After DC told me I fit the qualifications of someone he'd murder, I never wanted to speak to him again. So I probably shouldn't have blamed him for something he didn't do, against someone he couldn't stand. It sort of cheesed him off...
Okay, this i...
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He didn't come over, in the end. Not because I was worried about how much trouble I would get in—I'd reached the conclusion that I didn't care. I'd done everything my whole life to be as small as possible, as quiet as possible, to make ripples instead of waves, to never make my mother frown. We hardly ever had disagreements and that was because I was always trying to be my best. Above reproach. So yeah, maybe I'd made some mistakes recently and maybe even the band was one of them. But it was my life. And I was sixteen. If now wasn't the time to make mistakes, then I didn't know when that time would ever be.
Dorian didn't come over because he didn't want to be the reason the rift between my mother and I widened. He didn't want to be another tick-mark in our fight. It actually bothered him—Camille's disapproval. And, knowing everything now, I couldn't say that I was surprised.
He didn't have a mother, he had lost his in the worst way imaginable, so of course he'd want to be acceptable to other people's. And of course he'd want me to make things right with mine.
But I'd tried. And, honestly, it was like she'd become a total stranger to me.
My mother could get a little weird about the singing thing; I'd always known that. It was the reason I was so terrified to mention the band in the first place. She'd never shown support for my choral concerts, she'd always cringed whenever I so much as hummed in her presence, and she'd been the nexus behind my naming the guitar "Tom Riddle"… So, yeah. I'd always known that music made her crazy. She listened to NPR in her car, I'd actually never even heard her play a song in my life.
But it still surprised me how entirely she'd shut down at the mention of a band.
I almost felt like any second now she'd send me away to boarding school or boot camp, or something else insane, to reprogram me until I could come back without music on my mind.
But what she did, actually, was worse. She pretended I hadn't told her.
She started pretending I didn't exist.
For someone who'd spent her whole life trying to pretend she was invisible, that probably shouldn't have hit me as hard as it did. But there was something gut wrenching about being ignored by your own mother.
She should have asked me about what happened at school, about the lies I'd said some boy made up about me. About how things were going. She should have told me I was grounded and band practice was out of the question, and so was performing at Styx on Saturday. She should have done something. She just looked the other way whenever I left the house. She didn't ask me where I was going or what I was getting up to.
And on Saturday—when it was finally time to test my stage fright, once and for all, in front of everybody—I searched for her face in the crowd. It was a large crowd, larger than any I'd seen the other times that we'd come to "check out the competition," as Perry called it.
I knew Battle of the Bands was a big deal here, and it happened at the end of January every year. So every Saturday night performance before then was just one big rehearsal for it. A lot of the other bands in town that were going to compete for the cash prize would play on the weekends leading up to the event. And all of them had been waiting to figure out what happened to Red Light, Go.
