Keep Trying to Find, part 3

[tamcranver]

Part 1
Part 2



Alicia woke up feeling gross and sweaty and squished against the wall. Kyle was like a big space heater next to her on the bunk—great during the winter, but not so awesome when it was like 90 degrees on the tech bus. Maybe the whole “squashing herself and her boyfriend into one bunk” thing wasn’t such a great idea after all.

She managed to disentangle herself from the sheets and climb over Kyle. He made a vaguely protesting noise and muttered, “What? What time’s it?”

“’s morning,” she said, finally managing to get her feet on the floor and stretch out.

A pair of arms wrapped around her waist from behind, and Kyle groaned into her back. His breath was hot against her skin, and she wriggled out of his grasp. “Too hot, dude,” she said. “Man. I need a shower so fucking bad.” Urgh. Her bag was somewhere on the floor, under the pile of clothes and crap, and somewhere in that bag was her deodorant. If she couldn’t smell clean, maybe she could at least smell like fresh springs or whatever the hell the deodorant was supposed to smell like.

“So,” Kyle said as she dug through the underwear and Spin magazines, “got any exciting plans for today?”

She found the deodorant under her bra, but for some reason, she couldn’t take too much pleasure in the victory. She grabbed it and turned around. “I thought you and I were gonna check out the pool today. It’s supposed to have a slide and everything.”

Kyle winced. Alicia’d never understood why people gritted their teeth—it seemed like kind of a dumbass way to express your anger or whatever, and she’d heard it wore down your enamel—but she was actually finding a fair amount of satisfaction in clenching her jaw. “That’d be awesome, babe,” said Kyle, “but the guys and I were just gonna hang out today.”

Hang out. Right. That pretty much summed up what Kyle and “the guys” did every day. They sat on the floor, strummed their guitars—never actual songs, of course—and talked about their sex lives, such as they were. “Okay. Like, all day?”

Kyle squirmed uncomfortably, perhaps sensing the rays of anger that Alicia was sending out of her brain in his general direction. “Well. I mean, obviously, you’re welcome, too. It’ll be fun.”

Because that’s what she wanted to do on a hot day—spend it on the tech bus with her coworkers in a cloud of pot and B.O. “Oh, for God’s sake, Kyle!” She threw the deodorant on the floor, for lack of anything better to throw. Fuck it, she didn’t need to smell good anyway. She picked up a bra and put it on, staring at the hooks while she fastened them so she didn’t have to look at Kyle giving her the puppy-dog face. “You can’t take two hours off from hanging out to go to the pool? Here’s a wacky idea—we could hang out at the pool.”

“Come on, Alicia,” said Kyle irritably. Like she was the one breaking their plan to actually get some one-on-one time this tour. “You can’t go to the pool by yourself?”

Fuck him, she thought. Alicia wasn’t the kind of girl who had to spend every fucking day with her boyfriend, but she didn’t think it was too much to ask for him to spend a couple hours with her after the week he’d spent shitting his pants about being able to hang out with rock stars and spending every free hour doing just that. “I can go to the pool by myself, dickweed,” she said, pulling on a tank top and standing up. “I wanted to go with you.” She walked out of the bus and slammed the door.

She made a beeline for the merch table. Fuck, she was so glad Sarah was on this tour with her.

Sarah looked up and made a face at her. “Man trouble?” she asked.

“Tell me,” said Alicia. “Am I the biggest bitch ever for wanting my boyfriend to go to the pool with me?”

“No….” Sarah said with a sigh, folding a tee-shirt.

“Then what the fuck? Okay, I practically, like, got him this job so we could spend the summer together, because he was pissy about me going away for three months. But now we’re on the tour and he’s all vampire Kyle.”

Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Vampire?”

“I only see him at night.” She’d actually spent a bunch of time thinking up that one. And it was stupid, sure, but accurate.

“Oh, man. That’s weak,” said Sarah, rolling her eyes.

Whatever. She wasn’t a comedian. “Seriously, though.” Her anger was deflating a tiny bit, just leaving her a little sad and a little fed up. “It’s like he doesn’t want to do anything with me. I come up with all these things we could do—and you know me, okay, I’m a fun person! But all he wants to do is a, have sex, and b, hang out with the guys. Not actually do anything with the guys, just hang out. Which might be the most boring thing in the world.”

“Yeah?” said Sarah. She reached into the cardboard box at her feet to pull out another tee-shirt.

“Yeah. And it sucks, because we used to do all kinds of stuff together. Sometimes it feels like we don’t even like each other anymore, and I just, I don’t know what to do to make it better.”

Sarah let out a short huff of air and slammed a hand down on the merch table. It was surprisingly loud. “Alicia. You know I love you, right?”

“Me, too.”

