Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols
Then I disentangled Sam’s handkerchief from the pocket of my discarded jeans and secreted it in the pocket of my dress.
As I clomped downstairs, lugging Sam’s not-quite-empty guitar case in my best imitation of nonchalance, gradually I relaxed, and finally I just walked on through the living room and dumped the case by the door. My granddad wasn’t listening for me. He was doubled over at the kitchen counter, holding his sides.
I was alarmed at first that he was having a heart attack, but he was just laughing, harder than I’d ever seen him laugh, at something Sam had said. He’d lost my grandmom’s apron at some point. Sam chuckled, leaning against the kitchen counter, spinning his fork on a plate to snag the last bite of spaghetti and sautéed zucchini. He glanced up at me, reached behind him, and handed me a full plate, as though he’d cooked it himself. He probably had scooped the food out. He seemed to have taken over my granddad’s house.
He placed his own empty plate in the sink as he said, “But baggage claim found it eventually. Want to see? It’s held up great.” He grabbed his guitar from the kitchen table. As he turned around, he caught my eye, twirled his first finger, and glanced pointedly at my plate, telling me to hurry.
He extended the guitar toward my granddad, who ran his thumb across the “Wright” inlaid on the head. “This is the most delicate part,” my granddad said. “If it held up here, it held up every where.” He nodded toward me. “Bailey did the shading on that inlay, you know.”
Sam gaped in astonishment.
My mouth was full, so I just shook my head and gave my granddad a perplexed look. I’d seen him burn wood inlays to make them look three-dimensional. I hadn’t burned them myself. The most complicated piece of equipment I’d handled at his shop in the last week was a wring mop.
“It was a selling point,” my granddad scolded me, “and you were supposed to go with me on this.” He grinned at Sam. “I guess not everybody can be a salesman like you and me.” He put the guitar strap around his own neck, then plucked the strings, ran his hand along the bottom curve of the body, and launched a fast series of chords. He wasn’t thinking, just testing, more by the feel of the guitar under his hands than the sound of it, from what I could tell. Over the music he asked Sam, “Are you playing anywhere these days?”
“I’m playing with my dad at the mall,” Sam said, “which is of course where I met your beautiful granddaughter today.”
I rolled my eyes, which he didn’t see. He was schmoozing with my granddad, not talking to me.
“Other than that,” Sam said, “no way. I’m going to college on a music scholarship, but my dad says I have to switch my major to business and get a good job before it’s too late. My dad says a band would be a terrible distraction.”
My granddad grimaced. “I think your dad’s probably right about that.” He pulled the strap off over his head and handed the guitar back to Sam.
“Oh, yes sir,” Sam said with a straight face. “My dad has me totally convinced.”
With Sam giving me the hairy eyeball, I ate in record time, then grabbed his guitar case and escaped out the door while he carried his guitar separately. No, this did not look weird at all. I held my breath as I descended the ancient cement stairs down the hill that passed for a front yard, waiting for my granddad to call me back. He didn’t. We placed the guitar case behind the seat of Sam’s truck, on top of his electric guitar case, with his actual acoustic guitar on top of that. My granddad just grinned to us and waved from the front porch.
Sam kept his cool a lot better than I did, but he didn’t waste any time starting the truck and speeding up the shadowy street. At the stop sign, I looked in the rearview mirror and noticed he did, too. My granddad wasn’t running up the dark sidewalk after us.
I fished in my purse for my dark red lipstick and reapplied it in precise strokes. Then I unbuttoned my shrug, shimmied out of it, and dropped it out of sight behind the seat.
Sam had started to press the gas and drive on through the intersection. When he saw me move, he stopped again, looked me up and down, and smiled. “Now, see? You acted like you were so clueless about what you should wear, and you had me worried, when all along you knew exactly what I was talking about.”
“Oh, this passes muster?” I asked archly. With lipstick on, my lips felt stiffer, like somebody else’s lips. I liked that.
“You know it passes muster.” Sam’s voice had been honey sweet since I’d met him, but this time I heard a darker tone as he met my gaze.
My pulse quickened. Maybe his claim to my granddad that he was taking me on a date was more than just a ploy to get me to the gig. Maybe it was wishful thinking, on Sam’s part as well as mine.
He winked at me, then reached behind the seat and produced a cowboy hat, which he settled on his head.
Now I didn’t know what to think. Did the wink mean he’d been kidding when he implied I looked hot? We’d just met—if you didn’t count that one festival years ago when I was completely smitten with him—and I had no idea how to read him. I’d grown so used to Toby and the other people I’d hung out with senior year, whose cardinal rule was to suppress enthusiasm. I didn’t know what to do with this excitable guy with a lust for life and music, who might or might not have had a lust for me.
“What’s wrong?” He glanced over at me as he drove. In the shadows between streetlights, I couldn’t see his face clearly, only his dark hair mashed beneath his hat and curling around his ears.
“I just . . . I don’t know.” Finally I exclaimed, “I can’t believe you flat-out lied to my granddad.”
