The Bad Decisions Playlist (13 page)

“Yes, yes.”

“I'm serious, Shane. Lots of good stuff, but lots of work to do.”

“I know.”

“Amy, you make sure he stays on the straight and narrow,” says Ed.

“Can't promise that,” says Amy. “But I'll make sure to get his ass in the studio.”

More laughter. Ed hugs Shane, gives a salute, and departs. The others drop away one by one, Patrick grabbing my head between his hands and kissing me on the forehead before he leaves. Finally it's just me and Shane and Amy, and Amy says, “Babe, I'm taking the truck home. You get to cab it.”

They kiss, she gives me a big hug​—​“You star!” she whispers in my ear​—​and she walks out, pausing to blow another kiss at us.

We watch her go. Now it's just the two of us in the booth. It's one a.m. Shane is sitting across from me in late-night bar pose: one elbow planted on the table, propping up his head with the palm of that hand; the other forearm resting on the scarred, sticky surface, fingers curled lightly around a can of beer. I'm going with my own variant of the bar pose, slumped back into the corner of the booth, hands clasped on my lap.

Shane just looks at me, idly pivoting the beer can back and forth a few degrees,
shish shush.
Shish shush.
Joe Henry's “Trampoline” is playing on the jukebox. I return Shane's gaze.

“Cheers,” he says finally, and slides his hand forward across the table, knocking his beer can against my can of Coke.

“Cheers,” I say, and pick up my Coke, and we drink.

“You did great,” he says.

“Thanks. It was really fun.”

He nods.

“Amy's really nice,” I say.

“Yeah, Amy's the best. And you should hear her sing. There's a talent, I tell you. Gonna be big.”

“You ever record with her?”

He laughs.

“Naw. I'd prefer we stay on good terms.”

He sips his beer.

“So who was that you were talking to after the show?” he says.

“Her? Just some girl.”

“Huh,” he says, and scratches at the stubble on his jaw.

“What?”

He shrugs. “Dunno. Some girls are just some girl, like some guys are just some guy. But she seems like she's more. The kind of girl who knows who she is.”

I look at him sharply.

“What?” he says.

“Why do you say that?”

“Which part of it?”

“That she knows who she is.”

He shrugs again. “You look at her and you know it. You like her?”

It doesn't sound exactly like a question.

“No.”

“Okay.”

“I don't.”

“Okay. She like you?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

We're quiet a bit longer. Then he takes a deep breath and says, “Austin . . . I'm sorry.”

I look at him, confused. Or maybe knowing what he's saying and not wanting to acknowledge it.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I'm sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

He snorts. “Where to start. For being me. For being a mess. For not being there.”

I shrug, take another sip.

“No biggie,” I say. He doesn't answer for a moment and I sit there, looking at the top of my soda can, squeezing the aluminum so that it makes crunching noises.

“Nah,” he says, “it is a biggie. It's about as big a biggie as you get.”

I shrug again. “Whatever. It never bothered me that much.”

“Okay,” he says. “I guess I'm glad to hear that. But it bugs
me.
It bugs me a lot. I can't go back and change anything, but it's important for me to tell you how sorry I am. That's all.”

“No worries,” I say, dismissive, wanting to move on to the next topic. I'm still looking down at my drink, plucking at the pull tab with my index finger.
Boing. Boing. Boing.
He's silent long enough that I finally look up. He's watching me in that way he does, intense, that mix of longing and pain and grim humor.

“Well,” he says, “I'm glad we got to meet.”

“Yeah, yeah, me too,” I say in the same light tone, and then goddammit out of nowhere something inside me gets knocked loose and I give a sound like a hiccup and start bawling.

Sobs. Wrenching. Wracked by them.

Ambushed by sixteen years of sadness and need in the booth of that bar, sadness that I didn't even know existed. I'm crunched over in my seat, hands clapped tightly over my face like that will somehow keep it all inside, my palms wet with tears and snot. I don't want to be crying, so of course that makes it worse, each exhalation a cramped
hhnnnhhh
that clenches me into a tighter ball, followed by that explosive hiccupy gasp as I suck air in again.

I feel Shane's hand on my shoulder from across the table and
boom,
I'm ambushed by another unexpected explosion of emotion. Rage.

“Don't!” I say, and whack his hand away. “You don't friggin' know me!” I say, or as close to that as I can muster through the sobs. He's sitting back in his seat, hands up at chest height like I've got a gun pointed at him. I wipe my nose with my forearm, like a little kid, try to control my voice. “You don't get to do that!” I say again, and jab a finger at him. “You don't. You don't friggin' know me!”

I don't know what's happening. I don't know where this came from, all that joy converted to this ugliness. I clumsily work my way out of the booth and to a standing position, tears still streaming down my cheeks.

“Austin,” he says.

“Shut up,” I say, and let out another honking sob. “I wish you'd never come back.” I turn and push my way through the bar to the exit, aware that the remaining late-night drinkers are all gawking at me.

“Austin!” Shane calls, but I'm already out the door and kick-starting my bike.

“Austin!” says Shane, emerging from the bar, but I'm gone.

Is there sunshine on your side of the river /

'cause since you crossed there's been nothing here but rain /

let the waters rise, let them sweep away the memories /

wash clean the ledgers of all we lost and we gained

“You're late,” says my replacement tutor.

“Sorry,” I say.

My replacement tutor shrugs. “She said you would be,” he says.

“Josephine?”

