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Julie sighs, staring at the poster of Avril Lavigne up on her wall. It had been four months since they’d moved into the new house, but her room with the slanted ceilings and yellow walls still didn’t really feel like hers . The new therapist her dad had set her up with said that it was because this room didn’t have all the same memories of her mom that the old one did. Well, it didn’t have any memories actually. Her mom was already gone.
Her dad said it was just because she hadn’t spent enough time in it yet. ‘ Not that I’m against you spending time in your school’s studio, but… ’ he always started his lectures with.
Her best friend Flynn said it was because of Luke.
She didn’t want to think about Luke.
He’d been her boyfriend back at her old school, in her old town. He’d shown up one day out of nowhere and swept her completely off her feet. One thing led to another and before she knew it they’d been dating for four months.
And then her dad had told her and Carlos that they’d be moving. Sure, it was close to the music school of her dream, with an amazing new house, a beautiful town, and her aunt just down the street, but…it was also over six hours away from Luke.
Telling him was really hard. Actually moving was worse. When they slowly stopped talking, now that was what really broke her heart.
They’d been away for as long as they’d dated, and with little to no contact…
Sometimes Julie wondered if he’d just been some kind of incredible, amazing, ghost.
She sighed and opened her phone. A text from Flynn (who’d been her online friend until her dad told her they’d be moving to her town), three exclamation points and a flyer attached for a school dance. A formal, even.
She texts back an immediate ‘no’. Hanging out with Flynn is always nice, but she’s really not in the mood for dances still.
Sighing again, she shuts her phone off and flops onto her bed. Now the dance has her thinking about Luke again. How they’d go to dances together and sing the songs at the top of their lungs with his friends, Reggie and Alex. They were all pretty good singers, and they all played instruments, so sometimes they’d get together after school and just hang out and jam. Julie at her instrument, the piano, Luke pressed up against her on the bench, softly strumming chords and writing them down in that notebook of his; Alex thumping his sticks against his practice pads (his drums were a pain to transport to other people’s houses); Reggie messing around with all the effects pedals he kept buying.
They hadn’t reached out either.
And it was so unlike them that it made her wonder--why did they stop texting her?
She knew that they all had issues going on at home, but she thought that they’d been close enough to stay in touch. Especially Luke…
Wow. Thinking about him really just made her sad.
She needed to snap herself out of this. She should play some piano--that always calmed her down.
She got up and moved to sit at the piano she kept in a corner of her room. She turns the keyboard on as she sits down, then pulls some music she’d been working on out of a folder laid atop the piano. She took a deep breath in and blew it out before laying her fingers across the fake ivory keys.
But before she could press them down on the first chord, she heard…
Guitar.
Coming from outside her window.
She nearly brushes the new sound off as one of her neighbors practicing until she hears, in a bright voice that she knew all too well, the sung words,
“ Heey, Julie !”
Immediately she snaps up and runs to the window, throwing it open.
Down below, on her lawn, is Luke . Dressed in one of his tank tops and ripped jeans, silver rings glinting on his fingers as he strummed his acoustic guitar, he is looking up at her window. At her .
And he smiles widely.
“ I think you’re really kinda coool~” he continues to sing, his voice carrying beautifully even from two stories down. He’s swaying as he strums, left to right, back and forth. Julie had always found that mesmerizing.
“ Heey Julie! I just transferred to your schooool~”
Wait, what?
“ And you were always there for me when things weren’t nice, yeah you were always there to make those wrongs feel right~”
He occasionally steals glances at his hands to check his positioning, but for the most part he is looking only at Julie.
“ Which is why, I’m here toniiight, which is why, I’m here toniiight~”
He finished with a sweet little solo passage, then drops his guitar to hang by the strap around his neck. He spreads his arms wide with an expectant smile.
The first thing Julie says though is,
“Luke, it’s daytime!”
He shrugs.
“I thought I’d be here later! But Reggie is a menace at the wheel!”
She laughs.
Then she realizes that Luke is standing on her lawn waiting for her and she’s just standing dumbly at the window.
She lets out a small squeak and turns away abruptly, spilling out onto the second floor landing and descending the stairs like it was an Olympic sport. Oh what was she even wearing? Just ripped jeans and a hoodie, barely any makeup--she is so not ready for this.
Ah who is she kidding. It was Luke .
She flies out the front door and onto the lawn, seeing Luke swing his guitar around to his back so he could catch her in a hug.
Oh. She forgot how strong his arms felt around her. He smells like balsam.
