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“You want me to organize…all of this?” Julie asked, trying to keep her obvious lack of enthusiasm from seeping into her tone but aware that she was failing miserably.
She glanced around the small, crowded room packed with boxes full of cds and what she was pretty sure were a few dusty cassette tapes. She hadn’t wanted to do this internship, that was true but that had been more to do with how painful she thought it would be to be trapped the whole summer so close and yet so far away from all the music dreams she had been doing her best to stuff down and pretend she no longer had. She hadn’t even been creative enough during her sulking sessions to think she needed to dread her internship because she would be stuck in an allergy inducing closet organizing enough ancient music to fill the grand canyon.
Trevor’s hand came down to rest comfortingly on her shoulder.
“These not quite the glamorous duties you pictured?” He observed knowingly.
Julie hesitated.
She may not want to be there, dusty closet or no, but that didn’t mean she was ungrateful. She knew how privileged she was to have an uncle who was the co-owner of a record label who would open a door for her that so many people would do anything to beat down. She knew how lucky she was to have a Dad who saw her channeling her grief by sinking further and further into teenage angst and reacted by trying to give her something to both keep her busy and nudge her back towards what she had always loved. And it wasn’t like she thought she was above a little hard work.
So, no. She didn’t want to complain.
She just didn’t want to spend all day in that claustrophobic hell either.
“It’s not like I thought I was going to be giving notes to artists or anything,” Julie mumbled, unable to keep her stoic teenager act up in the presence of someone who had carried her on his shoulders as a toddler. “I just figured I’d like…get people coffee or something.”
Trevor chuckled and gave her shoulder one more pat before stepping back.
“There will be time for you to get coffee later.”
“I’m not so sure,” Julie sighed. “This could take me five years by myself.”
“Lucky for you then that you won’t be doing it by yourself,” He said, Julie frowning as she took in his comment.
“Who…” She started only to trail off as the door behind them swung open and someone else stepped into the already crowded space.
“What did I miss?” The guy in the orange beanie asked, glancing back and forth between Julie and her uncle eagerly.
“Luke, perfect timing,” Trevor clapped his hands together. “I’ve got to go but Julie here will fill you in.”
“Really?” Julie whined. “The guy who’s allergic to sleeves?”
“I’m not allergic to sleeves,” Luke insisted. “I just vibe better without them. I see you haven’t gotten any less grumpy.”
“Good, you remember each other,” Trevor was already backing out the door. “I’ll check in on you two later.”
Luke, as Trevor had so helpfully reminded her he was called, stepped further into the tiny excuse for a room, causing Julie to back up instinctively in an effort to maintain as much distance between them as possible. If he noticed her action he didn’t react. He was already reaching out to rifle through the nearest box, tumbling over its contents and sending up a cloud of dust that had Julie frowning before descending into a brief coughing fit.
That had him glancing up.
“You good?” He asked, reaching out as though to clap her on the back but drawing back and throwing up his hands in surrender when she jerked away.
Julie regained control over her breathing and sighed heavily.
Yeah, Trevor had one thing right…they clearly remembered each other. It was hard not to. Yesterday had been the first day of the Crooked Teeth Records summer internship program and the guy with the bright orange beanie and sleeveless scrap of fabric masquerading as a shirt had caught Julie’s eye immediately as soon as she entered the room where all the recruits were milling around. He had just been so out of place, even among a group who had taken the casual dress code to heart. Surely anyone who would interpret “casual but appropriate attire” as a cutoff band tee that left almost nothing to the imagination wasn’t someone who was taking the job seriously. And Julie may not have wanted to be there but that didn’t mean she had a lot of patience for someone who showed up without intending to do the thing and do it well. So, she had noticed him right away, and if maybe the tiniest bit of that attention had also been due to the fact that he was, well…obnoxiously attractive, thatdidn’t overrule the fact that he was clearly there for the wrong reasons.
So she had already been a little biased against him when he had swaggered up to her, and leaned in, fixing her with a charming look she was sure usually worked for him, and spoke to her unprompted.
“So this is wild, huh?” He offered out of the blue, leaning against the wall next to her where Julie had been hiding in the back of the room. “Who would have thought we’d see Crooked Teeth from the inside?”
“Yeah, who would have thought,” Julie replied dryly, not really wanting to volunteer the information that she had been there many times before, racing Carlos on wheeled chairs in the halls when they were little even.
“It’s pretty sweet even if Trevor Wilson wouldn’t exactly be my first choice of mentor,” He leaned over even further into her personal space to mock whisper near her ear.
Julie frowned and folded her arms.
“Why not?”
The guy did this little half chuckle paired with a head tilt that she definitely wouldn’t have found cute if he wasn’t already getting on her nerves.
“I mean…he stole that song right?”
Julie instantly stiffened.
