Boy Shopping (4 page)

“I'll get a ride home with my dad.” Kiki sighed, and Sasha took the hint to change the subject. Sasha told a long story about talking on the phone with her dad on Sunday morning, pretending everything was under control at the house, while scraping vomit off the kitchen floor with a bag of ice tied to her head all after Kiki had gone home. It was a funny story, but Kiki didn't feel like laughing.

What was Mark thinking? Did he really think that Kiki dressed like a slut? How
could
he, when he knew that she had gotten into a fight with the style consultant over her refusal to wear any skirt short enough to flash the audience, any top cut so low that she couldn't wear a bra, and anything that showed her navel? There was a fine line between sexy and slutty, but Kiki knew which side of the line she was on—didn't Mark?

And how did that make any sense, considering his other comment that nobody was interested in drummers? She'd heard drummer jokes since her very first show, usually some variation on, “What do you call someone who wants to hang out with musicians? A groupie? No, a drummer!” Was it that hard to believe that guys liked her, just because she didn't play an instrument with strings? Did he think that any guy who liked her was a crazy stalker? For the first time since they were five, Kiki had no idea what Mark was thinking.

Boy Shopping

“
Y
ou don't look so good, baby girl,” Kiki's dad said when he pulled up in front of Wentworth, staring at her over the top of his new black-rimmed bifocals. Kiki thought they made him look like Denzel Washington as Malcom X, which Dr. Kelvin considered one of the nicest compliments he had ever received.

“Thanks, Dad. How was work?”

“Fine. What's up with you? Aren't you supposed to be going to Franklin's for practice?”

“Practice was cancelled.” Of course, she didn't know if Franklin and Mark felt up to playing music, but she was definitely not in the mood. If they didn't appreciate her, they could find a drum machine somewhere.

“Those boys getting on your nerves?”

Kiki raised an eyebrow. Rumors spread fast at a school as small as Wentworth, but she didn't think they could reach the neurosurgery department at Vanderbilt in less than a day.

He laughed. “Any girl who was stuck with my friends in high school, morning, noon, and night, would have stabbed every one of us. Teenaged boys are just stupid. It's the hormones.”

“Maybe you can do a study on that, proving that seventeen-year-old boys can't think at all.”

“You can't practice neurosurgery on a subject that doesn't have a brain. There's nothing to dissect.”

She had to laugh at that. “You know, I've been thinking about what you said before I went on tour last summer.”

“That I would cut off Franklin's hands if he touched you?”

She snorted at that. “I told you then that that would never happen.”

“That if I heard you smoked anything I'd lock you in the basement until your eighteenth birthday?”

“Not that either. You said that you would support me with the music thing as long as I wanted to do it. But if I ever wanted to quit, you'd support me in that, too.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Your mother is the one who can help you get out of the contract.”

“I know. But you won't freak out about me letting my label down after they've spent a fortune promoting us, throwing away an opportunity that a lot of people would kill to have?” That was what her managers told her every time she complained about anything. And despite the fact that her managers were white, barely thirty, and slightly crazy, both of them reminded her of her father. Part of that was the way they treated her: like their favorite person in the whole world, unless she did something that annoyed them. Then she had to listen to lecture after lecture until they settled down.

“If you ask me to, I'll burn your drum kit in the backyard. It would be nice to have you around during the summer.”

Kiki's heart fluttered at the thought of her drums on fire, the glittery red paint on the sides bubbling and turning black. No. No matter what happened between her and Mark, she would never give up music.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“No problem.” He grinned, and couldn't help adding, “The day I complain because you won't be spending all your time with a couple of boys is the day I need my own brain examined.”

Once they got home, Kiki's dad asked her if she wanted to go out for dinner, since her mother was stuck doing paperwork at the courthouse.

“I've got a lot of homework,” she said, trudging up to her room. It was true—she always had a lot of homework—but she didn't feel like doing it. Instead she logged into the Internet to check her e-mail. She still talked to lots of people she had toured with over the summer—not all the time, since they all had strange schedules, but she tried to check in at least once a week.

After laughing at Annette's description of a terrifying dinner full of mysterious, slimy objects, hosted by her Japanese label's reps, and Colin's complaints about adjusting to real life after ten months on the road, Kiki felt a little better. Good enough that when Franklin's number appeared on her cell phone, she actually answered. He might be calling to apologize—about as likely as him bringing a girl flowers—but anything could happen.

