We Own the Night Read online

  DARK AND BROODING: It’s a girl question.

  NITEOWL: Again? Consider me all ears—and anyone else who’s listening, of course. What kind of girl question? I happen to know a lot on the subject.

  DARK AND BROODING: A scholar of it, are you?

  NITEOWL: Got my degree in Bon Jovi love ballads. So is this about your girl? Is she in love with another guy? Another girl?

  DARK AND BROODING: She’s in love with an idea that doesn’t exist.

  NITEOWL: I’m flattered! I’ve never had a girl in love with me.

  DARK AND BROODING: (laughs)I would be okay if she was in love with you. You would be good for her.

  NITEOWL: I . . .

  DARK AND BROODING: Sorry—I didn’t mean—

  NITEOWL: No, it’s thoughtful. I didn’t expect that from you.

  DARK AND BROODING: Perhaps people will surprise you.

  NITEOWL: Maybe the girl you like will surprise you, too.

  Chapter Fourteen

  That Wednesday, Billie invites me to North Platte. I go just to get out of Steadfast for a little while, but secretly it’s to escape. Grams is at the town hall playing bingo with the rest of the older generation, and I don’t expect her back home for the rest of the day. The monthly bingo Wednesdays are the only times I can really go out and do something without being worried about Grams. Of course I’m always still worried about her, but at least at the town hall she has other people looking out for her for a little while.

  And bingo just so happens to always fall on the one Wednesday Bossman lets me take off work. (God forbid he lets me take off a weekend. Amy Adams will win an Oscar before then. Leo did, so there’s hope.)

  I wince, thinking of work. Heather came back from lunch after I cleaned up the broken jar and gumdrops, and didn’t say a word to me the rest of our shift. She’s been mysteriously quiet since the incident. So has Micah. I saw him a few times in the morning, while we go to work, but we just make small talk.

  “Hi,” he’d always say. “Nice morning, huh?”

  “Hot as balls,” I’d reply.

  And . . . that’s it. Like there’s this moat between us infested with crocodiles and piranhas and our friendship is being eaten alive somewhere in the middle.

  Billie comes to pick me up around eleven in his gray Cadillac. It was his dad’s before he passed away, and it sounds just as old. “And why are we going all the way to North Platte?” I ask, getting in.

  “I gotta pick up something, and I thought you’d rather do something cool on your day off instead of mooning over Heathcah.”

  I groan. “Is that their couple name?”

  He shrugs. “LD started saying it. Either that or Miceather.”

  “That sounds menacing.”

  “You can’t really combine Micah and Heather too many ways.” He pulls out onto Main Street, and we head out of town. The engine rumbles under the hood, a soothing sound. The Cadillac is always soothing. It’s the only car we collectively have for our group. It’s ferried me to and from school almost the entire time he’s had it . . . except the last few months of our senior year. I missed riding in it.

  I prop my elbow up on the window and stare out at the fields of sunflowers. “And I’m not mooning,” I say after a minute. “I’m mourning.”

  He raises a thick blond eyebrow. “He’s not dead, Ingrid.”

  I purse my lips, turning my face toward the window instead of answering.

  “North, c’mon, it’s not that bad. We just have to wait this out. You’re not the only one who hates it. Believe me, sometimes I think she’s dating him to get back at me—”

  I sit ramrod straight. “Wait—you dated her?”

  “It was around Homecoming,” he defends, “and we didn’t date. We just kind of . . .” He waves his hand in the air, trying to summon the right word. “We just did things. For a while.”

  “How long?”

  “. . . Until April—ish? April-ish.”

  I stare at him like he’s a stranger in my friend’s skin. “Am I the only one who doesn’t know?”

  “You went silent right after Christmas,” he replies. “How was I supposed to tell you anything when you didn’t want to communicate? I tried talking to you but you just . . . you just shut down.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “No, you did. And I get it. We all know why now, but you could’ve confided in us. We could’ve helped. We’re your friends—”

  “Helped?” I scoff. “Can you cure Alzheimer’s, Golden Boy? Can you stop Grams from forgetting me?” My voice cracks despite myself.