When her uncle had been 18 and dumb and selfish and yes, wrong he had indeed put a song on his first album without attributing the lyrics as belonging to his former high school bandmate. It probably would have been a little known if shameful moment in his long career except that song had gone on to be nominated for a grammy and when the truth came out…the fallout had almost destroyed his career before it got started, not to mention dragged Julie’s mom’s fledgling attempts to make it big down right along with her brother’s. Trevor had withdrawn the song from consideration, admitted what he had done, split the profits from his entire first album with his former bandmate and then disappeared from the music scene for five years. Luckily his comeback had been successful, going on to make multiple hit albums full of songs he wrote himself before eventually retiring and starting his own label with one of his friends.
And Julie wasn’t making excuses for what he had done so long ago. As someone who wanted…who had wanted…to let the world hear her music more than anything she couldn’t imagine the pain of having someone else take credit for the soul you poured out onto the page. But she also couldn’t imagine anyone knowing the uncle that she knew and thinking they weren’t anything more than this one horrible mistake they made a lifetime ago. Despite Trevor’s success his reputation as a thief had hung over him to an extent ever since, had hung over their whole family, her mom…
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Julie snapped at the guy in the orange beanie, more as a way to distract from the tears burning the corners of her eyes than actual malice she wanted to point in his direction.
The guy’s eyebrows shot up and he gave a low whistle.
“Somebody’s grumpy. I’m Luke by the way.”
Julie was baffled that he was still talking to her. Clearly she wasn’t open to the conversation, had bitten his head off for an offense he couldn’t have possibly known he was given, and yet…he was still introducing himself with this hopeful little smile. And ok, she definitely would have found that charming if circumstances were different, definitely would have wanted to ask about his stupid sleeveless shirt and if he actually was into Rush or if it was an aesthetic choice, would have tried to figure out what type of musician the guy was because she could just tell he was one. All of that would have played into what she said next if circumstances were different.
Only they weren’t.
Because she didn’t talk about music anymore.
Because she didn’t find joy in the smiles of cute boys, or anything anymore.
Because she was only here because her dad and her uncle had conspired to try to distract her from the fact that her mom was dead.
So all Julie said was, “Ok.”
And she ignored the way his face fell a little as she pushed off from the wall to go stand closer to the front of the room just as her uncle entered to begin their orientation.
She had figured she could avoid him and all the rest of the enthusiastic, ambitious interns for the duration of the summer. She hadn’t counted on her uncle conspiring to trap her in the closest with the kid.
Julie was done coughing but Luke was still staring at her expectantly. When she didn’t seem prepared to offer a comment he jumped in instead, because of course he did.
“So, it’s Julie, right?”
Julie turned away, grabbing a random box and moving it to a different pile just to have something to do.
“You know it is,” She replied when her back was to him. “You heard my…Trevor say so.”
“I figured I’d give you a chance to be polite and introduce yourself,” He said, his tone indicating that he found the situation amusing rather than annoying which was somehow annoying in itself.
Julie sighed and spun to face him again, taking in the way he was bouncing on his heels a bit, reaching up to adjust his beanie as though she might find him more presentable if it was a few centimeters to the left.
Damn it.
He was so cute.
The old Julie would have been half head over heels for this guy already. Then again the old Julie had fostered a crush on Nick despite not having spoken more than a few sentences to him in years so…she couldn’t exactly be trusted in these circumstances.
“Look,” She started, one of her hands forming an involuntary fist where it hung at her side, her fingers curling inward tightly as though that could strengthen her resolve to remain detached. “I know this is probably like your dream job and I don’t want to ruin that for you. But I’m just looking to get through this summer as painlessly as possible. So if we can just sort through all of these ancient demos and figure out which ones we can clear out as efficiently and silently as possible, that would be great.”
Luke looked like he had a lot to say to that, his expression shifting and a flash of something behind his eyes letting her know that he was planning to but eventually his gaze dropped to her clenched fist and he seemed to think better of it.
“Yeah, sure. Whatever you say, Boss.”
Julie felt tension leave her in a rush as her shoulders slumped gratefully down from where they had inched up nearly to her ears. Maybe he was allergic to sleeves, and maybe he agreed with widely held but still hurtful opinions of her uncle and maybe he had an infuriatingly perfect smile…but maybe he wasn’t so bad.
She explained to him what Trevor had told her they were to do and then they both settled down to the task at hand, Well, she might have settled down with a little more focus than he had. While she tried to make sense of just how old each CD was and what genre it belonged to and if it was a band she recognized as still being signed with the label, she could see him out of the corner of her eye spending half his time excitedly examining track listings and pulling out his phone to snap photos, presumably so he could remember to look things up later. And she wanted to find that annoying, she really did only…she remembered what it was like to be that excited about music. It hadn’t been that long ago in the scheme of things. It just felt like it under the agonizing weight of her grief. And while seeing that love of music expressed through her Dad’s worries or Flynn’s loving nagging or Carrie’s competitive passion just made Julie miss her mom more…somehow seeing it reflected back at her through Luke’s glances in her direction when he found something that left him bouncing in place…somehow that didn’t hurt as much.
