This Is What It Feels Like Page 4

  “Dia!”

  “I’m coming!” Dia yelled, and then under her breath, “Jesus Christ.”

  She yanked a clean shirt on with her cutoffs and tossed her stained uniform in the hamper. All morning she’d been sweating in the kitchen of the bakery, pulling out sheet after sheet of sugar cookies and listening to her manager, Imelda, out front trilling, “Welcome to the Flour Shop!” She’d stolen a ten-minute break in the freezer, because another moment of Imelda’s voice would have officially pushed her over the edge.

  She pulled the elastic out of her hair and teased out her curls as she made her way to the living room. Her mom was pacing around the room, bouncing Lex almost aggressively, and when she saw Dia she let out this exasperated sigh. “Look, baby, it’s your mama!”

  Alexa kept on crying and Dia swooped in to take her before her mom lost it. “C’mere. What’s wrong?”

  Lex bumped her head into Dia’s shoulder, weeping a wet patch on that fresh shirt. Dia looked over her head to her mom. “Do you think maybe she needs to see a doctor? She’s been like this for days now.”

  Nina followed them into the kitchen. “No, it’s just a phase.”

  “Great.” Dia plunked the baby into her high chair and grabbed a handful of tissues to wipe the tears and snot from her face. “Has she eaten?”

  “Uh-uh.” Nina opened the refrigerator and took out a pitcher of iced tea. “She wouldn’t let me near her with anything.”

  “Right.” Dia crouched so she was eye level with her daughter. “Lex, I’m going to get you lunch. What do you want to eat? Use your words.”

  Alexa’s howls quieted to whimpers, and between giant gulping breaths of air she said, “I . . . want . . . bannas.”

  “Bananas! We can do bananas, no problem.” Dia watched Lex’s face light up. God, before Lex had come along she’d never imagined that she could be so infuriated yet so infatuated at the same damn time. If only the solution to everything was as simple as bananas. “And maybe after lunch we can go see the puppy, if Miss Candy’s home.”

  “We see the puppy?” Lex asked, sniffling but beaming. “Waffles!”

  “Yes, Waffles, that’s right!” Nina said, all cheer, and then to Dia, sharper, “You’ll spoil her, one day.”

  “I know.” She added that to the running list she kept in her head, Rules for Being a Good Mother: Be tough, don’t stress, keep her calm, don’t spoil her. Simple.

  “She makes it so easy, though.” Nina grabbed Alexa’s hand and kissed her chubby fingers. “I’m going to run to the store. You be good, okay?”

  “Bye,” Dia called as her mom left. When it was the two of them, Dia fixed her gaze on Lex, staring at each other with their serious eyes. “All right, Lex. What do you say we go on an adventure today?”

  They took the bus to Golden Grove Gardens, Dia’s absolute favorite place in town.

  In the stillness of the park Lex didn’t stop fussing, kicking her legs out of the stroller, and straining at the straps holding her in. She kept up the noise, too, and Dia ignored the pointed looks from the people they passed, focusing on calming herself with the beauty of the gardens. A year ago Dia would have been mortified by Alexa’s tantrum. Now, though, she didn’t really care. Let them stare all they wanted—what, like they’d never seen a kid losing it before? Besides, it didn’t really matter whether Alexa was yelling or sleeping or being the most angelic, beaming baby in the world; Dia always got looks. To everybody in town she was one of two things. To the assholes, and people who didn’t know, she was a walking, talking stereotype, another brown girl with a baby. (Like that was all she was—never mind that she was a musician, that she was a person.) And the people who did know . . .

  Dia could always recognize those. They were the people who looked a little too long before smiling at her, or patted her on the hand when she served them at the Flour Shop. And sometimes she wanted to say to them, “He wasn’t even officially my boyfriend, you don’t have to feel so sorry for me.” But she could never say that to anyone besides Jules, and the rest of the time she let them imagine whatever they wanted. Because she was still and always the girl who had the baby by the dead boy.

