We Own the Night Page 4

  He looks over the edge, biting his bottom lip like he does when he wants to hide his emotions, and doesn’t follow.

  I reach the bottom and set out through the maze, keeping my eyes trained on the blinking red star above me. It’ll lead me where I need to go. To the only place where I really want to be.

  It takes me awhile, but I reach the radio station. The spare key’s under the door where Mick always leaves it, and I go inside. It’s four in the morning when I crash onto the red sofa outside the recording booth. Soft rock plays from the night's preset auto shuffle and fills the room with a certain kind of silence that only the Rolling Stones can bring, about not always getting what you want but getting what you need.

  And I think, just before I drift off to sleep, what a load of crap that is.

  Chapter Five

  “Hell’s Bells, Ingrid!”

  I bolt upright on the couch with a cry. My bleary eyes focus on Mick’s Hawaiian shirt. The radio station manager. Not the enemy. I fall back down against the couch cushions with a groan. “Don’t do that!”

  He puts his hands on his hips. “What in the hell are you doing here? How’d you get in?”

  “The key under the mat, and I don’t want to talk about it.” I roll over, hugging a throw pillow to my chest. My head’s throbbing and my legs are so sore. Proof that last night happened. It actually happened.

  My throat constricts, making it hard to breathe.

  “Eula’s probably worried sick,” he says, and sighs.

  I don’t respond. Maybe if I pretend to be asleep he’ll leave me alone . . .

  He pries the pillow out of my death grip. “Ingrid North.”

  So, I guess I should back up a moment. This guy? This guy in cargo shorts and a blue Hawaiian shirt? He’s a retired Grateful Dead superfan who can whip up a mean guacamole, best known for his radio announcer voice and his one-movie one-trailer gig—you’ve probably seen it. The one with the superhero with the cool sidekick? Yeah, I hated that movie, too. Anyway, after that gig he bought the radio station and it’s been his baby ever since. No wife, no children, just two ferrets who like to make sweet, sweet love to a Winnie the Pooh on the regular, and an entire closet full of cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts.

  He’s thirty-three with a prematurely graying goatee and thick eyebrows. His skin is dark and his eyes are the color of brownies that’ve been in the oven too long. He’s thin because he eats nothing but rabbit food and jogs a kazillion miles a day, because other than deejaying at the radio station there is absolutely nothing else to do in Steadfast, Nebraska, for a single man ready to mingle. I met him when he first moved to Steadfast my freshman year of high school, I was listening to Rooney Quill’s radio show at Den’s Diner. He came in and sat down beside me, and we just started talking, I guess. About radio. About shows. About music. He ordered eggs Benedict, and I never talked with someone so long about radio—I never talked to anyone about it, actually. People in Steadfast usually just listen to the radio; they don’t want to be a part of it.

  He paid for my dinner and then turned a thoughtful look to me. “You know, I got a spot open Saturdays at midnight. If you wanna try your hand.”

  “What—you serious?” I asked, almost spewing my milkshake. “I don’t know anything about hosting.”

  “What’s a better way to start? Let me know.”

  And that was that. The radio station became my second home, and I guess he’s the closest thing I have to a father figure.

  “Girl, you smell like a brewery,” he tells me, crinkling his nose. “Get your ass up before you stink up the whole upholstery.”

  “It already smells like moldy cheese from your bare feet,” I mutter, yanking the pillow back. I hug it against my chest again. “Can’t I just stay for a few more hours?”

  “You have graduation today.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Ingrid, it’s Saturday. Graduation.”

  “Maybe I flunked out of high school. Maybe there’s not a chair for me. Maybe—”

  He gives a frustrated sigh and sits down in the chair beside the sofa. “Ingrid,” he starts patiently. He’d make a good dad if any marrying man could put up with the constant grooming of his goatee. He reaches into his pocket and draws out a Snickers bar, peeling it open like a banana. He offered it to me. “You hungry?”

  “I went to the Barn last night,” I say as if it were some sort of excuse, ignoring the offer of chocolate.

