The Bad Decisions Playlist (23 page)

Who is glowing, tireless, joyful, as merry as I have seen him. Our endlessly encouraging and positive ringleader. The other Shane, the angry, impatient one, the defeated one, it feels as if he never existed.

He never says anything directly to me about Josephine, but sometimes I catch him looking at us, that mysterious smile on his face. Amused and maybe proud and maybe something else, the closest that he gets now to melancholy, the way he looked during his show when he was peering skyward at those high notes that are gone forever. When he sees me observing him, his eyes crinkle more and his smile grows, and once he gives me a nod.

I want this song to go on forever.

And so do I.

And I know that it can't. Know in the back of my mind that gravity still exists. That it will eventually assert itself over whatever shoe or shoes are out there waiting to drop. The little red flag again. I look the other direction.

I still haven't spoken with my mom. But I started getting texts from a number I didn't recognize. I opened the first one and it said,
Hi, it's Rick
. That's as far as I got. I've ignored the rest.

The morning of the second day Josephine and I did a ninja visit to her house so she could grab more clothes. That night she had a phone conversation with her family, a sharp argument with her mother:

“Oh, you're going to call the police? How's that going to look in the paper? Mom​—​would you​—​Mom, listen to me​—​fine. Put him on. Put Dad on.”

Pause.

“Hi, Dad.”

She listened.

“Dad​—​hold on. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad, Patricia Laughton.”

She waited, a look of grim satisfaction on her face. I didn't hear anything coming from the other end of the phone. The pause seemed interminable, and she stood stock still, jaw clenched, and I watched her eyes get brighter as they started to fill with tears. Finally she said, “I'll be home in a few days, Dad.” And she hung up and put her head in her hands and cried, and I held her, confused. Finally she said, “I knew it. I
knew
it.”

“Knew what?”

“She's his campaign manager.”

“Oh. So . . . ?”

She looked at me.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Oh, jeez.”

Thus does Josephine blackmail her way to a brief period of freedom.

∗  ∗  ∗

Do Austin Methune and Josephine Lindahl, teenagers in love lying together unsupervised each night in a bed in a romantic hideaway, do they, well,
do
they?

I will not lie. There are repeated incidents of both hanky and panky.

But for me, none of those activities compares with just being together, holding each other, whispering, sharing our secrets, falling asleep intertwined. If someone made a pronouncement that time would now stop and I would get this and nothing else forevermore, I would be content.

To answer your question more completely: While there has been hanky panky, there hasn't been Hanky Panky. I'm still technically in the
V
column.

But the night that Josephine blackmails her dad, when we're wrapped around each other in the bed, she says, “You never asked me if
I
was a virgin.”

“I didn't think it was my business.”

“Do you want to know?”

“It's okay if you're not.”

“I know it's okay if I'm not.”

“Well?”

“Yes.”

“You
are?
”

“Yes.”

“Why did
you
wait?”

“I wanted someone special too.”

We lie there in the dark, and she starts to smile and I start to smile until we're both giggling.

“Okay, yes,” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

“But not yet,” I say. “Not yet.”

“When?”

“The night of the show.”

“Okay. The night of the show.”

We kiss and go at it and nearly break our own promise but manage not to. Because here's the thing: When you know that you're together forever, why rush it?

∗  ∗  ∗

And Todd.

The first day I picked him up, he was waiting on the corner, drumsticks in hand.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he didn't say, just nodded. Then climbed on the back and we rode wordlessly to the studio.

And that's how he's been. If someone were to transcribe every word Todd has said since the day I spirited him away from the lawn crew, it wouldn't fill half a page.

In the studio you get about five phrases from him:
Okay; Yeah; Sure; You mean like this?;
and
Got it.
I think he said more to me back when we were mowing lawns and he was threatening my life. Maybe this is just how jocks do the whole interpersonal-relations thing: grunts and nods, the occasional menacing outburst, maybe the mutual removal of lice.

There was one odd exception. It was just the two of us in the studio, Shane out to smoke, Josephine in the bathroom. I was strumming one of my own songs that I'd been working on, singing a few of the lyrics softly.

“That yours?” Todd said, and I nearly jumped.

“Yes.”

He paused, like he wasn't sure he was the one who had spoken. Then, “It's a good song.”

“Thanks.”

“Needs balls, though.”

Other than that, silence. It's the same at dinner each night. Todd sits with us without really being with us, and I'd wager that if you pulled that sneaky teacher trick on him​—​“Mr. Malloy? Can you tell me what we've been discussing for the past ten minutes?”​—​he'd fail every time.

For the most part Shane has seemed content to let Todd be Todd, other than entertaining himself now and then by saying something like, “Todd, please, would you shut the hell up already?” But on our third night in our regular booth at the bowling alley I keep noticing him glancing at Todd, rolling some question around in his head. Finally he indicates the fading bruise on Todd's cheek.

“Todd, tell me something. What happened there? That some sort of summer hockey league fight?”

Todd chews a bit and says through some food, “My dad hit me.”

Josephine puts her fork onto her gluten-free salad and sits back.

“Really?” she says.

Todd takes another bite, glances at me.

“Yeah, really,” I say. “I saw it.”

Josephine looks at me. Shane is watching Todd and has a funny half smile on his face.

“Has he done that before?” Josephine says to Todd.

Todd nods absently, sips his Coke.

“Does he​—​I mean, what about your mom?” says Josephine.

“Yeah, sure, he's slapped her a few times.”

