Chapter 23

While I had thought about her a few times, I hadn’t talked to Sydney since our impromptu lunch the previous Tuesday, which is why I was surprised when she intercepted me on the way to the lunch table Monday.

“Hey,” she said, stepping apparently out of nowhere in front of me.

“Hey, yourself.”

“Did you want to come sit with me and my friends today?”

“Really?” I said.

I don’t know what I thought she was going to say, but that wasn’t it. I couldn’t help but think about my first time getting to know Rhonda, and how that had been one of the first things she’d done, asking me to eat lunch with her and her friends. Although Sydney and I had had lunch together the other day and she’d been a little fan-girly when she’d first talked to me during the swimming competition, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might actually be into me.

Maybe I was reading too much into it and she just liked talking to me and wanted to hang out more, but after Rhonda and listening to my lunch friends talk, I’d realized there was a lot of social maneuvering involved in who sat where. You couldn’t just sit down with any group at lunch, at least not without people wondering what you were doing. Being invited to join someone’s lunch table had all kinds of implications associated with it. Hanna had brought me to her lunch table as a friend, and I’d ended up with a bunch of friends here at school that continued even after she went to college. With Rhonda, it was an audition to see if her friends would accept me if we started dating.

Of course, for Rhonda, there was the added weight that she was extremely concerned with what others thought of her and her position as queen bee of her group of friends. I didn’t get that vibe at all from Sydney. I was still learning about how all of this social hierarchy worked here, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t Sydney just wanting to hang out or for me to join her ‘friend group.’

I had figured out enough to know that if I said ‘no,’ she’d definitely read that as ‘not interested’ beyond being friends. Although I hadn’t thought of her like that yet, now that I did, I didn’t hate the idea. She was smart, easy to talk to, and not superficial like Rhonda had been. Now that I was considering it, she was pretty cute, too.

“Yeah. We haven’t talked since the other day and you’re so busy I thought this would be a nice chance to hang out.”

Since I’d only ever dated Rhonda, I still didn’t know all of the steps to this dance, but I was pretty sure she couldn’t just say ‘ohh, I think you’re cute and want to see if my friends approve of you,’ even though that would be a lot easier. Maybe she just wanted to hang out again, but the way she looked at me, I was pretty it was more than that. But what did I know? Even though my two best friends were girls, ‘women’ were still an absolute mystery to me.

“Uhh, sure,” I said, which earned me a big smile.

She whipped around, her shoulder-length hair swooshing around her face, and led me towards a table with two groups sitting at it and a gap of three seats making it clear they were very much separate. Since one group was five girls who looked to be around the same grade as Sydney, and the other was Goths, with their all-black wardrobe and emphasis on dark makeup regardless of gender, it wasn’t hard to figure out which group we were heading towards.

Even though the town was small, and the school didn’t have a huge number of students, I knew surprisingly few other kids, except the ones I had classes with or who happened to be friends of friends. Partly, it was because the kids who went here came from a wide area, many from farms outside of town, and partly because I didn’t really socialize with anyone outside of my friend group. I assumed they were all sophomores like Sydney, since I didn’t recognize any of them.

“Guys, this is Charlie. Charlie, that’s Shelly, Sabrina, Beth, Stacy, and Tasha.”

“Hey,” I said, setting my lunch down. “Are y’all on the swim team with Sydney?”

“Hell no. Do you know how many practices they had over the summer?” the girl Sydney had called Sabrina said. “No, we were all in middle school together, became friends, and just sort of stayed friends after that.”

“Beth is on the soccer team, Tasha’s in theatre, Sabrina and I spend all our time studying and are huge nerds...” Stacy said and then stopped as the girls protested.

“Hey,” Sabrina said.

“Yeah, hey. And I’m in math club,” Stacy said.

“Fine, not huge nerds but they spend too much time studying to do any extracurriculars, and Shelly there is a farm girl who goes right home to do chores every day.”

“She competes in barrel racing, to be fair,” Tasha said.

“Fine, she’s a horse girl,” Sydney said.

“You’re in theatre?” I asked Tasha. “Do you know Cameron Barnes?”

“Yeah. I mean, not personally. I only got small parts last year, so we didn’t really have scenes together, or whatever; and he tends to hang out with the upperclassmen. He’s nice, though.”

“Ohh, I didn’t realize there was a whole hierarchy in theatre.”

“You have no idea. I mean, it’s not huge so we all talk or whatever, but there are definitely cliques. Like, I mostly hang with the background people, the stage and lighting guys mostly stay to themselves, and the upperclassmen that get all the big roles mostly stay to themselves. It’s not malicious or anything; and if someone wanted to sit in with one of the other groups, I don’t think they’d get a lot of complaints, but we just don’t really do it.”

“I get it. Baseball was kind of that way too, I guess. The JV and varsity guys didn’t really hang out together.”

“So what’s up with your ex-girlfriend?” Beth asked.

I was taken aback by the question, since it was both out of the blue and a little hostile.

Sydney was also clearly not expecting it, because she got an annoyed expression on her face and said, “Beth!”

“What. He’s here and you keep telling us how great he is, then he can man up and deal with the bitch.”

