The Bermudez Triangle (24 page)

“Did he
run
?” Nina said. “Oh my God …”

Mel dodged one that would have gotten her eye.

“What are you
doing
?” Nina screamed up the hill. “You’re going to
hurt
us!”

Nina looked around for something to throw—a twig, a rock—but there was nothing but exposed water to their far left and to the center of the lake. They were stuck. Mel was afraid. This wasn’t exactly a joke or a friendly little snowball fight. In desperation, Nina started skating back to the edge, trying her best to dodge the rain of ice balls that was still coming down. Mel followed her quickly.

And then miraculously they heard Parker’s voice calling from somewhere above them.

“Hey, assholes!” he shouted. “Up here!”

The torrent stopped. Mel could see Parker at the top of the hill, standing next to a gray sedan.

“Is this your car?” he yelled down.

Parker ducked behind the sedan, and a moment later it began drifting down the inclined road. There was a series of yells, and their three attackers started tearing back up toward the lot.

Nina and Mel quickly got off the ice. Mel dropped to the ground and yanked hard at her laces, cursing how tightly and carefully she had tied them. As soon as she had enough of an opening, she pulled her foot through, almost twisting her ankle in the process. She stepped quickly into her boots. They both climbed back up the path, grabbing at the trees and exposed roots to balance themselves.

Parker was waiting for them at the top of the hill. Without a word, they climbed into Nina’s SUV. Nina threw it into gear and U-turned without even checking the road.

“What did you do?” she asked, trying to catch her breath.

“Just took off the emergency, put it in neutral. It goes on its own.”

He was laughing rather spookily now, like he couldn’t stop.

“Oh my God—they were psychos! You okay, Mel?”

Mel nodded. She pulled up the leg of her pants and saw a slightly green bruise blossoming on her knee.

She had a strong feeling that this all had something to do with her.

When they got to Nina’s, Mel curled herself on the sofa under a blanket and watched Nina and Parker. Parker kept looking out the front windows as if he were expecting the guys to pull up at any
second. Nina became an avenging nurse. She supplied them all with tea, cocoa, and hot cider. She tended to Mel with a warm water bottle
and
an ice pack.

“That was amazing what you did back there, Park,” Nina said as she forcibly removed Mel’s damp socks and replaced them with dry ones. “You get a medal. You’re a hero, forever.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what we’d do without you,” Mel agreed.

Parker didn’t have a comeback for that one. Instead he just played with Mel’s wet left sock, gazing at it in a kind of wonder.

Steve,

Okay.

First of all, major drama here. We were attacked by insane snowballers. But that story has got to wait. I have to tell you something else.

Something has been bothering me, and I have to tell you about it or I’m going to go nuts. I don’t want to be that girlfriend who complains, but …

I know you’re busy, and I know it’s hard, but I really feel like we have to try to talk more. Actually talk on the phone. I love the sound of your voice, and I need more of it. We’re both busy, and I just feel like we both have to try harder to make contact.

I was thinking that maybe I can get frequent-flyer miles from my dad for my birthday and come out to Portland or something. Or you could come here. It’s in mid-March, so maybe for spring break? I definitely want to be there for the mold season.

Anyway, can you please call me when you get this, and I’ll call you right back?

Love
,

Nina

The phone rang the next afternoon while Nina was halfheartedly working her way through a calculus problem. It was the Steve ring. She snatched it up.

“Hey!” she said. “I’ll call you right back.”

“You don’t have to,” he said. There was a strange tone in his voice.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Listen,” he said, dragging the word along. And then he didn’t say anything.

“Listening,” Nina said.

“We have to talk.”

“Okay.”

“There’s something …” He exhaled loudly.

“Something?”

“Something’s come up. There’s a … Something’s happened.”

“What?” Nina said worriedly. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, it’s …”

In that second Nina knew that this
thing
was about her—and it was something she wouldn’t like. As evil as this made her feel, she was kind of hoping he was about to say something like, “My mom has cancer.” Something outside of them.

“I know this is a bad time to be doing this,” he said. “I know this makes me the biggest dick in the universe ….”

Nina reached out and touched the colorful edges of the Post-its that popped out of the side of a nearby stack of books. She took a deep breath, but she couldn’t hold it.

Another loud exhale.

“I’ve kind of started seeing someone here,” he said. “Her name is Diane. She’s in Earth Share with me.”

Dead air for a good thirty seconds. Nina concentrated on the Post-its. They looked like tails of little tropical fishes hiding themselves in a reef.

“She kind of reminds me of you,” Steve said. He sounded a little desperate. “She kind of wears her hair the same way.”

“Don’t tell me this,” Nina said.

“Okay.”

He had to have something to add. He couldn’t just be calling her to tell her
this
—as awful as
this
was.

“Steve …” she said, her voice trembling a little.

“I still care about you so much. It was just hard being so far apart, you know?”

He was calling to tell her this. Just this. She sank down to the floor and sat with her legs apart, like a dropped rag doll.

“I managed,” she said.

Her voice was hard now. She couldn’t disguise it even if she wanted to. She felt herself trembling and steadied herself by taking a deep breath from her abdomen.

“So what are we going to do?” she said. “What does this mean?”

“I guess … I guess we’re breaking up.”

The conversation ended shortly after that. Nina couldn’t even remember what she said. It wasn’t angry. It was vague, a baffled and hasty goodbye.