“Your granddad is wrong,” Sam said simply. We’d turned onto a wider boulevard through town. He slowed to let a car flashing its blinker slide into the lane ahead of him. After a few seconds of thought, the guilt I’d been feeling seemed to register with him, too, because he went on the attack. “You mean to tell me that you’re eighteen years old, you just graduated from high school, and you never in your life lied to your grandparents or your parents about where you were going or what you were doing when you got there? A lot of girls are squeaky-clean like that, more power to them, but you don’t look like one of them.”
I gaped at him. “What is that supposed to—”
“And don’t even start with that,” he insisted. “You look the way you do on purpose. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
I blushed—not the reaction I would have had if I’d ever been able to achieve the screw-you attitude I’d wanted to achieve. On a sigh I admitted, “I did have some pretty wild nights in high school. I just never lied about them.” In fact, now that I thought about it, I’d felt morally superior because I might have been, at various times, a drunk, a pothead, and a bit of a slut (according to girls) or a tease (according to boys, describing the same series of events), but never a liar.
Until now. Sam didn’t even know my real name, and though I hadn’t lied yet about how famous my sister was about to become, I knew I would do it if he asked me a direct enough question. That made my stomach twist. I’d done a lot of bad things, but somehow I retained one fingerhold on this crazy code of honor. I was about to lose even that.
Sam repeated what he’d learned about me that afternoon: “You learned to play fiddle on the bluegrass festival circuit with your sister.”
I nodded. “From the time I was seven years old until last year, that’s pretty much all I did. No Girl Scouts, no sports, no . . .” I stopped myself before I said it, because I would sound pitiful. Then I couldn’t think of anything else to say instead, which made me seem addled. I finished, “Friends.”
“No boyfriends?” This time when he looked over at me, I could see his face clearly in the streetlights. There was no lust there, or jealousy, only curiosity. He wasn’t romantically interested in me. He only wanted to use me for his band. I was okay with that. I just needed to get that message through to my fluttering heart.
“Well, not then,” I admitted, “and not now. I dated in the past year.” Dated was a term I us
I realized I’d been staring at the dashboard in miserable silence when Sam leaned over to see where I was looking. Putting his eyes back on the road, he asked, “What made you quit the bluegrass circuit in the past year? Does it have something to do with why your granddad won’t let you out of the house?”
“No,” I fudged, “that’s just because he didn’t want me playing at a bar.”
Sam wasn’t buying it. “Fess up. It’s more than that. He was acting like he wouldn’t have let you out of his sight if he hadn’t known me and I hadn’t been so charming.”
“And if you hadn’t bought a guitar from him before,” I said dryly.
“There’s that.” He glanced over at me, looked at the road, eyed me again. As he drove, his face and his soft brown eyes brightened under a streetlight, then faded into the darkness. “You’re sure you’re eighteen?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Why does an eighteen-year-old let her granddad treat her like a child? Why is he so strict?”
I turned away from Sam, letting my gaze settle out the window. My granddad’s house was south of downtown, near Music Row, a quiet neighborhood where all the major record company offices were nestled. He lived so close to them, in fact, that some days this week I’d thought I could smell the smoke from the shriveled souls and dashed dreams burning in the record companies’ incinerators out back, wafting a few streets over on the morning breeze. Now Sam and I had steered out of the tree-framed streets and hit West End Avenue through the Vanderbilt campus, where stylish stores and hip bars lined the sidewalks.
Girls and guys strolling hand in hand were dressed a lot like me, and like Sam without the hat. They’d lingered after exams were over, or they lived here full-time because they’d broken away from their parents and no longer spent the summer at “home.” I would be one of these people in August, God willing. Sam was right. It made no sense that my parents had collared me like a dog and tied me to the side of my granddad’s house with a bowl of water and a dirty rawhide bone.
I sighed harder than I’d meant to, then stopped myself right before I rubbed my eyes and smudged my mascara. “I got in some trouble after graduation last Saturday night.”
“Uh-oh. What kind of trouble? Trouble, like, you sprayed Silly String all over the high school auditorium? Or trouble, like, the police came?”
“The police came.”
After the bright college campus, before the even brighter downtown, Sam drove into a darker section of Nashville. Here, decaying factories and crumbling houses waited on the edge of urban renewal. I could tell he was looking at me again only by the way the silhouette of his hat changed shape as he turned his head. He asked quietly, “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. That time.” My nausea over the whole incident lay exactly here. I was being punished unfairly for doing nothing. Yet I had done something that deserved punishment in the past, so maybe I deserved it now.
“I just—” I grabbed my wrist with my other hand and forced my fingers away from my eyes again. I needed one of those rubber dolls whose eyes bulged out when you squeezed it, anything to keep my fingers busy when I wasn’t playing fiddle. “I went to a party after graduation, like everybody. I didn’t drink because I’ve kind of stopped doing that, and my parents were home for once, and I didn’t want to get in trouble.” With my hands I made boxes and graphs on my thighs. “Note all of the ways I was trying to stay out of trouble.
“The crazy thing is, this time last year, I wanted so badly to get in trouble. Every time I tried, I didn’t have the heart. I smoked a joint and I was so paranoid about what it was going to do to my singing voice, on the off chance I ever needed it again, that the high turned bad on me.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I haven’t gotten that far, for the same reason.”
