Truth

Her eyebrow hitched. “You look pretty comfortable to me, sprawled out on my bed.”

I blinked, not moving my indolent posture. “You first.”

She pulled back, confused. “Me first?”

I sat up a little taller and stared at her. “What do my shows make you feel?”

Should I have wanted to know the answer to that? No. Because why should I have cared? She was my music teacher, and whether or not my shows had any effect on her shouldn’t really cross over to my music-making and our lessons. But I wanted to know. I wanted to know if that look of awe in her eyes was for the song. My words? Or was it my tone? Maybe just the music in general? What was it? What did she feel?

Brooklyn stared back at me, our eyes locking onto one another. It was strange how, just like

last night, the air changed between us once things weren’t as light or relaxed. It was uncanny. The room grew quiet, and our stares were locked and loaded, so much emotion coming from the pair of us for no reason other than the fact that we may be alike in some ways. Maybe she wore her emotions on her sleeve, too. Maybe she felt passion as deeply as me. Maybe she actually listened.

“I’ll only answer if you do,” she whispered, never once blinking or moving a muscle in her body.

“Why don’t you want to tell me?” I asked.

She broke our stare for just a moment before answering. “Because feelings are personal, and what your music makes me feel is personal.”

I nodded slowly, understanding exactly what she meant.

Then she perked up, as if a lightbulb went off above her head. “I’ll tell you first, as long as you promise to answer me after, and… as long as you help me with something.”

My eyebrows knitted together as I sat forward. “Help you with what, exactly?”

“Getting Finn back for putting a fake snake in my shower.”

Ah, and we were back to the shower fiasco.

I answered quickly. “Deal… but this doesn’t mean we’re friends now. Got it?”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t want to be your friend anyway.”

I could feel the muscles along my cheeks moving upward. “Good, as long as we have that out of the way. How do you plan to get Finn back?”

“What good are you if you can’t tell me how to prank him? He’s like a little mouse. I have no clue what he dislikes, or likes, other than chlamydia.”

I chuckled and shook my head. “Oh, I used to prank them all the time back before…” I let my sentence trail off as I hurriedly tried to push the thought of Angelina away. “I know what we can do to piss him off.”

Brooklyn jumped up onto her feet, barely making a sound with her small frame. “Okay, lay it on me. What are we gonna do? Because everything I’ve thought of in the last hour has been stupid.”

I shot up from the bed and angled my head to the door. “Follow me, Teach.”

As soon as Brooklyn and I made sure that the guys were long gone—probably eating out somewhere before they came back and rested for tomorrow’s show—we walked over to the mini-fridge that held all the tiny bottles of liquor—the ones Finn would snag to drink when he got back tonight.

He lived for those tiny bottles, and I had no idea why. It was some sort of ritual or tradition of his. I had messed with them before, and the outcome was hilarious. He threw a hissy fit whenever someone fucked with his sacraments before a show. He thought they were good luck or something ludicrous like that.

I strode over to the kitchen as Brooklyn stood back, probably wondering what the hell I was doing.

Snagging the hot sauce bottle that I knew would be in there, I walked back over to her and asked her to untwist all the lids of the liquor bottles and line them up. She did as she was told, and I took my steady hand and started to drop small drips of hot sauce in every bottle, even the clear ones. Finn never looked; he usually just threw them back and would yell out some stupid, loud noise like he always did.

“Ah, the ol’ hot sauce in the liquor bottles. Nice.”

I peeked up at her. “You’ve done this before?”

She shook her head but laughed. “No, but once when I was younger—like way younger than I should have been—my friend Kellie and I wondered what it would be like to get drunk, so we drank all her grandma’s vodka, and in an attempt to save ourselves from getting in trouble, we filled the bottle back up with water.” I continued twisting the lids to the bottles back on when Brooklyn continued on with her story. “And then… we put it back in the freezer.”

I paused and glanced up at her, ready to tell her how stupid of an idea that was, but she smirked. “I know, I know. Water freezes, liquor doesn’t. Lesson learned.”