Page 102 of Sounds Like Love

Not ten minutes later, in the stormy dusk, I spied a flashlight and a bright yellow raincoat dashing across the road, and the tight anxiety in my chest eased with relief. I pushed the door open as Gigi herded the three dogs inside: Buckley, Sam, and Frodo. Her raincoat was soaked through, and when she pushed her hood back, so were her box braids. The dogs shook themselves out in the foyer and trotted through into the theater before either Gigi or I could wrangle them back.

“No, no … oh, well, now the entire place will smell like wet dogs.” Gigi sighed, unzipping her raincoat. I held out a hand for it, and she eyed me silently before relenting. “Thanks.”

I hung her coat up on the coatrack beside the ticket window. “Buckley looks like he dove into every puddle on the way here,” I tried to joke.

“He did. Was every puddle like two feet deep? Also yes.”

“Sounds like Buck …” I commented. Shifted awkwardly. “Gigi, I just want to tell you—”

“I know.”

From the theater, Dad shouted at Buckley to get his nose out of the beer cooler. The lights flickered overhead, but then settled again. A distant rumble of thunder shook the building, steadily growing closer.

My shoulders slumped. “Can I say it anyway?”

She started to wring out her braids onto the floor, and then stopped herself when Mom came into the lobby with an armful of old towels she’d found in one of the storage rooms. They were dust covered and starchy, but they worked. “You look positively drowned,” Mom said, kissing her on the cheek. “Thank you for stopping by to get Sam and Frodo.”

“They were the easy ones, trust me,” Gigi replied.

Mom put the other towels on the ticket counter and told us that she’d made coffee. I was quiet, waiting for Gigi to take the lead. She debated for a moment, squeezing her hair, before she said, “We’ll be there in a bit, Wyn. Going to see if there are any stragglers coming in.”

Mom left, and an uncomfortable silence settled between Gigi and me. I shifted on my feet. There was only the storm, the rain pattering against the plywood-covered windows, and us.

“I’m sorry,” I said, fiddling with the buttons on Sasha’s shirt again. “I think I’m just a little jealous of you.”

“Of entertaining old ladies at bingo parlors and singing to men about to get vasectomies?”

“Yes—well, maybe notthat, but of you being here. Being home,” I admitted. The moment I said it, a proverbial weight slipped off me. It was a truth I hadn’t wanted to look in the eye. “You knew exactly where you needed to be and so you were here. You faced the hard things. I … I just ran away. And I went, and I chased my dreams, and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t, but …” My throat tightened. “But what was the point of all of that when no amount of success or songs will save the people I love the most?”

My best friend reached for my hand. “Jo …”

I swallowed the knot in my throat, but it didn’t help. “Why did I work so hard when it meant sacrificing all the time I could have spenthereinstead? What was it all for? I actuallygotwhat I wanted. How can I stand here and not know whether it was worth it?”

Gigi squeezed my hand tightly. Her fingers were warm against my always-cold ones. “That song—the big one right now? Whenever your mom heard it on the radio, she’d turn it up. She knows every word, and to the song before it, and before that—allof them. She has a whole mixtape behind the bar just of songs you wrote, Joni. You’ve been here the whole time.”

My eyes filled with tears. “Oh.”

“I mean,” she went on, “it sucks that everyone thinks it’s a song about Van—”

“It’s not.”

“I know.”

I shook my head, sniffling. I wiped my eyes with my free hand. “You …know?”

Gigi gave a loving sigh. “Jo, I see you all over this song. ‘Kiss tonight goodbye if you have to go, and tell yourself you’ll come home’—c’mon, you couldn’t have writtenthatfor Van Erickson.”

“No,” I admitted, “but for a minute there I began to wonder if I didn’t even know myself, if maybe my feelingswereconnected to losing Van … but I think I would have felt the same if I’d followed him to Boston. If I went anywhere. Because I wrote that song for the girl I was, and the one I could’ve been if … if I had stayed.” My voice cracked, and I sucked in a sob as I forced out, “I’m so homesick, Gigi. I’m s-so homes-sick.”

The moment I began to fall apart, Gigi pulled me into a tight hug. I pressed my face into her shoulder, hers in my hair, and I cried into her T-shirt, and when I heard her sniffling it just made me cry harder. Because the dreams we came with weren’t the dreams that we left with, and because the distance of our friendship often felt like eons instead of miles, and because even as adults we were still those girls who lied to our parents and took joyrides to see boy bands because it made us feel alive. Because we were the same and the opposite in everything that mattered. Because that was who friends were, and she was the best of mine, and the miles were too many, and the years were too long, and sometimes I missed that girl I’d been who sang in her beat-up car with the windows rolled down and dreamed big and believed that a good love song could cure anything.

As our tears dried, we cleaned up each other’s eyes, because my mascara smudged and her eyeliner ran, and we laughed at ourselves for being so vain when there was a literal hurricane outside. Still, best friends never let best friends face a storm without looking their best.

“You suck—you know I pity cry,” Gigi said with a sniff, shoving me gently on the shoulder,and I couldn’t help but laugh. She rubbed at the corner of her eye again. “Though, for the record? I never thought you ran away. I always thought you just ran toward something you wanted. I was always jealous of that,” she admitted.

“You were?” I asked, surprised.

“Obviously. Like—I’m here because I always thought Ihadto be. First for Grams, and then when she died I had to take care of her estate, and then I stayed for Mitch …” She rubbed her arms soothingly. “And I’m notunhappy, you know? I just … I love your brother. So much. And he’s been so patient and loving and kind. I think he’s just bracing for the worst. I know what he wants, and what your parents want, and what the town wants …”

---