Page 102 of Levi

Old footage, a camcorder a long time ago, the color gone warm. A church. Plank walls, a few pews, a window with trees behind it. A choir in robes. The camera finds the one it came for and pushes in.

It’s Levi. Sixteen, maybe. Thin. A guitar still too big for him. He steps to the mic and sings.

I know the voice. Younger here. Cracking on the high notes. Going low and breaking open on a word. No one’s fixed it yet.

There’s raw emotion on his face when he sings. It hurts to watch. The pain is already inside him.

The clip ends on a frozen frame. Levi mid-word, eyes shut.

“He was sixteen there,” Benji says. “A label saw a tape like that. Signed him at seventeen. Took him to Nashville and—” he gestures at the screen, the stadiums, the women “—built all of it on top of him. Seventeen, Dante.”

Last night he told me himself. My dad signed me over to him when I was seventeen. I don’t say it to Benji.

The anger has nowhere left to stand.

Benji watches me. He doesn’t make a joke of it. He knows it hit home. He shuts the laptop.

“Now you know everything I know. I’m not going to tell you what to do with it, and I’d like some credit for that, because I have opinions and I am sitting on every single one of them. I didn’t stay up all night to hand you a verdict. I stayed up because you’ve been walking around with the wrong picture of him in your head, and I couldn’t stand it, and this was the only thing I could think of to do with my hands.”

He stands, ties the robe, goes for the coffee. He’s at the counter, back to me, pouring, when he says, “But I thought he had a real nice voice. Didn’t you think so?”

I could say no. His back’s turned. He wouldn’t see the lie on my face.

“Yeah,” I say. “I did.”

Chapter 39: Levi

Dante didn’t say a word the entire drive back to the house this morning. Neither did I. Nothing to say that wouldn’t have come out the wrong way. And he drove me in the dark unshaved for once, the first shadow I’ve ever seen on his jaw. Evidence of another bad night of me printed right there on his face, and he didn’t take time to fix it.

It looks good on him though. That’s the thing I had no business noticing on the ride and noticed anyway. The pressed man gone rough at the edges, and my hands wanting to know what that jaw feels like now. Even gutted, even sure I’ve lost him, the wanting doesn’t come with an off switch.

But he made the coffee, two of the little strong ones, same as that first week when I wouldn’t touch mine and he drank both. This time I drank mine. Gladly.

The house is the same as last night, in the bad hour before his headlights came down the side cut. Every blind and door dragged shut. I go around and open everything.

My phone’s on the island where I left it, still telling Freddie exactly where I’m standing. I left it here on purpose again, so the dot would sit still and nobody’d come looking.

I pick it up. Open the tracking app. My thumb’s over the button that kills it, and I can’t make it move.

My heart’s going like I’m about to walk onto a stage. This is the stupidest thing I could do, and there’s a price I can’t see yet but will. Freddie will know inside the hour. My mind is screaming the old way, don’t, don’t, he’ll…

I’m sick to death of this shit.

I delete the app.

It’s gone in a second. A little box asks me to confirm I’m sure. I say yes and his eyes aren’t there anymore. On Freddie’s phone a dot that’s held steady over this house for two weeks blinks out. He’ll see it fast, that’s the design. Let him. I cut the eye out and didn’t run.

And then the strangest thing. Nothing happens.

I don’t go loose. My body doesn’t know how, it was built not to, and I’ll still sleep in my clothes tonight with one ear up. But unwatched. For one morning, unwatched. I didn’t know how loud the watching was until it quit.

It doesn’t last.

I knew it wouldn’t.

Freddie doesn’t call. That’s how I know how bad I’ve rattled him. Freddie always calls first. He runs me by phone. There are tires on the white street before I’ve thought about breakfast, a car door slamming, fast footsteps and then he’s at the open door.

He got dressed in a hurry. First thing I notice, and it tells me plenty, because Freddie doesn’t do anything in a hurry. The collar’s wrong, his color’s off, he came straight here because the dot disappeared.