“Okay. So then when I say I’m really sick of hearing about this, you’ll know I don’t mean it in a bad way.” Before Alicia could protest, because seriously, what kind of best friend got bored with the breakdown of her friend’s relationship, Sarah held her hand up and said, “Wait. Honey, you want me to say Kyle’s an asshole? Fine. He’s an asshole. I’ve pretty much always thought that, but you didn’t want to hear it, so I shut up. But you come to me with all this crap, day after day, for weeks now. You want my advice? Break up with him. If you don’t want to do that, then can we at least talk about something else for, like, an hour?”

Alicia couldn’t talk at all for a moment, she was so shocked. And then it hit her. Shit. She was one of those girls who only talked about their boyfriends, like they had no fucking lives. She was like one of those girls in school who hung on their boyfriends all through lunch and complained about them to their friends all through class, the ones she made fun of sometimes. Fuck. She tried to think of something, anything else to say. It was hard, considering the amount of time she’d spent thinking about Kyle over the last…millennium. That was pretty depressing in and of itself. Finally, she said, “Okay. So, I was watching a movie marathon on USA last week, and they showed The Faculty.”

“The one where Elijah Wood saves the high school from aliens?” Sarah looked up. She actually sounded vaguely interested, which was encouraging.

“Mm-hmm. And Jon Stewart’s like the chemistry teacher or something. So anyway, USA’s public access, so they cut out all the cussing. So the Josh Hartnett character says, ‘Fuck this shit,’ but it comes out, ‘Flick this spit.’”

Sarah actually laughed at that. “‘Flick this spit.’ That’s awesome.”

“I think you ought to make a tee-shirt that says that,” said Alicia with a smile. It felt really good to smile. “I’d totally wear it.”

“Yeah. And I could have, like, a line drawing of a totally disaffected Josh Hartnett on it. Oh, man, I should be writing this shit down!” Sarah scribbled something on a notepad, ripped off the top sheet, and stuffed it in her pocket. “Hey,” she said, “speaking of tee-shirts, wanna help me fold these?”

“If I help you, will you take me to the pool?” It was still fucking hot.

“Of course,” Sarah said. “You think I bought a new bikini just so it could ride around in the merch bus all summer?”

Alicia was so glad Sarah was doing merch on this tour. “We have a deal.”

“Sweet.” They shared a smile, and then Sarah said, “You wanna run and get the box of larges and extra-larges?”

“Sure thing.” She walked over to the parking lot feeling better than she had all morning. Her good mood deflated a little when she saw that the cardboard box with “L + XL” scribbled on one side was tipped over, spilling tee-shirts all over the floor of the van, but whatever. No big deal.

As she knelt on the floor to pick them up, she saw someone approaching out of the corner of her eye, and she looked up. It was a skinny, vaguely familiar guy—one of Bob and Ray’s nephews, she thought. The taller one, as opposed to the tiny one and the one with the gross hair. Alicia didn’t know Bob and Ray that well, but she kind of thought they were awesome. They knew just about everything about teching, and it was kind of cool to see two dudes who’d not only managed to keep their relationship going on the road forever, but who made pretty much no effort to hide it. Alicia respected them about as much as she respected anyone she’d ever met. But she felt like talking to another teenage boy right now about as much as she felt like having a root canal, so she looked back down at the pile of tee-shirts in hopes that if she ignored him, Bob and Ray’s nephew would go bug them and leave her alone.

It didn’t actually take too long to put the tee-shirts away, but she was still surprised to see the guy there when she stood up to close the box. He was just kind of standing there, staring…well, he was staring at her. And he kept staring as she wrestled with the flaps on the box, trying to tuck them under one another so it would stay closed. He didn’t move at all, and he didn’t have much of an expression on his face, but he was definitely looking at her. Holy shit, how creepy was that? She bent down to pick the box up, hoping against all hope that the guy would go away.

She’d been pissed at the universe a little lately, but to its credit, when she straightened up again with the box in her arms, the guy was gone. She sighed with relief and went to go carry the box to Sarah. Today was going to be a good day, and nobody, not Kyle and not Bob and Ray’s creepy nephew and not even Alicia herself, was going to ruin that.

**

“You know what I’m doing today?” asked Kitty. “I’m buying some underwear. Seriously, check out how disgusting this underwear is. I don’t know how this happens—every damn tour I think, ‘Okay, Kitty, you can get by with three shirts, but don’t skimp on the underwear.’ And every time I wind up with, like, two pairs of panties. Gross, gross panties.”

“Dude,” said Lindsey, “You’re not gonna toss the old ones, are you?” She couldn’t specifically think of what one might do with a pair of disgusting old panties, but she was sure there was some kind of magnificent prank just waiting to be born.

“Hell no,” said, Kitty, rolling said panties into a ball and stuffing them into her suitcase. “Because you know the second I buy new underwear, gremlins are going to steal it—and by gremlins, I mean Jimmy—or there’ll be some hideous accident with blue Gatorade or fake blood or something, and then I’m right back at square one.”

“You know what I’m doing today?” Steve asked.

A slingshot, perhaps. You could make a slingshot out of panties. “What’s that?” asked Lindsey.

“The same thing I do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world!” He laughed maniacally. From somewhere at the back of the bus came Jimmy’s voice, practically cooing. Talking to Chantal, obviously.

