The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away (18 page)

When Kate used to play basketball, her favorite part of the game was after it was over, when she felt all used up in a good way. She’d take a shower, put on clean clothes, and notice how good clean clothes felt, fresh and cool against her skin, the light scent of the fabric sheets her mom used just barely there but nice. After a game, whatever she put in her mouth tasted amazing, chips, pizza, spaghetti, it didn’t matter. Her body hummed with the happiness of having spent sixty minutes stretching and jumping and sprinting up and down the court a hundred times.

And now, sitting on the roof outside her bedroom window after band practice, she feels the same way. Like she’s had the best workout
of her life. Like her muscles have been uploading oxygen all afternoon.

Kate has just started roof sitting. She got the idea from a comic strip where a teenage boy sits on his roof a lot and thinks about stuff. One day, walking home from the bus stop, Kate realized she could do the same thing—that it would be easy to slip out of her bedroom window onto the part of the roof that overhung the front porch. So now she’s a roof sitter, and she thinks she’ll always be a roof sitter, because, as it turns out, her roof is the best place in the world to get away from everyone and do some real thinking.

What she wants to think about now is band practice. Two days ago it never occurred to her that she could be in a band, and then yesterday, Friday, this girl named Torie Reisman came over to where Kate was digging raised beds in the student commons garden and said, “Hey, I heard that you play guitar. My dad just said I could use his drum kit out in the garage, so I’m trying to get some kids to come over and jam tomorrow. You up for it?”

Kate didn’t even
know
Torie Reisman. Well,
she knew who Torie was, seventh grader, pretty smart, computer lab rat, jeans and T-shirt, hair always pulled back in a ponytail. Kate never would have guessed she was also the kind of person who would have a drum kit in her garage.

“Uh, yeah, sure.” Kate straightened up and brushed the dirt off her hands. “Although I guess I should ask what kind of music you want to play.”

“I’m still figuring that out,” Torie told her. “I’m sort of into the music my dad likes, just because he plays it all the time in the car. Like, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and stuff? But I also—I don’t know. I mean, I just got an iPod? So I’ve been downloading all kinds of songs, and I kind of like everything. So I’m open.”

“Cool,” Kate said. “Have you ever played drums before?”

Torie shook her head and grinned. “Never. But I heard you’re pretty good on guitar. And this girl Carter Ricks, who lives in my neighborhood? She’s homeschooled? She plays stand-up bass in her family’s old-time band. She said
electric bass would be no problem, though.”

“I’ve only got an acoustic guitar,” Kate told her. “But my friend has an electric one I could probably use.”

“You can rock out on acoustic,” Torie said. “You just have to use a pickup. We’ll figure it out. I’ve been reading my dad’s old
Musician
magazines and learning tons of stuff. My mom’s always bugging him to throw ’em out, but he won’t. He calls them ‘the expressway to his youth,’ whatever that means.”

So Saturday morning Kate got up and went to
Guys and Dolls
rehearsal, and then after lunch she got her dad to drive her over to Torie’s house. Carter Ricks was already there, sitting on an overturned milk crate and plucking out notes on a red bass guitar. “It’s weird to be sitting down while I play,” she said when Kate walked in, not bothering to introduce herself first. “There’s a reason they call a stand-up bass a stand-up bass.”

“I thought there might be,” Kate replied, setting down her guitar case. “But it’s nice to know for sure.”

Just then Torie came out of the house, a pair of drumsticks in one hand, a MacBook in the other. “You know we’re going to sound awful today, right?”

Carter shrugged. “Maybe. But sometimes even awful sounds good.”

And they did sound pretty awful at first. They decided to learn how to play the Rolling Stones song “Satisfaction,” since it was a song they all knew. They listened to it on iTunes a couple of times, and took a look at some chord charts they pulled up on the Internet. “Let’s give it a go,” Torie finally declared. “No time like the present, etc., etc.”

“You know, I don’t think ‘Satisfaction’ is the right choice for this outfit,” Carter said after the fifth time they’d tried and totally failed to play something resembling the song they’d been listening to. “Do you guys know this band called Midtown Dickens? They get played a lot on K-DUCK. They have this really cool, pared-down thing going on that might really work for us.”

That’s when Kate knew she and Carter were definitely going to be friends. By the end of the
afternoon, they’d gotten the song “Only Brother” pretty much down and were in agreement that they could use a banjo player. Kate liked how her and Carter’s voices fit together, weaving over and under each other. It was fun singing with someone else, she realized. Fun to make music in somebody’s garage, the sound of kids playing baseball down the street, bats cracking, voices crying out “I got it!” floating through the songs. It was like being on a team, Kate thought during a break as she sipped on the Coke that Torie had grabbed out of the garage fridge. The coolest team in the world.

Now she stretches out her arms to the darkening sky and sings, “
I am my only brother, but this cavern is not my home
. . . .”

She lets herself think about band practice a little more, holding off for a minute the next thing she wants to think about, something she doesn’t want to ruin by overthinking it. Finally, though, she gives in and thinks about Matthew Holler.

After band practice, her dad stopped at the Quick-E Mart to pick up a quart of milk, and
Kate went in with him, just to look around. You never knew what you might find at the Quick-E Mart. Once Kate had bought a pack of six glow-in-the-dark mechanical pencils for ninety-nine cents, and another time she’d gotten a copy of
Wonder Woman
in Chinese. She’d taken it in for show-and-tell, and this kid named Sonio Lee, who came from Hong Kong, translated it for the class.

While her dad was waiting in line, Kate had scurried to the magazine rack. Maybe she’d find the latest issue of
Rolling Stone
or
Guitar Player
. Instead what she found was Matthew Holler.

