I Was Already Gone novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Quarters

At a 2 a.m. laundromat a stranger lends Elliott four quarters and says whoever wrote Brecken's hit never met the man singing it, and then Brecken texts for the next song.

The dryer at Suds & Duds took quarters, and I had none.

It was two in the morning, and I was standing in the laundromat on Fifth Street with a garbage bag of wet clothes and a phone that would not stop buzzing.

I had walked there from Fenwick's because it was the only place still lit.

I turned the phone face down on the folding table.

It buzzed against the metal.

"Your phone sounds like it owes somebody money," a voice said.

A woman was sitting on the counter by the soap machine with a laptop on her knees and a cello case propped next to her.

She had a short dark bob and silver rings on every finger, and she did not look up from her screen.

"Ignore it," I said.

"I was going to."

She typed something.

I held up a dollar bill at the change machine and it spat the bill right back out.

I tried again, and it spat it out again.

"That one only likes crisp ones," she said. "Don't take it personally. It's rejected me twice this week."

"Do you have quarters?"

She stopped typing and looked at me, and I couldn't answer, because I had asked it badly and wanted to ask it again.

She waited.

She didn't fill the gap or finish my sentence.

It was the longest anyone had waited for me all night.

"Sorry," I said, after a while. "Could I borrow four quarters? I'll pay you back."

"Sure." She dug in her coat and counted four into my palm. "Dryer six. Not seven, seven eats them. Seven has eaten about eleven dollars of mine."

"Thanks."

"Bring them back Thursday."

"Where's Thursday?"

"The Kettle and Spoon, eight o'clock. I run the open mic." She went back to her screen. "Nobody's good. The coffee's free if you pretend to be."

I loaded dryer six and fed it.

It started turning with a thump, and I sat down on the plastic bench to watch my sweaters go around.

My phone buzzed again.

I did not look at it.

The woman tapped her laptop, and music came out of the little speaker beside her.

A guitar, then a voice I knew better than my own.

"Everybody on campus has this one stuck in their head," she said. "I've been trying to work out why it's good."

My hands closed on my knees.

It was "Last at the Door."

Brecken sang it the way he sang everything, clear and warm, with a smile you could hear.

"I'm always last at the door," he sang, and somewhere in the back of the room somebody cheered, because it was a live recording.

She paused it.

"Here's my problem," she said. "Listen to the words. A guy stands outside a house all night and never knocks. He rehearses what he'd say. He counts the porch lights."

She tilted her head at me.

"Now listen to the guy singing it. He sounds like he's never been late for anything. He sounds like he's already been invited in."

She played the line again.

"The words are sitting on a porch step at night," she said. "The singer is standing in the doorway with a drink. Whoever wrote that has never met whoever sings it."

I said nothing.

It took me almost ten seconds to find something that wasn't the truth.

"Maybe he wrote it a long time ago," I said. "Before he got confident."

"Maybe."

She said it in a way that meant she didn't think so.

She looked at me for a moment longer, at my wet sweater and the way I was sitting, and she didn't ask.

"I'm Roxie," she said.

"Elliott."

"Okay, Elliott. Dryer six, four quarters, Thursday."

The dryer thumped.

I watched it go around, and for the first time that night, the thing in my chest let go enough to feel like something other than a fist.

Roxie packed her cello and her laptop and left at three with a nod, and the door chimed behind her.

I was alone with the dryer and the hum of the lights.

My phone buzzed again, a long one, a call.

I turned it over.

It wasn't Laney.

It was Brecken, with a text under the missed call.

"Need the next song by Saturday. Same deal. Don't be dramatic about tonight."

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