  His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “I didn’t mean it like that. We could’ve been there for you. We’re friends, North.”

  I turn away from him again. The sunflowers are never ending, stretching for miles and miles. I hate it. This place looks so big, but I’ve never suffocated so much in my life. “I just couldn’t, okay? It was my thing to deal with. It didn’t affect you—clearly,” I added, referring to Heather.

  “Didn’t affect us? You—we just—we’re better—” He purses his lips. “Just forget I said anything, okay? It was a mistake.” Then he leans forward and flicks on the radio, and that’s that.

  Mick’s voice floods the stereo. “Aaaaand that was a killer track from Aerosmith. Man, you gotta love a guy with some tongue action. Next up is the Grateful Dead, and then maybe a little Mötley Crűe. But right now, let’s Janis this station up . . .”

  Janis Joplin’s voice crooned over the speakers.

  I cut my eyes over to the radio in surprise. This is the station that comes on when he starts his radio? My anger quickly melts into panic. “You . . . you listen to KOTN?”

  He shrugs, clearly still not over the fight. His eyes are trained on the road. “Sure. Why not? Mick plays good stuff. Sometimes.”

  “Do you listen . . .” I hesitate. Would he even recognize my voice over the radio? Would I recognize his if he ever called in? Of course I would. I could pick Billie’s voice out of a crowd. It’s soft and suede, and it crackles like a river.

  “Do I listen to what?”

  “. . . Jason Dallas?” I divert my question quickly. “I mean, he’s coming to Omaha, and tickets sold out in five minutes or something.”

  “Three minutes and forty-two seconds,” Billie corrects.

  I laugh. “Yeah? Aren’t you too cool to listen to Jason Dallas?”

  “Mick talked about it when it happened.”

  “Oh.”

  We ride the rest of the way to North Platte in silence. It’s much bigger than Steadfast, and there are so many more people there’s actual traffic. I can only imagine what bigger cities must be like—bumper to bumper for hours on end, sitting in the baking heat, breathing in poisonous exhaust. In a way, it sort of sounds poetic.

  Billie parks in front of the record store Manifest and we go in. A few guys in “RANCID” T-shirts browse the heavy metal aisles. Billie excuses himself for a moment to the checkout counter while I make my way to the rock and indie aisles. I flip through some of the vinyls. At the end of the aisle a record player spins off, making static popping sounds.

  Occasionally as I browse, I glance up over the sections to Billie at the counter, talking with a pretty redhead with snakebites and a sailor tattoo inching up her arm. He leans toward her, smiling in his golden-boy way.

  The more I think about those months before graduation, the doctor visits and skipping school early to take Grams to checkups and endless hours waiting at the pharmacy here in town for her medication, the less I remember of the gang. Thinking back on it, I did distance myself from them. I distanced myself from everyone.

  Those months still feel like a hazy dream—the kind you wake up from in a cold sweat and then feel “off” the rest of the day.

  When I finally did tell the gang, LD refused to talk to me for a week. She said she was heartbroken that I hadn’t thought to confide in them. But Gram’s illness didn’t affect their lives. If I’d told them any sooner, nothing would h
ave changed. You can’t cure something that you can’t control.

  Besides, I wanted them to enjoy their senior year.

  It seems like they did, at least.

  So why do I feel so betrayed finding out that Billie and Heather also had a—a thing? Out of everyone, I should’ve guessed he would.

  But . . .

  The redhead leans in, giggling, and he glances over his shoulder at me. He tells her something, and she slides him a piece of paper. Maybe her number? It wouldn't surprise me. He pockets it quickly and starts back toward me.

  I quickly turn around to the announcement board on the opposite wall. Band flyers for auditions litter the board like a live Craigslist page. I don’t really read any of them as I flip through them, lifting flyers to look at other ones underneath.

  One catches my eye. It has an official-looking header that reads MUSE RADIO. I’ve heard that Muse Records—the record label that signed Jason Dallas and the now-defunct Roman Holiday—partnered with a station.

  I unpin the flyer and begin reading it.

  CALLING ALL MUSIC ENTHUSIASTS.

