“Your card? You have a card, yo? That’s so old-school.”
“Just in case,” he said.
“I’ll definitely be needing this, Chase. I’m, like, super gangsta. Always looking for trouble.”
He was like, “Um. Okay. Well, maybe you’re also looking for a bat mitzvah band? Or sweet sixteen? Or quinceañera? We do a lot of those.”
Awkward. I changed the subject. “Why Lark’s Head? You guys could come up with something way fresher than that.” What a powerfully uncool name for a band. No wonder they can’t break outta the local scene.
“I don’t care about fresh.” He looked hurt. “I care about meaning.”
“Lark’s Head has meaning?”
“Me and Miles wrote our first song at my uncle’s place on Larkspur.”
“The music producer uncle?”
“Yeah. He let us rehearse there for a couple of weeks.”
“So you wrote ‘Eat My Cheese’ there?” He was impressed. “You remember?”
“I’m very into early Lark’s Head.”
“You’re fucking with me right now.”
“‘Eat My Cheese.’ Hilarious lyrics about twisted sex acts that parents do not get. Catchy with a good beat.”
“Too true.”
“So why Lark’s Head?”
“Because Miles hit his head on the garage door when we were leaving, and because Kyle Keyboard’s always talking ‘bout getting head. And the drummer has a huge head. And because Larkspur is a flower, genius, and we’re a bunch of dudes.”
I looked forward to Mondays and Fridays at the Calabasas Library as much as I looked forward to anything in my life. I don’t just crush on Chase because he’s so scorch—that would be shallow. I love his mind. I love that we can talk about books and music, and our friends, and whatever’s crazy on our feeds. One time I was bragging about Brooky’s finish times in a track event, and he said something about his older sister being an amazing athlete, and I was like, wha…? He’d told me he didn’t have sibs. I knew I shouldn’t ask any more questions, though, after he shook his head and said, “She died in a car crash.”
Later I tried to google her obituary in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is where he lived before his parents moved to Calabasas. His mom’s an X-ray technician at West Hills Hospital. His dad’s retired, but drives Uber and has a five-star rating. Couldn’t find anything else about the Masons. I hate when people don’t have proper identities online. Makes them so hard to creep. I really just wanted to see a picture of the sister whose death haunts my bae.
When I was thirteen and first started my volunteer hours, Chase told me he thought the YA book he saw sticking out of my book bag was stupid, and turned me on to literature, which he pronounced litricha to be funny. I loved that he read books at all, let alone novels by old black women, and dead Chinese women, and people of other cultures. Not long after I told him I was Jewish, Chase fished a copy of Diary of Anne Frank from the shelf. I didn’t tell him that was required reading at my house and I’d read it three times already, but I did tell him I knew the book, and loved Anne, and loved her writing, and how I thought if she lived in our time she’d be an influencer. He was like, “Rory, if Anne Frank lived in our time, she wouldn’t have had to hide from the Nazis and her entire life would have been different. She wouldn’t have been persecuted.” I thought, but I didn’t say, like, Chase, Jews have never stopped being persecuted.
Deep as they got, our convos never seemed to last very long. We were usually interrupted by a blonde in a tube top jiggling in the local history section, or a smokin’ redhead in booty shorts, or a skinny brunette from his school waving him over. He’d just grin at me like “what can a dude do” and motion them into the media room to conversate. I died a little. Every girl. Every time. I have no claim to Chase Mason, but it still razed me. Fee says I’m too good for Chase, and that I’m only obsessed with him because of the familiarity thing—a guy who would prolly, definitely, cheat on me? Daddy issues.
I do have daddy issues. I saw a girl wearing a T-shirt with those words in the parking lot at the public school. That is such a fucked thing to announce because it’s clearly a sexual invitation, yet an acknowledgement that our relationships with our fathers shape our relationships with