Read My Lips(54)

“Yeah, you,” he says, grinning. “I remember you. Full of the feels. You got any new music for us?”

Eric and I share a look before I turn back to the musician. “I’m not really a singer.”

“The hell you aren’t,” he spits back, half his face shadowed by the beige bowler hat he’s got on. “You got a pretty set of cords on you.”

“No, really,” I say after sharing an amused chuckle with Eric, “it’s just a hobby. I’m more of a sing-in-the-shower type of gal.”

Gal. Listen to me, sounding all Texan already.

“Come on, girl. I know you got some tunes in you. Don’t hold out on me.” The guitarist smacks a chord on his guitar for punctuation, inspiring a couple cheers of encouragement from somewhere in the back of the room. “We all got some blues in us we gotta get out. Some feels. Some pain. Don’t you want to get that pain out of you?”

I take a breath. “Well, when you put it like that.”

A moment later, the guitarist scoots over and I stand in front of the microphone, facing an audience that’s one tenth the size I had before—an intimate crowd, far more preferable.

Though Clayton is clearly not here, I pretend to see his face, focusing on an empty table in the middle of the room. Then the song comes, some new thing I’ve played with in my head, and I let it all out to that empty table while the musicians improvise, following my lead. No rehearsing. No judgmental stares. I just open my heart to the room and let the music go.

On the last note of my song, my phone, quiet as a fly, buzzes.





I stare at the text I just sent her.

My insides shiver. Every nerve in my body is all knotted up and shit.

Brant and Dmitri play Xbox on either side of me, sandwiching me on our couch, and I feel every shift and jerk and annoying jump of their bodies.

I take another long swig from my beer, then stare at the phone intently, desperate for a response.

Dmitri taps my arm and I ignore him. He tries to get his hands in my face, signing: You want to take a turn? I need a break. But the last thing I feel like doing is playing more Xbox against Brant; he’s a fucking prodigy at gaming and no one ever stands a chance.

Sunday was such a mess. Monday was no better. I knew I shouldn’t have let a girl do this to me. How many times did I warn myself?

That’s my best and worst quality: I never learn.

But Brant and Dmitri kept pushing me at her, as if they know what’s best for me. If they knew anything at all, they’d mind their own fucking business and let me suffer in peace.

I decide to text her again. I’ll text her until I get a damn response.

Over the course of the next hour, Brant goes off to bowl, which I learn through a few rushed signs from Dmitri after he gives up playing Xbox and tells me he has a short story due tomorrow that he needs to finish, then closes himself off in his room to jerk off; even without ears, I know what the fuck he’s really doing in there.

Or maybe I don’t know anything. Maybe I made a huge mistake by blowing Dessie off.

But when I woke up Sunday, reality had sat on my chest and made me its bitch. It wasn’t just the mild sting of a hangover; it was the feeling like I’d just woken up from an amazing dream that I couldn’t climb back into. I felt frustrated, lost, and obsessed.

I still feel frustrated, lost, and obsessed.

Suddenly I’m seventeen again and being laughed at by Lacy Torrington in the cafeteria when I tried to ask her to the homecoming dance. The dude she went with, some wrestling captain dickhead named Jerry, confronted me in the hall after fifth period. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but judging from the laughing faces that surrounded me in the hallway, he wasn’t complimenting my shoes. The confrontation ended with a coach pulling me off of Jerry’s bloodied, sputtering face. The hall wasn’t laughing anymore.

The interpreter in the principal’s office gave me all of Principal Harris’s words in a bunch of hand-shapes and finger wiggles that my parents were hearing. He tells my parents that I have an anger problem and they should consider routine counseling for me. I watch as the interpreter gives me my parents’ reply, my mom groaning about how the fuck they’re going to pay for something like that, and my dad pointing a finger at the principal, asking him what the hell he plans to do about Jerry and the other assholes who pick on his disabled son for being hard of hearing.

No matter how many times I tell my dad that “hard of hearing” isn’t the correct term and that I am, in fact, completely fucking deaf, he never learns.

But maybe that’s where I get it from. I never learn. My dad’s fucked enough random women during his marriage to give me seven hundred siblings. Every time he’d get caught in public going somewhere weird or playing peeping-tom at the pool or doing fuck-knows out in the city until three in the morning, he’d come home and give my mom the same remorseful rhetoric he’d given her since I was ten, and I’d be standing in my little Spiderman PJs in the hallway when they thought I was asleep, hearing every damn word.