Moving Neutral (2 page)

She was probably right. When Madison wanted something to happen, there weren’t many ways to stop her.

“Can you come?”

I nodded. “Sure. What time?”

She looked at the alarm clock next to my bed. It was already almost six. “Yikes. Two hours. I’ve got to go home and get changed.”

I was happy she didn’t want to stay in the boxer shorts, at least. “Should I meet you there? Text me when you’re leaving, okay?”

She grinned. “Can I borrow this?” She held up the magazine.

“Sure,” I said. I’d already practically memorized the article, anyway.

Jesse, though. I forgot about Jesse, the bassist. Jesse was the grandson of Elvis Costello, and it was his connections that got the band picked up in the first place, when they were still in high school in Los Angeles. Jesse was dork-cute and wore big black plastic-rimmed glasses in every photo. He had curly black hair and was the exact same height as April, which wasn’t very tall for a boy. They always tried to disguise it in the photos by having him sit down, or having her lean against something. But I knew pretty much everything about Moving Neutral.

“Bye, Mrs. Snow,” Madison called to my mother as she bolted out of the house to her car. I followed her to the door and watched as she drove away, not saying a word to my mother. I narrowly avoided tripping on one of Trevor’s tennis racquets as I walked back to my room and shut the door, hard.

I saw Madison’s car parked outside when I arrived at the party, and breathed a sigh of relief. I got to Matt’s house forty five minutes late, on purpose. I didn’t want to be the first one there, since technically, no one had actually invited me.

There were about twenty people inside, all of them seniors or recently graduated from my high school. We all went to the private school in Rockland, Prospect Academy, which wasn’t the kind of private school that billionaires and foreign royalty sent their kids to. It was pretty much just like the public school in Rockland, but with a better college acceptance rate.

Everyone said hello, and I took a beer out of a cooler on the side of the room. There were only bottles, no cans, and I scanned the tables in the room for an opener.

No luck. No one seemed to notice what I was looking for, so I walked into the kitchen, hoping Matt’s parents would have well-organized drawers.

Madison was in the kitchen with Jason, so I killed two birds with one stone.

“Casey,” she called out like she hadn’t seen me in a week. “You look so cute,” she squealed. “Jason, doesn’t Casey look cute?”

It was the kind of thing that a girl only says when she knows she’s the prettiest in the room. Madison was my best friend, but sometimes she drove me insane.

But if not for her, I’d be at home watching television with my ten year old brother. So I just smiled.

“How’s college?” I asked Jason. He was cute, if you liked that polo shirt, flip flop type. Which Madison definitely did.

“Oh, man,” he said. “It’s great. What a bummer to be home, right?”

“Totally.”

“So you’re going to Columbia?”

“Yeah,” I sat down next to them at the table, my beer still unopened. “I can't wait.”

“You guys are going to hang out all the time,” he said. “The village is way more fun than the Upper West Side.”

Madison was going to NYU, which was perfect, because they had a great theatre program, and she wanted nothing more than to become an actress. She had tried to convince her parents to send her to Julliard, but they’d insisted on a normal college. Madison still hadn’t gotten over it, but at least she’d be in the city. I couldn’t have even imagined how much she’d have flipped out if she’d been only been accepted to schools in Colorado or New Hampshire.

“I wish we were going to the same school.”

Madison said it, but I was thinking the same thing. It was weird thinking about the fact that I wouldn’t see her every day anymore -- we hadn’t gone more than a week apart since we
met as little kids. Up through junior high, it was us and my next-door neighbor, Brett, but he’d moved away at the end of eighth grade. For the rest of high school, it was just me and Madison.

We butted heads sometimes, but school was so much easier with Madison always there to be outgoing, to make friends and drag me along to parties. As much as I couldn’t wait to get out of Rockland, sometimes the idea of college terrified me.

“I should go say hi to Matt,” I told them. Mostly I felt like I should leave them alone -- nothing was going to happen with Jason if I was hovering around them all night. “Where are his parents anyways?”

“They’re at the Cape,” Jason replied. “They won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon, probably later with traffic. You guys can stay overnight if you want.”

I tried not to notice the look he gave Madison, smiling in a cocky way that made me a little nauseous. Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere but in this kitchen.

And it’s not like I could have stayed over anyway. Curfew from hell, duh.

I picked up my beer bottle and went back out into the living room, sitting down in an empty space on the couch. Everyone was talking about some video on YouTube I hadn’t seen. I didn’t want to admit I hadn’t seen it, because then someone would run around until they’d dragged out Matt’s laptop and played it for me, and I’d be expected to have some visceral reaction to it just because everyone had been talking about it.

It was easier to just pretend I’d seen it.

The good news was, Matt noticed my beer and handed me the bottle opener on his keychain. I wondered how he explained that one to his parents, or if other parents just weren’t as crazy as mine. We were all going to be in college in a few weeks anyway. What was the point in keeping me on such a tight leash?

“So, I heard you guys are going to see Moving Neutral this weekend,” Matt said as he sat down next to me on the couch.

I snapped back into focus, grinning at him. “Yeah, we’re so psyched. They’re my favorite band, it’s going to be amazing.”

“I hope they’re not too big to play the college scene next year,” Matt said.

“They probably are. The concert’s at some giant venue in the city, tons of people. But yeah, maybe they’ll still do some college shows.”

I was trying to be nice, but Matt was about a year too late. Moving Neutral had gotten started playing college shows, but they’d gone way past that.

I didn’t notice that Madison had come back into the room until she plopped down on the arm of the couch next to me.

"Are you going too?" She asked Matt, eyes wide. She’d woken up at 7 a.m. on the dot to buy our tickets, which was unheard of, even during the school year. Thanks to her, we were in the best row that had gone on sale to the public.

