I picked up the cassette and flipped it around to see if anything was written on the other side. My father had a cassette player in his office, though I had no idea why or what he ever did with it. I’d have to wait until he went to work tomorrow to sneak in there and use it.
I placed the cassette back into the box and read Sheba’s letter for the third time. Just as I was finishing, I heard my parents enter the house. The stairs were carpeted, but I could hear my mother pattering toward me. Sure enough, in a minute there was a knock on the door.
“How are you, dear?”
“I’m okay.” I reached behind me and flushed the toilet.
“I’ll get the Pepto-Bismol.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Did you take your temperature?”
“Yeah. It’s normal.”
There was silence for a moment as my mother thought this through. “Must be something you ate.”
I stared at the cassette and letter. I could sense my mother breathing on the other side of the door.
“Did you have something after breakfast?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t say nope.”
“No.”
“You didn’t eat anything at church?”
I thought for a second. I had become such an accomplished liar over the summer that it was easy to say, “Yes. There were cookies in the robe room.”
“Who brought them in?”
“No idea. Chocolate chip. They were really soft.”
“Hm. Underbaked, I suppose.”
“Yup.”
“Don’t say yup.”
“Yes.” My eyes were on the cassette. On Jimmy’s writing. My name. I flushed the toilet again, and then folded up the letter and placed it back in the box with the cassette. While the toilet was still running, I hid the box in the back of the bottom drawer of the vanity, beneath a plastic container of pink sponge curlers. Then I turned on the water and washed my hands. I didn’t leave until I’d heard the gentle sh-sh-sh of my mother descending the stairs.
The next morning, after my father had left for work and while my mother was in the shower, I snuck down the hall to my dad’s office. Behind the massive desk were built-in cupboards, and in one of the cupboards was a tape recorder.
I opened the cupboard and glanced around. I didn’t want to move anything unless I absolutely had to. I stuck my arm in and wiggled past two stacks of documents. My fingers tapped something hard and plastic.
Carefully, I removed one stack of documents and set it on the floor. Then I removed the tape recorder and placed it on my father’s desk.
I stuck my head out the office door to make sure my mother was still in the shower, and then returned to the cassette player and hit stop/eject. The clear panel popped open and I shoved in the cassette with a satisfying plastic click. I pushed the door shut （another gratifying click） and hit play.
Jimmy’s voice filled the room, so clear it sounded like he was standing beside me. “Mary Jane! What the hell, girlie, you are missed! Here’s the title track of my new album. I sure as fuck hope you like it.” I nodded my head, smiling, as if Jimmy could see me.
I leaned closer to the tape recorder and heard some background fuzziness followed by silence. And then the song began with a simple drumbeat that had a wooden tick-tick-tick sound to it. Next a bass guitar came in, strumming a two-four beat. There was anticipation in the music; I could hear it was building to something. Just when I couldn’t take the tension of waiting, Jimmy’s raspy, throaty voice started in. “Mary Jane!” My body jolted at the sound of my name. My skin felt inflamed. I wanted to pat myself all over, like tamping out a fire on my flesh. As the song continued I was no longer in my father’s office, standing beside the cassette player. I was in the Cones’ kitchen. The smell of birds in a nest on the stove. Izzy’s hair glinting in the sunshine that bolted through the window. And Jimmy beside her, his furry chest exposed, playing guitar and singing in the grumble of a low-riding motorcycle.
“Mary Jane!” Jimmy sang. My head buzzed with tiny explosions as I imagined a version of myself that matched Jimmy’s throaty words. . . . “She feeds you, but she ain’t never gonna bleed you. . . .” Soon, the buzzing calmed and it felt like a glowing white light flowed straight out of the tape recorder and into my veins. I was filled by it. Floating. This song, Jimmy’s song, was about the me I had become at the Cones’。 It wasn’t anyone my parents would recognize. It might not have been anyone they wanted me to be. But maybe, I hoped, I really was that person now. The girl Jimmy saw when he sang . . . “She don’t smoke, no—everything went silent for a beat and then—“MARY JANE! A voice sweet as honey, SUCKLE, honey, DROPS, honey, DARLING, honey, BABY, sweet, MARY JANE!”