Page 19 of Dear Rockstar (Dear Rockstar 1)

“What?” I turned to him, stunned. The coincidences just kept on coming!

“The apartment complex. Over on Wisteria.”

“Yeah, I know. I live there.” I pulled out of the nearly empty parking lot and turned right, heading toward home.

“I know.” Dale settled on the classic rock station, beginning to flip through the cassettes I had tucked into the console. “You laid out a lot this summer at the pool. Black and white bikini?”

“Oh.” I blushed. Our apartment complex had a pool and Aimee and I had spent a lot of our summer spreading ourselves with her “homemade goop”—a mixture of coconut and baby oil and God only knew what else—and working on our tans while we ran the batteries out on her boom box listening to Tyler Vincent. “Yeah, that was me.”

“And that was your friend, Aimee, with you?” Dale assumed. I just nodded. He was listing my cassettes under his breath as he looked through them. “U2. Duran Duran. Madonna. Rick Springfield. And of course, Tyler Vincent. Do you listen to anything that isn’t Top 40?”

“What’s wrong with Top 40?” I protested, feeling defensive about my music choices. “I never saw you at the pool.”

“I had a busy summer.” He opened the glove compartment, finding more cassettes inside, starting to flip through those too. “No time to swim.”

“Doing what?”

“Getting my band up to snuff.”

“Your band?” Did the similarities to Tyler Vincent never end? “What sort of band?”

“You like the Dead Kennedys?” He glanced down at his shirt, pointing. “The Cure? INXS?”

“Ummm…” I shrugged. I’d heard of them, but that was about it.

“Oh that’s right, you like Tyler Vincent.” He was teasing me, grinning, and I told myself to take it lightly, not to overreact, but I hated it when people made fun of Tyler Vincent.

“Don’t do it!” he begged me. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!”

“You know you look like him.” I changed the subject, glancing up at the red light we were stuck at, waiting for it to turn, trying to keep my cool, but the hair on the back of my neck was standing up.

“Nah, he looks like me.” His eyes—a decidedly devilish blue—narrowed slightly at my comment. The light still hadn’t turned and we looked at each other across the console. I didn’t like to be teased about my thing for Tyler Vincent, but from the look on his face, he didn’t like to be compared to him either. It was a brief, tense moment. “Is that why you offered to give me a ride home instead of making me call a cab?”

“No, it was the front row seats you promised.” I stuck my tongue out at him as the light turned green and I gave it some gas.

He laughed. “Touché.”

“You must know someone at Ticketmaster,” I mused. The thought of front row seats to see Tyler Vincent seemed almost too good to be true. Was he telling me the truth? “Or the radio station?”

“Yeah, I know someone,” he agreed, going back to his search through my glove compartment. “Hey! The Violent Femmes. There might be hope for you yet.”

I rolled my eyes. “So you obviously don’t play any Tyler Vincent.”

“Occasionally.” He made a face. “We have to do some covers, because the crowds want to hear familiar songs. Some day I’m going to perform my own.”

“So punk rock?” I prompted. “Like the Dead Kennedys?”

“Yes and no.” Dale closed the glove compartment, giving up. “I spent most of last summer in Seattle and you wouldn’t believe the music coming out of there. It’s like hardcore punk mixed with heavy metal and something else, like its own thing. You’ve never heard anything like it. That’s what I do. What I write, what I play.”

“Where can I hear you? Are you playing clubs?”

“Some, when we can get the gigs.” Something about his energy had shifted. He wasn’t so cool and casual and who-gives-a-crap anymore. “We’re auditioning for MTV’s Battle of the Bands. By then we should have it all together. I hope.”

“You don’t sound convinced.” We were coming up to Kensington Gardens, three stories high, red brick face, windows like dark eyes. It reminded me of a prison, even with the tall white columns in front, and my heart always sank when I pulled into the parking lot.

“Well, I got these guys together this summer,” he admitted. “We’re working hard, but the band I had back in Maine… we’d been together for years.”

So he had lived in Maine—Wendy had been right.

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