Boring Girls(116)

“Smoke some weed, play some acoustic?”

His face lit up. “Yes. Exactly. We should do that sometime.”

“I was just kidding,” I said.

He hesitated, then laughed awkwardly. “I know.”

We stared at each other, and that’s when I realized that his silences and his frowns and his furrowed brow stares, all of which I’d thought hid some level of deep thought, of quiet intelligence, were really just nothing. Chris was kind of an idiot. A nice idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. And we had nothing in common.

“I have to go to bed,” I said.

“Okay,” he replied, and I wondered if he’d been hit with a feeling similar to the one I’d just had. We looked at each other for another moment, and I felt myself wishing hard that this was different. Just for a second. I wished I was different or he was. I held my breath, admiring his long hair, his smooth skin, his blue eyes fixed on me, holding each other’s gaze for longer than we ever would again, because you can’t make eye contact for any real length of time with someone you don’t have stupid romantic feelings for. But then we looked away. He resumed his conversation with the other guy, and I got up and went to the bus. I felt a burning in my eyes as I crossed the parking lot. There was a little lump in my throat. When I swallowed, it turned into a quiet ache in my stomach. And that was the end of the closest thing to romance I’ve ever had.





FIFTY


I isolated myself as Fern came out of her shell. She’d go out with the other bands, truly making an effort to become the belle of the ball. I’d slump in my jammies, peeking out through the bus’s blinds to watch her cavort in the parking lot, arm-in-arm with Edgar, with Socks; somehow even making that douchebag Chick laugh, and a few times I saw her approach Marie-Lise, with a nice result. It probably sounds creepy or crazy, or like I was jealous or something, doing this, watching her, but you have to understand just how happy she was. She had been so off, so disconnected, so far gone from who she had been for so long. Those two worthless guys were dead, and as a result, she was becoming creative, happy, alive again. It was so jarring, but nobody really seemed eager to question what was behind it.

Chris basically stayed on his bus as well. With only a few weeks left, a feeling seemed to overtake the tour — that anxiety of being almost done, being close to finished. I’d play the show, go back to my bunk, try to sleep. So did Edgar. A lot of people did — it seemed like a split: you either wanted to party more and make the most of the last weeks, or withdraw early.

I was afraid of going home. I hadn’t talked to my parents in a long time, and the thought of going back to that little house — with Mom’s paintings on the walls and Dad’s books and Melissa’s sweet face and my little bedroom — scared me. I didn’t feel like I should be there anymore. Like I wasn’t the same person. They wouldn’t know me anymore — but I guess they hadn’t for a long time, anyway.

I toyed with the idea of asking Fern if she wanted to get a place together, or maybe I could move into Socks’s basement and sleep on the couch or something. I didn’t have a lot of money. I know Socks was looking ahead, into more touring. I just didn’t want to go back to the room where I had slept when I was a little kid after everything that had happened. I didn’t want to go home.

When you’re growing up, you have this sort of vague idea in your mind of what’s going to happen, right? I’ll go to college, I’ll get married to some handsome dude, we’ll have some kids . . . And then your life starts to take shape a little bit — for me, it was like, Okay, I’ll be in a band with my friends. And I didn’t know what was going to happen past that, other than some sort of half-assed backup, like, when the band stops, I’ll have to get a job. Maybe I’ll go to college or something. It’s a bit of a void, looking ahead to that. And then a weird flash of maybe meeting some guy, maybe having a kid? I don’t know if I ever seriously entertained either of those ideas. So it was all about the band, and then the weird purgatory afterwards when I guessed I’d have to transition into something else. But then I killed two people. That wasn’t one of the milestones I’d envisioned.

I had definitely anticipated some sort of consequence. That maybe one morning there’d be a knock on the bus door and Fern and I would be dragged, bleary-eyed and pyjama-panted, off to prison. I mean, yeah, we were travelling miles every day and moving along fast, and the dead guys weren’t exactly the beautiful missing persons girls that you’d see on the top news stories, but I expected something.