Scar Girl (6 page)

“C'mon in, Pick. Harry's here. We're working on a new song. You should hear it.”

Harry stood up when we walked into Johnny's bedroom. He always did that when I came into a room. Always a little too quickly, always with his shoulders and neck a little too stiff.

“Oh, hey, Chey,” he said to me, and then turned to Johnny. “I can get going. We can finish this later.”

“No, stay, stay. Play the song for Chey.” Johnny eased himself onto the folding chair behind his keyboard. We were cramped in there, and I felt like the walls were closing in. Harry looked at me, waiting for some cue, some hint to know whether he should stay or go. I needed to tell Johnny my news—our news—and I wanted Harry out of there in the worst possible way, but I was kind of stuck. I didn't know how to ask him to leave without giving everything away.

Anyway, maybe Harry could read all that in my eyes, because he said, “No, really, I should go. I'll play it for the whole band when we jam Monday.”

“Stop,” Johnny said. “Just play it. Really, she's going to love it.”

Classic Johnny. Issuing orders and talking about other people like they weren't in the room. As much as all of our relationships had grown and changed, the foundation of who we were was the same. While it didn't happen as much as it used to, when Johnny gave a command Harry was programmed to follow.

Harry sat down on the edge of the bed, lifted Johnny's acoustic onto his lap, and started picking. I leaned against the doorjamb, listening and watching.

Harry was nervous. I could tell because he does this thing with his forehead, crinkling the place where his eyebrows should be, kind of like a pug. The music was much slower and more ballady than anything we'd ever played before. But the riff was hypnotic. It was haunting. Then Harry began to sing.

Phones ring.

Voices meander, like waves

beating up the air.

None of those voices ever sing.

She wonders if

She even cares.

She's nearly a saint.

And no one notices when

she scrapes the ground.

She wishes she had the time

To hear pleasant sounds.

He stopped.

“I'm still working on some of the lyrics, but it has a bridge, too.” He started strumming, going from the main riff to a series of power chords.

Run away,

Go away,

Hide away,

Sneak away.

There's got to be an easier way

To face each day.

Then the bridge flowed back to the main riff, like a musical river.

Her ears ring,

Deafened by noise of boys playing with toys.

But the noise is nothing;

Maybe it's why she's so silently annoyed.

Johnny started messing around on the piano, but I wished he hadn't. It almost ruined the moment.

“Pleasant Sounds”—that's what it's called—was maybe the most beautiful song I'd ever heard. And here's the thing: I knew it was about me.

I could see it in Harry's eyes.

I could feel it in the chords.

I can't really explain it. I just somehow knew.

Johnny was clueless. When it came to music, he wasn't the same as the rest of us. Johnny was, in some ways, the most talented guy in the band, but it was coming from a different place. With me and Richie and Harry, it came from the heart. With Johnny, it came from the head. I actually think that's a good thing for a band, to have some of it coming from the heart and some of it coming from the head.

Anyway, Harry and I were in the middle of sharing this incredible moment, and Johnny was sitting there, grinning like an idiot, missing the whole thing.

“Isn't that great?” he said to me. “Don't you love it?” he pushed. Johnny always pushed.

I started to cry. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones, or maybe the song was just that beautiful, or maybe the long walk from the number twenty bus had done me in. Whatever the reason, I lost it.

“Chey?” Johnny asked, this time with a gentle voice.

“I'll leave you guys alone,” Harry said. He put down the acoustic guitar, picked up his Strat, and walked out of the room. I heard the front door to Johnny's house close, and we were alone.

“Pick, are you okay?” Johnny pulled himself up—like I said, he wasn't wearing his leg—and took a hopping step toward me. I saw him stifle a grimace of pain as he tried to pull me into an embrace. It didn't work.

We flopped down together on the bed, Johnny landing on top of me, pretty hard.

I panicked for a second, thinking, like,
Oh, crap, did he just squash the baby?
But even I knew that was silly. He must've seen my eyes go wide or heard me gasp with fear or something.

“Chey, I'm sorry. . . . I'm not . . . it's not what you think.”

It would've been so easy to just tell him right then and there. To say, “No, Johnny, I don't think you're hitting on me. It's that I'm worried about the baby in my belly. Our baby.” But I couldn't. His eyes were darting back and forth, and they were all glassy. Everything about him seemed lost, like he was in some kind of maze and couldn't find his way out. Johnny was still going through so much shit that I couldn't dump this gigantic thing on him. I just couldn't. It would just have to wait a few more days.

I managed to choke back my tears and tried to smile.

“No, it's okay,” I whispered, talking about us falling onto the bed. “I know, I know.”

And then Johnny McKenna did something I'd never seen him do before.

He started crying.

HARBINGER JONES

It got way more complicated when Chey showed up. I mean, the song was about her. Of course it was about her. I didn't realize that when I was writing it. Sometimes the words and music just pour out and you have no idea what they mean until much later.

In the case of “Pleasant Sounds,” I understood the meaning as soon as I started playing the guitar riff for Johnny. But once I'd started picking the notes, I was trapped.

I kind of hiccupped when I sang the first line—
Phones ring
—my voice catching like it was tripping over the edge of a carpet. And I mumbled. But it didn't matter.

Johnny, who is smarter than me most of the time, is kind of dumb in a couple of very specific ways. It would never occur to him that I would write a song about Cheyenne. Whether that's because he and I are best friends and he and Chey are together, or whether it's because he thinks someone like me has no business fantasizing about someone like Cheyenne, I have no idea.

So I finished the song, and Johnny was just beaming. I could tell that he really loved it, and that put me at ease.

“We have to add this to our set right away. Play it again.”

So I did, and he started messing around with some piano parts.

Then the doorbell rang.