  This was how the true story went: Dia met Elliot Mendes at a party, almost three years ago. He was cute, pretty eyes and a slow smile. They flirted for a couple weeks, made out at a few more parties. Then Elliot took her out to the drive-in movie theater, and when Dia teased him and said This is a date, isn’t it, he said, Don’t make fun of me or I won’t buy you any snacks and kissed her so she’d stop laughing. And that was how it went for a few months, and Dia thought maybe he’d be it, her first love and all that.

  They’d been at a party the last time she’d seen him. It had been a good night—they’d watched Ciara’s band play; Hanna had been on her best behavior, Jules had been silly. They’d jumped on the trampoline in a stranger’s yard. She still had the picture Elliot had taken.

  He’d told her she was beautiful.

  And sometime in the early hours of the morning, when Elliot was walking home, someone hit him with their car. Couldn’t look up from their phone long enough to see the person in front of them and by the time he hit the ground, her dad had told her after, the only reassurance she could ask him for, he was already dead.

  And that was that.

  Except it wasn’t, because then Dia took a positive pregnancy test and she decided, in a burst of selfish love and hurting broken-hearted-ness, to have the baby.

  So now she was the Girl Who Had the Baby by the Dead Boy, she guessed.

  The flowers were in full glorious bloom. They wandered the paths long enough that Lex finally ran out of steam and fell asleep with her thumb jammed in her mouth. Dia pushed the stroller in the direction of the rose gardens, and it was nice: the sun on her face, walking with no place to be, her baby content (for now), and all the beautiful scenery around them. See? Things could be good.

  She was so far away that the tick-tick-tick of bicycle wheels only registered a second before her name was called out: “Dia!”

  She whipped around, a finger to her lips as she faced the boy on the bike. Today his hands were bandaged, grimy white around his burnt-sienna skin. Always with the accidents.

  To his credit, Jesse looked suitably chastised and hit the brakes, coasting toward her quietly now. “Hey,” he said when he was close enough for normal volume, letting his feet drop to the ground. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Dia said, and she tipped her head in the direction of the stroller. “She’s asleep, is all, and we’re having kind of a rough day, so.”

  Jesse peered behind the hood of the stroller, pulled down so Lex didn’t get too much sun, and then his face broke into that beautiful smile of his. “She looks like butter wouldn’t melt.”

  “That’s what she wants you to think,” Dia said. “What are you doing here, anyway? You know you’re breaking the rules.” Dia pointed at a faraway sign that she knew had a big CYCLING PROHIBITED proclamation on it.

  “That’s not a real rule,” he said. “And I came to see you. I went by your house but you weren’t there, and then you weren’t at the bakery, but you were here. So here I am.”

  I came to see you. See, it was pretty little words like that, always getting Dia in more trouble.

  “You love him,” Jules would always say to her when she felt like being annoying. “Everyone can see it.” And Dia would say, “So? I don’t have time for a boyfriend.”

  That was true—when they’d first met, Alexa had been tiny and Dia was busy with school and work and taking care of a baby, and so she’d told Jesse they could only be friends.

  But the real reason she kept to herself. No one needed to know that her avoidance of Jesse had less to do with her busyness and more to do with how the last boy she might have loved was dead now. How afraid she was to lose another person, to feel that cold shock of loss steal the breath from her lungs.

  So she pretended it was all Lex and graduating and getting through, and Jesse got it
, he understood, and Dia had put all thoughts of his almost-black eyes and full mouth, his rich brown skin and back muscles out of her brain. They were friends. It was fine.

  Except for when he said things like I came to see you, or when she touched his hand a little too long, or when she caught him watching her like he thought no one could see him.

  Now Dia found a bench and sat, keeping one foot on the front bar of the stroller so she could ease it back and forth, keep Lex sleeping. “Here you are,” she said. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Working,” Jesse said. He leaned on the handlebars of his black bike, dirt sprayed across the metal. “If you come by I’ll hook you up.”

  Dia gave half a laugh. “Have you ever noticed that our entire friendship is based on free food?”

  “But Giorgio’s pizza is the best,” Jesse said.

  “No lie.”

  Jesse pushed back on his bike. “So you gonna come by?”