  “That solves the smell,” he remarks, biting into the candy bar. “And I heard.”

  I groan. “You did?”

  “Yeah, the boys got pretty banged up. LD’s got a nice shiner on her cheek. Fending men off you, I hear.” He takes another bite and chews slowly.

  “Hah. You mean fending men off them.” I pursed my lips together. “I saw Micah and Heather lip-locked.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, chewing on his nutty caramel candy bar, but then he slowly outstretches the rest of the Snickers to me. He puts it in my hands and curls my fingers around it. “A kiss is just a kiss, my girl.”

  Then he gets up and walks into the radio booth, where he switches the nighttime soft rock shuffle to Green Day’s “Oh Love” to serenade my heart, which is more confused than broken. More conflicted than shattered. I mean it is shattered, but not irreparable.

  Billie Joe Armstrong sings to me his woes as I finally pry myself off the couch to go to graduation.

  Chapter Six

  Steadfast High’s prized football stadium (which is a green field with three whole rows of bleachers on either side—it’s been standing for half a century, nourished by the blood of opposing teams) is packed with parents of the twenty-three graduating seniors and the rest of the town come to watch the spectacle. You know the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child”? Grams raised me, but I learned to ride my first bike from Micah’s dad, Mr. Perez, and I learned how to bake banana bread from Miss Seltzer (who never married) while she babysat LD and me when Grams and LD’s mom went to knitting parties. They’re all in the stands, their faces glistening in the mid-morning blaze.

  I heave a sigh of frustration, half-tempted to rip this stupid cap off my head to fan myself with it. Of all the colors for Steadfast High to pick for our polyester robes, they had to go with black. Even the balmy eighty-degree weather can’t keep us from roasting.

  I never said our town bred geniuses.

  All twenty-three seniors are actually sweating buckets even before we sit down in our assigned chairs. Mike Labouise shoots me a repulsive glare as he sits down in the row ahead of me. He has a nice bruise on his cheek from the fight last night. It feels like everyone who was at the barn is staring at me, which is practically everyone except Natalie Bowman, whose parents are so religious the only friends she has are in a church group half an hour away. And even she starts to stare just for the sake of staring.

  Well nothing like feeling like the elephant in the room. Or the cow in the stadium? Whatever.

  I find my chair. Micah’s already sitting beside me. Being North and Perez, we’ve always been seated together. Which I've loved—until now. I sit down, trying to pretend nothing is different from yesterday.

  Micah tugs on the collar of his robes. “You think anyone’ll notice if I start fanning my balls?”

  “You still have those?” I ask.

  He gives me a sharp look. “What’s got your panties in a wad.”

  I glance back at him, swallowing the real retort I want to give. “Sorry. I just . . . it’s hot out here.”

  “Yeah, it is. You guys skipped out early last night. Did you make it home okay?” he asks, dipping close enough so I smell his AXE body spray and motor oil musk. He must have done an early shift at his dad’s auto shop. Every spare minute he has he’s fixing up his old Honda motorbike or the mayor’s ’57 Chevy.

  His scent makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I fist my hands tightly, nails biting into the palms of my hands. My mind goes from Normal Teenage Girl to L
obotomized Invalid in less time than it takes for Han Solo to shoot first.

  I wonder what would happen if I kissed him?

  “Ingrid?” he quirks an eyebrow.

  I quickly look away, clearing my throat. “No, Billie just took me home is all.”

  LD leans back in her chair in front of us. She bedazzled the top of her hat to say, “SUCK IT, MIKE.” “Ooh, look, our golden boy’s about to make his speech! You know I wrote it, right? You both know I wrote it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you wrote it,” we intone.

  “Must be so tiring for Billie to be good at everything. Except speechwriting,” Micah adds.

  LD sniffs loudly. “Is that envy I smell?”

  “Envy? I’m just stating the facts—right Igs?”

  I open my mouth, then close it again. Micah isn’t wrong—sometimes with all of Billie’s achievements my head starts to spin, too, because how can anyone have time to be good at everything and still be popular? I remember our fight in the sunflower maze last night. “He just has it all together, I guess—”

  “Oh, oh—here he is!” LD interrupts.

