“Yeah. You’d practice your counting and he’d show you how to do addition and subtraction using marbles. And he’d try to teach you how to read music. He’d teach you the notes.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“It was right before you started kindergarten. Before we got so busy with everything else.”
“Wow.”
“He loved you like you were his own little sister.”
“I know.” She smiled again. “Did you know I had a crush on him?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but only for a minute. When I was like twelve.”
“Huh. How many more of my friends did you have a crush on?”
Taylor kinda snickered next to me.
“A few,” Courteney said, unapologetic. “But I knew they were all too old for me.”
“Good. What about Xander?”
“Nothing happened between me and Xander until I was eighteen, Cary.”
I considered that. “I hope so.”
“Were you worried about that?”
“I wondered.”
“Well, something probably would’ve happened when I was sixteen, if I’d had my way,” she admitted. “But Xander wasn’t having it.”
I rubbed my jaw. “Good to hear. We can move on.”
My sister smiled. “It still makes you uncomfortable.”
“No. As long as you’re happy and he takes care of you.”
“He does.”
“Good.”
“So tell me more about Gabe. You guys learned to play guitar together?”
“More or less. He started first and he got me into it. He gravitated toward bass and he wanted me to play guitar so we could join a band. So we did. We played in a whole bunch of local bands as kids. We started to get pretty good around seventeen or so.”
“You must’ve been the hottest ticket in your high school,” my sister teased.
“Something like that. We played all the school parties.”
“And when did you know you were going to become professional musicians?”
I thought about that. “I remember when we were about twenty, we’d been struggling in our band and we decided to break up. Gabe and I had written all this material and we were trying to put together a new band. We were crap at writing songs and actually finishing them at that point, but we had all these ideas. We wanted to make a demo and seriously pursue it, so we could quit our day jobs. He was working in a restaurant kitchen and I was detailing cars. We’d do anything back then just to keep enough money in our bank accounts to get us to the next show or to buy the equipment we needed. But there were a lot of musicians just like us, coming up in the scene. I don’t think we knew, back then, that we were actually going to make it.”
“And how did you find the right musicians to form a band with?”
“We didn’t, at first. There were a lot of false starts. When we were still in high school, we kept hearing about these guys, Jesse Mayes and Zane Traynor. I remember, there was all this buzz about these guys over in Dunbar. We felt like we were on the other side of the world in Kerrisdale.”
Courteney laughed. “You were practically neighbors.”
“Yeah. Gabe would’ve gone to high school with them if he hadn’t switched schools. And maybe he would’ve ended up in a band with them and never even met me.”
“Wow. Fate is crazy, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s that.” I thought back to that time, and how we’d taken so much of it for granted. We had no idea the things we were setting in motion. But kids never really did, right? “We ended up meeting Zane and Jesse a few times. But they were running in different circles. They had Brody managing them already and eventually he hooked them up with Elle Delacroix and Dylan Cope. Elle was only eighteen then, and when Gabe heard her play bass, he was so jealous. He said something like, ‘She’s so hot, and fuck can she can play.’ He figured our chance at hooking up with Jesse and Zane was over at that point. I guess he was right. But Brody actually introduced us to some other guys we played with for a while.”
“You guys were actually almost part of Dirty?”
“I don’t think so. Elle and Dylan were the right fit for Jesse and Zane’s band. We jammed with them once, but I think Jesse and I would’ve conflicted too much on guitar. Back then, we were both trying to assert ourselves in a certain way and neither of us would’ve given up on lead. I think that’s the same issue they had when they were