“Good luck with that one,” said Lindsey. “I’m gonna go head over to Bob and Ray’s place—Gerard and I are gonna hang out.”

That startled Steve out of his mad scientist impression. “Really?” he said.

“Sure, really.” Lindsey shrugged. She felt a little bad for constantly tricking Gerard just to get a reaction out of him, and this was a good opportunity to show him she wasn’t a complete asshole. Plus, it’d be cool to have someone new to talk about painting with, get a new perspective and all that, and Gerard seemed…well, interesting, though it wasn’t the most flattering-sounding word. “We made plans last night,” she told Steve. “I don’t know, maybe we’ll go see a movie or something.”

“Dude,” said Steve with wide eyes, “are you going on a date with him?”

“What if I am?” said Lindsey. It had been a while since her last relationship; she was ready to get back on the horse.

Steve groaned. “Lindsey! We’ve already got one lovesick sap in this band!” He jerked a thumb towards the bunks, where Jimmy was engaged in an exchange of seriously ridiculous endearments with Chantal. “Did you hear that? He just called her ‘pookie!’ If you’re gonna start mooning over this dude, we might as well hang it all up now, call ourselves the Nora Ephrons, and write songs about the magic of love and, I don’t know, being sleepless in Seattle.”

“I call dibs on the Rosie O’Donnell character,” said Kitty. She eyed Steve dubiously and said, “You can be Bill Pullman.”

Lindsey made a face at him. “Do I smell jealousy in the air?” she said. “You’re just jealous because Lucinda’s in New York, and I could conceivably get laid tonight.” It could happen, she thought. Optimism never hurt.

“Ooh, harsh.” Steve put one hand over his heart and one at his forehead, feigning a swoon. “Whatever! Go! Go on! Break my heart, if you really want to, you cruel hussy.” He shook his head sadly and said to Kitty, “It’s just you and me now, kid, a lone drummer and guitarist against the barbarian hordes of sex-obsessed lovebirds.”

“On the plus side, a barbarian horde of sex-obsessed lovebirds would probably be too busy with each other to cause too much mayhem,” Kitty pointed out.

“You’re not making this any better!” said Steve petulantly.

“I’m gonna let you guys duke this one out,” said Lindsey, grabbing her purse. “Smell you later.” She left to the sounds of Kitty downgrading Steve to Steve Zahn in You’ve Got Mail.

Bob and Ray’s RV was parked a little apart from the rest of the Used’s vehicles in the lot. From everything Lindsey’d heard, they were practically married, so she guessed they parked away from everyone else for a little bit of privacy.

Mikey answered the door, looking kind of glum. At least, she thought glumness was what he was aiming for—it might have been boredom, or irritation at seeing her, or general ennui.

“Hey,” she said. “Is Gerard around?”

He nodded without saying anything. It was on the tip of Lindsey’s tongue to say, “You think you could get him for me, then?” But as soon as she’d made up her mind to say it, Mikey went to sit down at the table on the far side of the RV and Gerard appeared in the doorway, rumpled and crazy-haired but apparently happy to see her.

“Hi!” he said, smiling brightly. “You’re here!” He actually looked kind of surprised.

“Well, we said ten, didn’t we?” Last night seemed like a million years ago, some kind of hazy not-quite-reality somewhere between a post-show high and the kind of exhausted fascination she’d had back in art school, when she and all the other pretentious little freshman sat up until three in the morning talking about movies and their classes and the fate of the world and whatever. Still, she was pretty sure that the whole “let’s meet up at ten tomorrow morning” thing hadn’t just happened in her mind.

Gerard shrugged. “Eh. I thought maybe you forgot. Or maybe I made it up in my head.”

Lindsey had to laugh at that—at least she wasn’t the only one a little confused about whether their conversation last night had actually happened. They’d taken it back to the parking lot so as not to talk through Brand New’s set, but it had still been loud and crowded and kind of unreal. “Nope. Pretty sure I’m supposed to be here.”

“Cool,” said Gerard. “So, like….” He scrunched up his nose and one side of his face, kind of looking like a disgruntled cat. “What do you want to do?”

Most of the stuff Lindsey had wanted to do in Sharpston—mainly, check out the gallery and hang out with the curator there—she’d already done. “You wanna catch a movie?” she suggested. That was always easy enough.

“Sure.” His eyes lit up and he said, “There’s a new X-Men movie. I mean, if you want.”

“Pretty people with super powers, what’s not to like?” said Lindsey. She was kind of amazed they were still making X-Men movies, but whatever, she’d enjoyed the other ones enough for the price of admission. “You a comics fan?” she asked Gerard.

He nodded eagerly. “Totally. Like, the day before yesterday, I went to a comic book store and bought, I would say literally, ten pounds of comic books. Like, a big box full of them.”

Hoo boy. “Wow,” she said. “You must have a ton of them.”

“Eh.” He made another scrunchy face. “Not really. It was the first time I’d been to a comic book store in six years, so, I guess I got a little excited.”