So that’s probably why Julie didn’t remember to muffle her reaction when her fingers closed around a CD that was all too familiar.
“Oh,” She said softly, lifting it out of the box with shaking fingers.
Rose and the Petal Pushers
“What’s that?”
Luke had appeared over her shoulder, his voice sounding from so close that Julie probably would have jumped if she wasn’t already in a state of shock. For a split second she clutched the case tighter, yanking it towards her chest as though she needed to protect something precious from his prying eyes. Almost immediately though her grip loosened and she let it drop slightly from where it had been pressing against her. She was only drawing more attention to what she was looking at by hiding it dramatically and…well, part of her couldn’t help but remember the excited look on Luke’s face as he browsed through the music surrounding them.
Part of her wanted to see that look on his face when looking at her mom’s demo. Wanted someone to look at it and see what Julie saw…all of her mom’s talent and passion and…greatness.
She wasn’t sure why she was so sure that Luke would be the one who saw that but somehow, deep down, she was pretty sure he was.
She swallowed hard and passed him the demo before she could think better of it.
“Wow, this looks sick,” He murmured, immediately opening it to pull the thin paper with a photo of Julie’s mom’s old band on it from the case. “All woman rock band. And look at that guitar!”
“It’s…it was…” Julie paused, considered chickening out then pressed on anyway. “That’s my mom’s band. Here.”
She reached out and tapped her mom’s face on the photo, quickly retracting her finger as though it had burned her.
Her mom’s much younger face stared up at them confidently from the middle of the photo, the hot pink electric guitar that had caught Luke’s eye slung across her torso.
Luke’s excited gaze show up from the photo to meet Julie’s.
“No way!” Luke exclaimed, doing that little bounce of his again. “Your mom is a badass!”
He was so enthusiastic and so right that the fact that he had referred to her mom in the present tense didn’t hurt nearly as much as she would have expected it to.
Still.
She couldn’t help the quiet sentence that slipped out of her next.
“Was. She passed away.”
Luke’s expression shifted instantly, his eyes going soft and his entire body stilling in a way that made it even more obvious just how much he had been moving before.
“I am…so sorry.”
She believed him.
She did.
And even though she was so, so sick of being looked at with sympathy…something about the fact that he had just been singing her mom’s praises made his sympathy a little easier to swallow. He wasn’t attached to her, she hadn’t even been particularly nice to him since they met. But he had instantly picked up on how amazing her mom was and he was so clearly into music and…maybe he got it. What it was like to be in this room, to be in this place, surrounded by everything that reminded her of what she had lost.
Just a little bit.
“Thanks.”
Julie managed a small, brief smile, forced as it was.
Luke’s eyes darted back to the photo he was still holding, flipping it over where a handwritten track listing had been scrawled.
“Which of these songs is your favorite?” He asked, jerking his head gently as though in invitation for her to join him.
Julie hesitated for a brief moment before crossing the small distance between them.
“I like “Dahlias in the Kitchen”,” Julie answered, pointing at track four on the list. “Dahlias were my mom’s favorite flower and my dad used to surprise her with them when they were dating.”
She hadn’t meant to tell him that but she didn’t exactly regret it, not when he was nodding eagerly as though it made perfect sense for her to have shared a personal story about her parents and their love story.
“Nice,” He said, tucking the photo insert carefully back into the case before handing it back to her. “All the best songwriters use personal experiences in their lyrics.”
Julie felt her lips twist into an amused expression against her better judgement.
“Like you I guess?”
“Well, yeah, I usually start with…” He trailed off and shot her a bashful grin. “How…how did you know I write songs?”
Julie’s smile was genuine this time.
“Just a vibe.”
Luke’s grin only widened as he waved his hands in front of his shirt.
“It’s the lack of sleeves right?”
Julie rolled her eyes and tried very hard not to look like she was losing the battle to not like him.
She was pretty sure she was failing miserably but she couldn’t bring herself to care all that much.
“It’s not the lack of sleeves. That just gives off vibes of stupidity.”
Luke clutched at his heart, teasingly pretending to be in pain.
“Ouch, you wound me, Boss.”
Julie raised an eyebrow as she carefully set her mom’s demo on top of the nearest box.
“Why do you keep calling me that?” She asked.
Luke grinned again and damn it, she had to add “has a perfect smile” to his annoyingly attractive qualities.
“Cause those are the vibes you give off,” He said with a smirk. “It’s a compliment, trust me.”
Julie felt a blush rise to her cheeks and instantly spun to face the other way in a hopeless attempt to hide that fact from Luke.
