Friday Nights

Chapter 4: Blue Toothbrush

After that night Beth seemed to shine.

She was something from a dream: sunshine-bright hair and cornflower-blue eyes and smooth skin. She seemed to place her trust in him, and then his devotion in her. The image of her—onstage, singing, caught up in her own little world—haunted him. She wasn’t real; there was no reason she could be. He knew she didn’t exist for him. She would never belong to him—Daryl was one person in her world, and yet she was already the world to him. He was a passing blimp in her life, a face she would glance at twice in the crowd, thinking he looked familiar in the back of her mind before forgetting him.

He knew—already—that the time he spent with her would be the greatest moments of his small, insignificant life. That she would eventually discover his lie and leave him like so many others had before, progressing onto the things she deserved—fame, happiness, recognition, love.

He would glimmer and fade into a fragment of a memory that would surface only on cold winter mornings and when sunlight filtered through the treetops.

Another Friday night rolled around in a flash, a pressure weighing deep in the younger Dixon brother’s stomach all the while. And then Daryl’s pulling his bike up to the Cherokee Rose Bar, and then he’s walking inside and ordering a drink. He took up his usual position—buzzed, broke and alone—at the bar, waiting for the doors to open, waiting for her.

And then she’s there.

His head snapped to the side, her feet—pale brown boots with straps, different from the last pair—entering his vision and then travelling up skin-tight jeans and a long white singlet pulled over her hips and a too-bright sweater. Her guitar’s slung over her shoulder. Beth’s hair was pulled into a loose knot at the back of her neck, and a silver chain hanging down her front, bouncing with every step. She smiled when her gaze landed on him, the sight spurring Daryl into action.

The distance shortened between them, almost too close, and then he’s reaching for the strap of her guitar. His fingers—dirty, calloused, unworthy—brushed her shoulder. Beth looked at her hand, watching as it arranged the guitar over his shoulder, and then her soft, open gaze flickered to him.

To Beth, once again the past week had been limited to one thought alone: of Daryl Dixon.

Most nights she’d raced blindly past her daddy—sitting in the front room, reading the Bible by weak candlelight—and locked her bedroom door shut. Their first encounter had left excitement and fervid enthusiasm and incentive and a million different emotions were burning inside her, never before as strong. She’d rummaged through her nightstand until her fingers met the pale green, rounded spine of her diary. Sitting on the bed, she flicked through pages and pages of her own looped, animated writing, pouring over numerous lyrics and poems and fragments of sentences and whatever else she’d written down during bouts of inspiration. Trying to find a song that just clicked, that she could use as a demo track.

There was “Blue Toothbrush”, her first real song, sweet and simple.

And “Expired Lover”, something she’d scrawled down after her break-up with Zach.

And “Rockstar”, her latest pop-chic attempt.