Christmas with a Rockstar (Rock Revenge Trilogy 3.50)

He pulls his hat from his head and a pile of dreamy hair flops to both sides before his other hand runs through it. I bet it’s soft. I don’t even care if it’s sweaty. He nods with a jerk of his head, lifting his chin as if to ask me what.

“Your band better not suck,” I say. A wave of nausea threatens me because that was really out of my comfort zone, but the sickness subsides when I see him chuckle.

“Find out for yourself. Come by when you hear us. You’ll know when,” he says.

I nod back, hoping it looks just like it did when he did it—that it looks cool, and a little sexy. Maybe bad-ass.

Nothing like me.

I can’t believe I have fucking ice cream on my shirt.

Two weeks went by before I finally heard music blaring from the open garage at the end of my street. I’d seen Jesse at school, though, when we started back after break. He was quickly labeled the “new guy” and had a table of fawning girls that rotated with a different set every lunch hour. He didn’t talk much. But when he was done eating, he would pull out his guitar and play. Never a song, and never anything someone begged him to play for them. He was working out melodies and trying to find something special. A few times, I thought he did.

It didn’t matter to his new legion of fans. Sitting on top of a lunch table with a guitar propped on his thigh and his tongue caught between his teeth was perfection. He played nothing but starts and stops of strings of notes, his fingers sometimes just fumbling around in frustration. To every girl in my senior class, he was a rock god. To me, he was thoughtful.

Sam tried to force me over to his table a few times, partly to be a little more interesting to him than the other girls, but mostly to push me because she could tell I was gone. That’s not how I want to be with him, though. I’ve already set the rules up that I’m not easily impressed, so I can’t get weak when I hear him borrow bits from Clapton or Zeppelin and try to rearrange them for his own sound.

But tonight is different. I was starting to give up on ever hearing what he promised—an invitation. So when it finally came, I texted Sam to meet me in my driveaway. She pulls up on their third run-through of a song I’ve somehow already memorized.

“Are we finally doing this?” She sounds a little buzzed. I tilt my head, and she gives it up quickly, flashing the water bottle she’s switched out with vodka. She’ll be spending the night, and we’ll be climbing in through my window.

“Courage?” She takes one more sip and holds the uncapped bottle out for me. I consider it for a moment, but I’m not really a drinker. Sometimes, at house parties in the Valley, but never much. My job is usually to keep Sam out of trouble and make sure we both get home.

I shake my head and she shrugs, tucking the bottle back inside her leather jacket. She pulls it tight as we start to walk down my street toward the sound, her boot heels clicking along the sidewalk. We’re both wearing the same color of dark, skinny jeans, but she’s rocking a runway look while I had to steal a bootlace from my dad for my Docs. I changed a dozen times, trying to find that perfect combination of flannel shirt, torn sweatshirt, classic band T-shirt, ripped jeans, shorts. I ended up with the first thing I tried—the outfit that makes me look just like Jesse. The closer we get to his house, though, the more I regret that choice.

We step in at the side, and I lean into the wall while Sam tucks her thumbs in her pockets and nods her head to the beat. I don’t know any of the guys playing with him, but they all look like they’re our age. The guy on drums has really long hair that’s tangled and sweaty, a mess that gets worse every time he bangs his head forward as he swats at the cymbal. He’s trying to look the part, but so far, he plays like shit. The bass guitar player looks like a guy applying for Harvard, a faded polo shirt and cuffed khakis that amuse me. He’s a solid player, though, so I give him a break. Jesse and another guy play guitar facing each other, not as in sync as they should be, and I can see the growing frustration on Jesse’s face.

He finally breaks their jam, slinging his guitar to his side and waving his hand while he shouts “Stop, stop!”

“Dude, this has to be good. Come on!” He throws his pick at the other guitar player, hitting him in the chest with it. The guy slaps it against his shirt, missing, and it falls to the concrete floor. His friend nods our direction and Jesse glances over his shoulder.

“Oh yeah, hey,” he says. The most disinterested and unimpressed welcome ever.

Your band isn’t even that good. My eyes lower with my inner thought, trying to act vicious, but Sam just flips him off when he turns his back. It amuses the Harvard boy, but his laugh is short enough to go unnoticed by anyone but me.

“Let’s sit, yeah?” Sam points to an old couch pushed against the wall, flanked by two stacks of boxes still left to be unpacked. Maybe it’s stuff that’s meant to just live in the garage, “forever storage,” as my mom calls it.

I walk behind my friend and sit on the end farthest away from the band, sinking in deep enough to feel the missing springs under the couch cushions. Sam swings one of her long legs over the other, and I attempt to do the same, only my jeans feel a lot tighter than hers must because the inside of my knee slides down the length of my thigh and to the boney part of my other knee cap. I hold the position for a few seconds so it doesn’t look like I missed at crossing my legs, but I have to give up when it starts to hurt. I opt to bring my feet up and cross them crisscross style.

“Let’s go again,” Jesse says, snapping a few times for what I guess is a count, and his drummer picks up and starts the same sloppy rhythm as before.

For a few seconds, Jesse’s eyes meet mine, and everything about it squeezes my chest. Thin lines make parenthesis to the right side of his lips, and I smile in response. I feel singled out somehow, even though I know Sam and I are their only real audience. I recognize bits and pieces of what he’s playing, the few bars he spent the week working out for his fans at lunch. They fit here, and he likes it. That dimple grows deeper as his eyes peel away, and I sink back into the sofa with a cleansing breath.

“He’s pretty good, yeah?” Sam speaks out of the side of her mouth, her body moving with the music where she sits, the motion making me rock a little. It’s kind of annoying but we all feel things differently. Sam likes to move. I like to watch.

“He’s a’right,” I shrug. He’s more than alright, but saying so would go against that new version of me I invented the other night.

My eyes close in on his mouth, and his tongue swipes along his lips as he opens them and leans into the mic, putting his weight on one foot. It’s practically a kiss against the metal the way his lips hum a few indiscernible words into the microphone, and his eyes close to show how much he’s in love with this particular song.

He wrote it. I can tell.

“You left me ripped wide open, bleeding out for nobody to ever notice. All I am is tug-of-war and poison, dirty secret nobody’s chosen…”

His bottom lip hangs open at that last word. It might just be in my imagination, but I swear it trembles with genuine pain. His eyes slowly open with the tilt of his head, and I think it’s an accident that they’re set on me, but they hold their focus through the next verse, and I feel every wound that those words intend as if they’re personal.

“Burning bright and high as an eagle, falling to the depths of that evil, swallowed up and swimming in darkness, your lack of love is so fucking thoughtless…”

I’m no longer smiling. I don’t think I’m supposed to. That’s not the point of this song, and the fact that his drummer thinks it’s time to bang his head and thrash like a fool makes me want to choke him with his own, raggedy-ass hair.