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T he next night, mom was actually home when I got there—at nine-thirty, coming back from Zack’s. I wondered if maybe she was sick, because she should have been at work.

“Do you always get home this late from your practices, Dani?”

“No, not always.” Sometimes I got home later. Every once in a while, earlier. And I got the feeling she wouldn’t like knowing that. “What are you doing here?”

“I got a new job and I start tomorrow, so I need to try to get a good night’s sleep. I don’t know if I’ll be able to.” I almost asked Why not? But it made sense logically, considering she was used to staying up all night working her tail off.

I eased the backpack off my shoulder. Once again, I’d be trying to cram in a little homework in the morning on the bus ride. “When did all this happen?”

“I’ve been looking for a while, but Nopal Elementary had an opening for a teacher’s aide. They remembered me subbing as an aide when you were little and volunteering with stuff, so I think that gave me kind of an in. They knew I’m good with little kids.”

My brain considered if that was actually true.

I didn’t remember my mom being particularly great with me or any of my friends, but it wasn’t like she was yelling at us or beating me for misbehavior.

And I figured she might be really good at it if she was getting paid for it. “That’s cool, mom. Congrats.”

“I’ll get better pay and benefits, too, Dani. I’ll probably be able to work for the convenience store in the summer when I’m off from the school.”

“Very cool.” I wanted to at least crack my Statistics book so I could get the homework done for it.

Besides, Zack might want a peek at my answers before class tomorrow.

In the meantime, though, I needed to prepare mom for reality.

“We’re practicing late a lot because we have that show at the end of the month. ”

“In Lamar?” Good. She’d remembered.

“Yeah.”

“And one in Rocky Ford in November?”

“Yeah, and we’re good, but we want to sound great before playing for an audience.”

“I should come watch you at the one in Rocky Ford.”

“Oh, my God, mom. How embarrassing.”

When her face showed genuine hurt and disappointment, I suddenly felt like the world’s shittiest daughter. “I’m sorry, mom. We would love for you to watch.”

“No, I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.”

I walked closer to her. “As long as you’re not acting like the proud mom, we’ll be fine.”

She let a breath out of her nose, a half smile on her face. “Okay, we’ll see.”

“I have some homework I need to get done before bed.”

“Just don’t stay up too late.”

I almost told her it was a little late for her to try parenting me in this fashion.

After all, for a couple of years, I’d been responsible for getting myself to bed at a decent hour—and I’d also had to deal with all the creepy noises outside and crap like that keeping me awake out of fright. Being a bossy mom wouldn’t work now.

But I didn’t intend to argue. “I won’t.” What mom didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

It was the strangest thing. While it seemed to take forever for the time for our first show to arrive, it also seemed like it got here quick. Suddenly, we were racing out of school so we could start packing up Zack’s grandpa’s truck to get ready to head out.

When I looked at my three bandmates and friends, I knew we were starting to look like we’d belong on a stage rocking out.

All three of the boys had hair as long as mine, but Zack and Cyrus’s had more body.

Braden’s tended to be straight like mine.

We discovered early on that pulling our hair up into ponytails was a good idea for moving equipment so it wouldn’t get in our eyes or get stuck in something like a tuning peg.

When I thought we were done, Zack packed in a black oscillating fan that looked like it had seen better days and probably belonged at the curb.

“Uh, Zack, haven’t you noticed that it’s been freezing all week? ”

As he wiggled it in the back of the truck so it wouldn’t go flying out when we were going sixty-five, he grinned. “How many concerts you been to?”

I shrugged. “None, unless you count YouTube videos.”

“You ever see the drummer?”

“Yeah.” And it dawned on me just as he said it.

“We’re all gonna be sweating our asses off—you included. Us three guys, we can run around and get a little air moving that way—but you’re gonna be stuck behind the drums, pounding away, with no relief. Thus, the fan.” He jumped off the truck bumper as if to emphasize his last phrase.

“Got it.”

“We could all try to cram inside the truck, but Cy already said he doesn’t want to do that, so he’s gonna drive his car. Dani, you wanna go with him?”

Was I hearing him right? Did he seriously think I’d want to do that? Of the three of us, I had less in common with Cyrus than they did—but Zack’s asking pissed me off enough that I decided to take him up on the offer. “Sure.”