“Yeah,” he said. “Actually, it’s pretty cool. My stepmom knows someone at their record label. We’re in the second row.”

It felt like my stomach gave out. I stole a glance at Madison -- she was gaping at Matt, her eyes already starting to narrow.

Maybe we were overreacting, but we’d spent most of the past year obsessing over this band. Obsessing. And Matt had second row seats, and he didn’t even realize they were bigger than the college circuit.

We were in the sixteenth row. And the whole floor space was flat. And neither of us was over 5'4". We'd be on our tiptoes the whole concert, and we’d probably still be stuck staring at the monitors. While Matt would probably be able to slap hands with April as they came onstage.

Or with Blake.

Before I even knew what was happening, I heard Madison’s voice from next to me.

“That’s cool,” she said. “But we have backstage passes. It’s so lame to watch shows from the audience.”

Matt gave her a weird look, as if he knew she was lying but was trying to be polite. Somehow that made me even angrier.

“Yeah,” I agreed, surprised to hear the words tumbling out of my mouth. “We’re going to hang out with them after the show.”

Matt’s eyes widened. Madison stretching the truth was one thing, but when I went along with it, I could tell he was starting to believe us.

Madison pulled her leg onto the arm of the couch and pretended to be playing with the cuff of her jeans. “It’s no big deal,” she said, and she looked so nonchalant that even I almost believed her.

She was going to make a great actress.

It was 10:40 when I finally drove home, and I tried not to think about how ridiculous it was to show up at a party and have to leave two hours later. Madison walked me to my car, rummaging around on the floor of the passenger seat for a pair of flip flops she swore I’d borrowed (I hadn’t). As I pulled out of Matt’s driveway, I fumbled in my bag for some gum, assuming out of habit that my parents would be up, waiting for me, when I got home.

I switched from the CD player on my car stereo to the radio, listening to a late night DJ dedicate songs to random names. When we were in middle school, Madison and I used to call the station to dedicate songs to whatever boys we had a crushes on -- the kind of bizarre, stalker-y thing that little kids can do without it being weird. We never gave our real names, of course. We used to listen to this beyond cheesy romance radio show for hours, waiting for our fictional dedications to play.

An ad came on for the Moving Neutral concert, and I felt my stomach tighten. I didn't even know why I’d gone along with Madison’s crazy lie about our plans for the concert, but it would be pretty obvious after the show that we’d made it all up.

I tried not to worry about it. I didn’t really care what Matt thought, and if he decided we were lying, it wouldn’t really matter. I tried to focus on college -- I was sick of our high school friends, sick of everyone always trying to sound cooler than everyone else. Matt’s second row
seats made me feel nauseous. That Madison and I felt the need to lie to impress him made me feel even worse.

I was distracted from thinking about it by the sound of my cell phone buzzing in the cupholder next to me. I looked down at the flashing text, Madison’s name appearing on the caller ID.

I lowered the volume on the radio and flipped my phone open to accept the call.

“Mad? What’s up?” I’d only been gone 10 minutes, but any number of disasters with Jason could have occurred in the meantime. I braced myself for tears.

“Casey, oh good -- you’re not home yet, are you?”

I looked at the street signs. “I’m a block away,” I told her, pausing at an intersection even though there weren’t any cars in sight. “What’s up?”

“Don’t be mad, but I’m, like, ninety percent sure that one of my earrings fell off in your car -- can you just check for me and see if you can find it?”

Another car pulled up, coming from the opposite direction. I hit the gas pedal, trying to look down at the seat for anything sparkly.

“Hang on,” I told her, squeezing the phone between my ear and my shoulder. I took one hand off the wheel and felt the leather for anything sharp. Nothing.

“Please, please find it, Casey,” Madison whined in my ear.

“It's not on the seat, but I can’t see the floor from here,” I told her. “Wait two seconds, I’m almost home.”

I pulled into my driveway using one hand to turn the wheel, and hit the garage door opener with my other hand. What was the big rush, anyways? Her earring would still be there in the morning. “Mad, does this have to be right now?”

“Yes,” she squealed. “It’s really important, because if you don’t have it, then I’m going to have to start looking at Matt’s,” she rambled, sounding tipsy. “And you know he’s going to think I’m nuts if I start going through his couch cushions, not to even mention Jason.”

My eyes flickered to the floor as the light from the garage started to filter into the car. I could make something out, but it could have just been some loose change. I squinted down at whatever it was.

I eased up on the gas pedal, pulling into the garage. Craning my neck to get a better look at the passenger seat floor, I reached down with one hand to see if I could feel anything.

And felt the cell phone slip off my shoulder. Madison’s voice was still coming from it, but it fell into the space between the cup holder and the passenger seat. I took the other hand off the wheel to grab it, squeezing my fingers into the empty space.

The wheel was turning before I even realized it. And with a sickening crunch, the car ground to a halt. It was stopped before I could even hit the brakes.

I looked up, terrified to register what had happened. Peering out from behind the dashboard, I saw the front of the car smashed against the inside wall of the garage. It had hit the concrete and crumpled like a piece of tinfoil.

I couldn’t even bear to look at it. I wanted to run, just to take off and never come back, but the car was squeezed so tightly against the wall that I couldn’t even open the door.

I could still hear Madison’s voice through my cell phone in my hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to lift it up to my ear. I just stared at it, her words a jumble of static like a foreign language. I sat there dumbly, wishing I could make time go backwards.

I was going to be grounded like I’d never been grounded before.

My mom came running into the garage within a minute, and I could hear her screaming to my dad before she even got through the door. When I first saw her face, all that registered was panic -- her eyes were white and wide open, short blonde hair framing her stricken features.