Jump A Little Lighter: Chapter 6

Read from the beginning here

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She strums the acoustic. As she continues, it feels more and more like we in the audience are watching a girl play for herself, as she lets the song become her. She sings like it’s blues, like a part of her soul is in the words, and that covers up her slight stumble on the guitar; she must be nervous.

Her performance is incendiary. It’s honest and that’s refreshing, what America has been searching for all this year. It is clearly not the song that was rehearsed, as The Host too looks shocked and moved by her rawness. He glances a couple of times at the camera, or whoever is behind it, not-quite gawping. Too city to gawp. But he is a professional sycophant, and he can work with this.

Rosalita looks bashful, but I suspect she has calculated that is the correct response to all of the applause.

***

Chapter 6: June 2017

The tornadoes on the other side of the state take up most of the news, but there are spectacular storms happening here too. I watch lightening strike from the quiet of my room. Sometimes Rosie is there, bending her strings around Ed Sheeran or Chuck Berry, but more often I’m quietly sipping tasteless tea my mom has made me whilst she sits downstairs and watches TV.

School is a blur now that tests are all over for the year and I’m nominally thinking about what I might write in my personal essay, but I don’t want to write about the obvious, even if Brit says it’s guaranteed to get me in. I do giver her my blessing to write about my dad in hers, though, as long as she gets another MEG to proof it. I’m grateful for the steady stream of updates she pings to my phone; I think she might be the most normal person in my life. She’s worrying if going to one of Elijah’s meets is basically seeing him naked before she’s ready, or begging all of us to apply to Cheyney so she won’t be alone then not accepting it’d be weird for me to apply to a HBCU. Meanwhile Rosie has become incredibly antisocial – she plays guitar constantly, breaks off during conversations to scribble in her reporter’s notebook and keeps telling her mom she’s with me, because Mrs Jacobs doesn’t trust boys and Rosalita needs apparently endless rehearsals with Tyler Miller and Zeke, who plays bass at Britney’s church. Brit says she can’t get up to any mischief with a church boy, and honestly I pity Tyler if he thinks she might like him for anything beyond his percussion, but I do worry about her – getting into some awkward situation, getting caught by her parents. I worry about myself, too, since I’m lying through my teeth and I don’t even know when. They practice in Zeke’s living room. His place is between hers and mine, and if her mom calls I say she just left and call telling her to go home. One day she plays a song down the phone at me and tells her mom the traffic was bad, and I have to admit it sounds good, but my heart hurts so badly I can’t bring myself to sit in with them even when she vocalises the unspoken invitation.

One Tuesday after school has finished I’m sat in her house whilst my mom is out working. We’re supposed to be watching VH1 – Rosie’s choice, never mine – but there’s some heated debate going on in the kitchen, so I’ve been left with videos of The Bangles Rosie would normally be testing her jangly guitar skills on. I finally hear a heavy sigh of acquiescence from Bobby and a victorious shriek from Rosalita. She dances on into the living room and tells me to call Brett: “I’ve got us a chaperone, we’re going out tomorrow!” I just catch Bobby’s raised eyebrow from the hallway.

***

By the time Bobby’s car swings by Brett’s at six forty the next day I’m in borrowed clothes, overly made up, and squashed in tight next to Rosie who has Zeke on her other side.

“Where’s Tyler?” I ask. “I thought this was a band outing…”

“Meeting us there. Didn’t want to get anybody else in this ancient Corolla.”

“Hey! You leave my tin can alone, or it won’t take you anywhere!”

“Why aren’t we in Brett’s car? It’s nicer.”

“That’s why I get the front seat, princess,” he says, sliding in. “I’m used to a better station in life. And your parents think I’m going to drink and get in a car wreck and kill us all, so it’s a condition that Bobby drives.” Brett is, of course, retuning the radio, and with nobody from school around but us he minces slightly singing along to the power pop girl on the country station.

“Bobby is the only one who’s legal!”

“My momma just knows those demons out in Omaha will sell alcohol to any teen looking for a good time. She also doesn’t know Zeke and Tyler are coming, or there’s no way she would have let us out, even under Bobby’s watchful eyes.”

Rosie is so busy performing her words that she misses me catching Bobby’s eye again – this time in the rearview. It’s starting to feel like I’m sharing as many secrets with him as Rosie, and I feel myself blushing. I try to ignore that I think he’s smiling.

***

Reverb Lounge is exactly how I thought it would be: all-American, like you’d see in any film, with a brushed steel bar and a slightly sticky floor. We don’t have ID so they stamp our hands with green (though Bobby gets blue) and we can only buy sodas from the bar. Tyler is inside already, waving us over to a great spot by the small, slightly grimy stage. I’ve seen Rosalita bewitch crowds in places like this, and smaller, and also before headliners on much more refined stages designed for theatre or opera, or not on stages at all but on barstools and church halls and her bedroom floor.

There’s tape and stickers on the equipment – too many speakers for such a small space, and a lot of musicians seem to expect to share quite a small space. Brett is back to being his most athletic self – he walked in tall, sat down on a barstool, and two women too old to be interested but drunk enough not to notice that have lain their elbows down next to him. He’s looking smug by the time the band is on and he comes back to our group for dancing, wearing a telephone number on a napkin like a British gentleman’s pocket square.

During the show Rosalita throws her arms around my neck and sways behind me.

“Thank you.” she whisper-shouts in my ear, “I know how hard all this has been on you, and I want you to know I appreciate you.” I only smile, seeing the meaning in her eye, and she goes on. “It’s important to me that you’re here now, and September too. These guys are nobody, you’re my OG.” I get a kiss on the cheek, but then the band start playing the simple arpeggio of the closest thing they have to a hit, and Rosalita whoops so loudly, right in my ear, that the moment is gone. She all but leaps over me, pushes her way over to Zeke and the two of them bounce manically, singing along and playing the most accurate air guitar I’ve ever seen. Before long Tyler is in a circle with them and they’re all holding hands, jumping in syncopation and taking cues from each other.

Bobby grabs my hand and we do something like an old-fashioned jitterbug to the saxophone and guitars. I’m laughing at our moves, and Bobby turns it into a Charleston and a 70s disco and I can’t stop smiling. It’s Rosie who catches my eye this time, and I pretend not to see her.

***

By the end of the night my ears are ringing and my feet are aching, and we have to drag Rosalita away from all the plastic cups on the floor. Her eyes can’t seem to stop scanning the wires, and the cases the band are packing their stuff back into. It’s only when Bobby says she’ll have to pay the parking fine as well as phone their parents to say they’re breaking curfew that she leaves, but walking backwards, surveying the whole space up to the ceiling and down to the debris as she goes.

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PLAYLIST OF SONGS

• [Ed Sheeran, Shape of You]
• [Chuck Berry, Maybellene]
• [The Bangles, If She Knew What She Wants]
• [Kelly Clarkson, Since U Been Gone]
• [Electric Six, Danger! High Voltage!]
• [Taylor Swift, Long Live]