“You don’t say?” said Lindsey wryly. But it was actually kind of cute.

He didn’t seem to pick up on her sarcasm. “Yeah! Man, this whole trip has been awesome. Like, sugary breakfast cereal? Oh, God, I’ve eaten a fucking ton of it in the last, like, 48 hours. And, um, music. I mean, obviously you guys, and the Used and stuff, because that was awesome last night, but also, I hadn’t been to a music store in a long time, so I bought a bunch of CDs, too. I think maybe I need to cut back on the spending, actually.” Before she could insert a comment (or, let’s be real, a joke), he frowned and said, “Oh, wait. I looked at the paper this morning, and the first matinee’s at, um, 1:15. So we have some time to kill.”

She took advantage of his pause for breath to say, “That’s okay. We can hang out here for a few hours. Maybe talk, get some lunch.”

He shot a look at the inside of the RV and said, “Um…maybe not here?”

Fair enough—who wanted to hang out with their brothers and uncles during a date? (If this counted as a date, which, really, it didn’t. Probably.) “We could go find a tree to hang out under,” she suggested. “There are probably a lot of nice places to sit around here.”

“Okay. Awesome. Lemme just--” He darted back into the RV. She could hear him talking to someone—Bob, maybe—and then he reappeared with a backpack on his shoulder and a pair of huge, goofy sunglasses. When she laughed at him, he just gave her a cheerful smile from under the sunglasses, which just made him look even sillier.

It felt way too early to be as hot as it was, but there was something refreshing about the feeling of grass under her feet as they got off the blacktop, and Lindsey kicked off her flip-flops to dig her toes into the grass.

“So, um,” said Gerard, taking off the sunglasses and stuffing them in his pocket. He scratched at his hair, looking nervous for the first time all morning. “Are you secretly a movie star?”

“Huh?”

“Well. I mean.” His shoulders shot up, less a shrug than a hunch. “’Cause you’re secretly, like, a badass artist and a rock star. So I wondered, you know, if you were maybe like a movie star or a best-selling author or, um, the queen of somewhere. In your spare time.”

She giggled. “Damn! You’ve revealed my secret. I’m actually a movie star, an author, and the queen of my own island nation. I was going to surprise you.” Then it occurred to her that his joke might have been a nice way of complaining about her earlier…misleading omission of information, and she said, “Hey, you’re not pissed about before, are you?”

“Pissed?” He had a really sincere face, she thought. “No way! I mean, I don’t tell people everything about myself when we first meet, either.”

It kind of wasn’t the same thing, since she’d pretty much always wanted him to find out that she was in Mindless Self Indulgence, just in a way that allowed her to say, “Gotcha!” But whatever, if he wasn’t mad then she wasn’t going to worry about it.

“Well, it’s like, okay, you want people to see you in the best possible light, right?” Gerard went on. “So maybe you kind of time how you tell people stuff about yourself. Like, you don’t necessarily want to tell them everything bad about you right when you meet, so maybe you tell them the good stuff in a way that makes it seem really, really awesome, so when you tell them about the bad parts of yourself they already know you as a really cool person, so the bad stuff doesn’t seem so bad. Not that—it’s not like I think you kill puppies or something in your spare time, I don’t mean that kind of bad stuff. Just, you know, right now it’s just like you get more awesome every time I talk to you, so….” His voice trailed off, and he reddened. “Okay, I don’t even know where I’m going with this. Maybe you should talk for a while.”

She laughed, and tried to think of something to talk about that wasn’t speculation about what rock Bob and Ray had dug Gerard out from under. “Wanna hear my life story?” she asked. She felt like she’d been asked about it in enough interviews that she had a pretty good version down.

“Sure,” said Gerard, in a tone that made Lindsey think he expected some more surprise awesomeness.

She started out talking about the band, and touring, and the album that they had coming out in the fall. But one thing led to another, and after going into a little parenthetical discussion of her passion for Riot Grrl music, she found herself talking about her childhood—how her family had moved around a lot, how angry she’d been all the time. To her surprise, Gerard managed to keep quiet through most of it. He looked genuinely interested in everything she was saying, interrupting every so often with a question, and somehow Lindsey just kept on talking without getting even remotely self-conscious about it. Somewhere around her high school experience, they sat down on the grass. “So,” she said, “on the one hand, it really sucked, because it felt like just when I’d get used to a place, we’d move, but on the other hand, I think it gave me a lot of opportunities most kids don’t have.”

“Yeah?” Gerard said, leaning on his elbow.

“Yeah.” She grinned. “You know, the opportunity to be someone else. Like, here I was the chubby art geek who never talked to anybody, but then we’d move, and I could be the chubby art geek who sometimes talked to the art teacher.”

Gerard laughed at that. “Oh, man. That totally sounds just like my childhood. Minus the moving.”

“Really?” Lindsey said, more fishing for information than anything, because she could totally see Gerard as a fellow chubby art geek.

Gerard nodded, flopping onto his back and folding his arms back underneath his head. “Oh, yeah. I never talked to anyone in school, except my brother.”

