The One Thing (16 page)

My breath hitched. What had Mason told his bandmates after I’d left his room the other night? That I was a stalker? A lunatic fan? Suddenly, I felt like one of those jackasses who had
resolved to ride out a hurricane in a trailer park. A storm was knocking on my front door, and now there was nowhere to go.

David put a hand to his chest. I held my breath, waiting for the ax to fall. “Be still my heart,” he said. “Maggie Sanders: the mystery girl. You look as lovely as ever.”
Then he loped over and crashed down beside me, bumping his shoulder against mine. “Do me a favor and explain that little scene in Mason’s room? Mason won’t tell us jack
shit.”

I blinked. Mason hadn’t told his friends about his suspicions? I waved David off with one hand, and, staring at the tattoo on his forearm, said, “It was nothing, actually. Just, you
know...a misunderstanding.”

“Then you and Mason don’t have a thing?”

I felt a weird tickle in my throat. I swallowed over it. “Nope.”

He kicked his spindly legs out in front of him and laced his hands behind his head, leaning against the couch. “Is there a reason you’re here at eight
P.M.
on
this beautiful summer evening, listening to reruns of...” He glanced at the TV and cringed. “Holy crap, it’s even worse than I thought:
So You Think You Can
Dance
?”

I shrugged.

“You know it’s Saturday night, right?” he asked.

“So?”

“So we are heading out to the Strand. The Dead Eddies are playing a reunion show there tonight and you should come with.”

“The Dead Eddies? No shit?”

He smiled with one side of his mouth. “I shit you not.”

“Wow.” The Dead Eddies were...well, they were the
Dead Eddies
. I’d loved them since forever. Still, the thought of being around Mason without the benefit of sight made
a hard knot settle in my stomach. In fact, the thought of being around Mason at all made a hard knot settle in my stomach.

I swallowed. “Are Carlos and Gavin going, too?” I asked.

David picked casually at a loose fray on his jeans. “Gavin’s tied up at some dinner soiree with his parents, and we haven’t seen Carlos since he stormed out of rehearsal a
couple days ago.”

“You guys have a fight?”

David shrugged, a motion that involved the entire upper half of his body. “Sometimes he doesn’t see eye to eye with the rest of us. He was hell-bent on changing an arrangement, we
disagreed, and he took off. His usual MO,” he said dismissively. “Anyway: the Strand?”

“Um,” I said, stalling. “Isn’t the Strand that place in Bridgeport? The over-twenty-one club?”

“Yup,” David said.

“You guys have fake IDs?”

“Yup.”

“Well, I don’t have one, so I guess I’m out.”

“Yeah, but here’s the thing: I know a guy who knows a guy who owes me a solid. I can get you in.”

Grasping now, I blurted, “I forgot my cane at home.”

He shrugged. “You can borrow my elbow for the evening. Or Mason’s.”

I swallowed so loudly that I swore he could hear it. “But Ben—”

David let out a massive sigh, like I was being extremely thickheaded. “Ben is ten and you are seventeen. He will completely understand.” And before I could protest or even say
good-bye to Ben, he yanked me upright, out the door, and into the driveway. As he guided me into the backseat of Mason’s car, he said to Mason, “Hey, man, I invited Maggie to come
along.”

“Ah,” Mason said. Which was technically only an acknowledgment of both my existence and the fact that I was tagging along. Still, Mason didn’t sound mad or upset or broody, and
so it felt like a victory.

I
f I were to jump up and down on a pogo stick while wearing four-inch heels, on the up-bounce I’d probably be just tall enough to hold on to
David’s elbow without reaching. So when I stumbled on the steps of the Strand’s back entrance, I sort of dangled from his arm. Mason, who was directly behind me, steadied me by the
waist while I regained my footing. “You all right?” he asked, taking his hands away but leaving what felt like two burning palms on my sides. I responded with something that sounded an
awful lot like “Gumph,” to which he replied, “Good,” as though I’d uttered an actual word. Which only proved that he was accustomed to starstruck girls who were unable
to respond to him in English.

