Next up is Becky and how she deserves to be happy, but never really gets there, with her mom being one more thing she needs to take care of, and Andy never being around for her. I hate that I don’t know how to help her.

James says he wants to change the world and that’s fine because he probably will. When has James ever failed at anything? Except there’s something…off…with him these days. Some wall has surrounded him that I don’t know how to scale.

And at the end, I’m left only with this: I don’t know what I want to do with my life.

And that might be the most terrifying thing of all.

My brother wants a loan.

My father says he’d rather buy Connor a gun that he can use if he wants to keep shooting his mouth off.

My mother says he doesn’t mean that.

My father says is doesn’t matter whether he means it because they don’t have money to lend, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be loaning it to Connor.

My mother reminds him that Connor is his flesh and blood.

My father says something about the “fag part” not coming from his side of the family, and I stick my head out my bedroom window and replace the yelling with the sound of trucks and car horns and the music from the Italian place across the street. If this is all there is to being an adult: fighting and hating and working to pay the bills, I’m not sure I want any part of it.

Part Two

The music comes and the music goes.

Sitting in American history class, I’m brimming with notes, overflowing with melody, spilling lyrics onto my textbook about the Civil War.

At home, my guitar is silent. Talk to me, I beg. Talk to me.

When I complain to James, he says, That’s how you know you’re an artist, Michael; the muse takes you as her fickle lover.

He’s so serious. So intense. So driven.

He’s some sort of prodigy. Some sort of genius. So hot.

These are the things said by people who don’t know James well.

But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

There are bigger clubs than The Echo. Clubs that are more popular. Clubs that draw the rich kids with their rich clothes and their rich drugs. There are clubs that are wilder and dirtier; clubs where broken glass is swept off the floors more nights than not. There are clubs for girls, and clubs for boys, and clubs for those at every point in between.

There are the clubs that Connor goes to: pills on tongues, sex in balconies with boys whose names you never need to know, the strange freedom that comes from anonymity and loss of control. Clubs I’m intrigued by, but can’t work up the courage to even walk into.

And it’s okay because I feel like myself in The Echo. I feel like I’m home.

I lean against the speaker. Bauhaus is droning out “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” and I can feel the scream of the bats in the treble, the dripping of fangs in the bass.