Chapter 9: The Notebook

I spent the six-hour drive to Atlanta with my forehead against a bus window.

I had never been fired from anything.

Stevie sat beside me with a bag of gas station pretzels and said nothing, which is how I knew how bad it was.

"I called my mom," she said at last. "She says come home, there's a spare room."

"Go if you want."

"I'm not going anywhere."

Stevie tipped her head onto my shoulder.

"Hank put me on the band's payroll as a runner. Jude's paying out of his own pocket."

I closed my eyes.

"I don't know what I am now," I said.

"You're a size 22 with a gold guitar pick," she said. "Figure out the rest later."

In Atlanta, Jude didn't let me sleep in the crew hotel.

He took my duffel out of my hands in the lobby.

He carried it into the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor.

His room had a sitting area, a fireplace that didn't work, and a long couch.

"It's a big couch," he said.

I sat down on it, and he watched me do it.

"I get the joke," I said.

He grinned and pulled a battered black notebook from his duffel. "I want to show you something."

He sat down beside me and put it in my lap.

The cover was bent and stained with coffee.

"Everything I cut is in here," he said. "Every line that didn't make the record. I never showed anyone."

I opened it.

The handwriting was small and slanted, and it covered every page.

There were verses crossed out and rewritten, and arrows, and doodles of stairs.

On the third page, in the margin, he had written one sentence over and over.

I take up the whole couch and I'm not sorry.

Fifty times.

"I was learning how to say it," he said. "I wanted to say it like you did."

I turned pages until I found the bowling alley song.

It was a messy draft titled "Doorframes," with a gap in the middle of the page and two words scrawled over it: bridge missing.

"I can't finish it," he said. "I've tried for nine days."

"What's the bridge supposed to say?"

"I don't know. It's supposed to be the part where she stops."