“Which one?”

“Hmm?” Gerard looked over at her and seemed to remember something. “Oh, um, Mikey. I think Frank was a lot better at making friends than either of us.”

Lindsey could see that. From what she’d seen of Frank, he seemed like the kind of person who was really willing to put himself out there. Mikey and Gerard weren’t exactly shy, but they were kind of weird—as far as she could tell, Mikey only opened his mouth when he found it absolutely necessary to do so, and Gerard…well, Gerard seemed pretty willing to put himself out there, too, in the form of rambling monologues about comic books and about putting yourself out there, which might not have gone over so well in high school. “It’s good you had your brothers, though,” she said. “Being a teenager sucks anyway, but it’s worse when you’re alone.”

“Yeah,” said Gerard with a heartfelt nod. “No kidding.” He rolled over onto his side and propped his head up on one elbow, tilting his head at her inquiringly. “So, were you always into music, too?”

“No way,” said Lindsey, snorting out a laugh. “Well. I mean, I listened to it, and I was into it that way, but not like…okay, so when I joined the band? My mad bass skills were not enough—I had to wow them with my firebreathing skills.”

Gerard sat up at that. “Your firebreathing skills?”

“Yep.” She was still kind of proud of that one. “Bottle of booze plus a match in my hair plus a strike pad on the bass. Voila—instant fire.”

“Holy shit.” Gerard settled back down, leaning on his elbows, and gave her a toothy smile. “That’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever heard.” Plucking absent-mindedly at a piece of grass, he added, “It’s a little like that with me, too. I mean, I always played my harmonica, but I wasn’t like…I mean, I think drawing was my big hobby, and music was mostly something I just listened to. But when we met—well, when Mikey was eleven, he wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and Frank already knew, and we kind of formed a band.”

“Jesus. You have a band?” She thwapped him lightly on the arm. “You were keeping that one close to the chest, huh?”

Gerard winced exaggeratedly, like her little tap had actually hurt, and said, “Well, we suck. I mean, we don’t have a drummer, and all our equipment’s a million years old, and….” He shrugged. “We’ve pretty much never played for anyone who’s not, like, family.”

“Have you guys recorded anything?” Based on what he was saying, it sounded like maybe his music was like his art—private. Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask.

“Mm. Sort of.” He dug a battered old iPod out of his pocket and started scrolling through it. “My uncle—not Ray and Bob, my uncle Brian—got us some recording equipment, but he didn’t really know what to look for, so it doesn’t sound great.” He looked at her, his hand with the iPod in it half extended towards her, and said, “You can listen. If you want.”

“I totally want!” She grabbed the iPod, hit play, and settled back, trying to be as objective and observant as she could so she could give Gerard some useful feedback. She just hoped it didn’t suck too bad.

The first thing she noticed was, yeah, no drummer, which hurt their sound—Mikey did an okay job keeping them on rhythm for the most part, but sometimes he’d slow down, and then Frank would speed up like crazy to compensate, and then Gerard would start singing at a tempo that wasn’t remotely related to either Frank’s or Mikey’s, until Mikey somehow managed to start playing at Frank’s speed and they got back together. Gerard had a cool voice, like his speaking voice but a lot bigger, but he wasn’t always in tune. Neither were Frank and Mikey, come to think of it.

But despite all that, it wasn’t bad. It was kind of punk, and kind of Queen-type stadium rock, and kind of like the music they played in epic battle scenes in movies. It also had kind of a foreign sound to it. Lindsey couldn’t put her finger on just what made it sound like that, like some kind of unfamiliar folk music. It was easier to hear during the bridge, when Gerard stopped singing and started playing his harmonica. The combined harmonica and guitars sounded weirdly like the couple of times Lindsey’d been to the opera, except she’d pretty much never heard anything like the chords they occasionally hit, which seemed to have too many notes and some extremely weird-ass intervals. The lyrics, as far as she could tell, were about vampires. Or possibly ghosts. Really mournful ghosts.

When it was done, she set the iPod down and looked at Gerard, who appeared to be picking fascinatedly at a scab on his elbow. “I like it,” she said.

He looked up at her like he thought maybe this was the setup of an elaborate practical joke. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” she said, and she meant it. It needed a lot of work, but there was something good underneath, something really interesting, which wasn’t something you could say for every shitty band out there. “I mean, you guys obviously need a drummer, and maybe you should practice all your parts separately more until you’re more in tune, but it sounded really cool. Who writes the songs?”

Gerard half-smiled, and said, “Well, we all write the songs. I do the lyrics, though.”

She might have guessed that. She’d known Gerard for, oh, about twenty-four hours at this point, but it wouldn’t surprise her at all to learn that he was a fan of horror movies the same way he was a fan of comic books. “Well. I really liked them, so, good job.”

“Thanks,” he said, looking at the ground. “Um. So, it’s like, 11:30 or something now, and it’ll probably take us half an hour to walk to the movie theater, so you wanna have lunch or something?”

