Chapter 30

The only really big problem with Homecoming was my schedule. The dance was Friday night after the football game and I had to be in Nashville to set up by eight in the morning Saturday. We went on at ten, but the event organizers asked for the music groups to be there two hours early to check in, so they could move groups in and out quickly. It was almost a five-hour drive from Wellsville to Nashville, which meant we either needed to go up the day before, which Homecoming made impossible for me, or leave around three in the morning on Saturday. After five hours driving in the car in the pitch black with no sleep, we’d then have to get on stage and put on a show, which always required a lot of energy.

As setups go, that wasn’t great. I know if I was a professional, I would have apologized profusely to Sydney and nixed the idea of going to the dance. The problem was, I was also a kid in high school, at the beginning of a relationship with a girl I really liked, and I wanted to go. I knew the band, or at least Lyla, would work with me and agree to head out in the middle of the night, but their being exhausted was just as bad. This was a very big opportunity, and I didn’t want to blow it.

When I voiced my concerns to Sydney, help came through from an unlikely source. Sydney’s mother. Apparently, her mother was a huge Ronnie Ralston fan and tickets to this festival were both hard to get, and a lot more expensive than I realized. So, she asked if I could get her into the festival if she drove us up there.

I knew I could bring people in with me, and I’d never even gotten close to bringing enough to be a problem, so I called Warren and he gave me the thumbs up to bring four people with me, in addition to my band mates, the fourth being Cameron. He was still following us to performances and practices for his article, and I’d gotten the okay the previous weekend to bring him and Kat along. Warren had also set up a cheap hotel for us, so the band could at least go up the day before and be well rested.

I’m not sure how Sydney’s mother negotiated it, but she apparently convinced Sydney’s dad to not only let Sydney go with me to Homecoming, but that her mother would drive us to Nashville after the dance. She also decided we’d leave right after the dance, which would get us into Nashville about three in the morning. She got a hotel, although one nicer than the one the label shelled out for us, and planned to drop me off with my bandmates before she and Sydney went to their hotel. That meant I could get four or five hours of sleep at the hotel, and probably several more while riding in the car.

Her mom would be a little tired, but she was actually planning on staying for another night. She and Sydney would make a weekend of it, while I rode back home with Kat and Cameron, who were driving up Saturday morning. They’d be tired when they got there, but Kat wasn’t going to Homecoming, so she could get enough rest to drive safely. I actually thought it was time for Kat to start going to stuff like Homecoming again, but she still didn’t want to go to big school events. Aaron was gone, but she’d had a lot of bad experiences at school dances and functions, and it made her nervous at the thought of attending them. She also didn’t like the pressure of being asked to dance, since it always triggered her condition and she felt like she was obligated to dance with the person, even if she didn’t want to. At some point, she’d have to face her problem, but I wasn’t going to push her now, considering she was still in the early stages of her long-term recovery.

So it would be me, the band, two friends, the girl I was dating, and that girl’s mother. As a group, it was a strange mix. What it meant, though, was I could go to Homecoming with Sydney. I was still limited to wearing a dress shirt and slacks, since I couldn’t justify paying for a sports coat or any kind of suit. Most of my money was still going to my mom, which was pretty dumb, but I still wanted to help her, in spite of everything. I knew Dad was probably drinking it away or blowing it on something stupid, but that was my mom’s decision. I could have gotten at least a sports coat with the money I had left for myself from playing shows on the weekends, but whatever I could afford would be pretty low quality. If things went well, I’d need to get one that looked nicer for official stuff. If they didn’t, I’d need to keep that money in savings, just in case.

Thankfully, as far as I could tell, Mom had only put Dad on the ‘company’ account and not on my personal savings account. I’d been stuffing money away in there ever since Mom forced me to open it, and he could wipe me out if he wanted to.

Sydney was waiting by the front doors of the school, just like she did on most school days, and as soon as I saw her I felt massively underdressed. Logically, I knew this was a poor and very rural community and a lot of kids would just be wearing their ‘Sunday’ clothes, but I still felt a little inadequate. For her part, Sydney looked amazing in a dress that was so dark green I thought it was black at first. Although the front of the dress went up and around the base of her neck instead of plunging down showing cleavage like some of the other girls’ dresses, it left her shoulders and arms bare, which looked really good. She had amazing shoulders, thanks to swimming, and the dress really accentuated that. It ended just above her knees and was very flowy, swishing around as she moved, showing off her legs really well.

“Wow, you look amazing.”

“You think so?” she said, looking down at her dress, smoothing it down.

“God yes. You look fabulous.”

“Thanks. You look good, too,” she said, almost reflexively. When I gave her a look, she added, “No. Really, you do. If you were all dressed up, it would look weird, like you were trying too hard.”

“That’s a strange double standard. You’re expected to be in a nice dress, hair done, makeup done, and if I go for anything more than a button-up shirt, tie, and slacks, I’d look like I was trying too hard. How does that work?”

“I don’t know, but it does. It’s how it always is, even on regular school days. But, for something like this, it’s also because we want to. I like getting all dressed up, putting on makeup, and getting my hair done. This is an excuse to do it.”

“Well, you look beautiful,” I said, holding her out at arm’s length to look her up and down again.

She beamed at the compliment.

“Let’s go dance,” she said, pulling me inside towards the gym, which was the same place the prom was held.

Mr. French was up on the stage behind a laptop connected to a mixer, with wires stringing out from it to speakers on either side of the stage. I had to smile, because that is exactly what Mr. Keller had threatened Karen Brooks with for prom when she didn’t want to hire us to play at prom, even though we were the only band who’d agreed to do it for their cut-rate budget.

Thinking of Mr. Keller, our old vice-principal, I caught Mr. Packer giving me the evil eye from across the gym as Sydney dragged me in. I’d managed to avoid him or any major trouble so far this year, and I guess he was pissed he hadn’t found an excuse to expel me yet.

We made it an area in the center of the gym that was opened up for dancing and joined the other kids out there bopping along to a Tina Sauer song. I actually hadn’t heard much of her music, since it was on the much softer side of pop and I preferred rock or pop that veered in that direction. As singers go, she was middle of the road, as far as popularity goes, not selling out arenas, but still holding down decent-sized gigs and making it into the top ten a few times. She had one of those dream stories being a girl from a small Midwest town who tried out, and won, one of those singing competitions on TV, walking away with a record contract. To her credit, that had been almost six years ago, and she’d managed to release two more records since then and hold onto her contract, so she wasn’t just a fluke.

I wasn’t surprised that Sydney could dance. I was basically limited to the simple side-to-side sway thing that most of the other kids did, having learned to dance at clubs and bars watching people bounce around to the music. She didn’t do the grinding that a few other kids were doing, or at least trying to do until a chaperone showed up to tell them to knock it off. The song ended just after we got on the dance floor and the next song started.