Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols

wild, which worked a lot better with the scruffy beginnings of his beard than the pompadour had. He’d traded the plaid button-down for a tight T-shirt, which he wore with the same skinny black jeans, rolled down now, and black sneakers. He was dressed a lot like me.
    At first he didn’t seem to notice I was looking at him. He didn’t seem to concentrate on his music, either. His fingers moved automatically over the guitar strings, playing an old tune brought to the Appalachians from Scotland and written before the systemof chords in Western music had been regularized, so it was full of progressions that sounded strange to the modern ear. The chords were minor, as if the song was meant to be sad, but the lyrics were ironically upbeat. Sam wasn’t singing them, but I knew the words. He stared into space, in my vicinity but beyond me, through me, like he was thinking hard about something else. His dark brows were knitted, and he squinted a little. The hot breeze moved one dark curl across his forehead, which must have tickled, but he didn’t brush it away.
    I considered standing in front of him until he acknowledged me. What did I want out of that, though? He wasn’t interested in me, and I shouldn’t be interested in him. So I just kept walking and hoped he wouldn’t notice me.
    I was all the way past him, stepping from the concrete ramp to the asphalt road, when I heard him call behind me, “Bailey!”
    I stopped automatically, then wished I hadn’t. Now I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard him. He was making everything more difficult. The more I interacted with him, the harder I was going to fall, and the worse the rest of my summer without him or anybody else was going to be.
    The damage was done, though. I turned to face him as he jogged the few steps between us, holding his guitar by the neck. “I’ve been waiting for you. I almost didn’t recognize you.” He stared at me, taking in my eyes, then my hair, but not with the appraising expression girls wore when they commented on my looks. A small smile played on his lips like he appreciated the way I was done up but also—a little disturbingly—found it amusing.
    To break the silence, I finally said, “I don’t wear the June Carter Cash wig home. Or the Dolly Parton Does Vegas outfit on my Dolly Parton days.”
    His brows shot up. “You have Dolly Parton days?”
    “And Willie Nelson days, and that’s just the first week.” I confided, “Mr. Nelson was a bit fried.”
    “I’m sorry.” Sam sounded genuinely sympathetic.
    “The outfit was okay, though, in comparison. How did you get away with wearing your own jeans and shoes while Ms. Lottie sewed me into a circle skirt? Only your hair got caught in the time machine.”
    “Yeah.” He laughed, putting one hand through his damp waves. “I’ve been doing this awhile. I know what Ms. Lottie will put up with and what she won’t. The real question is, how did you snag so many days a week of work so soon after you started?” He lowered his guitar to rest on the toe of his shoe and spun it as he said, trying to sound casual, “Your granddad must have a lot of sway.”
    “Somebody at the casting company owed him a favor,” I acknowledged. “But he doesn’t have any real clout in Nashville. If he did, everybody in my family would have had a recording contract years ago.” I shifted my fiddle case to my other hand and gazed impatiently at the parking lot like I had something to do tonight besides watch television with a seventy-year-old man and hate myself. “Why were you waiting for me?”
    “Oh.” He swallowed. “I just wanted to apologize for all the drama between my dad and me.”
    “Don’t worry about it.” I did worry about it, and I wanted to know more, but I waved the drama away with one hand. “I was playing at the very same place in the food court on Tuesday when I got into it myself with Elvis.”
    “Oh, man, they stuck you with Elvis, too? Who didn’t they give you to? Was he