“Whoa,” he’d said when he saw her. “I was just thinking about you.” He held out a copy of
Guitar World
. “There’s an article on electric guitar gods who started out as acoustic guitarists, and I was thinking they should do one on acoustic players who started out on electric.”

Kate couldn’t hold back. “I just had my first band practice! I mean, just this very minute. Do you know Torie Reisman? We practiced at her house.”

Matthew took a step back, a big smile blooming across his face. “Dude, I just had band practice too. Over at Bob Stockfish’s. It totally rocked, except for the part where we stunk up the joint.”

“Us too!” Kate exclaimed. “At first I thought, This is never going to work. But then we kind of figured it out.”

“Kate?” Mr. Faber stood at the end of the aisle. “Oh, hi, Matthew. Good to see you.”

“Hey, Mr. Faber,” Matthew said. “Kate and I were just talking about music.”

“As usual,” Mr. Faber said, and then he checked his watch. “I’ll be in the car, Kate. Five minutes, okay?”

Kate looked at Matthew, and they both grinned, like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. “Okay,” she said. “Five minutes. What can we accomplish in five minutes?”

“We could talk about the good old days,” Matthew suggested.

“Let’s talk about band practice instead,” Kate told him. So they went to stand in line so Matthew could pay for his magazine, and they talked about their bands. They talked about
whether Kate should put a pickup on her guitar or if Carter could just keep her amp low, and they talked about how much it would cost to rent practice space at the community center, because Matthew could tell Bob’s mom was not into the idea of having band practice at her house on a regular basis.

They walked out of the store, still talking, and stood at the bagged ice freezer, where they suddenly stopped talking and just stared at each other, both of them looking awkward and tense.

“I guess I ought to get going,” Kate said finally. “Do you need a ride?”

“Nah, there’s a shortcut to my house around back.” Matthew rolled up his magazine and slipped it into his back pocket. “But maybe you could come over sometime? Like tomorrow?”

Kate wanted to say yes. She missed Matthew. A lot. But she wasn’t ready to give up the feeling she’d gotten that afternoon, playing with Torie and Carter, this feeling of being strong and free and, well,
alive
. If she started hanging out with Matthew again, she might lose it. She might trade
it in for the feeling of having an almost boyfriend.

“Maybe not tomorrow,” she said after a minute. “But sometime, okay? I mean, soon. Like maybe when the play’s over. Are you coming to it, by the way? Opening night is next Friday.”

“Sure,” Matthew said. “Sounds good.” He reached out his hand, as though he were going to touch Kate’s hair, but then seemed to think maybe that wasn’t a great idea and shoved it into his pocket instead. “I’ll see you then. And we’ll hang out together soon, definitely.”

He turned to leave, and Kate turned to leave, and just as she reached the car, Matthew called out, “That’s awesome about the band, Kate.”

Kate looked at him. “It’s awesome about your band too. You’ll be great.”

Matthew nodded, and then he went around the corner of the store and was gone. Kate stood by the car door for another second, looking at the empty space he had left behind him.
Come back,
she wanted to call, but she didn’t. Because as much as she wanted Matthew Holler, there were other things she wanted more.

“What on earth are you doing out here?” Kate’s dad sticks his head out of the window. “You’re going to break your arm. Or get pneumonia.”

“Maybe both,” Kate says pleasantly. “Plus rabies, if there are any raccoons up here.”

Mr. Faber climbs through the window and sits down next to Kate. “Aren’t you freezing?”

“I’ve got a sweater on,” Kate points out. “And it’s not that cold. It’s going to be spring soon.”

“In a couple of weeks, maybe. It still might snow. So, was band practice fun?”

Kate shrugs. Sometimes she doesn’t know how to answer her dad’s questions. He’s always asking if things were fun. Was school fun today? Was PE fun today? Did you have fun spending the night at Marylin’s? Kate’s thirteen; her life really isn’t about fun anymore. It’s about bigger things now.

“It was good,” Kate tells her dad. “Only at first it was terrible. It took us a while to figure out how to play together.”

“I had some roommates in college who were in a band,” her dad says. “I used to watch them
practice, and the first twenty minutes were always worthless.”

Kate leans back against the roof and looks up at the stars. It’s still early, so there aren’t a ton, but she can see one or two, plus the moon.
One or two stars plus the moon
. Her mind goes to work on this, trying to turn it into a song—
One or two stars, the moon and you
. No, definitely not right.
Two stars and a lonely moon, another night here without you.
Better. When she goes back inside, she’ll write it down, play around with it some more.

“I heard you singing just now. It sounded nice,” her dad says. “You get that from your mom. I can’t sing a note.”

“I practice a lot. It helps.”

Her dad nods. “It’s the key to everything, practicing. I used to think you were either naturally good at something or you weren’t. I was a terrible runner when I was a kid, really slow, and I thought I’d never get any better. But I knew I’d never make the JV basketball team if I couldn’t run, so the summer before ninth grade I got up at six every morning and ran as fast as I could up and down our street
for thirty minutes. Totally wore myself out.”

“Did it work?”

“Yeah, I got a lot faster. Not like I was the fastest guy in the ninth grade, but I got fast enough to make JV anyway.”

Kate wonders what she needs to practice. Singing harmonies and learning how to pick the guitar instead of just strum, definitely. She should probably practice being nicer to Tracie, although it’s hard to be nice to someone who never replaces the toilet paper when she finishes up a roll and always takes the last piece of cake without asking if anyone else wants it.

Not missing Matthew Holler—that’s something she’s been practicing for over a week now, and she’s getting a little bit better at it, but she’s still not an expert. She knows she was right today to tell Matthew she couldn’t hang out with him yet. But she hopes more than anything that one day she’ll be able to be friends with him and not want to kiss him every second.

“
You’re the man of my dreams, you’re the man in the moon
,” she sings, forgetting that her dad is sitting right next to her.