  The golden boy looks like a solid brick wall in his black graduation robe as he ascends to the podium. He takes a few note cards out from his sleeve. His yellow tassel swings in his face as he bends toward the microphone and gives all of us his wide, white smile. “Hi, class.”

  “RAGIN’ FOURTY-EIGHT! GO FOUR GO!”

  Billie’s football nickname.

  The entire class erupts into applause like he’s the star of our small-town sitcom. The principal shoots a disapproving look into the sea of black robes, and the one idiot with “SUCK IT, MIKE” on her hat.

  Billie’s smile grows wider. “So, guys, let’s talk for a minute. There’s a reason I never ran for football captain, and why my vice president, the beautiful Heather Woodard,” he points back at Heather—the same Heather who was with Micah last night—sitting with her legs crossed under her chair, “did most of these speeches over the past few years . . . because I suck at them. But like Principal Monroe said, ‘There isn’t a better way to experience high school than to do all the things you thought you couldn’t.’ So, here I am . . . and please forgive my terrible speech.”

  LD mutters, “Terrible, my ass."

  A few people in the stands cheer, and someone—I think his mother—begins chanting the Steadfast High Hornets fight song, and other parents join in. I cover my face with my hands. If I never had to hear this stupid fight song again, it’d be too soon.

  “All right! All right!” Billie laughs.

  I peek out through my fingers.

  Billie motions for them to quiet down again, and they do. He’s like a maestro commanding a symphony. And he never loses his cool, not once. He looks perfectly comfortable in his skin.

  What’s that like?

  “Thanks, Mom,” he adds between his smile. Then he looks out into the audience, as if he’s trying to find an anchor to land. “So, not many of you may know this about me, but I like to climb. I’m not talking about trees or ladders. I mean I like to climb. I like to parkour up walls. I like to scale buildings. The higher, the better—and yeah, Mom, I know it’s dangerous, but most of the things that are dangerous are the ones that make us feel most alive, you know? There’s this one place in particular that I like to go. It’s not crazy high . . . but it has this view. It’s the view of everything I’ve ever known. The sunflowers. Main Street. Den’s Diner—”

  We howl at that.

  “—the tree where I got my first kiss. The parking lot where I . . . did other things.” Behind him, Principal Monroe begins to stress-sweat. Billie doesn’t stop searching the audience, looking out over every one of us as though he were in that lookout tower, looking down at the maze we called high school—at all of us, sitting in our stuffy black robes.

  Then his roaming gaze settles on me, and for a moment I can still taste the Diet Coke and Twizzlers and feel the sweet midnight breeze as it rustled through the sunflowers.

  He takes a deep breath and quickly looks away. It feels like he pulls a fish hook out of my heart, because he’s leaving. He’s actually leaving at the end of the summer. Our Billie.

  LD snakes her hand back and takes mine in her grip, and squeezes it tightly.

  Our golden boy is leaving us.

  From his height, I wonder how small we already look.

  Chapter Seven

  The rest of graduation goes as planned, and we all toss our hats into the air . . . and find them again. Because we’re twenty-three seniors, and there are only so many graduation hats. LD’s speech is a hit, and everyone congratulates Billie afterward for a job well done. We mingle for a little while in the stadium while Grams talks with Billie’s Mom. Mike Labouise and his crew hang around the refreshments, and he keeps giving me the stink eye, but I ignore him valiantly. LD invites us to her house for a graduation party, but I’m already busy.

  “With what?” she says, and laughs. “A secret boyfriend?”

  I stretch a smile over my face. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  Billie raises an eyebrow, coming to join us. “Are you?”

  “We’d know if she were,” Micah responds for me.

  “Would you?” I challenge.

  He gives me a strange look. I pat him on the shoulder. “I gotta take Grams home to take her medicine. I'll see you guys on Monday? Den’s for lunch?”

  As I leave, I hear Micah ask the gang, “She doesn’t have a secret boyfriend, does she?”

  “Maybe she has a secret girlfriend,” replies LD.