“Did you forget about practice?” His usual bass rumble had gone high and whiny.

“Nope. I'm just not coming.”

“You have to come. We have to arrange the rhythm section for ‘Every Angel,' and we've got to finish ‘Foxfire.'”

“I don't have to do anything, Franklin, and I'm not going to until you and Mark say you're sorry.”

“Sorry? Sorry for what?”

“Sorry you're just that stupid, maybe?”

“Look, Kiki, just 'cause you've got PMS, or haven't gotten laid in the last year, doesn't mean—”

Kiki hung up before she started screaming at him so loud that it might kill her cell phone. Whenever she disagreed with him, no matter how wrong he was, he always said it was PMS, or she wasn't getting laid. You'd think even Franklin would figure out that no one had PMS for a month straight, but his math skills were even worse than hers. She ignored the call when he instantly rang her back, concentrating instead on the text message she was typing to Sasha, Camille, and Jasmine.

Before she could hit “send,” she heard the asthmatic chug of Mark's Karmann Ghia coming up the hill. She scanned her bedroom for something to throw—her windows had a clear view of the front walk. There were books, but her mother would kill her for throwing anything with words in it. She had a few million pairs of shoes, but if she missed they might get dirty, and she liked her shoes. Then there were instruments: bongo drums, spare snares, cymbals, and hi-hats, and a keyboard she was teaching herself to play. Any one of them would hurt like hell, tumbling down from two stories, but she would never mistreat an instrument like that. She decided to run downstairs and tell her father to say she wasn't home, but she wasn't fast enough—she glimpsed Mark passing the big picture window in the living room, and that meant that he saw her.

“What do you want?” she asked, opening the door. It didn't help that he looked fantastic, as usual. Jasmine always laughed about Mark's sense of style, which she called “neo-grunge,” but what it really amounted to was Mark's complete lack of interest in his appearance. He really had no idea that his ragged, baby-blue polo shirt made his eyes seem even bluer than they were, and that his faded khakis made even his milky arms look tan.

Mark also looked apologetic, which went a long way toward calming Kiki down. But not all the way—oh no. No one who had known Kiki as long as Mark had, had any right to say the things he had said earlier, much less scream them in the middle of school for everyone to hear.

“I wanted to apologize for earlier,” he mumbled, staring at his shoes. “That was way out of line.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah.” He toed a pebble off the top step. “I was all freaked out about Dr. Eckhart, and then you said that thing about the cow's heart.” He finally looked up. “Is it true?”

“Would I make up something like that?” She tugged on a dreadlock in frustration. The cow heart had grossed her out, and scared her, too, when she ripped open the pretty, red-wrapped box by the mailbox on Valentine's Day. Her parents made her report it to the police and everything, though they cautioned her not to talk about it, because if whoever sent it knew it had made an impression, they might be tempted to try something even crazier. But it only happened once, and she had never received any sort of threats afterward. She had almost forgotten the whole thing, until the weird incident at school that morning. “Why would I say something like that if it wasn't true? Come on, Mark—you
know
me.”

“I thought I did. I don't know. I guess . . . things have changed, you know. Since before the band.”

Suddenly Kiki's heart was slamming against her ribs with no kind of rhythm.

“Yeah. A lot of things have changed since we were thirteen.”

Was he blushing? Yes, definitely blushing. But was it a good blush, or a bad blush?

He cleared his throat. “Not everything, though. Still best friends?”

He held up a fist that might have been a little shaky. Kiki made a fist and bumped his knuckles gently. Whatever he was really thinking or feeling, he wasn't going to say it. Not yet.

“Of course we are, stupid,” Kiki said. “Let's go over to Franklin's.”

 

Franklin's mother, Jade, let them in, but she told them that Franklin was gone.

“Gone where?” Kiki asked Jade's back as she and Mark followed her through the house. It was a gorgeous home, but it could not have been more different from Kiki's. Kiki's house was crammed with her mother's books, prints by the Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee, and her father's collection of African tribal masks. Her own room was probably the least cluttered, except for the living room, on a good day. Even the bathrooms were packed with old issues of
Neurosurgery Today
that had been crowded out of her father's office, and battered paperbacks by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker that Kiki's mom liked to reread in the tub.

