’s classic rock bands disappeared with the man himself, so in the years after he left, with years still to go before he’d come back into our lives, I’d lost not only my father and the music I grew up loving, but the freedom of dancing to it—dancing at all—as well.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. It just happened. When you have a pain response to a stimulus, you avoid it at all costs. You burn your hand on the stove, and you don’t touch the stove the next time. A song gut-punches you until you can’t breathe, you turn off the damned radio app. And you don’t turn it back on. By the time I realized I’d been avoiding music altogether, I’d already stopped my dance lessons and quietly quit the team.
I don’t know if David even knew that when he reintroduced me to hip-hop, a genre I’d thought I couldn’t stand.
He gets up and starts opening the Chinese food containers before handing me a pair of chopsticks.
“All right, huh?” David nonchalantly clicks around on his phone until Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life album starts playing, and he bursts into laughter as, after no more than a minute max, my shoulders start bobbing of their own volition as the song demands, bounce with me, bounce with me…
I concede with a smile, and get us each a bottle of water from the fridge. I wonder just how much he remembers about that night. If he ever realized just what he’d given back to me in offering me music that sounded nothing like my father’s favorites.
“Do you remember that club you snuck me into in Puerto Rico?” I ask him. We’d continued our shared family vacations after my dad left, and one night, on a trip to Puerto Rico, Sammy had met a girl, leaving me alone with David. I hadn’t complained.
David’s smirk stretches wider. “You mean the hip-hop club?”
“Ha.” But I take a massive bite of my egg roll just to give my mouth something to do other than grin like an idiot. It was only months before I met Brian, and I was schoolgirl-crushing on David hard. The resort we were staying in had a couple of nightclubs, including a teen club, and a few of the other kids had invited us—well, really just David—to join them there that night. I’d been upset because there was a minimum age requirement of fifteen, and I was still several months shy, so when David declined, I stayed quiet.