I anchored myself on the warm bricks of the building while David rapped on a metal-sounding door. The bass inside the Strand was rumbling through my shoes, pricking the underside of my toes. It
wasn’t the Dead Eddies playing—not yet—just some semicurrent deejayed song mixed with another semicurrent deejayed song.

The door opened and music charged loud in my face. “Paulie!” David hollered over the noise. “So Marcus said I could slide in through the back door whenever I wanted.”
There was a pause in which I suspected Paulie—a bouncer?—looked unconvinced. David went on to say, “You can ask Marcus if you don’t believe me.”

“This is a big night, kid,” Paulie said in a gravelly voice. “The kickoff for the Dead Eddies’ reunion tour. There’s a line clear down Sixth.”

“Right, but the thing is that there are only three of us, so we won’t even make a difference in the room capacity.”

Paulie didn’t say anything for several beats. He just stood there, smelling vaguely of body spray and spearmint gum and steroids. Finally he grunted, “Is the girl of age?”

David said, “Paulie, what do you take me for?”

Paulie exhaled a rather extreme burst of spearmint in my face. “Don’t make me regret it, kid.”

And then we were in.

The place was beyond packed. We took maybe five steps and were stopped by a wall of people. “YOU GOOD JUST STAYING HERE?” David hollered.

Like it mattered to me. “TOTALLY.”

David took off to thank Marcus, leaving me alone with Mason, who, due to the number of people crammed in the place, was standing shoulder to shoulder with me. I’d never had a regular
conversation with Mason, so I wasn’t really sure how to behave. Should I open with a joke? Small talk? Finally, I went with something honest.

“IT’S CRAZY IN HERE!” I hollered over the music, and he said “I KNOW, RIGHT?” and I said “WHEN THEY PLAY ‘THE BEGINNING OF IT ALL’ I MIGHT
TOTALLY, LEGITIMATELY HAVE AN ANEURYSM,” and he just laughed. This marked the longest dialogue we’d ever had, and definitely the most normal.

Just then, a cacophony of probably a half-dozen different perfumes floated up in front of us. I heard a chorus of squeals, and then an awed female voice, clearly the spokesperson of the group,
yelled, “I CANNOT BELIEVE IT! IT’S REALLY YOU!”

“OH,” Mason hollered back, “YOU GUYS THINK I’M—RIGHT. I GET THAT ALL THE TIME. I JUST LOOK LIKE THAT GUY.”

I could hear the disappointment in the girl’s tone as she said, almost in a whine, “BUT YOU LOOK
EXACTLY
LIKE HIM. YOU’RE REALLY NOT HIM? THE GUY YOU WALKED IN WITH,
HE LOOKS JUST LIKE—”

“NOPE,” Mason shouted back. I felt his shoulder raise and lower apologetically. “JUST A NORMAL GUY AT A CONCERT. THANKS FOR THE COMPLIMENT, THOUGH.”

Then the girls were gone.

I waited until the song ended, and then I leaned toward Mason and said, “Smooth, by the way.”

“Just wanted to enjoy the night, by the way.”

I smiled in his general direction. I liked being with this Mason, the one I couldn’t see. He seemed more human somehow, more real. I wasn’t distracted by the hair and the eyes and
the...everything. I wasn’t trying to hide anything from him.

David made it back right as the Dead Eddies took the stage. The crowd went insane. Everyone was screaming, jostling into one another, dancing. I’d always loved to dance, but usually I was
overly mindful of how my body was moving. But tonight I wasn’t worried about what people thought of me. I wasn’t uncomfortable. I wasn’t self-conscious. I wasn’t trying to
prove anything to Mason. I wasn’t anything but the music. My stomping feet were the downbeats and my hips were the chorus and my arms were the keyboard riffs.

When the band launched into “The Beginning of It All,” we were jumping up and down, matching the beat. My hair had fallen out of its elastic band, and it undoubtedly stuck out in a
tangled explosion, but I didn’t even care. Due to Mason’s close proximity and the fact that I actually, literally, could not help touching him, all at once we were dancing with each
other without the formality of dancing with each other, complementing each other’s movements perfectly. Every bend of his body seemed to seek out mine, every arch in mine fit perfectly in
his. When the song ended, there was one fragile second when we didn’t move, when we just stayed there, sort of smashed up against each other. And then we took a step apart.