“Yes.”

My replacement tutor is sitting in the spot where Josephine was when I first met her. He's a skinnyish, solemn-faced kid who looks to be about thirteen years old.

“I'm only about five minutes late.”

He cocks his head slightly.

“She said I'd say that, too,” I venture.

He doesn't respond, but I gather that I'd guessed correctly.

“Right,” I say. “I'm Austin.”

“I know. I'm Isaac. Isaac Kaplan.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I got the email.” Is he thirteen? Younger?

“I'm in college-level calc,” he says, either because he just read my mind or because I'm still hesitating in the doorway.

“That's impressive,” I say. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen. Well, I will be soon.”

“Okay.”

“It's math, not arm wrestling,” he says.

“You could probably beat me there, too,” I say, and toss my bag on the table and take a seat.

∗  ∗  ∗

It's been two days since the show. I haven't heard from Shane since then, and I haven't tried to reach him.

I don't know why I reacted like that in the bar. I just did. Everything had been so good, so perfect, and then it all broke and I hated Shane and felt like I was never going to stop hating him or being sad. It was worse because I was supposed to be happy​—​I had performed on stage, with my father, and everyone saw, and Josephine was there and she saw me and told me I was good, and all I was feeling was anger and darkness.

When I left the bar I was shaking so hard it was difficult to pilot my bike, the tears not helping much either.

I tossed and turned in my bed until five in the morning, feeling like the world had started and ended over the past twenty-four hours. Then I had a sweaty, fitful sleep, dreams of Shane and Josephine, a series of incoherent scenes and images with an unsettling musical score lurking underneath.

When the alarm woke me up, I was greeted by a thudding headache and exhaustion and my mom hectoring me,
Where were you, where were you,
all while I tried to eat breakfast and make a sandwich and get out the door.

I checked my email before I left and felt a burst of excitement and got angry at myself for feeling it: There was a new message from Josephine. Then I realized it was simply a forwarded message from Isaac Kaplan, who was agreeing to tutor me in her place. No extra message from her, nothing about seeing me perform, nothing.

We're not actually friends.

I wrote back a longish email, deleted it, wrote a medium one, deleted it, wrote
thx,
then deleted that, too. Then I went to work, parking my motorcycle in a hidden spot so that Todd and Brad couldn't once again use it as the canvas for one of their dog-poop-based art projects. Instead Todd used me as the canvas. “Hey, Methune!” I heard him shout, and when I was dumb enough to turn around I got my reward​—​
SPLAT
—​a hefty, pungent lump of art material square in the solar plexus.

“Bull's-eye!” said Todd, high-fiving and celebrating with Brad. He was right, because I had chosen that day to commit the minor infraction of foregoing my Rick's Lawn Care Service polo in favor of a faded The Who T-shirt. The one with the logo that looks like a target. A target that now had a big glob of dog poop smack dab in the center. It was one of my favorite shirts, but it stunk so bad that I just stripped it off and left it in some bushes and finished the day topless and sunburned.

When I got home, there was a note from my mom: she and Rick were at a movie, pizza in fridge.
We need to talk.

Which, no thanks. I made sure to be in bed and asleep before they got home, or at least in bed with the lights off while I hid under the covers and thumb-barfed bad lyrics into my phone.

I called and texted Devon a few times. He finally texted me back:
Can you f*** off for like a month?
Except he didn't use asterisks.

∗  ∗  ∗

Now I'm sitting with Isaac Kaplan. I'll admit that I'd been sort of hoping Josephine would be waiting for me in the classroom this morning, despite everything. I have to give Isaac credit, though​—​he seems to know his stuff, and although it's early on I've yet to catch a single eye roll from him as I fumble around.

I take a breather from the quadratic equation that's taunting me from the page.

“Did Josephine say anything else about me?” I ask.

“She said you'd try to distract me from the lesson,” says Isaac.

“Right.” I try without success to refocus on the problem. “Nothing else?”

“Um . . .”

“Nothing about the concert?”

“She didn't mention it, no.”

“Okay, right.”

I pick up my pencil again and tap it against the paper.

“Nothing?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Right. Okay.”

I go back to the problem, scribbling away, then pause again.

“We didn't really talk that much,” he says, before I can start.

“Right.”

Scribble scribble scribble.
A good thirty seconds go by while I advance the field of mathematics.

“Would you say that she knows herself?”

“Knows herself?”

“I mean, when you think of her, do you think, oh, she's just some girl, or do you think, oh, there's someone who's complicated and knows herself and is comfortable with who . . .”

He blinks at me.

“Never mind.”

“Okay.” He looks meaningfully at the unfinished equation in front of me. I go at it again, or try.

“She didn't say
anything
about me singing?”

“No. You skipped a step,” he says, indicating my mistake.

“Right. Okay.”

Tap tap tap
with the pencil on the page.

“I think she hates me,” I say. “Do you think she hates me? She acts like she hates me. I think she hates me.”

“I think,” he says, “that I can teach this stuff pretty well but that I can't make you care.”

“Jesus. How old are you again?”

We work the rest of the time in near silence. By the end of the session I think I've actually started to learn something. Then, after we've packed up and Isaac is about to leave the room, he pauses in the doorway and drops this: “She's definitely not just some girl. And, you know, people have all sorts of reasons for the way they act.”

Then Morpheus Kaplan gives me a little salute and goes off to be Delphic elsewhere.

∗  ∗  ∗