“Sure.” It was getting even hotter now, and it might be nice to be in the relative cool of the RV for a while.

When they got back to the camper, Frank and Mikey were sitting on the floor watching what looked like old episodes of Saved by the Bell. They looked up with interest when Gerard and Lindsey walked in.

“Hey,” said Gerard. “Where’re Bob and Ray?”

“They went to the grocery store with Matt. Said we were out of the essentials.” Onscreen, Zack said something smug, and the canned studio laughter howled. Frank took a moment to smile appreciatively at the screen before saying, “But there’s PB and J if you guys want sandwiches.”

Not exactly gourmet, but it sounded good to Lindsey. She and Gerard made sandwiches, Gerard found some paper plates, and they settled down at the table to watch Zack and Slater explain something to Screech. Gerard seemed to be dividing his attention between the TV and Lindsey, looking at both of them like he couldn’t believe he got to be in the presence of something or someone so wonderful. When he ate his sandwich, he smiled like it was the best thing he’d ever eaten in his life. Lindsey wondered how he managed to get through a day if everything excited him so much; she’d have thought it would get exhausting after a while. There were definitely worse ways to be, though.

About halfway through her sandwich, she became aware of the fact that Frank was looking at her. Not staring or anything, just giving her quick glances out of the corner of his eye and murmuring to Mikey in…well, it was definitely another language, but she had no idea which one, because it didn’t sound like a language she’d heard before. She nudged Gerard with her elbow and said, “Dude. What are they saying?”

Gerard, who’d been in one of his phases of infatuation with the television, jerked his head towards her with sudden awareness and then turned to frown at his brothers. “Guys,” he said loudly.

Mikey said something to Frank and then, to Gerard and Lindsey, added, “Hey. We’re gonna go hang out on the Used’s bus.” He gave them both a serious look before vanishing out the door, Frank practically skipping out behind him.

“What was that all about?” asked Lindsey.

“I don’t know.” Gerard chewed on his lower lip for a moment before saying, “I think something’s going on with Mikey, but I don’t know what. It’s weird, too, because he usually tells me everything.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to suggest that maybe, for whatever reason had gotten into his goofy-haired little head, Mikey didn’t like her—that last look he’d given them hadn’t done much to make her think he and Frank hadn’t been talking shit about her--but it seemed like an unnecessarily unpleasant thing to bring up on what was maybe supposed to be a first date. So instead she said, “Hey, wanna see what else is on?”

They found a marathon of The Golden Girls on another channel and watched it until it was time to leave for the theater. If Lindsey had thought Gerard looked inordinately amazed by the television, he was pretty much ten times more amazed by the movie theater. Maybe Lindsey would have found it really annoying on someone else, but for some reason Gerard just made her laugh. They shared a grossly overpriced popcorn and talked through the trailers, which Lindsey refused to feel bad about considering how few other people were in the theater.

“You know what? I’ve seen that movie,” she said about some stupid-looking romantic comedy with Matthew Goode and Anne Hathaway. “It was called Four Weddings and a Funeral. And Notting Hill.”

“Well, I haven’t seen either of those, so I can’t tell,” said Gerard. “But I don’t get why he doesn’t just talk to her instead of storming off like that—like, what if that guy she’s hugging is her brother? Or her friend, or something?”

“He’s probably her brother. Leave no cliché unturned. Oh, look,” she said as the next trailer started, “yet another biopic about a fucked-up musician who did a lot of drugs and found redemption through the love of a good woman. I ought to be taking notes on this. Maybe someday I, too, can be played by Joaquin Phoenix.”

Gerard snorted Pepsi out of his nose.

They were quiet through the movie itself, except when Gerard felt the need to grab her arm and say, “How cool was that!” or “Okay, it was not like that in the comics.” For most of it, Lindsey leaned back to enjoy the cheesy dialogue and the shirtless Hugh Jackman while Gerard had a religious experience in the seat next to her.

It was funny, but just a little odd, and between that and the way that Gerard walked through the crowd coming out of the new Will Ferrell movie after their own movie was over--like he didn’t want to come within ten feet of them because he was afraid of what they might do—Lindsey thought that a high-school-aged Gerard might have outdone her in the weird department. Christ, even she had been able to walk through a crowded hallway without flinching every time someone came near. She felt bad even thinking it, though, because every time she looked in his direction, he looked back with a big, happy smile.

It was still basically early when the movie let out, or at least, Lindsey had a few hours to kill before warm-up. They spent the walk back to the parking lot talking about the movie, but when they reached Bob and Ray’s RV, she said, “You got to see some of my art yesterday. Do I get to see any of yours?”

“You want to?” Gerard asked with a confused frown.

“Well, sure,” said Lindsey with a shrug. “If you don’t mind.” She felt like she’d told him way, way too much about herself, rambling on like she had this morning; now, with every weird thing he did, she wanted just a little bit more to find out about him, what his deal was.

