Page 139 of Broken Lines

“Is it Will?!”

Slowly, she turns back, sneering coldly at me.

“You’ll have to read the book.” She shrugs. “And sorry. No freebies.”

31

Melody

The crowd lurchesto their feet around me, clapping wildly. And for the first time since I walked in here, it yanks me from the dark cloud I’ve been trapped in. I blink, startling to my own feet and following the crowd in applause.

Which makes me the shittiest friend ever, I know. But it’s also frankly a miracle that I even made it from midtown to the East Village without getting hit by a taxi. Or without just falling to the sidewalk and shattering like glass.

Up on stage, the amazing June Hendrix—aka, my roommate and best friend—takes a graceful bow. Her wild and yet gorgeous wavy tangles of red hair flops over her face before she rights herself and grins at the crowd.

“Thanks so much for comin’ out tonight, y’all. Love you guys.”

The crowd, predictably, eats that up. They eat up everything June does, like the Tennessee in her that seems to disappear in the streets of New York but comes roaring out on stage. And they’re not eating it up because any of it is a gimmick. They eat her up because she’sincredible. And it’s an actual crime that she’s not selling out world tours.

Or even this dumb bar, for that matter.

Her fans are fiercely loyal. But they’re a small bunch. For now, at least. Or who knows. In a fair world, she’d be all over the airwaves and playing Radio City Music Hall tonight, not Smokey’s Joint way out on Avenue C. But, then again, the world is very clearly not a fair place.

After the show, I wait by the far side of the bar for June to slowly make her way through the small crowd waiting for her. Even in my foul mood, I grin a little when I see her posing for selfies with her fans, and even signing a copy of her last album on vinyl.

For a second, it hits me how weird it is to see June workingso fucking hardto “make it”. And conversely, I just came back from a week with a man who has spent the last decade actively hiding from having “made it”.

The grass is always greener, as they say.

Eventually, June makes her way to me, where I’ve got a whiskey—her favorite—waiting for her. I’ve been trying to hide my emotions by clenching them back with brute force. And also, with drinking more than I usually do. I mean, it’s her show. And even if I wanted to be here to show support, I didn’t want to be sitting there in the audience glowering like I was at a funeral.

“Fuck, what’d she do now?”

I frown as she plucks the glass from my hand and says it before I can tell her how great she was.

“What?”

“Don’twhatme. Mel, you looked like you were at a funeral the whole show.”

My face scrunches up.

“Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

She reaches over to squeeze my hand, her face wincing.

“What’d that—and I say this from the bottom of my heart—cuntdo?”

She knows me well enough to know how toxic my relationship with my mother is. And she knows I just saw Judy, because she’s the one that got her friend to let me into the studio.

“I…” I smile as a mechanism of holding back a tear. “New subject.”

“Shit. That bad?”

“Pretty fucking bad,” I say quietly, taking a large sip of whiskey.

“Is it the book she’s been blathering on about to every gossip blog on earth? Or something worse.”

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