Suzie’s House 278 : 24 Hours?

What a long day. Gene crawled into bed and didn’t even bother to turn his mp3 player on. Too tired. He scrunched down into the blankets. What was that word Tracy used? Nestle? Only she said it like the chocolate instead of the word that made him think of little birds in a nest.

It was like that other word she kept messing up. The one for liquor, only not. Oh, right. Absolute. She kept saying ablute. Was that even a real word? Sometimes she did it wrong just to see if he’d fall for it. She was a lot smarter than people thought.

Like today. How did Tracy do it? She went from talking big last night to putting an almost entire band together the next. The only thing they didn’t have now was a lead singer, but she said it didn’t matter because they could all do a little singing. Right?

That meant something had to really go wrong with the singing because God didn’t let things go that well. Unless Bruce the Keyboard Guy blew a gasket and hit someone. That was bound to happen. Except he seemed to be afraid of Justin, which was really funny because Justin might be ripped, but Gene seriously doubted the guy knew how to hit anything but a drum.

And how did they all end up in a band together in the first place? It was like Tracy could just stick her hand out in the hallway and grab people and it would work. Except Gene had picked Justin and Kate for playing drums himself.

They hadn’t played together yet, and maybe they wouldn’t really end up with Bruce in the band at all if the audition for him went like Gene hoped, but he got the feeling they were going to be great. Everything about this crazy idea was working out.

He should be glad, right? He had another excuse to hang with Tracy, and if they really did gigs and stuff, that would be beyond cool. Why else should he practice on the guitar so much? So why did he feel like Tracy got on a train and left him on the platform?

Someone knocked on his door. Had to be Ben. No one else bothered him this late at night.

“Yeah. Come in.” Gene didn’t bother getting up at all.

“Hey.” Ben closed the door behind him real soft and careful, like he thought a door would wake someone up when talking wouldn’t. He looked like nothing but a shadow moving around as he slumped into the one chair in the room. “Can we talk?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“It’s about Lisa.”

“Yeah?” Gene tried to remember what him and Lisa did today while all this crazy band stuff was going on.

“I feel kind of like she’s, I don’t know… invading my space or something?”

“That’s a bad thing?” Gene imagined something like when Tracy invaded his space, crawling all over him like she sometimes did. He kept hoping it would go a bit further than that.

“I don’t know. I guess so. I mean, I didn’t really introduce her to Mrs. Audrey to make her stop writing or anything. But Mrs. Audrey wasn’t nearly as hard on her as she was on me. Except maybe that bit about writing 50,000 words first. I mean, Mrs. Audrey kept telling me not to do it if I didn’t feel like I had to, but she let me show her stuff and told me what she thought.”

“Huh?” Gene didn’t even try to follow all that. It was more of that writing stuff that he didn’t care about.”

“I mean, it’s nice to have something in common with Lisa. But this was MY thing. What if it turns out she’s a lot better at it than me? I mean, don’t you kind of feel the same way about Tracy? She’s really good at both bass and guitar, and Lisa says she’s good at piano and violin and all kinds of stuff. Just not singing.”

“She’s not good at singing?” That could be a problem when they hadn’t found anyone to sing. It wasn’t like Gene wanted to do any singing. Not that he couldn’t but… he got a bad feeling about this.

“Aren’t you afraid she’ll make you look bad?”

“I don’t care how I look. I like Tracy. Besides, this whole band thing was her idea. She’s the one that talked to people, set up the auditions, and set up the meeting we’re going to have here tomorrow. I’m just… It’s kind of like being a piece of paper when a train goes by. I’m trying to not get run over.”

“I guess you wouldn’t understand.” Ben got up. He didn’t sound upset. More like sad. “So. See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”

Gene watched him close the door, then tried to relax enough to get some sleep. If tomorrow was like today, he’d need all the strength he could get.

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