The ride was weird and awkward at first, just because I’d never felt comfortable around Cy.

He was a quiet guy who kept to himself, but he was a hell of a guitarist who got the job done and didn’t seem to like screwing around.

Fiddling with the radio as we drove out of town, he managed to pick up a rock station out of Colorado Springs, but the static made it hard to hear.

I said, “Why don’t you play a CD?” Considering his car had a CD player, that seemed like a better solution than listening to what sounded like the equivalent of a song being shredded by a cheese grater.

“I wish. Stupid thing doesn’t work.”

That sucked, because the perfect solution to the awkwardness between us would have been alleviated by listening to music we both enjoyed. Now we’d be stuck sitting in self-conscious radio white noise for close to an hour.

Once we were on the highway, though, Cy hauled ass down the road.

At the rate he was going, it wasn’t going to take an hour.

His driving wasn’t scaring the shit out of me enough to remove the strange feeling, though.

So I decided to simply say out loud what I was thinking.

“I didn’t look inside Zack’s grandpa’s truck, but I’m pretty sure I could have fit in there. ”

“Yeah, probably, but I think Zack was afraid I’d feel lonely. ”

Then I felt bad for wanting to be anywhere but in this car. “Oh. Would you have?”

When Cy started laughing, I realized I’d never heard him do it before.

It was contagious, because I could sense a pure joy in it.

Although I was certain that Cy felt like he was just a little bit better than the rest of us, a little smarter, a little more conscientious, that didn’t make his laugh any less infectious, and I was soon giggling along with him.

Finally, he said, “Do I look like the kind of guy who gets lonely?”

“I have a theory about all that.” One I hadn’t yet voiced and latched onto when Cyrus made me think about reality.

“What’s that?”

“ Zack doesn’t want to spend any time with either of us. This is a really great way to make that happen.”

Cy was quiet for a second before he said, “Son of a bitch.” Tired of hearing static, he finally switched off the radio. “You might be right.”

Nodding, I looked out the side window at the prairie grass, soon replaced by a field of some unknown crop that had been harvested recently. Everything was bathed in muted gray tones as the sun dipped below the horizon behind us.

“But who cares, right? He couldn’t do this show without us.”

In a way, he was right. Maybe I was just a warm body filling a position, but Cy was way more than that. “Technically, a drum machine could replace me but you’re way too important.”

“Nah. A wise person once told me nobody’s expendable . The problem is, when you know you’re good, it’s hard not to see it another way.”

Cy was pretty cocky—all with good reason—but it was obvious he knew how important he was to the band. I wasn’t about to say that out loud, though. “Here’s the thing, Cy. Zack’s awesome on guitar, but most of these songs require two guys for it to sound right. ”

“Sure, it’s way richer, but don’t kid yourself. Zack could figure it out.”

Unlike Cyrus, though, Zack didn’t seem arrogant enough to attempt it. He’d humbled himself early on, telling us he needed his friends to reach his dreams.

Before I could say anything else, he continued.

“It’s cool that we have a couple of shows, but they’re in podunk bars in the middle of nowhere, probably shitkickers who only listen to country music.

We’re not even playing at home. I seriously doubt we’re gonna have an audience who likes us, much less appreciates us. ”

“Zack seems to think the audience will love us.”

“Here’s what I’m picturing, Dani. We’re gonna be in a bar, a bar that packs maybe twenty, thirty people.

And these are people who come to the bar every night to drink away their blues, ‘cause they work a shitty job and don’t want to go back to their shitty home.

Somehow, it all seems less shitty when drowned in whiskey.

So you have a band show up one night in this place that usually just plays a jukebox or some shit, and this band is a bunch of punk kids from another Podunk town who think they know what they’re doing. How do you think that’s gonna go over?”

I frowned, wondering how much of this was actually Cyrus talking and how much he’d heard from a parent—because I’d never reasoned in that manner. It just didn’t sound like someone my age was talking. “Why aren’t you excited? Even if no one there likes us, we get to practice.”

“Meh.”

“And I’m sure not all crowds will be receptive to what we do, so we gotta get used to that sometime.”

“Jesus. You sound like Zack.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Cyrus Gilliam might have been good looking, but he was an asshole—and I’d just confirmed that fact one-hundred percent. He’d have to try really hard to change my mind at this point…but I didn’t see that happening.