Wabanaki Blues Read Free Page A

the Beatles, which Lizzy deemed peculiar. She said no respectable blues musician would obsess about a dumb-ass pretty boy and a fifty-year-old British rock band. But I don’t care; I know what I like. Take The Dead Kittens. Their lead guitarist, Scratch, is the same age as me. After graduation, I want to go on tour with a band—not the lukewarm mess of a band that Lizzy and I cooked up—I mean a real band. Or, I might go solo with my blues act and head for St. Louis. I’m moving far away from here, that much I know.
    I once told Bilki my ambitions, and she said, “So you want to be a musician? The creation of art and beauty is fraught with sacrifice. One day, you’ll need to decide if you’re willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve your goals or if those goals are a fantasy.”
    I’ll admit me hooking up with Beetle is a fantasy. But me touring the world with my music is a certainty. It’s only a matter of time. Trust me.
    I play a couple lines of Louis Armstrong’s “St. Louis Blues.” I got those St. Louis blues, just as blue as I can be. Oh, my man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea…
    My face almost slips into a fluffy teen magazine cover grin at the thought of traveling west to the great city of St. Louis with Rosalita, when a shadow crosses my feet. It’s Mia, for sure, and I doubt she’ll be as friendly as my dead grandmother. I keep strumming in the hopes I can wish away my fate. But it’s no use. They say Mia takes revenge on the naïve and vulnerable. And look at me: I’m a senior who’s never been kissed, locked in a cinderblock basement cell playing a woebegone tune. I glue my eyes to Rosalita, hoping not to see anything that might be construed as the specter of a dead teenage girl. I don’t dare look up—at first, anyway. But curiosity kicks in. I have to take a small peek. I raise my head and see…nothing. What I thought I saw must have been the shadow of some woman on the street, courtesy of the light streaming through the lunchbox-sized window overhead.
    Imprisonment is making me crazy. I rush to the locked metal door and hammer my palms against it. My pounding sounds muffled and stuffy, like your hearing does after an airplane flight or inside a nightmare. I need to apply more force. I lift my foot to kick that door but pause when the lock starts to rattle and the door cracks open. I drop my leg. Crooked old fingers appear, winding around the door jam. Millicent Dibble reenters, her raunchy red lipstick neatly reapplied.
    â€œI hope you’ve had enough time to reflect on your misguided clothing choice, Ms. LaPierre.”
    Footsteps thump down the stairs behind her. Mom appears and freezes in the doorway, her endless dark hair flowing past the narrow waistband of her yoga pants. She made it here in record time because she didn’t bother to change. Fantastic. Mom stares at the dirty mop head in the corner of the room, precisely as I did. Like everyone else in town, she knows the legend of Mia Delaney, although she didn’t grow up here. Mom moved to Connecticut from Hicksville, New Hampshire, to attend Yale University. Dad came from a similarly backwater town in French Canada. My parents met at a Yale conference called “Ancient Rituals in The Modern World.” That was appropriate, as they both like outdated things. Dad had already been teaching at Twain College for a decade when they met. My guess is their connection landed Mom her job at Twain. Or, should I say, former job. I wonder if my parents liked each other back then. Now Dad finds every excuse to fly to remote parts of Russia on archaeological expeditions with his team of adoring graduate students. Mom never travels with him. She loves downtown Hartford and hates everything about everywhere else in New England, especially places that have too much fall foliage. She says it wears on her. What’s up with that? She is a