This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,47
leaned against the hood of Jeremy’s car, bracing himself with sneakered feet. “It was a great show,” he repeated.
“A licensing rep came up to me afterward. He wants to see our album when we’re finished,” Jeremy said. He sat on the hood next to Daniel, letting the metal dimple slightly under their combined weight. “So I need you to finish those lyrics soon, OK? We’ve got a good opportunity here, and I don’t want to screw it up. I really need this.”
This didn’t have the impact on Daniel that Jeremy expected. Daniel still looked distracted, half a world away. “Sometimes I wonder, who do we think we’re kidding?” Daniel mused. “You and I, we’re both thirty-four; Emerson is thirty-five. The only person still in his twenties is Ben, though God knows he seems to be trying to make up for all of us. But rock and roll is a business for kids, and we’re really pushing it.” He prodded his gut with an index finger. “I mean, it’s not like we’re going to make the cover of Rolling Stone with these bodies.”
“Speak for yourself. We have a real shot, Daniel. Trust me. I’ve done this before.” He paused. “I don’t have anything else but this.”
Daniel threw him a strange look. “Fine, I’ll get on it.” He fixed his gaze at the ground, his head bobbing slightly, as if holding a conversation in his own head. He kicked a stone and sent it skittering across the parking lot. “Where is all this coming from tonight, Jer? Did something happen?”
Jeremy picked at a pink bougainvillea blossom that had glued itself to the hood, while he tried to figure out how to answer this. He’d already roughly sketched out the facts of the situation to Daniel—the impending foreclosure, the mortgage hike, the money crunch, Claudia’s job—and he suspected that Daniel wanted more details, a more emotional catharsis that Jeremy didn’t feel ready to give. “Oh, you know, it’s the same stuff,” he said, noncommittally. “We had to take in a roommate.”
“No shit.” Daniel’s shoe sent another stone skittering. “That’s got to be weird.”
Jeremy shrugged. “It’s only temporary, I hope.”
“Guy or girl?”
“A nurse, named Lucy.” Lucy. Oh, God, just intoning her name made him want a drink. She’d moved into their vacated bedroom that evening. It broke his heart. Waking up every morning to that view over downtown had always been his favorite thing about living in Mount Washington; it somehow made up for the isolation of living on a cul de sac on the top of a hill. The fact that he could see that little sliver of skyline from their bed—the lights of downtown, winking at him in the dark—had always given him a reassuring sense of connection with the rest of the city. For just two hundred bucks a month, he had sold out; they had shoehorned their king-size bed into the spare bedroom, whose one window looked out at a concrete retaining wall.
He’d just been leaving that evening when Lucy arrived with her big wooden trunk in tow. She stood in the doorway of the house with a key—their key!—in one hand, an overflowing Hello Kitty duffel in the other. When they first met, he had pegged her as an average-looking girl who’d lucked out with those spectacular breasts; today, even those were hidden under floral acrylic nurse’s scrubs. She looked pleasantly forgettable, like someone’s kid cousin who worked the checkout line at the supermarket.
“Hello there!” she said, as he tried to brush past her to the door.
“Hello goodbye,” he mumbled. “I’m on my way out.”
“That’s too bad. I brought a bottle of wine. I thought we could make dinner or something, get to know each other.” Big, damp brown eyes wheedled and begged behind fluttering lashes. Was she flirting with him?
“Got a show, sorry. Maybe another time.” He barely managed to keep a straight face.
She smiled, unperturbed, and then threw her arms around him in a hug. “I’m so happy to be here,” she offered. “There’s such a great vibe in this house. I’m really flattered to have made the cut.”
He’d mumbled something affirming and extricated himself from her embrace and fled, his behavior just this side of rude. I’m not a very nice person, he thought now. I should be friendly to her, if I’m going to live with her. Yes. He’d work harder at being tolerant and focus his energy on getting the album done instead: It was the wiser tactic to getting her out of the