Kyle copied the B-flat-major diagram into a new document and printed it. Then, with “Song Against Sex” still coursing through his head, Kyle took the guitar in his hands.
For the next week and a half, Kyle spent at least a few hours a day in the den, a small, dark room at the corner of the house farthest from Starlee’s back step. First, he worked on his transition from the F chord to the B flat major right below it. Getting his fingers into the right shape from a resting position was one thing; going from F to B flat major and back again proved quite another. To play “Song Against Sex,” Kyle had to slow the song to a fitful crawl. He hardly recognized it.
When he could execute each chord change in a second or two, Kyle started singing the song as he played it. After a few days, he had the lyrics memorized. He was still singing and playing the up-tempo rocker at the pace of a country ballad, but he was playing it through without any stops and starts. And when his voice strained to reach a high note or his fingers touched strings they shouldn’t have, Kyle’s version of “Song Against Sex” captured some of the rawness of the original, and he felt something surge inside him.
After ten days, Kyle knew he had “Song Against Sex” down well enough to play along with the recording. But the family’s only CD player was in his father’s computer, within earshot—and eyeshot—of Starlee’s back step. That fact made him hesitate, but Kyle decided he’d worked too hard not to hear his guitar backed by the drums, bass, vocals, and trombone of Neutral Milk Hotel, and that, when he got down to it, he wanted Starlee to hear him play. So he sat on his parents’ bed, waiting for those guys to leave Starlee’s house and for her music to stop. The boldness of it all excited Kyle. What are you doing, man? he asked himself, smiling. There were reasons not to make such a bald attempt to impress Starlee, and Kyle was aware of them, but he convinced himself that school’s beginning—just three days away—offered a kind of clean slate. With bells and homework and rumors and football games, would Starlee even remember whether or not he’d played? Would Kyle?
Kyle wondered who had made the music that filled the air between Starlee’s house and his own today. He was pretty sure it wasn’t Neutral Milk Hotel. I’ll ask her later, Kyle thought. But then he remembered that Starlee had told him not to listen to anything going on in her house, and asking would mean admitting he’d been listening. Before Kyle could lift a phrase from the lyrics and search for it, the music stopped. A minute later, the Camaro started up and rumbled away.
Kyle sat motionless on the bed, breathing through his mouth, waiting for what would come next. He heard Starlee’s back door squeeze out of its heat-swollen frame and the screen door creak on its hinges. Her bare leg hit the concrete first and the rest of her followed. She was wearing red shorts and a gray t-shirt one size too small. She lit a cigarette, and when she’d exhaled her first deep drag, Kyle pushed himself to his feet and turned up the volume on his father’s computer speakers. Then he grabbed his guitar, sat down on the rolling desk chair, and rested the guitar on his thigh. As he moved the cursor to the play button with his right hand, he made the shape of an F chord with his left.
During the ten seconds of feedback and chatter at the beginning of the recording, Kyle took his white Fender pick in hand and held it above the sound hole. The drummer clicked off the rhythm with his sticks, and the guitarist began to play. And when the singer came in four bars later, Kyle played his own guitar, spreading a layer of clear acoustic tones above the fuzz of the recording. He stared hard at the fingerboard, making sure to hit only the strings he was supposed to this time. He wanted Starlee to hear he could play.
After verse one, Kyle wondered if she could hear him at all. He’d set the volume loud enough to get her attention, but was the recording drowning him out? What if she thought he was simply blasting her own music back at her through his father’s computer speakers? What would she make of that?
Kyle looked out the window and found Starlee leaning her shoulder against the back of her house and facing his own. Then he mangled an F and returned his eyes to the fingerboard until he was back in sync with the song. When he looked up again, Starlee was staring at the ground between their houses. Her forelock hung in front of her face, keeping Kyle from getting a look at her eyes. She wasn’t smoking anymore. She was just standing on her back step, listening.
As the final verse began, Kyle’s stomach flooded with emotion and he strummed so hard he worried a string might break and blind him. “Song Against Sex” built to its climax—the speaker’s threat to light himself on fire—and Kyle played loud and hard and clean until the song petered out with three lazy descending notes from the trombone.
When he looked up, Starlee was gone.
Kyle leaned his guitar against the desk and wiped his sweaty face with the front of his t-shirt. Now he was the kind of kid who taught himself strange songs and slyly serenaded older girls. Maybe he always had been but hadn’t known it. Maybe his thing made him who he really was.
Kyle spent the following morning playing B flat major and F chords without any rhythm or purpose. He glanced out the window every few minutes, hoping Starlee would come out of her house to smoke or cool off or take out the garbage. He was sure that she would see him differently now and wanted to feel her eyes on him.
By that afternoon, Kyle still hadn’t been seen by Starlee, and he feared that whatever good his performance had done him was waning. To take the edge off his impatience, Kyle carried his guitar to the den, leaned it against the arm of the yarn-upholstered couch, and turned on the television. Every few minutes, he muted the sound, hoping to find that Starlee’s music had stopped. At four-thirty, it was still blaring. What can be taking so long? Kyle wondered.
Too antsy to sit any longer, Kyle walked out the back door and around to the front yard. The Camaro was still parked in front of Starlee’s house. It was painted in a matte-finish black, and two hubcaps were missing. All the driver’s money must be going into the rumble, Kyle thought. That must be his thing.
Suddenly Starlee’s music cut off right in the middle of a song, and her front door opened. Her two usual guests stepped out. The bigger one—they were both big—closed the door behind him. Kyle watched them as they walked toward the Camaro. When they noticed him and stopped, Kyle shifted his gaze to the house across the street.
“What are you looking at, boy?” the smaller one asked.
“Nothing,” Kyle said. He’d never noticed that the house across the street was peach-colored until now. He’d always thought it was yellow.
“Show’s over,” the bigger one said. He lowered the curved brim of his ball cap over his eyes and pulled a ring of keys from the left hip pocket of his jeans. “Run along now.”
Kyle didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either. He didn’t want to run along. He was in his own yard.
The bigger one took a step toward him. “Did you hear me, boy?”
Kyle knew the two guys would have no qualms about leaping the chain-link fence and giving him hell, so he walked toward his backyard, but slowly. The bigger one said something under his breath and the smaller one laughed. Then the engine started up, and the Camaro rumbled away.
When Kyle reached the backyard, Starlee was standing at the fence holding an unlit cigarette in her hands. Kyle felt himself get scared, more scared than he’d been of her friends.
“What are you doing talking to them?”
Her tone made him wince. “I wasn’t. They were talking to me.”
“What were you doing so close to my house?”
“Nothing.”
