“Sometimes. Come fall, I’ll be back performing the classical stuff with the Alabama Youth Symphony. But it’s been a long day.” A thin smile crosses his face. “Got in an argument with my dad in Tennessee, and decided to take the bus home. So tonight, it’s probably going to be a fiddle.”

That was a joke I sort of got. Violins and fiddles were basically the same instrument. You could call either the other, as long as you were playing the right song.

I also got that the part about the argument with his father was his way of explaining the black eye, which made my heart constrict with sympathy for him. But he didn’t seem like the kind of boy who would take well to sympathy, so I kept my voice casual as I said, “I should have brought my guitar. We could have played something sad and depressing together.”

Now his face lit with curiosity, and he tilted his head to reassess me, which put his eyes directly in line with the overhead light. I could now see they were an incredible blue, a blue so pretty, they caused my breath to unexpectedly catch. The boy might not have been much to look at, but his eyes packed one hell of a punch. That’s another thing I clearly remember thinking That Night.

“What kind of music do you like to play?” he asked.

“This is and that. Mostly stuff I make up,” I answered. A sip of my story, not the whole glass. I’d learned a long time ago that admitting I was basically a unicorn—a black girl who played and wrote country music—brought up more questions than it answered.

“Do you sing?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

The boy raised his eyebrows, like he didn’t quite know whether to believe me. “Alright then, let me hear you.”

This was before what happened happened, before I stopped singing in front of people ever. But even back then, I can remember thinking there was no way in hell I was going to get up the nerve to sing in front of this weird teenager with the intense blue eyes on Mike Lancer’s back steps.

The boy wasn’t nearly as cute as Mike, but he made me nervous all the same. Maybe because of the way he was looking at me now. Like I’d suddenly gone from being a simple math problem to a complicated one.

“No, I don’t think so,” I answered, my stomach fluttering with butterflies at just the thought of singing one of the songs I’d written.

“Why not?” His voice sounded different now. Even deeper and huskier, like we were involved in some kind of secret conversation.

“Because…” I started, searching for a plausible excuse.

“What are you doing here, Fairgood?”