“Why didn’t you text me?” she interrogates his shirt, muffled because of how close she is to him.
“Yeah, I’m suuuper sorry about that by the way,” he tells her, rubbing her back. “I thought you-- you! --wanted space for some reason, and then things got kind of crazy over there what with Reggie’s parents’ divorce and Alex being disowned--”
“Wait what ?!” Julie exclaims, pulling back to stare up and Luke. He chuckles awkwardly.
“Yeeaaah, so Alex is kind of living with me now, which is super weird to say out loud, and when Reggie decided to move here to live with his aunt after the super messy divorce, of course we’d come!”
Julie’s heart sank.
So he’d come when Reggie moved, but not for her.
“Hey hey, what’s wrong? What’s with your sad face?” Luke says hurriedly.
“I do not have a “sad face”,” Julie says indignantly, and Luke tilts his head.
“You totally do,” he said, pushing his eyebrows close to each other and pulling the corners of his mouth down in a comical exaggerated frown. ”And it looks like this--so what’s up?”
She sighs, looking down. Luke’s arms are still around her, and she takes comfort in the fact that he’s here . They can talk things through like they used to.
“Well, it’s just that…I kind of got ditched for four months Luke, and when you finally visit you’re only moving here because Reggie did? What about me? What about four months ago?”
Luke, rather than being taken aback, smiles softly.
“It took my parents a while to find a house, Julie,” he says quietly, still smiling. “I was always going to come here for you--Alex and Reggie are just an added little bonus."
“ADDED BONUS?!” someone yells, and Julie abruptly turns to see Reggie sticking his head out of a car window, parked down the street. Alex is squished back in the passenger seat, trying not to stick his nose in Reggie’s ribs. “I AM THE BEST THING THAT’S EVER HAPPENED TO YOU AND YOU KNOW IT!”
“Alex! Reggie!” Julie yells in delight.
“Alex!...Reggie!...” Luke says with forced enthusiasm through clenched teeth.
“Sorry! I tried to stop him!” Alex shouts. “You two were having a moment! I’ll just--”
He wrestles Reggie back into the car and roles up the window with a wide “mom-style” grin and a little wave.
Julie giggles and waves back before turning back to Luke.
“You mean it? You came for me?” she asks. Luke’s eyes crinkle up in a smile.
“Of course,” he says, and Julie is reminded why she fell for him in the first place. “Can you ever forgive me for ghosting you?”
She smiles.
“I’ll think about it,” she says, and with that, she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him.
She’s missed the feel of his lips on hers, the warm firework of happiness that went out inside her whenever they kissed. It always brought her back to their first, both of their firsts, on the swing in the backyard of her old house. But that was then, and this was now, and he had his hands on her lower back and was pulling her in closer and her heart was alight.
They pull away and Luke is immediately smiling, the one he saves just for her. The sunset is giving him a halo, and she has a vague thought that--no, he’s not a ghost. He’s an angel.
“HEY JULIE!” it’s Reggie, from the car again. Alex just looks resigned at this point. “JOIN OUR BAND!!”
“You’re making a band?” she asked.
“Yeah, but only if you’re in it,” Luke says. “Without you we’re just elevator music, in Reggie’s words.”
Julie tilts her head like she’s considering it, but she’s really not considering.
“I’ll join if we play at the school dance this weekend,” she offered.
“Course! It’ll be the perfect way to introduce my new school to me .” Luke said with a grandiose gesture.
“AND ME!” Reggie yelled.
“And me,” Alex said, though with less volume.
“So Julie and the Phantoms will take the stage!” Luke declared.
Julie grimaced.
“Well if we’re performing Friday, we’d better get practicing…” she pointed out.
She turns to watch Reggie clamber out of the car, bass guitar already in hand. Alex shrugs and opens his door as well, already twirling his sticks.
“I’m ready!!” Reggie yells, and does a heel click on the grass. He always has too much energy, especially now as someone whose parents just got divorced…Julie’s glad to see he kept it though. And Alex, still ready to jam and hang out even though he’d just been through something horrible.
She loved these guys.
“Get in!” she calls as she takes out her phone, and the three boys quickly crowd into view. Luke throws up a hang loose sign, Reggie sticks his tongue out, while Alex is normal and just smiles. Julie herself smiles widely and takes the picture, quickly opening up messages to send a text.
“Who’s that going to?” Luke asks, dropping his chin on her shoulder.
“Flynn,” she tells him. “She is not going to believe this.”