Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols Page B

of things before his brain caught up. “My dad knows about my band. It’s not a secret. But he doesn’t want me to pursue music as a career because he wasn’t successful and therefore there’s no way I could be successful either, get it? My only musical activity that gets his approval is backing up his loser impersonation job.”
    “Got it.” I didn’t, exactly, but I wanted to hear the rest.
    He talked fast. “So I have this parentally acknowledged and yet discouraged band that plays country and rockabilly. Some Cash, actually. Alan Jackson. Zac Brown.”
    “Michael Jackson?” I ventured.
    He grinned and opened his hands, forgetting he was balancing his guitar on his foot. He snatched it up before it touched the concrete ramp. “See,” he said, “I knew you would get it.”
    I flushed with pleasure, basking in the glow of his approval.
    “Yes,” he went on, “the Johnny Cash songs do have a tendency to morph into Michael Jackson’s funky deep cuts, and the Zac Brown will sometimes give way to Prince. There might be some Chaka Khan thrown in. . . .” He slowed, less sure of himself as he saw my skeptical expression. “And some Justin Bieber for irony, and maybe a little Ke$ha. Look.”
    He stepped closer and stooped so that he looked straight into my eyes. I got the feeling he’d done this before. Maybe he’d never asked a punky fiddle player to come see his band, but he’d persuaded plenty of girls to follow along with his outlandish schemes. In his words I could hear the echo of every other time he’d done this to every other girl since he was a blond kid.
    “A good song is a good song,” he said. “You know that. The most important thing is the unrelenting beat. We’re a dance band, acrazy party band, emo with a side of redneck. So far people seem to like us, but we’ve only played our friends’ parties and a street festival and my mom’s cousin’s retirement party, and then it’s a long story but there are a lot of immigrants from Laos living south of town and we were fortunate enough to get on the Lao wedding circuit. But tonight we have a gig .” Remembering to secure his guitar this time, he opened only two fingers of that hand and all the fingers of his other hand as he said gig .
    “A gig, ” I repeated, imitating him by opening my own hand, not the one holding my fiddle case.
    “Yes,” he exclaimed, delighted that I was mocking him, “and it’s at a bar !”
    “A bar !” I echoed, trying hard not to laugh at the ecstatic expression on his face. He was excited about this gig. He wanted me to come see him play. And I couldn’t, because I was grounded—at least, as grounded as a legal adult could be. “Good luck!” I stepped past him.
    “Wait, what? No.” He jogged backward until he was in front of me again. When I didn’t stop moving, he kept walking backward into the road. “This bar where we’re playing may not be on Broadway,” he said, “but it’s close, in the District. I want to take the band to the next level. We’re getting there, but slower than I want to go. We’re not getting the attention we deserve. There are too many bands around town for anybody to give us our big chance. You know what we need?” He tripped backward over a curb around a tree.
    “What?” I asked at the same time I instinctively caught his elbow to keep him from falling. Too late I realized he weighed a lot more than I did.
    Using his guitar as leverage, he managed to balance himself again and keep me from falling in turn. We both held our instrumentsout to one side and gripped each other’s free elbows. A shock ran through me—the pain of his strong fingers wrapping around my arm, and the tingle of awareness that went with it.
    If he felt the tingle, too, he was oblivious to it. He released my elbow, then patted my arm as if to make sure he hadn’t hurt me, that’s all. “We need a fiddle player! I knew it as soon as I heard you play.”
    It had seemed to me yesterday that