  “Really?”

  “No, Micah. Not really.”

  I chew on the inside of my cheek so I won’t smile too much, because LD gets Micah with her dry sarcasm every time, and I turn to find Grams in the crowd. I don’t have to take her home so soon, but I do so anyway because I worry about her missing her medication. I usually bring extra in my purse, but you can only fit so much in black graduation gowns. Besides, her doctor said that missing one pill won’t mean the disease will just wash her away, but I still worry. Grams and I make pizza and watch Jeopardy again. I make sure she’s asleep before I sneak out of the house—I have the back door well oiled, so I don't wake her up.

  It’s Saturday night, and I have somewhere to be.

  The radio tower is by far the biggest structure for at least a hundred miles. It’s taller than the water tower in North Platte, and you can fit at least three monster trucks underneath that one. Our tower rises like a pinprick up into the clear night sky, proudly holding up a red light that blinks like the North Star.

  My North Star. The only star in the sky worth seeing.

  I find the key underneath the back doormat and let myself in. A drum solo from a ’70s hair band drifts down from the second floor. I dump my book bag in the office and climb the stairs to the studio.

  Mick’s head-banging to the Grateful Dead three minutes until midnight. It’s the last song of the hour. He always finishes his programs with the Grateful Dead—it’s part of his charm. He slaps me on the back in greeting and howls the final guitar lick.

  “I thought you wouldn’t show tonight,” he says, breathless, and hurries back over to the microphone. He flicks a button and the LIVE light above the studio blinks to life. “And that was the sweet, sweet sound of the Dead. I hope some of you are feeling awfully good right now, because after that rockin’ set, you should be. Stay tuned the next hour for our Saturday night special with our lovely host, Niteowl. Until next time, peace, and love and light to you all.”

  I raise an eyebrow as he flicks the microphone off again, and the LIVE light goes dead again. “I think your hippie’s showing.”

  He shrugs, wiping his sweaty forehead with his shirtsleeve. “It was a good couple of years.”

  Rolling my eyes, I push up a chair and ease down into it. “So, been busy tonight?”

  “Pretty quiet on the home front. What’s on the books for tonight’s show? You never wrote it down on the calendar.” He
jabs his thumb back to the hot firemen calendar he has hanging on the wall where we write down all of our shows. It’s just me and Mick, but he wants to at least look semiprofessional. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the hot firemen throws the whole concept of professionalism right off a burning rooftop.

  “Oh—I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” I begin messing with the sound levels on the board, cueing up my intro music. “Did you catch Rooney today?”

  He scrunches his nose. “You’re not going to talk about One Direction, too, are you? I mean I’m all about no censorship but . . . think of the children!”

  I cock my head. “I don’t know. Think of all the 1D-ers we could reel in . . .”

  He gives me a level look but then shakes his head. “Fine. Fine. You’re going on in two minutes, girl.”

  “Have some faith! I’ll make something up. How to Get Over Unrequited Love? Why Some People Kiss Other People You Hate? That Time in Your Life When You Just Want to Cry All the Time? In Case of Emergency: Channing Tatum?—”

  “You got Channing Tatum as a guest?” he asks, perplexed.

  “I wish.”

  “Damn. Hey, uh, how about that thing.” Mick snaps his fingers, trying to remember. “That thing about that band.”

  “Stoner got your brain?” I push my rolling chair over to the antiquated computer and wiggle the mouse. The monitor blinks awake, and I search over the Internet for something to talk about tonight. “You mean the Jason Dallas concert in Omaha?”

  “That's it! Sold out in three minutes flat I hear. He any good?”

  “Only the best,” I reply. “His killer licks in ‘Shotgun Heartache’ are to die for. God, I wish I could play something. Maybe if I did, someone’d like me.”

  “Or like you less. I never liked musicians. They never shut up.” He shrugs and gets to his feet. “And you know, if you played music you wouldn’t be here. And I think here is where you need to be.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes it tightly. “You’re a radio heart; always will be.”

  I smile up at him. “Thanks, Mick.”