Night One

Night One

Our sleeping and traveling setup was larger than the van, but smaller than a bus. To me, it almost had the feeling that I would expect a ship to have—if I could judge anything from the impression I got from the movies. Narrow beds—though perhaps they weren’t accurately described as beds; they were more cots, or cells, like in a beehive—stacked neatly, one on top of the other, two on each side. Privacy was a nonentity. The bathroom was miniscule. Kay declared, first thing upon entering, that we could use the bathroom for its traditional use only in the event of an emergency. Showering was permitted.

All being paranoid types, or perhaps just reasonable, Adnan, Ian, and Mark had brought their guitars back to this trailer with them. Suitcases and duffel bags were shoved under the cots, and we were ready for action.



We found, in slogging through the interminable mud and muck, a tent that served food.

A Simple Delight:
Eating food that had not been prepared more than twenty-four hours previously.

There was a group of three girls sitting near us at dinner—Jenna, Rae, and Molly. Their names fit together, somehow. Their appearances fit together, even though they didn’t all look the same. Black-haired Jenna obviously dyed, and blonde Molly couldn’t care less, if her sloppy ponytail said anything. Rae, too, was blonde—she was the middling; she wasn’t as friendly as Jenna nor as introverted as Molly, and she was completely unassuming in every way.

In a stark contrast, we saw the Cremnomania crowd across the tent. Keeley and the angel twins waved, and when she tugged on Dave’s sleeve and pointed, he turned around and offered a smile. Ian raised a hand in salute in return. Observing Kyle didn’t turn around. I watched because he unsettled me.

“So,” Jenna whispered, as if a conspirator, to me, when nobody else was listening except maybe Adnan, “which of them have girlfriends?” She was, I could tell, eyeing Pete in particular through the tines of her fork. If Pete ever caught on, sparks would fly.

Pete wasn’t attracted to any girl; he was attracted to girls. Jenna, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, was just his type. Bodacious and obvious and excited and bright and perky and flirty and fun—a combination of any other girl Pete had ever dated before. Not that his girlfriends weren’t nice. They usually were. Often, when Pete had a girlfriend, she could convince him to lay off me.

Besides, I wasn’t above petty gossip. “Mark’s with Kay.” As if this wasn’t blatantly obvious. Kay had made Mark eat vegetables with his dinner, because they were good for him. Poor Mark had only moved out of his mother’s house two days ago, and already he had his girlfriend bossing him around. Not that he minded. “Adnan you only date if you’re prepared to enter into an engagement.” Jenna raised her eyebrow. “He’s religious.” The eyebrow fell. “Pete’s single.”

“Nice,” she breathed. A few seats down, Pete was shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth with reckless abandon. I honestly couldn’t say what, precisely, was so attractive about the image, but apparently to some girls, Pete wasn’t just an asshole with drumsticks where his brains ought to be.

“And Ian?” she asked. It hadn’t even occurred to me to mention Ian. Maybe that was stupid of me to assume, but there it was. I hadn’t even thought of it.

“Ian’s, um, married,” I stammered, flustered. That was bizarre. Anyone who had needed to know before had already known. Girl, eighteen, getting married directly out of high school and not pregnant? I was news. And I definitely couldn’t have a baby for over a year, just to prove all the mutterers wrong.

Jenna’s eyebrows skyrocketed. Apparently she was very expressive in that area. “Married?” she echoed. “To whom, pray tell?”

I blushed. “Me.”

She gave a low wolf-whistle. “Damn, Sloan, I wouldn’t have pegged you for the type.” I thought I saw her catch Rae’s eye and step on her foot under the table. She definitely shook her head slightly and flicked her eyes to Ian. Luckily, I wasn’t too much of the jealous type.

“What do you mean?” Everyone else was too engrossed in their other conversations to listen to us.

Her face twisted in a “what can I say?” sort of smirk. “It’s no big thing. You just don’t strike me as the wife-of-a-rocker, married-out-of-high-school poster girl. I’d see you more as the stubbornly-remaining-the-girlfriend type. You know, the one that remains mysterious and aloof, and thereby is incredibly sexy.”

Was she, perhaps, insinuating that I wasn’t sexy or stubborn because I hadn’t refused marriage? That seemed a little cheap to me. And, again, I felt a little embarrassed. “It wasn’t my idea.” Ian was sitting at the other end of our little group. “He was all freaked that we’d fall apart, and I didn’t have a problem with it or anything.”

With her sharp bob, Jenna seemed so much more mature and worldly than I was. At twenty, she had done so much more than I had, been so much more than I had, and yet wasn’t condescending. She was just more. “You’re adorable,” she told me.

“Thanks, I guess,” I thanked, ungraciously.

A Feeling:
Being around Jenna made me feel both utterly unimpressive and unimportant.
But alternately, it made me feel really impressive and important, because she was spending her time talking to me when she could have been talking to anyone else in this room, practically—maybe not Distant Kyle.

We had a solid eight friends under our belt on just the first night. And even if they weren’t really our friends, we’d call them that, just so that we could say we had some friends in this mess. And maybe knowing two bands of forty wasn’t anything to write home about, but it was better than being all alone in this mass of people. Because, when it all boiled down to it, there would be times when I couldn’t cling to Ian or Kay or Mark or Adnan or even Pete, because they’d be playing, or practicing, and Kay would be studying, and I’d be the loose end.

A Fact About Being the Loose End:
Even if you thought you didn’t mind—even if you usually didn’t actually mind—sometimes it still bothered you. You couldn’t help it. When nobody knew your name and nobody wanted to talk to, even if you were someone who was usually accepting of anonymity, situations where everyone knew someone else, and everyone loved someone else—well, those situations were a little uncomfortable. And making friends, or even acquaintances, helps you deal with that, if only a little.

And, because Pete is Pete, once he went off with Jenna to “see her drum set”—even though Rae was the drummer—he didn’t return for the rest of the night. And so Adnan got the bottom bunk like he’d wanted.