Читать книгу Don't Let Me Go - J.H. Trumble - Страница 10

Chapter 5

I knew that night had scared him. I looked at his text again.

Seatmate: u look sad. Me: Leaving boyfriend. No more seatmate.

LOL.

God, I loved him. I took a deep breath and fisted my hands around the phone, trying to quiet the trembling. I still needed him, but I was on my own now. There’d be no Adam to talk me off the cliff the next time I danced with self-destruction. The key was to stay off the cliff.

I cut the engine, and the temperature in the car immediately began to rise. In the front window of Ratliff Music, the Open sign glowed. My shift didn’t start for another hour and a half, but I had nowhere else to go. I tucked my phone in my pocket and went in.

“Hey,” Juliet said as she hooked a little plastic bag of guitar strings on a wall peg behind the counter. She flashed me a grin. It faded quickly. “Oh, Nate.” She dropped the rest of the bags into a box on the floor and hurried around the counter.

“He’ll be back,” she said, throwing her arms around me. More than anyone, Juliet knew what Adam’s leaving was doing to me. But I can’t say I welcomed the embrace. It gnawed at what little self-control I’d managed to amass on the drive over. Fortunately, it didn’t last long.

From the office doorway, Juliet’s dad cleared his throat, and she let go. I swiped at my eyes with the collar of my shirt, embarrassed, but Mr. Ratliff pretended not to notice.

“You’re early,” he said.

“Yeah. I dropped Adam at the airport and didn’t really have time to go home, so I just came on in.” I stepped behind the counter and retrieved the bags Juliet had dropped.

Mr. Ratliff slapped me on the back as he slipped past me to the scheduling book. “Great. I could really use a guitar sub today. Gary can’t make it in until noon, and he’s got a new student scheduled at eleven. Danial Qasimi. I was planning to cancel, but since you’re here ...” He looked up at me cautiously. “You up for it?”

I told him I was and then glanced at the clock on the wall behind him. Ten twenty-three.

He told me to grab a guitar off the shelf—acoustic. I chose a Takamine I’d had my eye on for a while.

While we waited for the new student, I sat on a bench and tuned the strings and filled Juliet in on how things went at the airport, leaving out the more embarrassing lapses of control. She laughed at the homophobic seatmate. “Was she afraid she might get zapped by some flash discharge when God sent the lightning bolt down on the gay guy?”

I laughed a little. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Getting pretty bold, aren’t you?” she said fingering my T-shirt.

It was a simple black shirt, printed across the front in white letters: Closets are for brooms, not people. “Every crusader needs a slogan.” That’s what Adam had said when he gave it to me that morning before we left his house. I smiled, remembering how he’d helped himself to one last appreciative look as I switched shirts. I shrugged.

“He dressed you, didn’t he?”

I pressed my finger just behind the fifth fret on the D string and strummed both the D and the G strings, then tightened the tuning peg until the notes echoed each other.

Juliet watched me, a grin pulling her lips wide.

“What?” I said, looking up at her.

“He’s marking you, you know.”

“I resemble that remark.” I showed her my Sharpied arm. She shook her head.

When the door opened a few minutes later, Juliet tweaked my shirt and got up. “Showtime, hot stuff,” she said.

The name hadn’t registered with her earlier, but her eyes lit up when the new student stepped into the shop and pushed the door closed behind him.

“Danial Qasimi? I thought that name sounded familiar.” She gave him a good once-over with her eyes. “Whoa. You’ve grown up.”

“Whoa, yourself,” he said, grinning widely. “Juliet, right?”

He was tall. Middle Eastern—Pakistani, I found out later. His skin was a rich brown, almost the color of burnt bacon, but beautiful. His hair black. A dimple on the right side gave him a boyish look when he smiled. Juliet explained that they’d been office aides together in seventh grade, back when Danial was a scrawny nerd. Apparently he’d grown up a whole lot since then. He looked like a linebacker.

I watched with amusement as the two caught up with each other, Juliet animated and brazen as always, Danial more reserved but clearly charmed.

