Second Life: Dumping the Scum novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Second Slot

Kensley plays a song she won't write for four years, Breckin can't sing the bridge of 'their' song, and Wynona hands her a card; by morning Breckin's video says she stole their songs, with Adalyn holding up a notebook of Kensley's lyrics in her own hand.

I didn't have a guitar.

Mine was in Breckin's van, because Breckin's van was where my things went to become his.

Hudson reached under the board and came up with a battered Gibson in a soft case.

"Studio loaner," he said. "The G string's new. Don't trust it."

"Do you trust anything?"

"Logs," he said. "And my grandmother, about half the time."

I took the guitar and went down the side aisle with my songbook under my arm.

Varnell was coming off the stage steps as I reached them.

Breckin saw me and stopped dead.

"What are you doing?"

"My set," I said.

"You don't have a set."

"I have four minutes. That's a set."

The stage manager read my name off the clipboard, shrugged, and waved me up.

Adalyn's lace sleeve brushed my arm as she passed.

She smelled like his cologne.

The light was hotter than I remembered.

Three hundred faces, and in row J, the cardigan and the folded arms.

I sat on the stool and didn't open the songbook.

The song I was about to play wasn't in it.

I wrote "Porch Light" at twenty-six, in a hotel bathroom in Tulsa, with the fan on so nobody next door could hear me cry.

Breckin and Adalyn were next door.

He put it on his second album and dedicated it to his fans.

"This one's called 'Porch Light,'" I said into the mic. "It's new."

My hands shook on the first chord.

By the second line, they didn't.

"I paid the power bill on a light for you, now I'm gonna see what the dark can do."

The hall went quiet.

On the last chorus a woman in the front row put her hand over her mouth.

"That's ours!"

Breckin stood at the side of the stage with his guitar still around his neck.

"That's our song! She's stealing our set!"

Three hundred heads turned to him.

I stopped strumming.

"Is it?" I said into the mic. "Then come sing the bridge."

He didn't move.

"Come on," I said. "You wrote it. It goes right after this chorus."

I pulled the mic off the stand and held it out.

He came, because the room was watching, and Breckin never could walk away from a room.

He took the mic.

He opened his mouth.

He sang "porch light, porch light" twice, to a tune that wasn't mine, and stopped.

Somebody laughed in the dark.

Then a lot of somebodies did.

"It's not finished," he said. "She's playing an old draft."

"Then sing the new one," I said.

He shoved the mic back at me and walked off without looking at me.

I sang the bridge myself, every line of it.

When I finished, the applause came late and all at once, like rain that had been waiting over the river.

Wynona Hartsell did not clap.

She stood, came down the aisle in her oatmeal cardigan, and met me at the bottom of the stage stairs.

She looked at me over her reading glasses for a long time.

Then she handed me a card.

On the back, in fountain pen, it said: Monday, nine. Don't be late, I'm old.

"That bridge," she said. "Who taught you to put the key change there?"

"Nobody," I said.

"Good. Nobody's the best teacher in this town."

She walked out without staying for the rest of the show.

Hudson was waiting by the loading door with his keys out.

"You need a ride," he said.

"How do you know?"

"Your ride is Breckin, and he's crying in the parking lot to a girl in a lace dress."

His car was a green Volvo wagon older than both of us, with a tape deck and a dashboard covered in sticky notes.

"Is this a car or a filing cabinet?" I asked.

"Both. It's a good system."

The notes said things like STUDIO A HUM CH 4 and MIC 3 LIES.

"Mic three lies?"

"Mic three tells everybody they sound better than they do," he said. "Breckin loves it."

I laughed, and it surprised me.

The last car I'd been in had gone through a rail.

This one smelled like old coffee and pine, and he drove five under the limit with both hands on the wheel.

"You always drive like this?"

"Like what?"

"Like the road owes you an apology."

"I'm carrying a priceless instrument," he said.

"The Gibson's a loaner."

He didn't answer that, and he didn't look over, and the back of my neck went warm anyway.

At my building he put it in park.

"'Porch Light,'" he said. "I log everything that goes through Studio B. You never recorded that."

"No."

"When did you write it?"

I looked at the streetlight through the windshield.

"I'm still working that out," I said.

He nodded and unlocked the doors.

"Monday at nine," he said. "She means it about being late."

"How strict is she?"

"She told my mother I was four minutes late being born."

I slept with the songbook under my pillow.

In the morning my phone was buzzing itself off the nightstand.

Forty-one texts.

The top one was a link.

Breckin's face filled my screen, red-eyed, sitting on the edge of a bed I knew.

"I didn't want to make this video," he said. "But my ex stole our songs."

The camera swung.

Adalyn sat beside him, holding up a notebook and turning the pages slowly for the lens.

Every word on those pages was mine.

Every word was in Adalyn's handwriting.

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