“Okay. If you want to, I mean. I don’t mind. Just—wait here a sec.” He darted into the RV and reappeared a moment later with a backpack. “We could go back and sit in the grass,” he said, with a nervous glance at all the people in the parking lot.

“Sure,” said Lindsey, and without even really thinking about it, she grabbed his hand. He stared down at it like he’d never held hands before, but when she started to let go, thinking maybe it was a little cheesy, he smiled at her and held on.

They found a tree to sit under and Gerard opened up his backpack, pulling out a sketchbook and a pile of loose papers before handing them to Lindsey. There were a ton of pictures; obviously Gerard hadn’t been kidding back at the gallery when he said he drew a lot. Most of them were portraits—these seemed to be divided between pictures that looked more or less like regular people and drawings of vampires and aliens and zombies. Lindsey’d totally called the horror movie obsession. A bunch of the pictures were action drawings, though, and under a pile of loose pictures of Mikey and Frank, she found what looked like a handmade comic book and picked it up.

Gerard winced. “Um, I did that when I was fourteen, so, like. I don’t know, it probably sucks.”

“Hush, you,” she said, mock glaring at him. “How’m I supposed to read this if you keep talking?” She flipped through the pages, not really reading so much as skimming, just to get the thrust of the story, and looking at the pictures. It seemed to be about three crime-fighting orphans, all of them obviously based on Gerard and his brothers, but it ended before there was any real conclusion to the story. Lindsey wondered if there was a sequel, or if Gerard had just tired of the idea before he thought of an ending.

Finally, she reached a pencil sketch of herself, probably from last night’s concert. Gerard blushed furiously but let her examine it, and Lindsey studied it intensely, more so she wouldn’t have to meet Gerard’s eyes than to catch the details of the drawing. There was something scary and flattering and maybe sweet about it, and she swallowed involuntarily.

“These are really good,” she said, finally, and not just because she was pretty sure she was developing an embarrassing crush on Gerard. Part of it was probably that his bold colors and angular style appealed to her own tastes, but part of it was just that he was genuinely pretty good.

“Thanks,” he said, looking off to the side somewhere.

“No, seriously.” She opened the comic again, to a page where the Frank character and the Gerard character were facing off in a fight. Some of the proportions were off, but considering Gerard had only been a kid when he’d drawn it, Lindsey thought it was damn good. “Where’d you study?”

“Mm.” Gerard scrunched up his face. “I didn’t really study, so much. My mom got me art lessons when I was a kid, ‘cause our school didn’t have an art teacher, but, um. We don’t really have anything like an art school where I live. Like, there aren’t really any artists, and I guess the town doesn’t really need any. At least not my kind of art. It’s really small.”

“Wow,” said Lindsey, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She couldn’t even imagine living in a place so small it didn’t need art, not without completely suffocating. It didn’t even sound like Gerard had thought about going away for college, which would have been one obvious out. She thought for a moment about how excited he seemed by everything, how worked up he’d gotten by the movie, how he had watched their concert last night with the fascination of a kid who’d never seen one before. “Gerard,” she started before realizing she had no way of finishing the question. There wasn’t really a tactful way of asking a guy you liked whether he was maybe in a cult.

Unfortunately, Gerard had clearly picked up on the hesitation in her voice, because he looked at her with a frown and said, “What?”

She considered coming right out and asking him, but instead she said, “You didn’t think about applying to an art school? I mean, think about how good you’d be if you had someone to help teach you.”

Gerard looked wistful, peering sadly over Lindsey’s shoulder at the comic book, before sighing. “I couldn’t.” He shrugged weakly with one shoulder and made a face. “It’s not like I didn’t think about it, but, well…it wasn’t really an option.”

Lindsey could think of a few reasons art school wouldn’t be an option for Gerard. Maybe his family didn’t have the money, or maybe someone in the family had gotten sick, or maybe his parents really didn’t want to pay to send him to become an artist. Maybe it was just a privacy thing, that he didn’t want his art to be something he did for other people instead of himself. They were all pretty logical reasons, reasons that made a lot more sense than the idea that Gerard and his brothers belonged to some separatist sect that sent their teenagers out to explore the real world before they settled down to six wives and seventeen kids. Still, Lindsey couldn’t help but ask, “Hey, Gerard, you’re not in a cult or anything, are you?”

Gerard laughed, snorting through his nose. “What?”

Well, she hadn’t really thought he was—too much knowledge of pop culture—but she felt relieved that she’d at least gotten the question out there. “Well, you don’t seem to get out much.”

“That’s because I live in the ass end of nowhere, not because I’m in a cult.” He giggled again, high and a little nasal. “I’m not even religious. I mean, I think I believe in some kind of higher power, destiny or fate or something, but I’m not, like, a fanatic.”

“I was just checking,” said Lindsey. “Are you super offended now?”

He wrinkled his nose at her. “No. Just, do I come off like a culty kind of person?”

“Not really,” Lindsey admitted, “but you do come off a little like a visitor from another planet fascinated by our earthly ways.” Gerard’s face fell and his eyes widened at that, so she hastened to say, “Not in a bad way. It’s kind of cute, really.”