  “Can’t.” She held up her hand to make the biggest air quotes. “We’re having ‘family dinner’ tonight. My mom’s cooking.”

  “Okay,” Jesse said. “So I’ll see you around eight, then?”

  Dia reached out to smack him but he dodged her, too fast. “Shut up. It’s not my mom’s fault she’s a terrible cook.”

  “I never said she was,” Jesse said. “But, y’know, if you’re still hungry after, we got you.”

  “Sure.”

  Jesse spun his handlebars. “Are you going to Revelry next week?”

  “For what?”

  “The Sun City contest. The launch night or whatever.”

  Dia lifted her head and eyed him. “A launch event? They never did that before. Who’s playing?”

  “Are you serious? You haven’t heard?” Jesse shook his head as he swung his backpack around. “Sometimes I think you ignore this stuff on purpose. You know they’re changing the contest, right? Everybody’s losing their shit even more than usual.”

  He pulled a crumpled flyer out of his bag and handed it to her. “See?”

  Dia snatched it and scanned the glossy words: Sun City Radio presents . . . Originals contest . . . First Place prize $15,000 and the chance to open for Glory Alabama.

  Hold up.

  Playing with Glory Alabama?

  Fifteen.

  Thousand.

  Dollars?

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Holy shit. That’s a lot of money.” Not to mention the little thing of playing with Glory Alabama. She read it again and slapped her hand on the bench. “Wait, is this for real?”

  “One hundred percent,” Jesse said. “Like I said, everyone’s losing it.”

  Understandably, Dia thought. She was on the verge of it, too, as she took in the words on the flyer.

  This was way bigger than before.

  This was more.

  This maybe changed things.

  “Oh my god,” she said, looking up at Jesse. “Can I keep this?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.” And then his look turned suspicious. “Why?”

  “Because,” Dia said. “That’s all.”

  “Because maybe you’re thinking about doing it?”

  Dia raised her eyebrows. “Me and what band? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t play anymore.”

  “Okay,” Jesse said, bouncing his front wheel on the sand-colored gravel. “No, you’re not interested, not at all.”

  She got up and grabbed the stroller, accidentally turning it so sharply that Lex woke with a startled cry. “Don’t be an ass.”

  “Me?” Jesse put on a hurt face, but his shit-eating grin couldn’t be hidden. “Come on, Dee. I can see the wheels in your brain turning as you talk.”

  Dia folded the flyer in half, and then again, and slipped it into her back pocket. He never missed anything with her. Not that she was really thinking about entering, because it was true, she didn’t play anymore. There hadn’t been a band for years. They didn’t speak to Hanna. Dia couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to a show, let alone played one.

  (That was a lie. Of course she remembered the last time they’d played: in Rexford, at the end of a skate competition. Under a wide-open sky, the sun glowing on them, Elliot buried a month. And all day long, trying in vain to keep Hanna sober so she could play. Sweet memories.)

  And really, Dia thought, so what if she was intrigued? It was only fantasy, one she would cut off before it began to hurt too much. It wasn’t like she was going to do it. How could she?

  She turned the stroller and scuffed her toe in the gravel. “My wheels are turning, huh? You think you know me,” she said to Jesse, her fingers plucking at the collar of his shirt. “But I have secrets like you can’t even imagine.”

  Did that sound too flirty? It was so hard to toe the line she’d drawn and sometimes hated.

  But Jesse held his hands up and gave that smile of his. “All right,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

  Dia rolled her eyes again, over-exaggerated this time, because maybe he was right, too. “We’ll see,” she said.

  Then they walked the rest of the park, through the rose garden and by the pond and back around, talking about anything but the contest, how bad Dia wanted to play again. It was easy enough; Dia didn’t talk about it anymore. She had made Jules stop, too. They both knew how much they missed performing and recording and feeling the pulsating energy of an audience with its eyes on them. Talking about it when there was no hope of going back there was way too much of a downer.

  And it was okay, Dia told herself now, leading Jesse through the flowers. She didn’t need it. That was then, and this was now.