  WANT A CAREER IN RADIO? HAVE A TALENTED EAR FOR GOOD MUSIC?

  MUSE RECORDS, with ROONEY QUILLS, IS TAKING APPLICANTIONS FOR A ONE-YEAR INTENSIVE WITH NEW YORK’S TOP RADIO DJs.

  BE PART OF THE MUSIC.

  Rooney Quills.

  An internship with the Rooney Quills. Bless, that sounds like heaven. Not only wonderful—a dream. Being able to learn from the DJ who crafted the fine art of pop culture interviews. Who squeezed the last bit of juice out of Renee Prosperity’s social life. Who got to the bottom of Roman Holiday’s love triangle. Who has crafted so many memorable interviews and radio shows, he has redefined the shape of how society ingests pop culture.

  The Rooney Quills.

  I stare at the flyer. It looks like a possibility. The kind that’s becoming more and more rare the longer I root and rot in Steadfast, the longer I keep my head down and my nose clean. It’s a possibility I can’t take, because of Grams and because of Micah—

  “You’re nothing,” Labouise’s taunt rings in my ears.

  It feels like a stab in my gut. He’s right. I’ve never done anything, but I’ve always chalked it up to bad timing. With club activities in high school, with not going to college, with Micah . . . forever stuck in a loop of nothing.

  Being nothing.

  But Niteowl isn’t nothing.

  “Hey, North, what’re you looking at?” Billie asks, coming back over. He’s got his hands in his pockets. I want to ask what the girl slipped him. He looks at the flyer. “Cool, you like radio stuff?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply, not quite a lie. I stare at the flyer, trying to see the answer in it. Or the possibility.

  He shrugs. “I think you’d be good at it.”

  That surprises me. I tear my eyes away from the flyer to look at him. “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What, do I have a face for radio?” I joke, and he pales.

  “No—no. I didn’t mean that at all. You’re pretty. I mean you’re not pretty, I mean you are but you’re more than just pretty, you’re—”

  I begin to laugh. “I was busting your balls!” I punch him in the shoulder and he gives me a wounded look. “But you know what? Maybe you’re right.”

  He begins to blush. “You’ve got a massive music collection—don’t think I don’t remember your library.” Of course he remembers, he used to come over and borrow music all the time before . . .

  Before he became the golden boy. I miss that Billie. The one with spiky blue hair and death metal T-shirts.

  He plucks the flyer from my hand and takes a pen out of his plaid breast pocket. Who still keeps pens in their breast pockets, seriously? He puts the flyer against the wall, beginning to fill out the form.

  I pale. “What are you doing?”

  “Filling out your destiny,” he replies, writing my name and address.

  “Seriously? I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.”

  He ignores me. “What does the radio mean to you?” he asks, reading off the first question on the questionnaire.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said—”

  I tear the flyer away from him and fold it up, sticking it in my back pocket. “It’s personal,” I reply.

  He quirks an eyebrow. “But you won’t fill it out.”

  “I will.”

  “Pinky swear?” He holds out his pinkie and wiggles it. I give him an annoyed look. “Look North, I won’t believe you unless you pinkie swear with me.”

  “What are we, four?”

  “We’re whatever we want to be,” he replies. “C’mon, North.”

  I roll my eyes. “Fine.” I give in, not because he’s the golden boy or because of his smoldering blue eyes and his charming smile or the way he sounds so confident that I can actually be what I already am in private.

  I give in because, for a moment, I see a glimpse of the Billie I used to know. The blue-haired one, who worshipped Bowie and wore holey jeans and told me when I was so, so little and I didn’t have parents to shadow for Shadow Day, that he could be my family because I wasn’t alone.

  We hook pinkies and kiss our thumbs.

  At the end of the aisle, the skipping record player goes silent and then begins to play a soft, slow song. A soft voice rides the wave of guitar strums. I turn toward the music, listening quietly, and our pinkies unravel.

  Billie shakes his head. “Some things never change.”

  “Shut up, I love this song.”

  “Love it more than Jason Dallas?”

  “This is different. Wait for it—here.”