Franklin's house was the complete opposite. There were no bookshelves, no framed photos of Franklin growing up, not even the warm tones of old leather couches with cozy throws for taking naps. Everything in Franklin's house was white. There were white walls, white carpets, white sofas. The first time she came inside, Kiki wondered how a place like that survived Franklin, who spilled sodas on absolutely everything at school except himself. She soon discovered that when Franklin was home he stayed in his bedroom, in the music room, or in the kitchen.

Jade didn't answer Kiki at first, possibly because her arm full of bangles and her belled anklets made so much noise that normal conversation was basically impossible until she sat down, which she finally did, in the kitchen. Jade always dressed in black, and dyed her long hair a flat shade of black even darker than Kiki's.

“Well, I'm not sure where Franklin went,” she began, sipping from a chipped coffee cup that had a faded image of a young Michael Jackson on it, back when he had an afro. “Diet Coke?”

“No thanks,” Mark and Kiki answered together. Jade lived on Diet Cokes. She was so thin it scared Kiki a little, though Franklin said she had been like that his whole life. Jade had fronted a band herself a long time ago, married a music producer in LA and wound up in Nashville. Jade had expected Nashville to kill her—she'd told Kiki and Mark all about her early fears during the summer tour, more than once. It never seemed to occur to her that Kiki and Mark were from Nashville, and liked it. Jade had thought moving here was the end of the universe, until she actually got to know the city.

“Did you know that Michael Jackson has recorded here in Nashville?” Jade mused, returning to her favorite subject. “Say what you will about the man's private life, but
Thriller
was one fine album. The Jackson Five was good, too.
Everyone
has recorded here—the Beatles, Ray Charles. Did you know that Hendrix got his start playing in the blues clubs north of town, back when he was still in the army?”

Of course Kiki and Mark knew all this perfectly well. Both of them had been born well within Nashville's city limits. But they always listened patiently to Jade's lectures, since they didn't have much of a choice about it either way.

“Yes, we've heard about Hendrix. Do you have any idea where Franklin went?” Mark asked. “We're supposed to be in the studio on Saturday afternoon to record ‘Every Angel' for that soundtrack, and we really haven't arranged anything but the melody line.”

“I think he said something about a party. I don't know. Is somebody having a party?”

Kiki glanced at Mark, who just shook his head slightly. They knew of at least three Monday-night-football parties starting right after school, but if that's where Franklin went, he would be in no shape for rehearsing by the time they kidnapped him and brought him back home.

“I don't know, Jade. Probably. I guess we'll see you tomorrow,” Kiki said.

“Yeah,” she answered, and took another sip of her drink. Kiki was not convinced that it was just diet soda. But Jade was a weird woman regardless—she seemed unable to focus on anything but the music business, and she focused on that with the same intensity Kiki saw in her own father when he was examining brain-tissue slides. If it weren't for Jade, they definitely wouldn't have a deal with RGB Records. Unlike Franklin, who cared about Temporary Insanity but cared more about having fun, Jade didn't care about anything but the business side of the band, and Kiki knew they owed their success to her obsession.

“So what do you want to do?” Mark asked on the way back to his car. The sun was already setting, though it was just past five o'clock.

“Get dinner, I guess.”

“Loveless Café? Come on, it's great!” he promised when she groaned. The Loveless Café made the must-see list of every tourist who hit the city, but Kiki had never gone. Her parents were from New York, and their idea of comfort food was greasy pizza or take-out lo mein, not hash brown casserole and red-eye gravy. And by the time Kiki was old enough to go out without them she had become a vegetarian, and she had heard rumors that the Loveless put lard in everything.

“I've heard that even the biscuits aren't vegetarian!”

“Biscuits don't eat meat, Kiki.”

It was an old argument, and they both laughed on cue. Mark had been making fun of her vegetarianism since the day she stopped eating meat two years ago, on the way to a show in Athens, Georgia. They had stopped at a little country store so Jade could get some more Diet Coke, and Kiki had wandered around back, wondering if they had an outhouse—it was her first visit to a really small town. The little towns outside of Nashville were more like suburbs, and when they visited other cities, Kiki's family always flew. She thought that the town, called Butler's Grove, was cute.