“Come on, we’ll never get out of here if we don’t get started.”
“Whatever you say, Boss.”
She didn’t need to see him to be able to picture the affectionate smile he was currently directing at the back of her head.
Oh this boy was going to be a problem.
After that they had settled down beside each other on the floor, sorting through their respective boxes mostly in silence except for Luke’s occasional excited exclamations when he found something so cool that he just had to show her. And if Julie started to return the favor, pointing out a band she recognized from her mom’s collection or a group with a name to hilarious not to share…well, it wasn’t that she was enjoying talking about music again. It was just that his enthusiasm was completely contagious.
Ok, maybe it was a bit of both…
They had managed to divide about half the demos into the room between those to trash, donate and keep based on the criteria Trevor had given them when Luke startled her out of her concentration with an unexpected statement.
“I didn’t want to do this internship either.”
Julie’s head jerked up in surprise.
He had said it matter of factly but there was something in his expression that made her think he was actually trusting her with information more personal than the individual words might give away.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it,” She tried, her voice trailing off as she heard how unconvincing she sounded. “Ok, you’re right that’s what I meant by wanting to get through the summer as painlessly as possible. But…I’m surprised you didn’t want to do it.”
He nodded, fiddling nervously with the demo he held, turning it over and over.
“I wanted to focus on my band but my parents, especially my Mom don’t think it’s a real career. It’s been…a thing. I moved out for a while in high school. It…wasn’t good. I think my Mom thought calling in a favor to get me this gig was supposed to be a compromise, like if I could get a job close to music I’d give up on the band. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate it but it also pisses me off, you know? How can both of those things be true?”
His voice had become more and more agitated as he spoke and Julie instinctively reached out to place a comforting hand on his knee.
That seemed to do the trick.
He let out a huff of air before biting his lip and shooting her an apologetic smile.
“Sorry, you didn’t ask to hear all that.”
Julie was already shaking her head before he even finished apologizing. She knew exactly what it felt like to have so much you wanted to say and nobody you felt like you could say it to. She was lucky, she knew that. She had her dad and Carlos and her aunt and Flynn…but sometimes she felt like they knew the old Julie too well. Sometimes she wasn’t sure there was room with them to let out this new version of herself who was so sad and confused and…
“I’m angry at my Mom,” Julie said in a rush. “I love her obviously, more than anyone, and I miss her so much but…I’m still mad at her. For leaving me. So. I get it. Feeling opposite things at the same time, I mean.”
She trailed off and just had time to regret her word vomit before his hand drifted down to apply gentle pressure to hers that still rested lightly on his knee. Yet another blush rose to her cheeks but for some reason she let their hands linger in that state for a few long seconds before she finally pulled it together enough to yank hers back.
Luckily he didn’t seem offended, only shooting her another one of those smiles.
“Look at us, bonding.”
Julie was very grateful for the opportunity to roll her eyes and get back to the more comfortable zone of finding him exasperating (even if it was with a lot more affection by this point if she were being honest).
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” She insisted. “We’re tolerating each other.”
“You can tolerate me if you want,” Luke shrugged. “I like you, Boss.”
Well, so much for being back in a comfortable zone.
Julie reached out and slapped at his exposed shoulder.
“You can’t just say things like that.”
Luke chuckled, going back to digging through the demos.
“Now that we’re friends…”
“Not what’s happening,” Julie interrupted, only to be completely ignored.
“Maybe we can team up to convince Trevor to listen to my band’s demo by the end of the summer,” He continued. “He seems to like you.”
“Seems like it,” Julie agreed, fighting down a knowing smile without much success.
“Probably because your mom applied to the label a long time ago?” Luke suggested, not looking up. “They probably met.”
“They sure did,” Julie said calmly. “Being siblings and all.”
Luke froze.
“Your mom was…but that would mean…Trevor’s…so he’s…”
“My uncle,” Julie supplied helpfully, before reaching over to tap Luke’s chin. “You can close your mouth now.”
The expression of panic on Luke’s face was truly comical.
“Julie…what I said yesterday…”
Julie decided to put him out of his misery, standing up and reaching her hand out to help him up too. He took it and stumbled quickly to his feet. She turned and grabbed one of the heavy boxes they had labeled as needing to be donated and barely managed to lift it, shoving it almost immediately into Luke’s unsuspecting arms, a burden he accepted with a surprised grunt.
She leaned in slightly, wondering who she even was in that moment, and taunted him from directly over the box he held, only a few inches from his still stunned face.
“You can make it up to me.”
She turned and headed for the door, stopping to pick up a much lighter box as she went, pretending she didn’t grin when he called after her.
“I’m on it, Boss!”
She had thought her dad and uncle forcing her into this internship had been pretty heartless but maybe…just maybe…it wouldn’t be such a cruel summer after all.