  The sound of the song gets louder, stronger, fuller. Piecing together orchestra strings and piano chords, weaving three separate melodies together. Then the chorus breaks—chills. Pure bliss.

  I shiver. “Every time. It gets me every. Single. Time.”

  “Gets you?”

  I don’t know why I’m saying this aloud. I don’t talk about music to anyone—not Micah, and definitely not Billie. Niteowl talks about music. Niteowl has the opinions. But this song has played me to sleep more times in the last few months than I care to remember. My voice is soft, almost a whisper, definitely a secret, “Listening to it, I feel infinite.”

  The edges of his lips twist up. He drops his gaze down to our hands. I hadn’t realized how close we were, almost touching but not quite, an invisible shield built of everything he is and everything I can never be. But then he moves through that invisible boundary and takes my hands. His are warm and large and slightly sweaty like they always are.

  I remember them—but we’ve never held hands before, have we?

  He spins me around. I look up into his emerald eyes, unsure of whatever this is. He tilts his head in. “Remember what you asked in the sunflower maze? Why I changed?”

  My heart rises into my throat. I nod.

  He bends in closer and presses his lips against my ear, “I haven’t.”

  My mouth goes dry. “I . . . I—”

  Suddenly, a loud scratch makes me jump. I whirl around toward the record player. The guys in “RANCID” shirts are taking the record off.

  “We were listening to that, assholes,” Billie says.

  One of the guys scoffs. “Yeah, whatever. Shit song.” Then he puts on Avenge Sevenfold, and the moment’s over. I step away from Billie so quickly, I bump into a stand of postcards and they go scattering across the floor. The RANCID guys point and laugh.

  Billie makes a move at them, but I catch him by his fitted plaid shirt and pull him back, advancing on the douche bags. They watch me as I delicately pluck the needle off the record player and move it off.

  One of the guys squints at me, and puts it back on.

  I pluck it off again.

  We glare.

  Billie tries to pull me away. “Come on, North, not worth it—”

  “Yeah, listen to your boyfriend—”

  “He’s not my boyfriend
,” I rebuke.

  He pushes the needle back on the record. “Listen to him anyway.”

  “Excuse me.” Before I even get the chance to make a comeback, Billie reaches over and pulls the vinyl from the player with an ear-splitting shriiiiiik! He flicks his wrist like throwing a Frisbee and it goes sailing over the RANCID bros heads, away toward the far wall, where it shatters and clatters to the ground in pieces.

  The redhead by the counter looks up from her magazine in alarm.

  Billie grabs my hand. “I think we should run.”

  “You just destroyed a record!”

  “It was a shit song!”

  We make a break for the exit before the RANCID idiots can fumble out the story to the redhead, and we jump into Billie’s truck. We don’t breathe until we’re halfway out of North Platte.

  Then he looks at me. I look at him.

  “Golden Boy, eh?” I finally say, and he cracks a smile to show off those beautiful white teeth, but all I see in his eyes is possibility.

  Chapter Fifteen

  That evening after Billie drops me off, I just want to face-plant on my bed. Grams comes home a few hours later, having raked the town hall clean. She’s good at bingo—and I don’t know how anyone can be good at bingo. It’s pure luck.

  “It’s just the universe paying me back,” Grams jokes, but it’s a bittersweet humor because nothing in the world can repair the bad hand Whoever Almighty dealt her.

  She goes to bed early, so I eat a slice of cold pizza (there’s always cold pizza in the fridge), and go upstairs to put a record on and read a magazine. I put on Jason Dallas’s new album and set the needle down on the very end. The stereo crinkles, and the sound of white noise fills the room.

  I sit down on the floor and close my eyes, but all I can see is Micah standing outside of Sweetey’s waiting for Heather. Like a Labrador or something. And then he looks at me and waves from across this invisible moat where all of our friendship is drowning, and all I can do is wave back. And then I remember how my hand felt in Billie’s and I’m split in two. I hurt and I want and it’s horrible.

  I press the heels of my palms against my eye sockets until the darkness explodes with colors, and that’s when the music from the stereo starts.