Tara Kelly - Harmonic Feedback

“I can go with you,” Naomi offered.

“I need to do this alone.”

She opened the door and let me out of the back seat. “Good luck. And call me if you need us to come back.”

I took a deep breath as the squeak of Roger’s fan belt faded into the distance. The screams and giggles of children rang out from the small park, and the jingle of leashes could be heard from dogs walking the trail. The sun had graced Bellingham with its presence today, lighting snippets of water and making me squint. My eyes paused on the baseball dugout. A figure with dark hair was hunched over, reading something.

I headed across the damp grass, my shoes growing heavier with each step. Just as I reached the dugout, my foot slipped, and icy mud bled through my sock.

Justin’s head jerked up. The skin under one eye was the color of a plum. He closed his book and set it on the bench. “You really should try wearing jeans. They’re more dirt friendly.”

Brown sludge covered the hem of my white underskirt. “They’re too scratchy and confining,” I said, clutching the metal fence and stepping inside the dugout.

He glanced at my feet and smirked. “I hope you don’t expect me to give you a ride home.”

“I don’t expect anything other than an explanation. You can’t just be there for someone and then disappear.” I sat down but kept my distance from him.

“I missed one day of school. Why are you talking like I left town?”

“Because that’s what guys do—they disappear. And most of the time, I don’t care. But when they’re really nice…” This wasn’t where I wanted to go.

“Don’t hold me up too high, Drea. There’s a lot I haven’t told you.” He rested his head against the wall, keeping his eyes downcast.

I stared at my muddy shoes. “Why?”

His face turned in my direction. “Because I like you.”

I forced myself to look at him. “I like you too.”

We stared at each other with parted lips and nothing to say. Did his like mean the same as mine? I wondered if his stomach fluttered when I was around. Or if he thought about me before he went to sleep. Either way, we needed to stop hiding from each other.

“You know what I love about music?” I asked. “It doesn’t lie, even if the lyrics do.”

“Are you a Hendrix fan?” he asked.

“Yeah. His solos just say, This is who I am. You can take me or leave me.”

“Me too. My mom had a record player in our living room. I’d go in there and play air guitar to ‘All Along the Watch Tower’ over and over.” He looked down, smiling.

A laugh escaped my throat. “I’m sorry I missed it.”

“Don’t be. I have two left feet, and my sister said I looked constipated. Guitar playing just wasn’t in the cards for me.” He glanced at me and smoothed his ruffled hair back. The sleeve of his T-shirt rode up, revealing a hint of black ink on his arm. A tattoo—not something I expected.

I looked at his jagged fingernails and the bruised knuckles of his right hand. “I want to know you, Justin. Even the parts you don’t think I’ll understand.”

He exhaled sharply and drummed his feet against the ground. “Bellingham is my clean slate—my second chance. I can’t screw it up.”

I waited to see if he’d offer more. He didn’t. “Is that all you’re going to tell me?”

He followed my gaze to his knuckles and covered them with his other hand. “I didn’t use to be much different than Scott, okay?”

“You sold drugs and hit girls?”

“No, but I got wasted a lot. And I used to race. Only we were a bunch of rich private-school guys—we didn’t even care about the cash.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I needed the rush and the distraction. After my mom died, I didn’t want to feel anything. I wanted to hit the fast-forward button and skip to the part where my stomach stopped hurting. When the dreams stopped. When everything I looked at didn’t remind me of her. I wanted to pretend she never existed.”

“Did it work?”

“No.”

Justin told me about his freshman year. He wore a lot of black and smoked pot behind the library with his friends Kermit and Jake. They’d write lyrics about robots and global warming for their industrial band. But Kermit got kicked out later that year for selling his mom’s painkillers. And the band went to hell.

He joined a metal band sophomore year. They met a chick from the all-girls’ school down the street who could roar like the guy from Mayhem. He fell in love with her and with speed that year, but she used him to make the lead guitarist jealous. The rest of the year was a blur—moving walls and trails in his eyes. Sometimes he couldn’t even tell what was real anymore. He got suspended for coming to class high and then expelled for breaking some guy’s nose. But he couldn’t even remember the guy’s name, much less why they fought.

He went to public school his junior year, and his dad tried to keep him housebound when he wasn’t in class. So he ran away—lived out of his car until he met up with his old buddy Kermit. He joined Kermit’s band, and they played gigs around town. But mostly they sat around Kermit’s mom’s apartment and got wasted.

“I was with Kermit the night he got busted,” he said. “He was selling weed to some girls behind the mall and these unmarked cars came racing up. Doors flew open, and I just ran. I heard them grab Kermit, but I was too high at the time to even realize they were cops. I got away and flagged down a cab. Went back home, asked my dad for help. He called the cops. I can’t get the look in his eyes out of my head. He was fucking terrified of me.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “They found speed on me. Charged me with possession and obstruction, all that fun stuff. They tried to pin an intent-to-sell charge on me, but it didn’t stick. My dad told the judge he didn’t want me back home. So I got to spend more time in juvie, then rehab. My sister took custody when I got out—made me promise I wouldn’t let her down. And here I am, repeating my junior year like a dumbass.”

I couldn’t imagine my mom calling it quits on me like that. Despite my issues and our fights, she never walked away from me. “Are you angry with your dad?”

He looked over at me and shook his head. “I was at first, but not anymore. It wasn’t like he didn’t try. He put his job at risk so he could be home with me last year. We were never close, though.”

I moved nearer to him and put my hand over his. “You’re nothing like Scott.”

“I was waiting for you to get up and run.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

He weaved his fingers with mine, brushing his thumb along the back of my hand. “Good.”

The warmth of his touch traveled up my arm. I looked away, trying to hide a smile. “What was your mom like?”

“She was always cooking something atrocious.” He shook his head and chuckled. “I mean, really bad. But she loved it. Never gave up. And she never let us give up, either.”

He talked about how she required him and his older sister to practice their passion for an hour every day—piano for him and everything from martial arts to hairstyling for his sister. “When she got sick, it happened so fast,” he continued. “One day she was humming in the kitchen, full of energy, and then she wasn’t.”

I laid my head on his shoulder and squeezed his hand. There wasn’t anything I could say—words wouldn’t take away his pain. His heart beat slowly against my ear, and he rested his head against mine. We stayed like that for a while, taking in the sounds around us. The lake whispered in the distance, calming my racing thoughts. There was cheering from a nearby soccer game and laughter from people eating charred burgers at picnic tables. Things I normally hated because I didn’t feel part of them. Sometimes it was like watching aliens in their habitat from behind a glass wall. But Justin’s warmth against my cheek made it okay.