I cleared my throat.
She dropped her gaze.
We both ricocheted back into our own space. Sanity restored.
“Sorry,” I said, swirling my finger in the air to mimic her curls. “Your hair fell out of place, and I…”
“Oh, I know. It does that all the time,” she answered, swirling her own imaginary lock. “Bad curl.”
I croaked out what I’d intended to be a laugh, but it came out all sexually frustrated. You’d think I was an inexperienced middle schooler the way I was acting around her, and I hadn’t been inexperienced eveninmiddle school.
“Hey, focus,” she said, snapping me out of my head. “Back to the lesson. Are my hands still good?”
She lifted them up to show me that the sticks were still properly positioned.
I gave her a thumbs-up. “You’re a natural.”
“I have a good teacher. Now what?”
“Now, you show me what you’ve got.”
Grace let loose, wild and out of control. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she’d overdosed on bath salts.
“You know what…” I grabbed her hands. “Why don’t we try a beat?”
“I thought that’s what I was doing.”
“No. No. That’s not what you were doing at all,” I said, not even attempting to sugarcoat the rhythmic atrocities she’d just committed. “Try alternating your hands. Right, left, right, left.”
“Ah, good idea. Okay. Hang on. Let me just…”
I watched her mime writing with her right hand and could not, for the life of me, understand what ritual she was performing.
“Uh, Grace?”
She waved off the question I’d yet to ask. “Don’t mind me. Sometimes I get confused by what’s right and left, so I pretend to write something to remind myself.”
“That’s just… really concerning.”
“Stop.” She laughed, tapping the beat into my leg. Entirely incorrectly. Left, right, left, left, right.
I gripped my damp hair, tugging it at the roots. “You’re killing me.”
“Fine,” she sighed. “How about we try it my way?”
Using my thighs as her drum kit, Grace dropped into an actual beat, one without an ounce of that right and left bullshit. She lifted her eyes, and the shine that radiated off her blew my mind. This girl knew exactly what she was doing.
My little Grace Note was actually a damn good percussionist.
9
GRACE: WHEN THE SAVING HAPPENS
His shock was duly noted. I fed off of it, copying some of his performance mannerisms to fully engage my audience of one. Sure, I wasn’t as dynamic as he was, the guy who’d managed to command a small army of musical recruits with the swing of his mighty arms, but I was holding my own in the eyes of the only one who counted—Beats—the hottest street guy in Los Angeles County.
I couldn’t believe I’d just formulated those thoughts in my head. Holy hell, what was I doing? In every single safety-first bedtime story my mother had ever read to me growing up, this very scenario existed. Do not… I repeat… do not go off with a strange man. First chance I got, what did I do? Went off with a strange man. Granted, I hadn’t actually gone off with him. No, it was worse; I’d sat down beside him and made myself comfy. I’d let him tuck a strand of hair behind my ear with such smoldering intensity that I nearly forced my first kiss on him. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, I was now drumming a Shinedown song onto his open thigh.
Mommy would not be pleased.
