Kit and Tully | Love or Music?

8 - Party for the Band

Housewarming, Saturday, July 199x

Exactly a week after first meeting the band, we're all at the house warming. Needless to say, my parents have no idea we are at a party just ten minutes away from where I live. 

Dad dropped me out to Felice's house earlier. He thinks we're going to spend the night watching videos under Axel's supervision. The whole time we were getting ready, Felice talked about Len, the drummer, and I talked about Mac.

"Len says Mac can be a bit of a diva," Felice tells me.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't know," she says with a shrug. "It's just what he told me."

The house is a bland four-bed on one of the new estates. People spill out of the front door onto the cobble locked driveway at the front. We're definitely the youngest, the only ones still in school, though of course Spike is no longer in school. I try to look like it's not my first time at a party like this. I pretend I'm not nervous, but the truth is, though I'd never admit it, I'm out of my depth.

If Felice finds it intimidating, she hides it well and acts like she goes to parties all the time. Len's face lights up when he sees her enter the living-room –– she's worked her magic on him. Felice radiates sensuality. It comes off her like heat and, often, it's like her surplus transfers onto me. 

Usually, when we're together, I feel more alive, more confident, empowered, visible, but not tonight. Tonight I'm raw, vulnerable, everything is changing.

I look over at Spike chatting to the sound guy. He talks to people easily, especially interesting people, people in music and media, the kind of people who make me nervous, they seem so impossibly cool, but Spike gets on well with them. He's going to fit in so well in Dublin, he'll never come back here.

Why would he?

I wouldn't if I was him, if I had a choice.

The party flows around me and I sip a tepid beer from a can and drag on a cigarette. The warm beer tastes horrible, but I want to blend in, look like I belong with the group.

A massive set of speakers is blaring out REM. Mac sits in the middle of a dilapidated leather couch surrounded by admiring women. It's just like my fantasies. Except he doesn't look up. He doesn't even notice me.

There's no sign of Baz and Jenna. They were the ones Tully and I talked to the most, the ones we got to know a little bit, the only ones who aren't complete strangers. It's only now that they're not here I realise I'd been looking forward to seeing them again.

"I wonder where Baz and Jenna are?" Tully sits down on the window ledge beside me. 

This time it was Felice who invited Tully. I hope she didn't ask him for me. She certainly didn't ask him for herself.

"You didn't have to come," I tell him.

Tully smiles back at me. "Wouldn't have missed it for the world."

There is something in his tone, not flirting exactly, but something, a softness, or perhaps I'm imagining it.

In one way I wish he wasn't there. I'd stand a better chance of getting Mac's attention without Tully hovering around me. But, in another way, it's a relief to have somebody to talk to.

"Not drinking?" I ask as he takes a sip from a can of coke.

"Can't, I'm driving."

"Really?" I'm surprised he has a license. Beside Mac, he seems just a boy –– young, immature, naive. "How old are you?"