“I need your keys.”
He scoops them out of his pocket and tosses them to me, and I guess that’s the upside of not driving. Pretty easy for Ryan to trust me with his keys when he knows perfectly well I’m not taking his car out.
“Thanks, Ry,” I say, but he’s already lost to his headphones. I watch him for a moment. Ryan never sings along to songs, or even mouths the words, but his lips always twitch like he wants to. He can actually sing—he just never does anymore, not even the heavily ironic falsetto some guys do on Snapchat or TikTok. That’s the one thing I don’t get about straight guys—okay, it’s one of many, many things I don’t get about straight guys. But seriously. Why are some guys so opposed to showing off their singing voices? If their goal is to hook up with girls, shouldn’t they lean all the way into it? Even jock girls get melty over boys who can sing. It’s a legit romantic superpower, and they don’t even use it.
But Ryan’s one of those guys who never really dates, even though he’s got rumpled brown hair and long lashes and is objectively above average in cuteness. Andy calls Ryan a gorgeous waste of space. But he’s kind of shy, and even though I’m pretty sure he likes girls, he’s intensely weird about them. Not that it’s the kind of thing we could ever talk about. Like. EVER.
My relationship with Ryan is kind of hard to explain.
Honestly, I don’t even understand it. I swear there are times when no one gets me like Ryan does. Like when our parents are being weirdos, and we have a whole conversation with just our eyes. Or the way certain phrases, certain words, will hit us in just the same way.
But then he sneaks in late from some f-force party, or he fist-bumps Jack Randall in the hallway, and I get this pang in my chest. I guess I wonder sometimes—if Ryan and I weren’t siblings, would we even talk to each other?
I mean, we used to be inseparable. We’re only eighteen months apart. Mom calls us Irish twins, even though we’re not Irish, and I’m pretty sure a year and a half is way outside the Irish twin window. Ryan turns eighteen next month, and I’ll be seventeen in March. We used to play Hot Wheels and Playmobil dollhouse and Pokémon Rumble Blast and Pokémon cards, and we were Ash Ketchum and Pikachu for Halloween two years in a row, and okay, I don’t want to name names or call anyone out for being obsessed with Pokémon, but only one of the Garfield kids still has a florescent Bulbasaur on his wall. I’m just saying.
Anyway. At least I’ve got his car keys.
I head straight downstairs, back through the kitchen, where the pups are snoozing on the floor. My guitar’s waiting for me right in the trunk, next to a mitt and a few baseballs. I hoist the case up by its handle and hug the whole thing to my chest.
I love this stupid guitar. It used to be Mom’s when she was younger, but Ryan rescued it from the basement a few years ago. He never actually learned to play—he just posed with it a lot for Instagram. Hashtag: “jammin.” I’ll never let him live that down. I don’t think I could even call myself his sister if I did.
Though, to be fair, Ryan’s the reason I play guitar at all. After what happened with Eric, I really thought I was done with music forever.
Scene 10
Eric Graves. The shittiest guy. My shittiest day. Even now, I want to throw up every single time I think about it. But it’s always there. I guess it’s kind of my origin story.
Here we go.
Once upon a time in eighth grade, Queen Kate the Clueless fell in love with Sir Dickbrain Fuckmonster Eric the Taintweasel, Level 69 F-boy.
It’s hard to explain. Yeah, he was cute. But there were massive red flags from the start. For one thing, Anderson wasn’t on board with it. It didn’t matter how many times I mentioned the time Eric held the door for me once. Anderson couldn’t be persuaded—his belief in Eric’s dickbrained taintweasely fuckmonstrousness was unwavering.
It was the opposite of a communal crush.
But eighth-grade me didn’t care what Anderson thought about Eric.
I let my crush brain soar. I wrote Eric’s name in notebooks. I orchestrated drive-by encounters in the hallways. I stared at the back of his head so long in social studies, I memorized his neck freckles. And in the evenings, I was even more of a love story fiend than usual. It was practically a chemical craving. I mainlined To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before almost weekly. I inhaled every YA rom-com in the library. And then the squad discovered Ella Enchanted, which I watched so often, for so many months that my dad could quote it. Obviously, I had Queen’s “Somebody to Love” totally memorized, and I could sing it just like Anne Hathaway in the movie. I had it down to a science. Every inflection, every pause, every tiny dynamic shift. Even King Perfectionist Anderson was impressed.
I mean, here’s how much I was feeling myself: I performed it for my mom.
And she loved it. She acted like I’d performed a solo at the Kennedy Center. She sprang up from the couch, full-on applauding, dropping brava after brava. There were seriously tears in her eyes. For weeks afterward, I’d hear her bragging to her music teacher friends about the crispness of my consonants, or my stage presence, or how much my voice had matured.
So I guess I should have seen the whole variety show thing coming.
It wasn’t exactly a new conversation. Mom had been trying to talk the squad into singing in the variety show since sixth grade. “You four are so all-in on the musical. Why on earth are you so shy about the variety show?”
I could never quite explain it. Maybe it was a matter of context? When you sing in a musical, you’re a character. There’s a script. You’re telling a story. You’re being directed.
In the variety show, you’re you.
But Mom can be kind of a bulldozer when she wants you to do something. And I guess she got it in her head that I should do Ella.
Okay, that’s not entirely it.
She wanted me to, yeah. And at first I said no. But then I kept picturing Eric Graves in the audience, staring up at me, entranced. He’d be in the front row. He’d think, how have I never noticed Kate Garfield before?
It was pure cliché nonsense.
I guess I let myself be bulldozed.
My hair was so long back then, it took me an hour to dry and straighten it. I dressed like Ella, too—at least the second-rate mall version of Ella: white peasant top, blue maxi skirt, thick belt. The variety show was just one night, always a Friday. But we did our dress rehearsal as an assembly during the day for the school. I was so wrecked with nerves, Mom had to play the opening notes twice. My voice trembled at first, but I shut my eyes and kept going.
And then the song did what songs do. It took over. It pushed me out of the driver’s seat. I was Freddie Mercury and I was Ella and even Rachel from Glee, and I’d never felt so beautiful, ever. I opened my eyes after the first chorus, and there was Eric. Front row, center. The house lights were down, and I couldn’t quite make out his expression. But he wasn’t sleeping or whispering or even texting, like Mira Reynolds was doing beside him. He was paying attention. And when I finished, he clapped and whistled.
I just about bubbled over with joy.
For the rest of the day, I floated through the halls, feeling quietly triumphant. I didn’t breathe a word to the squad. But I could just picture Eric on the walk back to homeroom, trying to explain it to his friends. Her voice. I think I’m falling for her.