He doesn’t give me another glance.

They climb into their cars, Jezz and Patrick into the truck, heading toward the east side of town, Jezz’s house, Patrick’s place, and Anders heading toward his house, not far away, here on the northwest, near the woods.

I wait until their taillights have winked out in the distance, down the cracked asphalt of the road.

I get my bicycle. I take the path straight through the woods. The trees lean back as I pass. They whisper and hiss. They know what I am. They know what I know.

My own house isn’t far away, on a mossy dead-end road deep in the oaks and pines. I’ll pass Anders’s house first. Take one more look. Make sure he’s inside. Watch his windows. Wait until he shuts off the lights. Maybe.

Maybe I’ll wait even longer than that. Maybe I’ll watch all night.

Anders

When I get home, I take an epic shower. I do this after every show at the Crow’s Nest. It’s the start of my comedown. And I need to come down, or I’d still be buzzing from the energy of the show at four a.m. I’m sure Mom and Dad think I’m doing some embarrassing and perverted teenage guy thing in here. They’d be surprised to know I’m just standing with my back to the showerhead, my hands hanging at my sides, letting the spray pound the aching muscles in my back.

Not that I really want them to know this, either.

I keep the water right on the edge of blistering. Hot enough that when I climb out, the bathroom is one big cloud, and I’m just a shadow on the foggy mirror. Even when I wipe the fog away, I barely recognize myself. I grew three inches last year, long after I’d stopped expecting it. Free weights and push-ups have changed things, too. These days, my arms look less like something that could have been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. Plus, Patrick’s sister gives me free haircuts in exchange for letting her practice her cosmetology school techniques on me, so I don’t look like the poster boy for the fifteen-dollar kids’ cut at ValuClips anymore.

I look like—

I don’t know.

I clear another stripe of mirror with my forearm. The guy staring back at me from that blurry stripe is taller, broader, choppier haired than the kid I still expect to see. I put on the rock-star face. Aloof, a little haughty. A little hard. The guy in the mirror almost pulls it off. He can fake it, anyway. Except for the eyes. His eyes still show what a complete and perpetual dork he is.

I drop the face and lean into the mirror, palms on the counter.

Tonight was good. Really good. Amazingly, mind-blowingly good. Jezz and Patrick and I know each other so well and have played together so long that it always feels like we’re part of one electrical circuit. But tonight, like it has more and more often, the electricity laced out of us and ran through the entire room, all the heartbeats pounding in rhythm, the crowd giving back everything we gave to them.