Searching through the boxes, I found the one I was looking for. The one box I’d kept from high school was the one with all my old sketch pads and art materials. Sketching always relaxed me—it took me out of myself for a little while. I seemed to need that a lot lately.
When I was packing up, I hadn’t had enough time to go through all my old drawings, but tonight I had nothing but time and four grim walls. I needed something to take my mind off my family problems, and I didn’t have money to buy any new books.
Hauling the box over to the bed, I wiped away the dust that had collected on the top of the sketch pads with an old T-shirt and curled up on the bed to look through them. Some of the older drawings made me smile. Drawing wasn’t something that had come particularly easy to me at first. I’d loved to do it but was never able to make a sketch come alive. Until a boy in my first-year class (one I happened to have a massive crush on) in high school showed me how to hold a sketch pencil correctly and how to stroke against the paper, not draw in hard, unbending lines.
From there I caught on quickly and I was hooked.
The art lasted. The first crush didn’t.
A sheet of paper fell out from the third sketch pad I’d picked up and suddenly I was reminded of another boy. A year ago I would have been able to look at the sketch and feel nothing but a prickle of pain—a ghostly reminder rather than the real thing.
Now, however, looking down at the drawing of my ex-boyfriend Nick, I felt bitterness well up in me. That bitterness was becoming a familiar part of me and I hated it. I just didn’t know how to fight it.
But I leaned against my pillow, my fingers crinkling the sketch of the gorgeous Nick Briar. I’d gone out with Nick nine months after my first boyfriend, Ewan, had dumped me out of the blue. For a time Nick soothed the hurt Ewan had left me with. In my immaturity, I actually felt like I had won something over Ewan when I began dating Nick. He was nineteen and gorgeous and the lead singer in a rival rock band.
Nick had been the first of my bad boys . . .
* * *
The small club was dingy and smoky and much too hot. But I was filled with giddy excitement as I watched Nick sing onstage with his band, Allied Criminals. I thought their name was stupid and I wasn’t a huge fan of their music, but I loved Nick’s voice and his passion and how excited people were by them. I felt proud standing in the crowd as his girlfriend, and I promised myself I would always support him, no matter what.
Nick played up his brooding persona onstage, but in reality he was such a sweet guy. The night before, when I told him I wouldn’t be able to make it to this performance because of a family thing, he’d been really cool about it. He was disappointed, but he didn’t make a big deal about it like Ewan would have. And he made me feel special in a way that Ewan never had. Nick was always telling me how beautiful I was, how funny and interesting. I’d felt ordinary until I met him. I was completely falling for him, which was probably why I’d had sex for the first time with him a few weeks ago.
My friends were acting all immature about it and jealous, which was ridiculous. They thought it was a mistake for me to give it up to him and were really being unsupportive and ignorant about the whole thing. Lucky I had Nick in my life so I didn’t have to put up with their silly naïveté all the time.
After Nick was so cool the night before, whispering sweet nothings in my ear while he made love to me, I decided I’d get out of my aunt’s birthday party to come and see him play. I couldn’t wait to see the look of surprise on Nick’s face.
The band finished up and I hurried toward the door that would lead to backstage. A bouncer tried to push me back, but after I explained who I was he disappeared backstage and returned with the band’s “manager.” In reality he was Nick’s older cousin, Justin, and I wasn’t really sure what it was that qualified him to be their manager. I didn’t really care just then. Justin recognized me and got me backstage only to disappear before I could ask which way I was going. I wandered in the opposite direction and came upon the band sitting around a randomly placed and barren pool table. They were drinking beer and talking loudly among each other with a couple of guys and girls I didn’t recognize.
Nick was nowhere to be seen.
Alan, the lead guitarist, glanced up and stiffened when he saw me, his eyes flickering beyond me nervously before they snapped back to me. “Shannon.” He stood up abruptly and the guys all looked at me in much the same way. “I didn’t think you were coming tonight.”
I smiled back, but my lips trembled. The tension my appearance had caused had alarm bells ringing in my head. “I wanted to surprise Nick. Where is he?”
“Uh, I don’t know.” Digby, the drummer, shrugged, looking at the other guys with a faked nonchalance that they returned.
Not Alan, though. His lips pinched together as he watched them, and when his eyes swung back to mine I stared into them stubbornly. My directness made him flinch. Alan and I got on pretty well. In fact, I sometimes got the impression he liked me. He flirted with me all the time and was always so considerate of me. I’d always brushed it off because I was mad about Nick and no one else could come close to how I felt about him.
“Where is he, Alan?”
Alan’s eyes softened with regret. “He’s in the cloakroom, Shannon.” He nodded in the direction behind me as the others shifted uneasily.
Feeling my heart bang away in my chest, I turned on my low-booted heels and strode with more confidence than I was feeling down a narrow, dark walkway. I came to a stop in front of a black-painted door with the word CLOAKROOM in peeling white paint across it.