5, 4, 3, 2, 1
“FIVE,” the electronic voice booms. The sound vibrates deep in Addie’s chest, as if it’s going to dislodge her heart from where it fledgling flutters in her throat.
“It’s almost time, Addie!” Her mom loops an arm around her shoulders and squeezes tight. This is the happiest her mom has sounded in weeks. (Months? Years? Probably years, if she’s being honest with herself, and with all the lies that permeate their home, it really is up to Addie to be the honest one.) “Are you excited?”
Addie nods her head. The music has kicked up, the first bars of Amber DeGray’s latest lead single ghosting beneath the reverb of the bass churning through the packed stadium. It’s much too loud to speak. But no one speaks at an Amber DeGray concert. They sing scream themselves hoarse, until they’ve left the best parts of themselves in the air like an echo.
“Selfie?” asks her mom, and she doesn’t wait for Addie’s response before whipping out her phone and turning it sideways. Addie doesn’t tell her that no one takes selfies in landscape mode. She might not be allowed to have social media, unlike every other girl in the seventh grade, but she knows that much.
But her mom is so happy, so Addie doesn’t complain even when the flash blinds her.
She also doesn’t ask if they are going to send it to her dad, like he normally demands when they are out without him.
Addie blinks several times while her mom examines the picture. “Perfect,” her mom says, pocketing her phone. For the first time that Addie can remember, her mom didn’t comment on her own smile, and the chipped tooth that she claims always ruins the picture.
“Four hours,” her mom answers when Addie asks how far away the stadium is the morning of the show. Her dad has left for his monthly poker game. Addie is happy to not be home when he returns. He always smells like cigars and stale beer.
She is also happy to not be home because her mom always whisper fights with him about the money he leaves behind at his friend’s table. Despite the pillow she stuffs over her head, she notices that her dad always speaks last. Sometimes she feels like she is the only one who realizes that her bedroom butts right up against the kitchen wall.
“And we’re just staying one night?” asks Addie as her mom shoves a huge suitcase into the trunk. They have an SUV for the day, a favor courtesy of mom’s best friend from where she used to work. She quit when Addie was six and hasn’t had another job since.
“Mmm,” her mom says, a non-answer, before she grabs Addie’s suitcase and follows suit. Addie, at her mom’s request, had packed nearly her whole closet in there. You never know what you might need, her mom had said.
Addie decides not to ask about the other things–like the box of Addie’s baby toys and the photo album of Addie’s grandparents’ wedding–she’d seen her mom slip beneath the seats when she thought Addie was too busy doing her makeup. Addie almost never wears makeup because her dad doesn’t like her to, so it took her a long time in front of her mom’s vanity mirror. Her mom shuts the trunk and turns to Addie, tapping her bitten nails against the silver of the car’s exterior. “I think it’s about time, kiddo.”
Addie nods and watches as her mom throws a tote bag of road trip supplies into the backseat. Addie doesn’t ask why several framed baby pictures spill across the seat along with the licorice twists and sour cream and onion chips.
“Three months,” her mom says, as Addie looks up at her wide eyed. They are sitting on the floor of the family room beneath the strobing lights of the muted television. “Three months until Amber DeGray.”
Addie was not expecting to get tickets to Amber DeGray’s We Ride at Midnight Tour, especially not for her birthday. Addie’s dad referred to Amber DeGray’s brand of pop as “teenage crap.” If anything, she thought that her best friend Lana would invite Addie to go with her using the tickets her mother scored through her fancy job downtown. She has known Lana for five years, and she knows the expression on Lana’s mom’s face when she saw Addie’s house with its peeling clapboard and broken down truck living permanently on their front lawn.
“Really?” asks Addie.
“Really,” answers her mom, grinning with her lips closed.
And then Addie can’t help it; she tackles her mom into a hug, the giggles of excitement leaving her throat in uncontrollable squeals.
Her mom laughs too. Addie hasn’t heard that in a while.
Their laughter is abruptly cut off when her dad rolls over with a huff on the couch.
They both freeze. Addie doesn’t have to be told to not tell her dad.
When it feels safe, her mom whispers again, “Three months.”
Addie tucks that beacon into an unused corner of her heart, and for the first time in a while, she hopes.
“Two times,” her dad says to her mom. “You went to the grocery store two times this week.”
“We were out of toilet paper,” her mom says. Addie is listening from the hall, and she knows this is a lie. It was because Addie got her first period and her mom was out of her own supplies. She knows her dad has these rules, and she used to wonder why her mom didn’t just follow them.
Lately, she has started to wonder why her mom had to.
“You know that money is tight, Cher,” her dad says. “We can only afford what I budget.”
“Well, it isn’t enough,” her mom says.
“You think I don’t know how to take care of us?” her dad asks.
“N-no,” her mom stammers. “It’s just that sometimes I forget something that’s supposed to be on the list. Like toilet paper.”
“If you would just use your head,” he says, and Addie is surprised when her mom cuts him off.
“If you didn’t gamble away our money every month—”
Crack.
“I make the money,” her dad says. “I spend it how I want.”
Addie hears the kitchen door leading to the garage open and slam shut. She runs into the kitchen and her heart leaps into her throat. She sees the blood and the shards on the floor: ceramic with a pretty blue pattern and now broken.
“My parents got us those plates for our wedding,” her mom says.
Her mom will be fine—she has no more than a cut lip and a chipped tooth—but Addie will never be able to forget her mom’s haunted voice as she looked at the plate on the floor.
“One day,” Addie’s mom mutters as she flips through the newspaper at the kitchen table. Addie has just turned eleven, and it’s a quiet morning because her dad is still sleeping off a hangover.
“What’s one day?” Addie asks over her cereal bowl. She was rereading the same book she had finished last weekend because her dad decided that she and her mom could only waste gas on going to the library once every two weeks.
“Oh,” her mom says, closing the newspaper. “It’s nothing.” She looks around as if lost, then gets up. “I should finish the laundry before your dad gets up.”
When Addie hears her mom’s steps on the basement stairs she grabs the newspaper and flips to the page her mom was looking at: an article about a woman who burned her ex-husband’s house down with him inside.
She closes the newspaper when she hears her mom on the stairs. When the door opens, Addie is looking at the music and arts section.
“What’re you reading?” her mom asks.
Addie shrugs. She knows she can’t tell her mom she knows, so she tells her mom what Lana had told her at school last week: “Amber DeGray is going on tour. Do you think we can go?”
Megan St. James graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 2014 and was a founding editor of Gandy Dancer in 2012. While she currently teaches English language arts to middle schoolers in Buffalo, NY, where she lives with her husband and dog, she has recently fallen back in love with writing and spends her evenings inventing stories while curled up with her laptop and a cup of tea.