“Are you always so…confident?”
“You were going to say ‘cocky,’ weren’t you?”
“No,” I lie.
He gives me anI don’t believe you at allsmile.
It’s a nice smile. I move us on from it. “You want to be a musician?”
He shifts position so he can face me better. “We’re really doing this thing?”
“What thing?”
“What Fifi told us to do. The get-to-know-each-other thing.”
“If there was a ballroom dance mafia, Fifi would be the kingpin. Our lives will be easier if we just do what she says.”
“I feel you,” he says with a quick laugh. He looks back at the clubs as we pass them. “I’m a musician already. What I want is to be a rock star. I want world domination. I want the big stadium. The sold-out shows. The cover ofRolling Stone.The induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
“The groupies,” I interject.
He laughs and shrugs.
“But the odds are so against you,” I say.
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” He sounds defiant and tired at the same time.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to tell him that his probability of making it is low. I wonder how his parents feel about his big dream. Parents don’t usually love it when their kids take risks with their futures.
“You know what, though?” I say. “If everybody thought about the odds, there’d be no rock stars in the first place.”
His smile comes back, and I’m happier about it than I probably should be.
Our bus pulls up to a stoplight. A few pedestrians wave likewe’rethe actual celebrities.
“So you moved out here to become a rock star?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
He examines my face for a few seconds. I get the feeling he’s trying to decide how much to trust me with. “A friend of mine died last year. Clay. He was our bassist.”
“Oh, X, I’m so sorry.”
He nods down at his hands. “Me too.”
I don’t think he’s going to say anything else, but then he does. “The band was me, Clay, Jamal on drums and Kevin on keys. We almost called ourselves The Lonely Onlys.”
“How come?”
“Not a whole lot of Black kids in the Lake Elizabeth school system,” he says with a smile. “Clay and I knew each other from middle school. We met Kevin and Jamal at band tryout freshman year of high school. We said it was a miracle that there were four of us.” The memory of the day is in his eyes. “And before you give me a hard time again, I didn’t pick the name X Machine myself.”
“When did I give you a hard time?”
“Seriously? You don’t remember? When we first met. Your exact words were ‘So the band is named after you?’ ”
“Are you sure?” I ask, even though I remember perfectly. “That doesn’t sound like me.”