Gerard didn’t look too reassured. “Sorry,” he said. “Just…it’s a really small town, and we don’t have a car, and we’re not--” He broke off and gave her a crooked, awkward smile. “We kind of keep to ourselves. It’s not a religious thing, though. It’s kind of like a small town thing, and kind of like an ethnic thing.”

Well, that explained the foreign language Frank and Mikey had been speaking. It explained a lot, really. “Where are you guys from?” she asked.

She wouldn’t have thought it was that weird a question, but it seemed to make Gerard even more uncomfortable. “Um,” he said. “It’s. Uh. You wouldn’t even have heard of it. And I don’t remember it or anything. We moved when I was little.”

All righty then. Lindsey couldn’t decided whether she was more offended that Gerard thought she lacked the geographical knowledge even to have heard of where he was from, or more weirded out that he was so evasive about it. “Okay,” she said, sounding kind of flat even to her own ears.

Gerard reddened. “It’s not—I mean—it’s kind of complicated.”

“What is?”

“Like, okay, we really keep to ourselves. I mean, we are kind of like a cult that way. I’m not supposed to talk about it, and we don’t really have a lot of contact with the outside world. That’s why I haven’t been to a movie in six years and stuff.”

“Why six years?” She thought back to their earlier conversations, and the ‘six years’ number seemed to come up a lot. Gerard hesitated, and she decided she didn’t mind pushing him a little bit. “Come on,” she said. “I gave you my whole life story. You don’t have to tell me secret cult stuff or whatever, but you could at least tell me what the deal is. I mean, as far as I know, Ray and Bob don’t live on some secret compound, and they’re your uncles, right?”

“Kind of,” Gerard muttered. He was silent for so long that Lindsey thought he wasn’t going to say anything more, that he was effectively ending the conversation there. But just when she was about to change the subject completely, maybe excuse herself and head back to the MSI bus, he said, “So, okay,” and took a deep breath. “My parents died when I was five and Mikey was three.”

“God,” Lindsey said, appalled. She hadn’t meant to dig up old traumas. “I’m so sorry.”

He gave her a quick flash of smile, just a tiny tug on one corner of his mouth. “It’s okay. I don’t really remember them anymore. It was a, a boat accident, kind of. Mikey and I were in it, too, but we don’t really remember it. So, anyway, we get rescued by the Coast Guard, and this woman adopts us. Mama.”

“Wait a minute,” Lindsey interjected. “Where was Frank?”

“We’re getting to that,” he said, holding up a finger. “So meanwhile, Frank’s parents die when he’s two, and he gets adopted by his grandpa. His grandpa dies when he’s seven, and he goes into foster care. So, okay, like two or three years later, Mama dies, and Mikey and me get sent to this, um. This group home. And that’s where we met Frank. And we got to be best friends with Frank, and so later, when we met Bob and Ray and they helped us find our biological grandma—six years ago--she adopted all three of us. So we went to live with—with our, you know. Our people.” He paused for a moment, looking sad, and added, “Then she died last year, so now we live with our Uncle Brian.”

Lindsey couldn’t even speak. She couldn’t imagine being orphaned once, much less three times. No wonder Gerard and his brothers were a little odd—fuck, anyone who went through that would probably have some issues. Her own family seemed pretty damn normal in comparison. “Jesus,” she finally managed. “That’s….”

“It sounds a lot worse than it….” Gerard broke off and closed his eyes. “No, actually, it kind of sucked. A lot. But, you know, it’s like, we have each other, and we have Bob and Ray and Uncle Brian and all these people who care about us. So. It could be a lot worse.” He grinned crookedly and added, “Plus. It’s so cool that Bob and Ray let us stay with them this summer. I mean, we get to see all these concerts, and catch up on what’s going on in the real world, and…well. I got to meet you.” He wasn’t looking at her when he added that last part, but there wasn’t anything unsure about his voice when he said it.

Lindsey was still weirded out about the “I can’t tell you where I’m from” thing, but she wasn’t really pissed anymore. She was crushing on probably the weirdest dude in the world, but at least she was pretty much 99.9% sure he was crushing back. She reached out to grab his hand again, and this time he caught on right away and squeezed back. “Hey,” she said. “I’m glad I got to meet you, too.”

He looked up and smiled at her, then, and maybe it was the warm afternoon sunlight that made him look less like a cartoon character and more like a really attractive guy, but whatever it was, Lindsey felt a rush of happy excitement in her chest and said, “Hey, you wanna make out?”

He giggled his weird-ass giggle again and said, “Sure.”

So maybe she wasn’t going to get laid today, but she was more than happy to just hang out on the grass kissing Gerard. Whatever crazy place he was from, at least they didn’t seem to mind if their kids learned how to French kiss, because Gerard was not bad at all, and there was something kind of romantic about the soft grass and the sun shining through the tree branches in funny patterns and the way Gerard twisted his fingers around hers while they kissed. Maybe this was a date, after all.

Part 4