Byrd Read Free Page B

you listen to?” he says, casually exhaling a plume of purple smoke, as if the question were casual, which Addie knows it is not.
    She wants to say the right thing. She could humor him and say Dylan or the Stones or Howlin’ Wolf. None of those would be a lie. She could be ingratiating and obvious and say the All-mans. “Joni Mitchell,” she says.
    â€œRight,” he says, “of course,” and laughs.
    â€œShe’s a genius.”
    â€œShe’s got that fluttery voice. It gets on my nerves.”
    They finish their cigarette and go back inside and Roland starts the song again from the top. This time he relaxes into it, holding notes, bending them. He turns up the distortion on his amp to get a bluesier sound, more like Duane. That raw, run-down, lied-to sound.
    Addie closes her eyes. The less he tries to impress her, the better he plays.
    He’s almost at the end—it’s all double-stops and chords now, loud, wailing, building to the full-on heartbreak of the final chorus—when they hear a pounding overhead.
    Pet.
    â€œRoland,” she calls from the top of the stairs, “you have homework.”
    He stops abruptly, without protest, without complaint, as if he’d been expecting the interruption. He turns off his amp, takes off his guitar, wipes the neck with a chamois cloth, then lays it gently in its case, the way you’d put a child to bed. He turns off the stereo, lifts his album by its edges and slides it into its cover.
    â€œI like listening to you,” Addie says.
    â€œI like playing for you,” he says. “You and me, we’re not like everybody else.”
    That night she lies awake in her blue bedroom with her headphones on, listening to Joni, whose high, sad voice drowns out everything. She tries to imagine being Joni—brilliant, beautiful, always in and out of love, able to write and sing and paint about it. Joni even has her own music company, Siquomb, a word she made up, an acronym for “She Is Queen Undisputedly of Mind Beauty.” Addie tries to imagine herself as queen undisputedly of anything.
    Flower Street is quiet. Every now and then a car drives by, flashing its headlights through the dotted swiss curtains. Addie imagines it’s Roland coming for her in his father’s Buick. She imagines him parking along the curb, lighting a cigarette, waiting. There’s no time to get dressed. She will slip out in her nightgown, run barefoot across the grass. Her feet will get wet from dew. She won’t be able to see his face in the dark, only the glowing orange tip of his cigarette. He’ll push open the passenger door and say to her, Come on, let’s drive to the lake . And they will, they’ll drive to Old City Lake and park near the dam, and the night will be spacious and peaceful with only the lapping of the water, and she’ll lean against him and point at the trees on the far bank and say, Look, lightning bugs .
    â€œI love how you’re not afraid to speak up,” Roland says. They’re at the wall, sharing a smoke between classes. “I love all the shit you know. How do you know so much?”
    â€œI read,” she says.
    â€œI don’t. The only book I’ve ever read start to finish is On the Road.”
    â€œToo bad you didn’t pick a better one,” she says.
    His laugh is like a dry cough. Huck-huck-huck . Self-conscious, like he’s laughing at the sound of himself laughing. “I had a head injury when I was young. My brain hurts when I read.” He tells her the swimming pool story. He tells it as if he’s letting her in on a secret he’s never told anyone, and she pretends she’s hearing it for the first time.
    â€œMusic is how my brain works,” he says. “Ever since I hit my head, the only way I can think is in music. Which is cool when you’re playing guitar, but not when you’re not.”
    â€œMost people would kill to play