I glanced at the clock after a bit, sorry that I had to interrupt their little reunion. “You brought your guitar,” I said, nodding at the case he gripped loosely in his left hand.

“My brother’s. Are you my instructor?”

“Just a sub.” I reached out to shake his hand and introduced myself. Juliet followed us with her eyes as I showed him to a lesson room. I glanced back at her.

“Wow,” she mouthed.

I stifled a laugh.

“Gary’s your regular instructor,” I said, turning back to Danial, “but he’s running a little late today, so you got me.” I closed the door and sat opposite him in the closetlike space. There was just enough room for the two chairs and a small table with a CD player. On the door, Gary had hung a poster with guitar chords. On the wall behind Danial was my contribution—a poster of Bob Marley in concert. Danial sat down and flipped open the well-worn case, then pulled out a beautiful Taylor guitar.

“Can I see that?” I asked.

He handed it over. The back and sides were a rich, finely grained dark brown. “What kind of wood is this?”

“African mahogany, I think.”

“Pretty.”

The fretboard had a beautiful pearl inlay that looked like calla lilies. I strummed the strings, then adjusted the tuning and strummed again, enjoying the rich sound. “Does he still play it?”

“My brother? No. Not anymore.”

“So,” I said, handing it back, “show me what you got.”

Danial knew his way around the guitar and could play some chords. After encouraging him to mess around a bit, I taught him a riff that required only three power chords he was already familiar with and a few single notes. I played along, improvising once he got the hang of it. He stopped periodically to massage his fingertips with his thumb. Before we finished, I wrote out the notes of the riff on a musical staff so he could practice at home. I thought for a moment that it would be nice to have him as a regular student.

“Where are you from?” I asked as he laid his guitar carefully in the case.

“Chicago.”

“I meant, where did your family come from?”

He laughed. “I know what you meant. My parents were both born in Pakistan. They moved to the States after my brother was born. First Chicago, then Clear Lake, then here.” He snapped the latches closed and stood up. “Nice shirt.”

I bristled but ignored the comment. I picked up the Takamine and opened the door.

Danial blew on his fingertips as he stepped out.

“Sore?”

“You could say that.”

“Keep your practices to about ten minutes at a time until your fingers toughen up a bit more.”

He nodded, then dropped his eyes once again to my shirt and smirked.

“Is there a problem?” I asked, an edge in my voice.

He grinned a little and scratched at the back of his head. “No problem.”

I left him at the counter with Mr. Ratliff so he could pay, thinking maybe I didn’t want him as a regular after all. I replaced the Takamine and found Juliet restocking band lesson books in a wire floor rack. With summer band camps starting in a couple of weeks, there’d been a run on them. Mr. Ratliff had had to restock twice. I picked up the scissors from the floor and sliced the paper tape on a box of books and ripped it open.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“Okay.”

“Okay? That’s it?” She looked past me to get a glimpse of Danial at the counter. “He’s really grown.”

“Yeah, I know. You already said that.”

“Shut up.” She gave me a little shove that threw me off balance, and I dropped onto my butt. “I’m telling you, when we were in seventh grade, he was like this little boy computer geek. I mean, he’s a freaking genius on the computer. He was posting articles on Wikipedia before a lot of kids even knew what Wikipedia was. He was always getting into some kind of trouble for it.”

“Oh yeah? What did he do?”

“I don’t know. A little creative editing on some religious articles or something. I think he put some school stuff on there that they made him take off.” She grabbed a stack of books from the box and slid them into their respective slots on the wire rack. “You should get him to help you with that blog you want to write.”

“Maybe.” Maybe not.

Shortly after Danial left, Mr. Ratliff caught me yawning and checking the time on my phone. “Nate, go home. And do me a favor and take this one with you,” he said, giving Juliet’s hair a playful yank. “Gary will be in shortly; we can handle the store the rest of the day.”

I was not about to argue, not today, because (1.) I was an emotional wreck, and (2.) Adam had spoken the truth—we hadn’t slept that much.

