Do I really have a choice in any of this?
I wander the hotel, looking for a distraction. Anything that can bring back that easy film of denial. Anything that can help me forget. I try going into the casino, where people sit at machines, looking like dull zombies, but someone barks at me when I try to step off the carpet walkway that leads through the area. No kids allowed. I keep walking until I find myself at the Crossroads Blues Club—the place where my parents met all those years ago. The place that led to a drive-thru wedding and a three-day honeymoon before Joe got a call from that talent scout and he ran off to become a rock star. I expect someone else to yell at me when I walk into the club, but instead, the man in the entry takes one look at me, slams a green stamp on my hand, and tells me that the right half of the room is reserved for “contestants and their families.”
The club is dim and smells thick of booze—which seems fitting since it reminds me of Joe. This is the place where it had all started. I probably wouldn’t have ever been born if my parents hadn’t both ended up here that fateful night.
I laugh to myself at that word. Fateful. Fate. That thing Haden clings to and I desperately want to escape.
I want to forget.
A waitress stops at a booth with a tray of shot glasses. She sets it on an empty table and starts flirting with a group of frat boys who’ve called her over.
I’ve always despised Joe for his drinking. I’ve never understood his need to drown out the world. But at that moment, I get it. Because all I want is to forget—if only for one night. I want to stop feeling. I want to be numb.
I want to make it all go away.
While the waitress is distracted, I snag four shot glasses—two in each hand—and retreat to a secluded booth in the back of the club. Where I can drown in the dark.
chapter fifty-one
HADEN
“How many of those have you had?” I ask Daphne when I find her in the Crossroads Blues Club. There’s some sort of talent competition going on, and the place is packed. A teenage boy is onstage, playing a wicked solo on the bass guitar. Daphne sits in a booth near the back of the club. In front of her sit a few small glasses filled with an amber liquid that gives off a sharp, woody smell. She looks a bit green in the face.
“Two,” she says, holding up two fingers. “Two sips, that is. I keep trying to down a shot whole, but the taste makes me gag.”
I had begun to worry when it started to get late and Daphne hadn’t come back to the room. Garrick was passed out on the couch in the suite and Tobin was raiding the mini-refrigerator and giving me sidelong death glances, so I decided to go looking for her. Somehow, I knew she’d be in the club. And from the looks of her, I’d been right to be worried.
“I think two shots will get me buzzed,” she says. “I think a third shot will get me properly drunk. It may take four or five before I black out. I don’t know. I’ve never had alcohol before.”
“How did you even get those?” I’d used the ID that said I was twenty-one at the entrance of the club, but because of the talent competition, the place is overrun by underage kids and their families. Daphne has a bright fluorescent green stamp on her hand to indicate she isn’t legal.
“Stole ’em off a tray.”
“That takes some guts.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll leave some money on the table.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“I haven’t decided if I’m going to keep trying to drink this one yet,” she says, running her finger around the rim of the glass. “I don’t drink. I swore I never would because of Joe. My mom is always giving me lectures about how kids of alcoholics have to be real careful—how underage drinking increases their risks of losing control. I don’t like not being in control. It doesn’t fit into my plan. Everything I’ve done my whole life has been part of my master plan. Teaching myself music, rehearsing day and night, practicing self-discipline. It was all leading toward the same goal. I knew exactly where I was going and how I wanted to get there. And then you had to come along.…”
“Can I sit?”
She shrugs. “It’s not like I could stop you.”
“You could if you wanted to.”
She looks up at me. “Could I?”
I purse my lips.
The guy with the bass guitar finishes his solo, and the crowd goes wild with applause. A table of who I assume are judges hold up white cards with numbers on them. The audience gets even more excited.