Page 43 of Our Moon
He nods in acceptance, and I feel like a total asshat. Like Alex, my best friend has no reason to think I’m lying to him. I never have before. We’re as close as brothers, as close as he and Alex are. As close as he and Ally are, maybe even closer since she’s a chick and all.
“Yeah, they’re going dress shopping or some shit. They were talking about it at lunch.” Alex adds, giving me an odd look. To be honest, I’m a little nervous around him after he almost caught me and Ally the other night.
“Dress shopping?” Why don’t I shut my big fat mouth? But I can’t help it, she didn’t tell me she was dress shopping.
“Yeah, for graduation,” Alex says.
“That’s still two months from now,” I say.
“How the hell would I know? Girls do weird shit.” Alex says. “I’m going commando under my gown.”
And he says girls do weird shit. Joey laughs while Trevor and I shake our heads. “That’s a visual I didn’t need, bro,” Trevor says.
“Let’s take it from the top, boys,” Joey says, starting us off with the beat for the first song on our set list.
We have about a dozen original songs, and the rest we do are covers of bands like Three Days Grace, Theory of a Deadman, and some of the softer Stonesour hits. Our set list consists of about half and half. We’ve tossed around the idea of cutting our own demo to sell at our shows and send off to labels, but we decided to wait until after Alex graduates so we have the time to dedicate to it without pulling his attention from school any more than being in the band already does. Mr. and Mrs. Monroe have been supportive of the band, and we don’t want that to change.
We play through the set list one last time, and I rush out of there, eager to get home and talk to Ally.
***
“I almost slipped up today,” I tell Ally when we’re talking on the phone later that night.
“How?” she asks nervously.
“At practice, Trev asked where you were and I told him you were shopping. Alex asked how I knew, and I freaked. I told them I overheard you mentioning it yesterday.”
She laughs. Laughs. I gave myself a minor heart attack earlier, and she thinks it’s funny. It’s the same reaction I got when I told her about my run-in with Alex the other night. Apparently she had gotten the same line of questioning from him, and fortunately, somehow, our stories matched up.
“Not funny, baby girl.”
“It’s kind of funny.”
“Wouldn’t have been funny if he beat my ass.”
She sighs, “We’re going to have to tell them eventually.”
“But I like my face,” I whine.
“I like your face, too, baby. But you know the longer we wait, the worse it will be.” She’s got a point, but that still doesn’t mean it’s going to be good when we tell them.
“I know, baby girl. I just wish we could stay in our little bubble forever.”
“I don’t,” she says sassily. “I want to shout from the roof tops that you’re my man.”
I laugh. “And I want to shout that you’re my girl.”
“Swoon.”
“Did you just say ‘swoon’?” I laugh.
“Shut it, Baker.”
I laugh harder. “You’re such a girl sometimes,” I joke because we always tease her at practice when she acts like a girl because she’s always been one of the guys. She’s not ‘one of the guys’ to me anymore, but I still have to pretend.
“Yeah, but you like me as a girl,” she flirts.
Ain’t that the truth? “That I do.”
