I Was Already Gone novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Same Deal

Elliott goes to Brecken's apartment to take back his notebooks and finds Laney in Brecken's shirt, a framed copy of his lyric on the wall, and a threat nobody will believe him.

I still had the key to Brecken's apartment, so on Wednesday morning I let myself in.

I wasn't there to fight.

I was there for seven black notebooks in the bottom drawer of his desk.

The place smelled like toast.

Laney was standing in the kitchen in one of Brecken's shirts, barefoot, with her hair piled on her head.

She dropped the butter knife when the door opened.

"Elliott!"

She put her hand on her chest.

"You scared me. I thought you were Brecken's landlord."

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't know you'd be here."

That was the truth, and it sounded like the wrong thing to say.

"I live here half the week now." She picked up the knife and pointed it at me, not meanly. "Don't be weird. Do you want toast?"

"No, thanks."

"Coffee?"

"I'm just here for some things."

She looked at me for a second, and her face changed.

"Okay. Before you go in there, can I say something?"

I waited.

"What you did last night was really unfair to him," she said.

"He planned that whole dinner for weeks, and he was so nervous."

"Then you left in front of everybody, and now people say he did something to you."

"He did."

It came out a full ten seconds after she finished, and by then she had already turned back to the toaster.

"Brecken said you'd take it hard," she said. "He said you'd make it about you."

"What else did he say?"

"That you've always been a little jealous of him."

I opened my mouth.

"Don't," she said, and she smiled to take the edge off. "Not right now, okay? You'll say something at the wrong speed and we'll both feel bad."

She meant it kindly.

That was the part I could not get past.

I walked down the hall to Brecken's bedroom, and the door was open.

Above the bed, in a black frame, hung a sheet of paper in Brecken's handwriting.

Last at the Door, every verse, written out in blue ink.

I knew it was a copy, because I knew the original, and mine had a coffee ring on it.

Laney had come up behind me with her toast.

"He wrote that for me," she said quietly.

"Did he?"

"Before we were together. He told me in August he'd been too scared to say it to my face."

She laughed a little.

"Everyone thinks it's about some girl he never met. It's about me."

I had written that line at nineteen, on the back steps of my parents' house.

I had been looking across the street at her bedroom light.

I counted the porch lights.

I never knocked.

"It's a good song," I said.

"It's the best thing anyone ever did for me," she said, and she squeezed my arm and went to shower.

The bathroom door closed.

I knelt at the desk and pulled open the bottom drawer.

All seven notebooks were there, with their spines cracked and my handwriting running down every page.

I had put the first one in that drawer the winter I turned nineteen.

Brecken had said that if I wrote the songs, he'd get them heard.

I did not know then what he would call it.

"Put those back."

Brecken stood in the doorway with a coffee in each hand.

He wasn't angry.

His voice was warm and low, the one he used on stage between songs.

"Buddy," he said. "Come on. Sit down. I made you a coffee."

I stacked the notebooks against my chest.

"I'm taking these."

"They're in my apartment."

"They're mine."

"Prove it."

He set the coffees down on the dresser, carefully, without spilling a drop.

"Same deal as always," he said. "You write, I sing."

"I cover your share of the rent, and I get you into rooms."

"Nothing about it changes. I'll even say sorry about last night, if that's what you need."

I tried to say something and could not find it.

He watched me look for it.

"There it is," he said gently. "That's the whole problem, Elliott. You get there late. By the time you've worked out what you want to say, I've already told everyone what happened."

The shower started down the hall.

"I could tell Laney right now," I said.

It took me a long time to say, and he let it take as long as it wanted.

"Tell her what?"

"That the song is mine."

Brecken smiled, and for the first time that morning it wasn't warm.

"Go ahead," he said. "I'll wait. Everyone will have to, honestly."

He stepped aside to let me out of the doorway, and he held the front door open for me too.

"Nobody believes the slow one," he said.

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