Juliet poured us sodas and popped popcorn in the microwave. And then we just stared at each other over the bar. I needed sleep. I needed to go home. She reached over and tapped a kernel of corn in my mouth and watched me chew. I made a pouty face and she made one back, then came around the bar and hugged me from behind.

“What’s that for?”

“Just for being you.”

I smiled and turned to hug her full on. “I don’t think Mike would like this.”

She tilted her chin down and looked at me, a mischievous grin on her face. “He knows I’ll always love you best.” Which made me laugh because not only was Mike Rutgers crazy about Juliet, but I was no threat to him, and he knew it.

My eyes flicked up to the wall clock next to the kitchen sink.

“What time does our boy arrive?” she asked.

“Another hour and a half.”

In Juliet’s room we pulled up the airline’s flight info on her computer. The flight animation showed a little black plane hovering over a map of the United States. According to FlightView, Adam was flying over southern Illinois at 530 miles per hour at the moment. We watched the flight tracker for a while, updating the results every few seconds, but it was like watching the seasons change.

“What do you think he’s doing right now?” I asked her.

“Sleeping. Listening to music. Staring off into space. Thinking about you.”

I stared at the black plane and tried to envision Adam kicked back with his earbuds in and bopping his head slightly like he always did. And then I envisioned an explosion ripping a hole in the fuselage and the plane nose-diving toward the ground and people screaming and shit flying everywhere and—

“Can I ask you something?” Juliet said. “Why did you make him go?”

And now it was just a piece of clip art again. “I didn’t make him go. This was his dream. His big opportunity. He wanted to go.”

“He didn’t want to go.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“He told me he was scared,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Of leaving you.”

“That’s not not wanting to go.”

She watched me for a moment like she was trying to unravel my brain, but I didn’t want it unraveled, so I looked back at the screen. The plane had scarcely moved a nanometer. “He called me a brat,” I said.

“He did not.”

I scoffed. “This is a lot harder than I thought it would be, Jules. I gave him a really hard time on the way to the airport.” I flopped back on her bed and she cozied up next to me. A long strand of her red hair slapped me across the face.

“Don’t beat yourself up. He loves you. This is hard on both of you.”

“Is it?” Because it sure didn’t look that way to me.

We lay quietly for a moment.

“We’re pathetic,” she said finally.

I stared at the ceiling. She had no idea.

Juliet sighed and giggled, and when I asked what was so funny, she leaned over me, her face just inches from mine, and said, “I just realized that I finally have you alone, in my bed.” She raised an eyebrow. “If I were that kind of girl, I would so take advantage of you right now.”

“Oh you would, would you?” I laughed and gave her a quick kiss on the lips. But the laugh didn’t come easily, and it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared a moment before. I bit my lip and focused on the ceiling, the bits of dust that clung to the sharp texture and swayed in the draft from the cold air blowing from the vent.

“It’s okay to cry,” she said.

That was all it took. She pulled me to her and held me tight while I emptied myself of all the fear and frustration and hurt that had been building over the past weeks. When the shaking finally subsided, she held me away from her, her eyes all soft, which should have been a warning. She kissed me on the corner of my mouth, then again full-on. I pulled away. “Jules, don’t.”

She looked hurt and embarrassed, the same look I’d seen the first time she saw Adam and me together together.

“Jules.” I felt like I should say or do something else, but I just didn’t have the emotional energy. So I just said her name again.

She got up, just like before, and left, pulling the door shut behind her. I closed my eyes and tried, for her sake, to forget that momentary failure to observe a well-established boundary. I fixed my eyes again on the ceiling, but my mind was on a memory loop from last night. We hadn’t slept that much, but we had slept, our bodies and our minds exhausted by the intensity of the days and nights leading up to his leaving, sleep dragging us under like a strong tide. I kept trying to remember what it felt like having him next to me, but I couldn’t, because he wasn’t.

I debated going after her. It wasn’t entirely her fault, this awkwardness between us.