“Don’t. It was unpleasant. I got drunk a couple of times when my parents weren’t coming home until later and wouldn’t find out. But before I go to bed at night, I always . . .”
I was about to admit to him that I wrote songs, but I stopped myself just in time. He’d already dragged me on this adventure I wasn’t sure I wanted to join, just because I played fiddle. If he knew about the songs, I might get myself in deeper trouble with him.
“I always write in my journal,” I said, which was sort of true, if a notebook printed with music staffs could be called a journal, “and I have time for myself. I need that every night. This time my brain didn’t work right. I missed my brain. Whenever I drank, I walked around the whole next day wishing I had those hours back. The more I tried and failed to be a bad girl, the angrier I got. The final injustice was that my parents had ingrained the desire to be a Goody Two-shoes so deeply in me that I couldn’t even shake it at a party after my own high school graduation. I was aware of this and scared of being caught at this crazy party, totally absorbed in myself.” My usual state of mind lately. “I had no idea my boyfriend was high as a fucking space station. And when I rode home with him, he wrecked his car.”
Sam didn’t make a supportive comment like I’d thought he would. He sped on down the boulevard, which was nearly empty in this sparsely populated section of town with no open stores. The driving should have been stress free, but he held the steering wheel tightly with both hands.
Finally he asked quietly, “Was your boyfriend killed?”
“No!” Maybe I shouldn’t have said this like the idea was so ridiculous. We could have been killed, as my parents had said over and over.
“Was anybody hurt?”
“No. Well . . .” As the fluorescent lights of a gas station flashed by out the driver’s side window, I pulled up my dress to show him the ugly green bruise on my right thigh. It was some grade school instinct to show off a nasty scar. As I was doing it, I realized I shouldn’t be showing my upper thigh to a guy I’d just met, or my unattractive bruise to a cute guy no matter how long I’d known him.
He peered over at it. “Ouch!” he exclaimed. “Why did you say no at first? You said nobody was hurt.”
I flipped my skirt down. “Well, you meant was anybody else hurt, right? You were asking if he’d run into anybody. He only drove into a pond and totaled his car.”
Sam gaped at me.
“I know,” I said. “We had to wade out, and there was a big scene. Get this. He was high on coke and he didn’t even tell me.” I started laughing, remembering how shocked I’d been. I’d tried so hard to be bad in the past year, but even I couldn’t fathom snorting coke. The more I thought about it, the harder I laughed, until my sides hurt. I shut myself down with difficulty. It was strange that Sam hadn’t said anything the whole time. I prompted him, “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Sam wasn’t looking at me now. He was staring at the road like the San Andreas Fault had just opened up in the middle of West End Avenue. “Well, yeah.”
“I mean, I know you’ve heard of it. Have you seen it?”
“Yeah.”
He said this so flatly that I suspected there was more to the story. “Have you done it?”
“No. I don’t . . .” He shook his head, suddenly looking way too serious for his lighthearted cowboy hat. “My father is an alcoholic. Sometimes that’s genetic. I might be one, too. If I never have a drink, I’ll never have a problem. Same goes for drugs. If you inherit that addictive personality, that problem with obsession, you’re going to have a harder time kicking than your average Joe. I’m like, live and let live. I don’t judge people. I’m just not going to do it myself.”
“You don’t judge people, except your dad.” And me, for being involved in this crash. Sam’s smile, his animated body language, every-thing I’d liked about him had shut down the instant I mentioned it.
He and I had seen eye to eye on so much already. I’d assumed he would understand what had ha
He didn’t believe me, I realized with a sinking heart.
Nobody did.
What was new?
He pulled to a stop at a light, checked in the mirror and saw nobody was behind us, and turned his whole body to face me. I expected a lecture, and I was going to have to tell him where to go. This was what I got instead: “Bailey. You’re not still dating that guy, are you? You said you weren’t dating anybody, but now you’re referring to this shit as your boyfriend.”
“No,” I said rather desperately. The idea gnawed at the back of my mind that I’d unintentionally lost Sam before I even had him. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, and I didn’t want him to think Toby and I were still together. “Definitely not. My leg really hurt at first. It seems stupid now, but I thought it was broken. Water was seeping into the car. Toby wouldn’t get out. He wouldn’t let me get out. He tried to convince me to take the fall for him.”
“What?” Sam glanced up at the green light, then over at a car dealership, as if considering whether to pull into the lot and grill me on this further. Then he checked his watch, saw we didn’t have much time before the gig, and kept driving. “Take the fall how?”
“Tell the cops and his parents and my parents that I was driving. That’s when he admitted to me that he was high, which explained why he’d been so hot to leave the party all of a sudden, and so paranoid out of nowhere that the cops were coming to break it up. It was also the reason he’d wrecked the car and then screamed at me not to leave it. I was hurt, and he was scaring me. And then he said that I had to take the fall for him because he had everything to lose, a baseball scholarship to Vandy, and I had nothing to lose by taking the blame for the wreck. I was just a washed-up ex-musician.” And you’re never going to amount to anything. You’re just going to sit around and bitch about your sister like you have for the past year.