“Jani.”
“Hmm…you’re hiding something, aren’t you?”
“I’m eating dinner and talking to my sister. Nothing is more important than that.”
“Of course it isn’t.” She laughs, and lets it go, and we move on to her tour dates and whether the heating in the van works and whether my boss is still a nightmare.
We’re not together, Rhonda and me. That’s the thing I keep having to remind myself. We’re friends who text from morning to night. We’re friends who blamed a kiss on a pitcher of beer. Friends.
We are only friends.
I was having a great dream about my Instagram reaching 1 million followers, when myphone goes off.
Groggily, I pick up the phone on my pillow. Rhonda. I sit up and clear my throat.
“Hey, you okay?”
"I had the worst show ever," she says, and her voice is rough, worn down.
"Oh no, what happened?"
"The sound was off. Sandy was distracted. Jo left early—again. I played the wrong bass line in the bridge of 'Nightwork' andnobody noticed, and that's almost worse than if they'd all stared at me. If they'd called it out, at least someone would've been paying attention."
I pull the pillow behind my head. The streetlight is making patterns on my ceiling, orange and geometric.
"Tell me about the wrong bass line."
"It was the verse line. The one that sits under Jo's melody in the second verse. During the bridge I switched to autopilot—you know how that happens, where your hands just know what to do and your brain checks out? I played the verse line instead of the bridge line, and I played it for thirty seconds, and nobody looked at me. Jo was singing. Sandy was playing her part. Jeremy was keeping time. And I thought: I could play the wrong part for the entire set and none of these people would know or care."
"I'd care."
"You weren't there."
"I'm here now."
She's quiet. I can hear her breathing, and the sound fills my small apartment.
"I wish you were," she says. "I wish you were in that room. I wish you could've been watching."
"Really?"
"Yeah you would've paid attention. Someone would've seen me fucking up and cared that I was fucking up."
"I care about you all the time."
She breathes. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"That's—" she stops. "Thanks Lena."
We talk about food. She ate a kebab from a cart outside the venue and it was excellent, charred vegetables and sauce that was somehow both too salty and not salty enough. I ate leftover pasta and burnt the garlic again. We talk about childhood. Hers in foster care, twelve different houses before eighteen. Mine in a house with a father who chose his wife's comfort over his stepdaughter's safety.
“I think I hold onto grudges,” Rhonda says at some point, maybe an hour in. “In my head. A ledger of everything I do for this band that nobody asked me to do—the calls, the studios, the six-a.m. emails. I know it’s toxic. But it’s the only record that the work happened at all.”
“I think that’s okay, you’re just protecting yourself.”
“That’s a generous read.”