Her next song is even better. Loud and angry. She pulls sounds from those strings that I didn’t think were possible, like she’s playing two guitars or three. I can’t keep track of her fingers to figure out how she does it. But even if I could—I mean, it’s not like I know enough about playing to pick it up from watching someone else.
I want to hear it all, every word, every note, but I get stuck in my head. I can’t stop thinking about how I have to get on that stage and my songs don’t have similes or metaphors or fancy fingerpicking. I can’t stop picturing myself forgetting how to hold my guitar, opening my mouth to squawk like a ragged old crow.
All of a sudden, everyone’s clapping. Some people are even standing to applaud for Marion Strong. I clap hard and my palms sting. Marion bows her head slightly and smiles, her moon face ruddy and shining and gorgeous.
The scarecrow guy gets up on stage. I tap Jim’s shoulder. “Watch my guitar?”
He nods.
I weave through the seats and tables, trying not to look at the people. I don’t want to think about all those eyes watching me, or worse, not watching me. All those eyes looking at their neighbor, widening to say, Who does this chick think she is?
In the bathroom mirror, I stare at my own eyes. I look at them until they sting because I don’t let myself blink and it smells like someone smoked a clove in here not too long ago. When I finally do blink, my eyelashes get wet. I rip a piece of paper towel from the roll on the sink, fold the corner and brush it under my lower lashes to dry them before my mascara runs. I sort through my bag, find my eyeliner and focus everything on lining my eyes with a thin black line. I pretend I’m an ant, following the curve of my lashes, the way we learned to do line drawings in art class. Slow. Millimeters at a time, until I don’t hear the crowd and I don’t hear the music. I just hear my breath. In and out. So warm it fogs the mirror. I smudge the lines with a twisted piece of paper towel. By the time I’m done my body is loose and warm, my head floating on my neck.
I go out and take my seat, trying hard to cling to the calm. My index finger has a smudge of eyeliner on the nail. I fixate on the smudge until the next singer is done, and the next one too, and Scarecrow Man is on stage again.
“Now we have two untitled originals from April.”
My heart squeezes tight like a fist. I flip my guitar case on its back and undo the latches.
The scarecrow shuffles papers on the clipboard. “Just April? Looks like we have a Madonna on our hands.”
Everyone laughs, but I pretend they aren’t real. They are eyeless. They are bowling pins. Giant black bowling pins in chairs, wearing hats and beaded necklaces, hand-woven shawls. They can’t see me, and I can’t hear them.
I climb on stage and sit on the stool. I don’t know what to do with the microphone. Scarecrow must sense that, because he’s almost back to his seat, but he returns to pull the mic closer and angle it at my mouth. “Thanks,” I say, and it echoes through the room, bouncing off the bowling pins.
My first strum sounds wrong and I realize my fingers are not where they should be. I strum again, pretend to fiddle with the tuning. “Okay,” I say into the mic once my fingers are firmly in their starting position.
I strum three times, close my eyes and start to sing:
Your eyes tell me what we’re gonna do,
And it’s not like I haven’t thought it too,
And it’s not like it’s wrong.
No, it’s not like that.
So I close my eyes, and you take my hand.
We’re both in the right place,
And it seems like the right time…
The right time.
I keep my eyelids shut tight and hear my voice coming back to me from the corners of the room. Bowling pins wearing wire-rimmed glasses, the black lines around my eyes, the change from Mrs. Varnick’s car, hot water in a cup. I think of all these things and I see myself on stage, like I’m up in the rafters watching.
When I’m done, there’s applause and it’s loud, and the audience is full of people again. People who like me. It’s not polite. It’s real and it just keeps going. I wait and wait. I adjust my guitar on my lap and the applause dies to a few random claps.
For the next song, I am brave. I sing about my father. I sing, “Don’t forget you made me. Don’t forget you made me the way I am.” And I look right at people in the audience. Right in their eyes, like I wrote the song about them. A guy with dreadlocks, King Neptune, the scarecrow. I sing to Marion Strong and the girl with the white eyelashes. I finish the song looking right into Jim’s eyes. When it’s over, he stands to clap. A few other people stand too, and the applause is the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.