The Quarry Girls(24)
She glanced over. I could see her profile, blinking like she was waking up from a nap. She grinned. “Thanks,” she said in the general direction of my dad and Sheriff Nillson before turning to fiddle with the dials on her amplifier.
“You don’t mind if I come up onstage and introduce you, do you?” the sheriff asked, directing the question toward me.
Flustered, I glanced over at Brenda. She appeared a little green all of a sudden. This was really going to happen. “Everyone ready?” she asked.
Maureen nodded, her face glowing. Junie was shaking so much that the tambourine she held was playing itself. Seeing how scared she was gave me a surge of confidence.
“You ready, J-Bug?” I called out, tossing her a wink.
She nodded but didn’t open her mouth. I suspected I’d hear her teeth chattering if she did.
“We’re good,” I said to Brenda, shooting her a reassuring smile.
Brenda grinned fiercely at Sheriff Nillson. “Introduce us.”
He hopped onto the stage.
CHAPTER 13
“That was insane,” Claude crowed. “You guys have never sounded better.”
I nodded, still dazed. He was right. We’d started off a little clunky, like we were playing three different songs. Some dude booed. But by the second tune, people who weren’t even there for the music left the midway and started flocking toward the stage, toting stuffed animals they’d won, nibbling at sticky cotton candy.
By our third song, they were dancing.
Dancing.
People we weren’t even related to.
That’s when Maureen yelled Valhalla!, and we shared an exultant, secret smile over our instruments because we were in it, entirely inside the music together against the world, flying and falling, making magic.
I could have played all night, but it was over almost before it began.
Sheriff Nillson jumped back onstage, grabbed Maureen’s arm, whispered something in her ear, and then huffed to the microphone.
“Let’s give it up for Pantown’s own the Girls!”
The applause felt like it was injected straight into my veins.
Johnny Holm’s roadies began scurrying across the stage, adjusting and moving stuff, high-fiving us before they stored Maureen’s and Brenda’s instruments in a corner so we could enjoy the fair. We floated on clouds to the backstage area. Claude plus Ed, Ricky, and Ant were waiting. Maureen rushed straight into Ed’s arms. Even that couldn’t get me down. I was soaring too high.
“What’d you think, Ed?” Maureen asked. “Did you like how I sounded?”
“Sure,” Ed said, his lips pushed out in a way I bet he thought looked cool. He was extra-Fonzie-looking tonight in his white T-shirt and jeans, his black, oiled hair reflecting the stadium lights. His boots had heels, tall ones that must have added an inch and a half to his height.
“I don’t believe I’ve met this one,” he said, pivoting Maureen so he could get a full gander at Junie, flushed and glowing from the set. “What’s your name, pretty girl?”
“Junie,” she squeaked, tugging on her cherry-colored top.
Ed crushed his pop can and tossed it off to the side before yanking a pack of Camels from the inside of the leather jacket he held over his shoulder. He flicked out a cigarette just like they do in the movies. He held it in his teeth as he lit it. He was putting on a show for us, that much was clear, but why were we all watching it?
Cigarette glowing, he took a deep drag and then released it. He winked at Junie through a haze of smoke. “You look just like my first girlfriend, you know that?”
Junie smiled.
“She broke my damn heart,” he said. His mouth squirmed like he’d bitten into a bad peanut. “Women, right?”
Junie kept smiling, but her face crumpled, leaving her mouth out there like a weird island. She didn’t have a map for navigating these sorts of conversations. I didn’t, either, but I’d be danged if I’d let him make my sister feel bad like that.
Except he turned to Maureen before I could gather a comeback. “How about we head out into the crowd so I can show you off?” he asked.
That was the right thing to say to Maureen.
“What about my party?” Ricky whined.
“It can’t start until we get there,” Ed said. Despite his coarseness, I still saw what Maureen saw in him, his silky edge. But couldn’t she sense what I did, that he was stamped with about fifty blaring danger signs?
“Girls!”
I turned toward a familiar voice. Father Adolph Theisen, our priest at Saint Patrick’s, was walking toward us. I’d never seen him out of his collar, and tonight was no exception.
Ricky stiffened. Ant melted behind him, clearly hoping to disappear. Ed glared at Father Adolph, as if daring him to speak to him.
If Father Adolph noticed any of it, he didn’t let on. “Wonderful to hear that music coming out of four of my favorite parishioners. Can I count on you returning to choir to share some of that beauty with God’s children?”
He was staring at Brenda, the only one of us who could carry a tune—which the father well knew—his eyes twinkling.
Brenda nodded, but she otherwise didn’t respond. She’d dropped out of choir last year, shortly after her and Maureen had returned from one of Father Adolph’s summer retreats. The getaways were held at a cabin in the woods, just outside Saint Cloud on the quarry end of town. My dad and Sheriff Nillson helped Father Adolph organize them as one of their community initiatives. Rumor was the cabin had a sauna and you got to eat pizza all week, but neither Maureen nor Brenda had wanted to talk much about it when they got back.