Immediately after hanging up, she knew she had to call him back. She had to pin him down and make him talk because he would
see that this made no sense, that it couldn’t be real. This Diane with the kind of similar hair was not who he wanted. This was just a phase, a little problem, and they could work it out.

His phone was busy. It was still busy five minutes later. And an hour after that.

Nina didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t even put on her pajamas. She sat on the floor and thought about the fact that nothing changes when the boyfriend who was never there suddenly
goes away.
It wasn’t like she had to go out of her way to avoid him or distance herself to forget him. She had all the distance she’d ever need.

She opened up her windows and let the freezing air come into her warm room until she couldn’t stop shivering. There was a dull pain in her head that she suspected would never leave her.

The next morning, her eyes red and puffy from the all-nighter, Nina got in her car and drove over to her hair salon on Broadway. They managed to find her an empty space in the schedule and took her right back. She yanked out the bands that held up her Princess Leias. Her hair sprang out on either side of her head in two slowly unfurling corkscrews.

“What are we doing here today?” the stylist asked, coming over and taking the curls in her hands.

“Cut it,” Nina said. “Change everything.”

Dating Gaz was
pretty much the complete opposite of dating Mel—in more than just the obvious male versus female way. For someone who didn’t like having long relationship talks, it should have been a dream come true. There were no heavy conversations about where their relationship was going. They rehearsed together, and if Avery felt like it, she stayed late and messed around with Gaz on the basement couch. They both kind of knew they were together, and that was enough.

Except … that it wasn’t. She still wasn’t feeling anything particularly strong for Gaz, outside of the physical attraction. That would have been okay, except that Gaz’s easygoing manner was starting to get to her, especially when it came to the band.

Somehow since New Year’s, Angry Maxwell had acquired three new members. Avery didn’t really even know where they came from—they each just showed up one day. Two of them, Rob and Dan, were guitarists. The third was a girl named Lizzy who didn’t actually play anything. She said that she was Wiccan and that she channeled pure energy. Her talent consisted of spinning around, making shrieking noises, and falling down. She frequently fell into the keyboard. She would have been kicked out
immediately if Avery had anything to say about it, but Hareth liked her, so she remained. Rehearsals, which used to be pleasant wastes of time, now turned into irritating ones. There were endless debates about what kind of sound they were shooting for.

After a few days with her new bandmates, Avery made an important discovery: It’s easy to form a band. You just get a bunch of people together and
voilà:
band. But the big step is to move out of the basement and into a place where people have actually paid you to play—not offered to pay you to stop. One was the golden number. Once you got one paying gig, you were professional.

Avery was going to get that paying gig. Someone had to do
something
useful.

On Saturday morning she went to Philadelphia Avenue. This was the central meeting place of all Saratoga musicians. It always reminded Avery of pictures of medieval European streets. It was narrow, with hanging signs and brightly colored restaurants and bars. There was a wooden notice board at the top of the street, which had all the names of the local businesses painted by hand in funky white print. Next to that, there was a notice board jammed full of flyers for gigs and guitar lessons and Pilates classes.

Checking through the ads, Avery saw that there were plenty of places to play open mike, but that didn’t pay. In fact, most open mikes required the bands to fork over some cash to get in. There was only one thing to do—she would just go from bar to bar, asking around to see if anyone was willing to hire them.

She walked through most of downtown that day, hitting about twelve bars, before she finally got someone to say more than just “no.” One pub owner, a man in his fifties with a sharp white goatee, let her talk a bit while he smoked and unloaded a crate of liquor and stocked the well.

“You guys have a tape?” he asked.

“No …” Avery said. A tape would have been useful.

“Who do you play?”

Who
do you play was a way of saying, “We don’t want to hear any of your original crap. If you play here, play something we know.”

“A normal mix,” Avery said. “What do other bands play here?”

“Our customers like pretty regular stuff. U2, Van Morrison, REM, Jimmy Buffett. Stuff like that.”

Middle-aged beer music
, Avery thought.

“We do a bunch of U2 and REM,” she lied. “We just did a whole set of music like that at Skidmore last week.”

“Yeah?” The guy didn’t look wildly intrigued, but at least he was still talking. “No tape, huh?” he said. “Not much I can do without a tape.”

Avery looked around, trying to figure out a way to keep the conversation going. Over in a corner of the stage was a piano. She hadn’t exactly prepared for this contingency, but …

“How about I play you something?” she asked.

“Like what?”

The only thing she could think of at that moment was “Piano Man,” by Billy Joel, which had to be number one on her list of Songs
to Be Stricken from the Musical Record. It was a song she despised so much that she knew it perfectly, note for note, just so that she could hate it
in detail.
She knew it in her head, anyway. She’d never tried to play it. But to get this gig, she was prepared to do the unthinkable.

She pointed to the piano.

“Can I show you?” she asked.

“Sure.” The man shrugged. “Go ahead.”

Avery had a fairly well developed ear. This was still a gamble, but she thought she could pull it off. After running through the song mentally for half a minute, she started to play. Her version was dead-on. It actually creeped her out. She had talents she really didn’t want to know she had.

The man stopped her after a minute or so.

“You like Billy Joel?” he asked.

“Um … yeah.”

“I don’t,” he replied. “But that was pretty good. I’ll tell you what….”

He turned around and pulled a calendar off the wall next to the cash register. He pinched his bottom lip and pulled it out, moving it from side to side as he flipped back and forth between two pages. Avery could see that his bottom teeth were deeply yellow. She looked at the pack of Marlboro Reds that sat on the counter and wondered about the ashy taste in her own mouth.