In the two minutes Johnny was gone answering the door, my nerves started jangling. I was pretty sure it was Chey. It's like the universe suddenly notices that I'm doing kind of okay and then it rings the doorbell to set things straight.

When Chey walked into the room trailing Johnny, I felt an overwhelming need to get the hell out of there. I tried, but Johnny kind of forced me to play the song.

Again, I was trapped.

I know what you're thinking.
How can he force you, Harry?

There was too much history between Johnny and me for it to work any other way. It's hard to explain.

I played the song with my eyes shut the entire time. When I finished, Cheyenne just started bawling. She knew right away that the song was about her. Johnny looked confused.

I grabbed my guitar and left, feeling pretty shell-shocked. I figured Chey was crying over the guilt of her and me having kissed in Georgia and that she was going to tell Johnny everything.

Yes, we kissed. It was one time, it lasted all of five seconds, and it never happened again. It was right after Johnny had quit the tour and gone home, and we were all a bit confused. In the end, it didn't mean anything. But I knew Johnny wouldn't see it that way. He would see it as a betrayal, and I couldn't blame him.

I sat in my car, waiting for them to come storming out of the house. I had this mental image of Johnny hopping over to my window and bludgeoning me with his prosthetic leg. When that didn't happen, I thought about going back inside and confronting them, but who was I kidding? There was no way that was going to happen.

All the good stuff in my life that had started to take root was about to be wiped away, again. It was like getting your favorite cassette tape too close to a magnet, all your favorite tracks jumbled and gone.

I started on one of my lists. It's a trick Dr. Kenny taught me when I was a kid. I memorize and recite boring lists of things; it's supposed to help calm me down. Anything from naming all the presidents or Oscar winners to memorizing recipe ingredients or children's books, whatever will force my mind in a different direction.

It works every time.

I was up to the forty-ninth digit of pi—five, in case you're wondering—and it was starting to have an effect. I was settling down, and I knew it was time to leave.

I had my hand on the gearshift, getting ready to back out of Johnny's driveway, when Chey stepped out of the front door. She had stopped crying, but she looked bewildered and more than a little bit freaked out.

“You want a ride?” I asked through the open window.

She didn't say anything or even look at me as she opened the door and took a seat. Not knowing what else to do, I pulled out of the driveway and rolled on down the hill.

We cruised streets in Yonkers, Tuckahoe, and Eastchester for at least ten minutes in total silence. At first I was nervous as hell. I was pretty sure that whatever had happened between Johnny and Cheyenne was my fault, you know, because of the song. But after a while, with neither one of us talking, I kind of disappeared into the car radio. It was playing some New Wave crap—Culture Club, I think—I would never admit to liking in public, but in my head I was singing along.

“He asked me to leave.” Chey's voice startled me. My nervous system was pulled right back to a state of high alert. Launch the bombers, flood the tubes, that sort of thing.

“Why?” It came out more as a croak than an actual word.

“He didn't say. But I think it was his leg?”

“His leg?”

“Yeah, when he got up to hug me, he lost his balance and pulled us both down onto the bed.”

“Smooth move.”

“It wasn't like that!” Chey snapped.

“Sorry,” I muttered, and kept my eyes on the road.

“That's what he was afraid of, that I was thinking he was trying to get us to, you know. It never even crossed my mind. I could tell that he'd lost his balance and had just fallen.”

“And he asked you to leave over that?”

“I think he was embarrassed. Embarrassed that he couldn't be there for me. He started crying, Harry. I've never seen Johnny cry. It was so awful.”

I'd never seen Johnny cry, either. His default reaction to adversity was anger, not despair.

We were quiet for another minute; then I decided to go out on a ledge.

“Chey, why were you crying to begin with?”

CHEYENNE BELLE

When Harry asked me why I was crying, while we were tooling all over Westchester County in his car, I thought for a minute about telling him the truth. I felt like I needed to tell someone, but that seemed wrong to me. Johnny was the father, and he needed to know first. I would just have to figure it out, so I dodged the question.

“You know what we need?” I said instead. “We need to jam.”

There is nothing in the world, not even kissing, that brings a smile to the face of Harbinger Jones like the phrase
We need to jam.
Of all of us, that boy's soul is most connected with the sacrament of music. Plus, playing a bunch of older Scar Boys tunes would wash away “Pleasant Sounds.” As much as I loved that song, I needed to get it out of my brain.

Anyway, at the mention of jamming, Harry seemed to forget his question about why I'd been crying.

HARBINGER JONES

I didn't forget about the question. Chey made such a show of changing the topic so suddenly that I just let it drop.

CHEYENNE BELLE

It was too early for Richie to be home from school, so Harry and I went to the diner for lunch. I wasn't feeling so hot, so I didn't eat much, but we sat there for a long time. We didn't say a whole lot, but that was okay. One of things I love about Harry is that the silences between us are almost never awkward.

HARBINGER JONES

The silences between us are almost
always
awkward.

CHEYENNE BELLE

When we finally got to Richie's house he wasn't there. Mr. Mac, his dad, told us that he'd come home after school, grabbed his skateboard, and left. We thanked him and went to Richie's usual skating spot, the playground at PS 28, where Johnny and Richie went to grade school. (Even though they all lived close together, Harry was districted for a different school, PS some number I can't remember.)

Sure enough, Richie was there, just kind of skating in circles by himself. He had a Walkman on his hip and headphones on his ears.

We sat and watched for a minute from the car.

“I envy that,” Harry said, as much to himself as to me.

“What do you mean?”

“Look at him. He's completely lost in the moment. It's like the world outside doesn't exist.”

“And?”

“Don't you wish you could feel like that sometimes?”

“Who, me?”

“No. I mean, maybe. I guess I mean me.”

I stared at him, thinking he must be kidding. When he looked over at me, I could see he was surprised.