“We totally do.” Sticks stood and stretched his muscles. “We are so going to rock the fuck out of that club.” He returned to the box of music sheets and receipts, picking up where he’d left off in his self-appointed task of organizing.
I packed my guitar, and Holden did the same, waving us goodbye before silently slipping out the opened bay door.
Sticks glanced my way as I found a more comfortable place to sit than the bicycle seat and hiked my ass onto the top of an old scarred nightstand table.
He frowned. “You don’t have to stick around here just for me. I’ll close the door when I leave.”
“It’s fine. We have to pad-lock it too, and I haven’t gotten you a key yet. So, yeah, I kind of do have to stick around.”
“Oh.” He stood abruptly. “Shit, sorry. I can go then. I didn’t mean to keep you.”
“No, really.” I waved him back down. “I’m in no hurry. I don’t have to be at work for another hour or so. And this...” I motioned to the notebook I was writing in. “I can do here just as easily as I can at home.”
He gingerly reseated himself on the floor where he’d been sitting with his legs crossed. “Well, if you don’t mind... I think I’ll finish organizing this shit then, or it’ll drive me batty.”
With a laugh, I waved him on. “Knock yourself out, man.”
So we worked in companionable silence for a while until he suddenly said, “All these songs are written in the same handwriting.”
“Yeah.” I glanced up curiously. “Was there a question in there?”
“No, I just...” Sticks looked down at the sheet music, then a couple other pages. Then he whipped his head up to gape at me. “Wait. Did you...?”
I arched an eyebrow, waiting for him to continue.
Finally, he blurted, “How many of the songs for Non-Castrato did you write personally?”
I cocked my head to the side, confused. “All of them. Why?”
“All....all of them?” he squawked. “Get out. Even ‘Ceilings’?”
Unable to help myself, I grinned. “Yeah. Why? You like that one, don’t you?” I knew he did. It was the only one he ever requested.
“I love it,” he gushed. “I can’t believe you wrote that.”
“Yeah, I could tell it was your favorite. What makes you like it so much?”
Sticks lifted a hand as if to wipe hair out of his eyes, when there wasn’t any hair in his face. “I don’t know...” The move made me crinkle my eyebrows because I’d seen Caroline do that to her hair many times. Made me wonder if he’d recently had long hair. “It reminds me of my mom, I guess,” he finally answered.
That caught my attention. “Really? Your mom?”
With a nod, he mumbled, “Yeah, she uh...she was pretty heavy into drugs for a while there when I was younger.”
I understood immediately. “Ceilings” was a depressing song. The lyrics followed the journey of a girl who spent her life looking up at ceilings during her most pivotal moments. She fell in love while staring up at the ceiling of the backseat of her boyfriend’s car. Then she gazed up at the ceiling of an auto repair shop where she was hiding when a drive-by shooting took his life. The ceiling of the hospital was what she watched as she gave birth to her dead lover’s baby at sixteen. And she cried up at that very same ceiling as she made the decision to sneak out of the hospital and abandon him. When her family refused to have anything to do with her, she hooked up with a drug dealer who turned her into a nasty addict. And she stared up at the ceiling of her bathroom as she tried to abort the baby that drug dealer had knocked her up with. And finally, she gazed up at the ceiling of his living room while the drug dealer took her life.
“It’s such a poignant, way-too realistic story that always sends shivers up my arms.” Sticks rubbed them now as goose flesh pebbled the skin. “And every time I hear it, I don’t know...I automatically think of my mom.”
I stared silently at Sticks, experiencing a weird connection with him I’d never experienced with anyone else before. Because what he said...it rang exactly true for me too. I always thought of my mom when I sang it. Probably because it was about her, but whatever.
Remy gave a sudden, self-conscious shrug. “I mean, if her family hadn’t kept such a tight leash on her, I could’ve so easily seen my mom falling into that very kind of life, hooking up with some guy who beat her to death and everything. Hell, if it hadn’t been for my uncle and grandma, she probably would’ve either left me at the hospital or tried to abort me, too.”
My heart thudded in my chest, because I totally got what he meant. “That sucks,” I murmured. “What ended up happening to her?” But I already knew it couldn’t be a happy ending. I didn’t know anyone who’d gotten into drugs and then met a good ending.
Sticks glanced down at his hands. “She fried her brain and ended up in a mental institution.”
“Jesus.” I shook my head, sympathy filling me. “I’m sorry, man.”