  And right now, she definitely wasn’t still thinking about the flyer in her back pocket, the contest.

  Not at all.

  Dia

  Dia waited until Lex was asleep in her crib that night, uttering her soft toddler snores, and then plugged her headphones in to her laptop. She clicked through to find the folder buried deepest of all, labeled EP.

  Five songs that they’d recorded in Hanna’s garage, with the jankiest setup, but it had been all they’d known how to do, and it was exhilarating to be able to play their music back afterward.

  She hovered the cursor over the Play button. This was silly, really. What did it matter if the prize money was big enough to mean something to her now? Or that one of her favorite bands was involved? Her life was still what it was. The contest didn’t change that.

  But. Still.

  She clicked Play.

  The first note hit and that was it: Dia was gone. No longer was she sitting cross-legged on her bed, the sun setting outside and her daughter lying near. She was fourteen again, precocious as hell and pleased by that.

  It had started when Dia had dragged them to a party they weren’t invited to, to watch this band she’d heard was cool: Graceland. And they didn’t let her down—their sound was staticky, electric, and Dia had been fixated on the lead singer, a light-skinned girl with locs twisted into a crown and flowers tattooed on her arms. I wanna do that, she’d thought, carefully watching the girl’s careless style on the makeshift stage.

  She’d been all keyed up after and started saying, “We should make our own music. We could be as good as that. Better, even. That could be us.”

  Dia already played. Her dad had been teaching her since before she could talk. She practiced on his old acoustic, and a third-hand, cherry-red electric she’d saved enough birthday money for. When she begged, he got his old equipment out of storage for them—amps and mics and everything they needed. Hanna bought an almost-trashed drum kit from a kid at school and Jules blew her savings on a battered bass, and, like magic, they were a band.

  They’d thrown themselves into writing, playing, listening over and over to five-second loops of Glory Alabama songs to figure out their intricacies. Spent lunch periods scribbling lyrics and chord changes in the back of their notebooks.

  The first time they played through a ten-minute set of their own songs, Dia felt more than triumph
ant.

  “Now what?” Hanna had asked.

  “Now,” Dia said. “We get a show.”

  They had already been going to the all-ages nights at Revelry for a year almost, and hanging out at backyard shows. There was this festival that happened every year, the biggest and best local bands coming together for free. And Dia decided that that was going to be their performance debut. All she had to do was convince the organizers to let them in.

  Her first email had gotten her this response: “The lineup’s full, sorry! Maybe next year.”

  But Dia was stubborn and emailed again, and again, every day with a new reason why Fairground—the name they’d chosen after a thousand hours—should be on that lineup. And when she got silence in return, she took herself down to Revelry and begged the manager for help. “Sorry, kid,” the manager said. “No can do. Maybe—”

  “Not next year,” Dia said, already on her way out. “Now.”

  She’d stood out in the parking lot, wondering where to go next, and only noticed the girl coming toward her when she spoke. “You have the persistence down already,” she’d called out to Dia. “And the attitude.”

  Dia had looked up and said the only thing she could think of. “You’re Ciara Lennon.” The Graceland singer.

  “That’s me,” Ciara Lennon said. “I’m also the person you’ve been emailing every single day.”

  Dia’s instinct was to apologize, but instead she straightened up and folded her arms. “Persistence,” she said.

  Ciara smiled. “The question is, are you actually any good?”

  “Let us play the festival,” Dia had said, “and you’ll find out.”

  Then Ciara had laughed. “Fine,” she’d said. “Only so you’ll stop irritating me.”

  So they’d played ten lightning-fast minutes in the early afternoon to a scattered audience—but a girl came up to them after and said she really liked them and would they play at a party she was having?

  They did that party, and then a whole bunch more, and practiced almost every day after school, and got good. Really good. They played a different backyard show at least once a month, and Ciara even got them a couple slots opening up for Graceland at clubs outside Golden Grove. They’d drive out and play, then watch from the wings and wait until Ciara was ready to take them home, eating French fries in the back of the van. And after one of those shows, a woman gave them her card, said she was A&R at an indie label and they should get in touch with her.