“BETH,” Sydney said, her eyes darting to me and then back to her friend, looking panicked.

If it wasn’t for the bit about Rhonda, I’d actually find it funny. I’d already figured out Sydney liked me, or at least I had once she invited me to sit with them, and normally it would be fun to see her squirm as her friends spilled her secrets. However, I hadn’t spoken to Rhonda since before the summer and had only seen her in passing once or twice since school started back up. As far as I was aware, we were completely done with each other. She’d tried to make trouble for Kat at the end of last year, but I thought that had been about Kat and Aaron, maybe trying to get some kind of social cred from Aaron’s crew, and had been pretty sure it didn’t have anything to do specifically with me.

If she was going after Sydney, then that was something else. Sydney and I weren’t dating, but I think people had seen us out together and figured out we liked each other. The two times we’d talked we’d been in public and Rhonda was popular enough that it wasn’t hard to imagine word getting back to her. Of course, that still didn’t explain why she’d want to go after Sydney. She’d made it clear she didn’t have any interest in me anymore.

“What happened with Rhonda?” I asked Sydney, who clearly didn’t want any part of this conversation.

“It was nothing. She just stopped me outside the school this morning to talk.”

“She told Sydney that she should stay away from you, accused her of chasing you ‘cause she thinks you’re going to be famous, and called her a slut,” Sabrina said.

“Really? She just came up and said that?” I asked Sydney.

Sydney looked more embarrassed by the whole thing than upset, nodded and said, “Yeah, but it’s not a big deal. She didn’t actually do anything. Just insulted me, and I don’t care what she thinks of me.”

“Still, she shouldn’t have done that, especially since we haven’t spoken since last year. I’ll talk to her.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Sydney said. “It wasn’t a big deal, really.”

“It is and I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I promise I won’t make a big deal of it or anything.”

“Please don’t,” Sydney said, making hard eye contact with me. “I really just want it to drop.”

“Fine, but if she does it again, or escalates it somehow, I’m going to talk to her, okay?”

“We’ll see.”

“So, what’s it like playing in clubs and traveling around?” Beth asked.

“It’s fun, although really exhausting. A lot depends on which clubs we play. The ones that are more bars than live music, as opposed to live music venues that also serve alcohol, kind of suck. People aren’t really paying attention, and that kills the vibe. A lot of what makes being up on stage fun is playing off the audience, using their excitement and energy and feeding it back to them.”

“I can’t imagine what that’s like. We’ve only had a couple of small swim meets, and even then, I have to pretend there aren’t any people watching or I get so nervous. I can’t imagine playing in front of thousands of people.”

“It’s more like dozens of people. We mostly play small clubs and bars that aren’t that much bigger than the Blue Ridge. We played a few music-specific venues, one that held over a thousand people and was half full, which was fun. We did get to open for House of Grace, and they had a huge, packed audience. That was otherworldly.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Sydney said.

“It’s pretty exciting, although I honestly don’t know if it’s because of the crowds or just because I like playing. I mean, I have a good time even when we’re practicing and there’s no one around but us. That’s when it’s all about the music. Sometimes we aren’t figuring stuff out; we’re just jamming, maybe even playing covers.”

“That sounds fun,” Sydney said.

“You could come someday, if you want. I can’t promise it will be too exciting, but I think our practices are pretty fun.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

I’d done an excellent job so far of staying out of the house as much as possible, until Thursday night. Kat had therapy, which Hanna’s mom took her to, the band didn’t practice on Thursdays, since we’d be playing all weekend, Chef had to do dinner service, and Sydney’s mom was taking her to Asheville for something. All of which meant I didn’t have anywhere else to hide and was stuck having dinner with my dad until Mom got home.

I spent most of the time hiding in my room, but when Dad called and said dinner was ready, I couldn’t really just ignore him. For one, I was starving, since it was almost eight and school lunch had been at eleven-thirty that morning. And two, Dad was actually a pretty good cook. If Mom was around, he always insisted on having her do the cooking while he ‘practiced,’ which usually meant plucking aimlessly on his guitar while drinking a stack of beers. That was always weird to me, because he was actually a better cook than she was, especially when trying to make something worth eating on the extremely stretched budget we lived on when I was younger. He knew it, too; since he pointed out the fact to Mom all the time, whenever she made something that didn’t quite work.

Tonight, he’d made spaghetti, which for us was a small amount of ground beef, a few cans of tomato sauce, some Italian seasoning, and spaghetti noodles. With that, you could make enough to feed three people for three meals for just about seven dollars if you got the store-brand stuff only, not counting the Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, or garlic powder, all of which could be used making a lot of meals, adding only ten cents or so to the total cost of each meal.

It wasn’t a gourmet meal, but it was filling and actually wasn’t half bad.

“I made your favorite,” he said, which showed how little he actually paid attention.

While I liked it, it was far from my favorite meal when I was a kid, and wouldn’t be in the top fifty now. It was just that this was the best thing he made, and it was better than Mom’s cooking, so it was better than the alternative. But give me a fast food burger and friends, or literally anything from the Blue Ridge, and I’d take it any day. What he meant was, “this was the thing I make that you liked the best, and I only paid attention to you when it somehow involved me.”