“What if the moment just passes me by?” I sighed, as hope’s fragile light flickered inside my chest.
Summer looked over at me as I studied my reflection in the mirror. My faraway eyes came back down to earth, catching her worried expression. Summer was accustomed to watching me leave the present—she knew when my mind was wandering. It was simply my brain’s fault: I gravitated toward building irrelevant scenarios in my head. Unfortunately, today’s scenario was all too relevant.
Summer cleared her throat as she clasped a thick gold bracelet around her wrist, letting me know it was Less-Devastating Topic Time.
“So, is Garrett coming tonight?” she asked.
I froze. Her words found my chest: a fist tightening around my delicate heart.
“I doubt he’s coming,” I muttered.
Summer had sent the invites out five weeks ago—a casual birthday comingling thanks to a free Dave Matthews Band concert in Central Park. Shamefully, Garrett Scholl’s was a courtesy invite—one I was certain he would turn down, but one I knew I had to have Summer send. Let me be clear: it was a courtesy invite for me, not for Garrett. Leaving Garrett off the guest list would have been an acknowledgment that we had fully died. I wasn’t ready to bury one of the most important friendships of my life, even if the coffin was already sitting in the earth, waiting for the ground crew.
“You told me you guys had a good chat—I figured everything was cool now. Back to being besties.”
“The conversation was good, it’s just…” I shrugged. “He’s been kind of distant since then.”
Distant was generous. Dead silent was more accurate. Summer stepped closer to me with her steely Olivia Benson expression.
“What aren’t you telling me, Maggie?”
“Nothing.”
I grabbed a pair of black matte Louboutins from the shelf behind Summer, deflecting with high fashion. Summer rolled her eyes.
“I told you, men like to compartmentalize. He’s got you in a box.”
“I opened the box,” I said forcefully.
Summer’s eyes widened.
“You opened the box?”
I nodded.
“You’re in love with him again, aren’t you?” she said.
“Again” implied I had stopped loving him. I had spent the last year adamant about the fact that I wasn’t in love with Garrett, shutting the conversation down so that Summer would stop convincing me to pour my heart out to him already.
I had, unfortunately, not stopped loving Garrett Scholl since the night I heard his voice.
3
TWENTY-THREE
THE SKIES DECIDED TO OPEN up after Summer and I concluded that we were too close to our next destination to slip into a cab. We had just finished drinks with a small group of friends who all had big workweeks ahead and couldn’t rage on a Monday night. Summer also had a huge week ahead, but she refused to let me go home before midnight on my goddamn twenty-third birthday. I had a big week as well: playing two different night gigs, singing at a wedding ceremony, cold-calling bookers around the city, and trespassing. My lunch hour was spent hovering around the doorsteps of recording studios, until I curved my body in behind a delivery messenger. I’d slide my demo onto their packages and duck away—just hoping my voice would land in a producer’s hand. My second demo was five songs long, homemade inside my mom’s soundproof closet. Maybe twenty-three would be the year someone listened to one of the songs.
Summer and I sprinted through three rainy blocks on the Lower East Side and arrived at Arlene’s Grocery, a former bodega turned iconic dive bar, soaked from our heads to our heels. My white ribbed dress was see-through, and underneath I wore a black bra, so all in all, I looked ready to rock.
It was live music karaoke night at Arlene’s Grocery, and our first stop was the amber-lit packed bar. Summer ordered us two cheap beers, and suddenly, dopamine hit the back of my brain. The chords thumped against my heart—E minor, C, G, D over F sharp—the grungy electric guitar tugged my body away from the bar, edging my bare wet shoulder past the crowd of hipsters and toward the purple-lit stage like a moth to a flame.
My guitar teacher introduced me to The Cranberries’ “Zombie” when I was ten. It was the melody behind my ears when I was told that my brain was wired differently. “I like the way this song sounds—dark blue and mustard,” I said as my guitar teacher played it for me on his boom box. Up until that point, I thought everyone heard music this way, but my guitar teacher looked at me wide-eyed, before explaining that I had a special neurological gift: synesthesia. I could see music in color, and I could taste specific words—some were bitter against my gums, and some danced on my tongue like a packet of sugar.
I peered over the heads to see who was responsible for this time machine, for the taste of salt and vinegar on my tongue and midnight blue behind my eyes. Strangely, the buzz of nostalgia shifted—now strangled inside my throat—as I locked eyes with the voice. He was wearing a vintage R.E.M. T-shirt and was built like a machine gun, with biceps that flexed as he gripped two white-knuckled fists around the microphone shaft with such intensity that I was certain the cord was an extension of his lips. I, Maggie Vine, was so, so, so fucked.
“You’re so fucked,” Summer whispered in my ear.
I aimlessly seized the cold beer from Summer’s hand, with my eyes glued to the singer. What good were eyes if I didn’t use them to take in every inch of this guy?
This singer—whoever he was—sent my body into a tailspin. He swept his thick, wavy blond hair to one side of his angular jawline, revealing a face so handsome it belonged inside the pages of a magazine—a face teenage Maggie would have torn out of YM and taped over her bed. It wasn’t just his beauty that leveled me, it was the way his entire body stirred with the song: music meant something to him, which meant everything to me. He moved in slow motion as sweat poured down his neck and onto his tightening veins, his raspy voice turning Dolores O’Riordan’s mezzo-soprano voice into something both violent and gorgeous. The live backup band was at his mercy—their eyes just as wide as mine.
“So, so, so fucked,” I said, open-mouthed.
He finished the song to a chorus of applause and effortlessly jumped off the stage with a one-sided grin. I watched him wrap one arm around his friend, a cheering young woman. I didn’t know which was worse: the thought of him belonging to someone else, or the thought that he could belong to me. He laughed into a drink, going on with his normal life as if he hadn’t just brought a complete stranger to her emotional knees. Instantly, I knew that loving this man could only destroy me.
“You’re next,” Summer interrupted.
She flicked her eyes up to the ceiling and sipped her beer with a straw, refusing to let cheap ale ruin her perfect magenta lips.
“What? I can’t follow him. Are you serious?”
“I called ahead and they slotted you in, birthday girl,” Summer said as she bumped her shoulder against mine. “And don’t be ridiculous. No one can follow you.”
Under normal circumstances, sure. I was the best act you’d see at any karaoke bar, unless Lady Gaga strolled on in. The measuring stick for wowing drunk dive bar patrons in New York City wasn’t set too high. That was then. Before this guy.