Sometimes I thought my entire gender should just be eradicated. Maybe it was worth losing the good ones to get rid of this shit.
“I wasn’t cool with it and I wanted to leave because I didn’t feel safe, but I was hammered. I called my brother without thinking and he said he’d come to get me, but when I saw how bad the storm was, I tried to call him back. I know this is going to be hard for you to grasp, but back in ye olden times, we didn’t have cellphones and he’d already left the house, so he showed up not long after that. I got in the car and thought about just telling him to stay there with me and wait it out, but I’d already drunkenly blurted out why I wanted to leave and knew he’d knock my boyfriend’s teeth out if we went in. We hydroplaned on an overpass on the way home and he didn’t make it. I barely had a scratch on me.”
I pulled her closer, aching at the guilt I could hear in her voice.
“I’ve been to lots and lots of therapy. I know objectively that it wasn’t my fault, but nothing is ever truly going to convince me of that. I went off the rails hard after it happened. My parents hated me. The story that made the rounds was that I’d had sex with all the guys and was so drunk my brother had to come get me. I didn’t even care. Oh God,” she said with a forced laugh, “I accused Miss Alice of being Debbie Downer, but I’m over here giving you the whole sob story.”
She was trying to deflect with humor, but I didn’t need her to. “I’m here for the hard stuff too, baby. If you’ll trust me with it.”
She gave a broken laugh. “Okay, but you can’t say shit like that to me right now because I’m not going to cry about this again. I’m done crying about it. I fucked my life up for years thinking I didn’t deserve to have one, but I pulled it together and I’ve clawed my way to a career and a future.”
“If he loved you like you said he did, he’d want you to forgive yourself,” I said.
“I can’t seem to stop fucking up long enough to forgive myself. I shouldn’t have come,” she said miserably. “Anytime I do something on impulse, something for me, all it does is bring trouble to people I care about.”
I lifted her chin. “You decided to be with me on impulse and that hasn’t brought trouble.”
She brushed her fingertips across my cheek where I was sure a black eye was beginning to bloom. “Hasn’t it?”
I wrapped her in my arms, wishing I could take away her guilt. “Some things are worth a little trouble.”
18
MAIA
Then
* * *
“You can’t go onstage like that.” The voice on the other end of Zane’s phone call was so loud, I could make out what he was saying.
We’d stopped for gas not far from Zane’s mom’s neighborhood and he took the chance to call his manager. He sent ahead a picture of his black eye, knowing he needed to give them a heads-up.
“I couldn’t make out the whole conversation, but words likebrandandimagegot thrown around a lot while Zane patiently deflected it all.
When he hung up, he gave me a quick kiss. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah…” I said tentatively. “Are they not letting you play?”
He shrugged. “He’ll come around. I’ll wear some sunglasses. Maybe they’ll just have to recraft our image so I’m the bad boy, right?”
I forced myself to embrace the humor even though I felt guilty as hell. “I could picture you in leather. You’d rock it more than Johnny does with the overblown swagger.”
When we got closer to his neighborhood, I looked around and said, “So you’re a suburban kid. That tracks.”
“Yeah, yeah…I had allll the first world problems.”
I nudged him with my knee. “Go on then. I told you my whole childhood sob story. What do you have, city boy?”
He laughed. “Nothing I should be complaining about. My family is close; we never struggled for money even if we weren’t rich. I just got kinda buried under it all. Everything in my life was so controlled by adults, so over scheduled all the time that I sometimes wonder if I even know what I want for myself or if I just let everyone else tell me.
“I went to school all day and then went to whatever sports practice was in season, then I went home, did my homework, did my chores, went to bed, and got up to do it all over again the next day. On the weekends we usually had games or tournaments. I didn’t get to decide how I spent any of my days. Didn’t get to decide how or what I learned or how I wanted to train that day.”
“The horrors of growing up in suburbia!” I teased, but rubbed his thigh. “Really, though…that sounds oppressive. If you don’t ever have time to yourself, time to be bored even, you can’t really figure yourself out.”
Another reminder that he was still so early on that journey…
“I didn’t start playing guitar until high school and it was a game changer. It was mine. I could experiment and play what I wanted and there was no one there telling me to practice or what to play. The music set me free. My parents were devastated when I said I wasn’t going to college like my brother Alex did, but I didn’t want to go into another system where someone else was going to dictate my time. I wanted to know what it would be like to just exist as a person, wait tables to pay my bills, and see where the music took me.”