David leaned into my ear and yelled, “I’M SWEATIN’ BALLS”—which, incidentally, was not something I wanted to hear loudly—“GOING TO GET SOMETHING TO
DRINK—WANT SOMETHING?” and I screamed, “YES, WATER, PLEASE,” and he screamed something else, and I said, “WHAT?!” and he screamed it again, but I still
didn’t hear him, so I just nodded because it wasn’t worth the hassle. Minutes later, David came back and shoved an overly sweet, overly aftertasty lemonade in my hand, which I chugged.
I’d have preferred water, really, but I was hot and thirsty and frankly relieved to be drinking anything at all.

By the time the Dead Eddies wrapped up, I’d sort-of-danced with Mason for an hour and a half straight. Also, I’d downed several more lemonades, all of which had gotten surprisingly
better as the night wore on, and all of which seemed to have descended to my bladder at exactly the same moment. “I have to pee,” I announced grandly. “Which is a
problem.”

Man, I felt strange. Loose-jointed.

“Why is it a problem, Maggie?” Mason asked in an amused tone, as though he were talking to a child or a revered pet.

Which unglued me instantly.

After I recovered my voice, I said, “Because
someone
abducted me from the Milton estate without as much as a cane. So now I have to navigate inside the restroom sans cane, which
is nearly impossible because I suck at navigation in general.”

“Particularly when you’re drunk,” David added.

“I’m not
drunk
,” I said indignantly. “I do not drink.” Which was true on multiple levels. Even when I’d still had friends and gone to parties, I
hadn’t been a drinker. Seemed like I’d always had a big game or a big tryout or a big practice the next day. Besides that, the almighty keg always powered high school parties, and I was
generally not fond of beer due to the fact that it tasted like an aluminum pole.

“Well.” David sounded uncomfortable. “You drank tonight. I thought you said you were cool with hard lemonade?”

“I didn’t actually hear that question.” I’d meant to say this quite seriously, but the last part came out in a laugh. And when I tried to say something else, it also came
out in a laugh, which then caused me to laugh harder and lose my balance, whacking into a wall.

Actually, not a wall: a rather large person who smelled strongly of spearmint gum and annoyance. “Paulie!” I said congenially, as though we’d served in Vietnam together or
something. “You should try the lemonade—it’ll change your life!”

Paulie steadied me and spoke over my head to David, “How many drinks did she have?”

“Like, four.” After a long pause, David added, “Ish.”

“Ish?”

“Okay, so possibly five.”

I turned in Paulie’s general direction and said, “By great error, I have had too much to drink and now I have to pee. Badly.”

“Yes. That’s generally how the plumbing works,” Paulie said. “But I think you should take your pee elsewhere.”

Probably the correct response to Paulie’s request would have been “Yes, sir” with no sarcasm. The wrong response, evidently, was “Yes, sir” with sarcasm. And a
salute.

“I have to pee.”

“Right,” Mason said. “You might’ve mentioned that already.”

We were walking across a blessedly quiet parking lot to Mason’s car. By walking, I mean that David had my legs and Mason had my arms. So technically, I was lying down and they were
fulfilling all the walking obligations.

“When is your curfew, Maggie?” David asked.

“Don’t have one tonight,” I said loudly. “Parents are on an overnighter in the city.”

They hoisted me into the backseat of Mason’s car, where I curled up against the cool vinyl, suddenly exhausted. I shut my eyes and rolled over, forehead against the seat, not quite asleep,
but not quite awake, either. I was straddling the obscure gray passageway that ran between the two.

After a couple minutes, I heard Mason mutter, “She passed out?”

“Yeah,” David whispered back. For a moment there was just the steady hum of Mason’s car. And then David’s voice again: “You can thank me now.”

The blinker clacked a couple times, and the car veered left. “For what?” Mason said.

“
I’m
not blind,” David said lightly, a smile in his voice. “I saw you two dancing.” He paused for a tick, probably waiting for Mason to respond. But he
didn’t. “Just wondering why it took the Dead Eddies to pull your heads out of your asses,” David said.

Mason sighed. “It’s a long story.”