Josephine is aghast.

“What? You should tell someone! You should call the police! You guys should leave!”

Todd gives her a look, something akin to an eye roll, and returns his attention to his burger, done with the conversation.

Shane says, “Yeah, well, it's never quite that easy when you're living it. Right?” Looking at Todd as he says it.

Todd's chewing slows, then stops.

“Uh-huh,” says Shane. “I grew up down near Odessa. Odessa, Texas. Scrub brush, oil fields, doublewides.” Stretching it out to
wiiiiiiides,
his accent stronger now. “My old man​—​this guy's grandfather”​—​tilting his head once toward me​—​“he worked in the fields. What you call a roustabout. Used to get loaded,
pshooo.
” He mimes a punch. “I left when I was, what, sixteen, off to be a big star. Never saw him or spoke to him again.”

We wait while he takes a sip of beer. Todd swallows, his burger forgotten in his hand.

“Now, I can't say as I'm a great expert at being a dad.” A brief glance at me. “But I
can
tell you it ain't too late.”

“Not too late for what?” says Todd.

“For you to not become like him.”

∗  ∗  ∗

When we leave the restaurant, Todd is somehow even more quiet than before, like he's retreated deep inside himself somewhere. Shane pulls me aside and says, “Hey​—​you have to go home? You want to come hang out a bit tonight?”

So there's some subterfuge with me pretending to take Josephine home​—​Me: “You sure it's okay?” Her: “Of course. Go hang out with your dad”​—​and then I go around to Shane's front door where the horseshoe is mounted and ring the doorbell.

We end up lying on the roof. We talk about the show, music, nothing, me wondering if that's all he wants, just some company.

I say, “Where's the horseshoe from?”

“My granddaddy. My mom's dad. He was an honest-to-God cowboy, way back.”

“Your dad,” I say. “I didn't know that stuff about him.”

“Yeah, why would you. Maybe growing up like that, maybe that's why I left KD. Afraid I'd turn out like him.”

He lights another cigarette while I think about that.

“So you
did
know about me.”

He's quiet. He exhales smoke and it briefly blurs the stars, blurs a portion of the moon before dissipating.

“Yes. Or I suspected.”

“You told me you didn't know.”

“Yeah. I wasn't being honest with either of us. I blocked it out for so long. Austin, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for being dishonest about it, and I'm sorry for leaving.”

He's got his head turned, observing me, maybe apprehensive that we're going to have a repeat of my hysterics in the bar and this time I'll hurl myself off the roof.

“You all right?” he says.

“Yeah, I'm all right,” I say. “What I said before, in the bar, I didn't mean it. I'm glad you came back. I'm glad we met.”

“Me too.” He gives me a pat on the shoulder, and this time I don't feel like batting it away.

“But are you gonna leave again?”

“Well, I have to.”

“You don't
have
to.”

“This isn't really my home, Austin.”

“Could be. Could be your home. You could live up here. Lots of people make music up here.
Prince
makes music up here.”

“Well, I ain't exactly Prince. Plus I don't think I'd make it through the winter. Plus, look, I'm gonna be traveling a lot. You want to make money as a musician nowadays, you have to play shows constantly. Can't just sell records like you used to. All that streaming crap wrecked it. Not that I used to sell a lot of records.”

He takes another drag on his cigarette.

“So, yeah, I'll be moving on. We've got the show tomorrow, and then I was going to fly out for the show in New York next week. Then back here for a few weeks until the end of the month, then probably back to Nashville for a spell.”

“To finish the album?”

“Yeah. But we can hang out till I go, you want.”

“Okay,” I say.

He turns his head toward me.

“Hey,” he says.

“What.”

“Even after I go, I'll be
around,
” he says. “You know what I mean?”

“No.”

He rolls onto his side and props his head on his elbow.

“I mean, I want you in my life. I want to be in your life. I want to come visit you and have you visit me and, when you're old enough, maybe you can come and hang out with me for a bit, and who knows?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Meeting you, Austin, it's changed my life. I might leave, but that doesn't mean I'm
leaving.
You get it? I won't ever leave you again. You hear me, right? I won't ever leave you again.”

∗  ∗  ∗

Josephine stirs when I climb into bed with her.

“You have a good talk?” she says sleepily.

“Yeah.”

“Good. You excited about tomorrow?”

“Yeah. Shane Tyler and the Children's Crusade. It's a good name.”

She makes a half-asleep sound that's not quite assent.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

She yawns. “You know what happened in the children's crusade, right?”

“No.”

“The Middle Ages. A bunch of kids marched off to free the Holy Land.”

“And?”

She doesn't answer at first, starting to doze again.

“Hey.”

“Hm?”

“So what happened to them?”

“The kids? They all died.”

She yawns again, and pretty soon she's asleep.

I stay awake for a long time.

I've been back and forth through midnight twice /

the first time fun / the second / not so nice

Gravity returns when I go to get the Replacements T-shirt.

It's Friday. Show day. The plan is to meet at the studio for a late-afternoon rehearsal, then food, then the show.

But I need my Replacements T-shirt for the show, because I just need it, can't visualize performing without it. Except it's at home.

When I explain to Josephine that I have to go home to get my Replacements T-shirt​—​“Okay. Wait. Why?” “Because. I just need it”​—​she says she's going to walk around the lake and let's meet later. So off I go, midmorning, knowing that my mom will be at the nail salon and Rick will be off somewhere, suing people or doing whatever he does.