Girl Abroad

MY ENTIRE LIFE, I’VE BEEN BAFFLED BY THIS CULTURAL INFECTION of rock star worship. Groupies sleeping in cars on cross-country pilgrimages. Teen girls staked outside hotels. Waiting hours in the rain, distraught and hysterical, for an autograph. Obsession as disease.

Then this dark-haired bit of poison slings a bass guitar over his shoulder, and I’m entranced. Utterly dumbstruck. Riveted by the way the instrument hangs low at his hips. His shoulders hunched over as he plays. The silver rings on his fingers. Leather bands and bracelets of string around his wrist that all have a story, a meaning, but you don’t ask because he won’t tell. You don’t want him to; it would ruin the infinite mystery.

While not Jack-sized, he’s tall and lean with perfectly sculpted arms, biceps flexing when he begins to strum. My throat goes dry as he closes his eyes, nodding his head to a melody I’m scarcely hearing. I’m too distracted by the way he’s biting his lip. He’s feeling the chords as his fingers rip across the bass line. Rhythm and poetry.

I’m mesmerized by the dumbest things. How one lock of hair drips in front of his eyes. The shirtsleeve riding up his bicep. The worn, raw marks on his guitar that each encompass a memory. I hardly hear a single song in their set. For twenty full minutes, I’m in a trance, until they leave the stage and I snap out of it. I hastily look around, worried that everyone has noticed my intense preoccupation, but they’re all chatting among themselves, oblivious to my pounding heart and damp palms.

The bassist eventually reemerges and makes his way through the maze of tables in the pub.

Toward ours.

He’s coming this way.

A jolt of nervous panic surges through my limbs. Stupid scenarios of him picking me out of the crowd run through my head as he flashes a wry smile, jerks his chin the slightest bit in recognition, and—

Kisses Yvonne, who eagerly rises to meet him.

I feel flattened.

Run down and backed over.

Frantically embarrassed, I avert my gaze and stare into my barely sampled wine. My pulse remains wild and frenetic, so insistent I feel it in my feet, my teeth. I hope nobody can see my mortification.

“Nate,” Lee says as the bassist pulls up a chair beside Yvonne to throw his arm over her shoulder. “This is our new flatmate from America. Abbey, this here’s Nate.”

I don’t know what to do with my hands. Thankfully, Nate doesn’t bother with a proper shake. He offers a nod as Jack hands him a pint.

“All right, Abbey,” he says in a deep, husky voice.

I never know if that’s a question with Brits. “Uh, yeah. Great set.”

I inwardly cringe, kicking myself. Already, I sound like a stupid fawning bass bunny. I’ve played dolls in Steven Tyler’s house and ridden horses at Skywalker Ranch, but here I am starstruck by some guy playing gigs in a West London pub. I hate me.

Approaching something like nervous nausea, I down my glass of wine. In the chair beside me, Jamie raises an amused eyebrow in question.

“Another?” he asks.

Why not. “Please.”

As he stands, the shouted drink orders pile up. Jamie makes his trip to the bar while the others talk and I struggle to appear engaged as their competing accents become more difficult to distinguish the more glasses they empty.

“Ask Abbey,” Celeste suddenly says. Ask me what, I don’t know.

I glance over. “Huh?”

“She’s a bit of an expert.” Celeste looks at Nate, which means I look at Nate. And my pulse rushes again.

“You a musician, Abbey?” His eyes are dark brown and inquisitive.

“No, not even a little.” I dabbled on guitars and drums when I was younger. Even briefly took up piano and violin lessons when my dad thought it was a change of genre that might spark some creative interest and latent talent. That was not the case.

“Her dad’s Gunner Bly,” Yvonne informs him.

“That right?” Nate sits forward. He drags a hand over the stubble shadowing his chiseled jaw, his inscrutable expression giving nothing away. “He recorded all the instruments on Apparatus himself, didn’t he?”

“Um, yeah.”

Nate becomes more animated. “I heard he laid down the rough cut on the back of his tour bus during the second leg of a European tour.”

I nod. “Some of the original masters were confiscated by Polish police when they searched the bus while he was on stage in Warsaw.”

Jack, who’s been typing on his phone, lifts his head with interest. “What, they stole them?”

“He got them back, didn’t he?” Nate asks, those curious eyes locked on mine.

I find it hard to look away. “My dad’s tour manager, Tommy, damn near got arrested fighting these cops for them. He’s my godfather, actually. Still has a scar from where they clubbed him.”

“Clubbed him? What the hell happened?” Jack grins as he raises his pint glass to his lips, drawing my attention away from Nate’s eyes to Jack’s mouth.

My erratic pulse is now confused as to which guy it’s pounding for. Both, it decides and careens harder. Awesome. I’m caught in a love triangle fabricated entirely by my overactive imagination. Because in real life, Nate is clearly with Yvonne, and Jack treats me like a little sister.

“Abbs?” Jack prompts.Copyright Nôv/el/Dra/ma.Org.

I try to remember what we were talking about. “Oh. Right. So Tommy watches the officers walk off the bus and put the tapes in a police car. He tells my dad, and Dad goes to one of the riggers and says, ‘I need a pipe or whatever. Something heavy.’”

I realize midsentence that I’m doing that thing I always cringe at from other celebrity kids: making my entire personality about who my father is. I almost never tell these stories at home. Maybe because for most of my childhood, his name was everywhere.

Now, it’s like I’m stuck in his cycle of word vomit. I can’t shut up, even as I listen to myself speak like an out-of-body experience.

“The rigger hands him a shackle, like what they use to hang truss and chain motors. He takes this steel shackle and smashes the passenger window of the car, and Tommy grabs the masters. Except then he gets clubbed and hits the ground. He tosses Dad the tapes, shouting, ‘Run, man! Forget about me.’”

Everyone at the table breaks out laughing. “This is wild,” Lee raves.

“So Dad hightails it out of there. He flags down a random car outside the arena with the cops running after him. Tommy manages to get back on the bus, and the driver takes off. Dad gets dropped off at the airport and calls Tommy, like, ‘Get your ass here. We’re getting the hell out of the country.’”

I look at Nate, who’s shaking his head in amusement. It’s not lost on me that my most interesting stories are not of my life at all.

“Anyway, my dad can’t go back to Poland. He likes to tell people they put an Interpol warrant out for him, but that’s just a rumor.”

Jamie comes back in time for another wave of laughter. He sets several drinks on the table. “What’d I miss?”

“Abbey’s dad is an international fugitive,” Lee explains.

Jamie waves that off, as if to say, I can top that. “Did I tell you about the time my mate brings this girl back from Ibiza on his plane to find a bunch of massive blokes in suits and black SUVs waiting at the airport? He’d practically kidnapped a crown prince’s daughter.”

The group soon tears through the fresh round of drinks and dives right into another. I don’t try to keep up, though the more I run a distant second, the more the wine calms my brain. Until there’s just the warm embrace of gentle inebriation.

At some point, we migrate to the dartboards. Turns out Jack and Jamie are bitter rivals where pub games are concerned.

“What strategy is that then?” Jack says, collecting the darts Jamie just flung at the board. “Going to hit everything but the money spaces?”

“Keep it up, ya twat.” I’m discovering that Jamie loses control of his tongue after a few drinks. I sort of love it.

They go at it to a draw. Neither are satisfied, and the skirmish soon becomes a battle of attrition in the war of trash-talking.

“As enthralling as this is,” Lee says, sliding up to me, “I’m dipping out. Don’t let these fools kill each other.”

I give him a coy smile. “Tell Mustache George I said hi.”

He winks in response, then kisses his sister goodbye on his way out.

“Face it, yeah? There is no world in which you beat me.” Jamie’s on one now. I don’t know what he’s been drinking, but he’s consumed a lot of it, the belief in his invincibility now total.

“You’re welcome to put down those darts and put your elbow on the table.” Jack cracks his knuckles and then flexes his biceps, as he apparently challenges Jamie to an arm-wrestling competition.

“Bring the darts and I’ll take that action,” I mutter to myself.

I don’t realize until I hear a muffled chuckle that Nate has come up behind me. I glance at him over my shoulder. Bad idea. In his amused gaze, I become stuck. There’s a flicker of, I don’t know, awareness of sorts. Then it vanishes with Jack’s bellow of victory at throwing a bull’s-eye to end the game.

I’m drafted by Jack onto a doubles team against Jamie and Celeste, leaving Nate and Yvonne to cozy up undisturbed. At some point, they duck out together, and that’s how I met and lost the crush of a lifetime in a single night.

I think I love London.

I think I hate it.