Page 8 of Christmas Trees & Weak Knees

I’m too stunned and dumbfounded to process everything as it’s happening, and before I know it, my ratty old knockoff Samsonite and beat-up guitar case are tossed on the ground at my feet. I blink as a cloud of dust billows up around me when Johnny shifts the van into drive. From the front passenger seat, Ryder gives me a sympathetic “Them’s the breaks” look.

I stare at the taillights as the tour van squeals onto the main road and chugs back toward the highway on-ramp.

My eyes burn. My chest pounds. And a streetlight flickers on.

I pull out my cell phone only to find there’s no reception. Because of course there’s not.

This pit stop is the absolute pits.

Interlude

6StringJustice:

Someone got too big for his britches. IYKYK.

6StringJustice:

Pro tip—know when to trim the fat.

6StringJustice:

We’re leaner, meaner, and our sound is much cleaner. Check out our new song!

Track 1

Back to My Roots

Paisley

July

The first few weeks of summer break pass in somber tones as I sink into myself. Picasso had his Blue Period. I guess this is mine. Most of the time, it feels like the only thing I’ll ever successfully accomplish is soaking my pillow with tears of failure and frustration. But even that’s growing old.

After my onstage meltdown, I returned home with a bruised ego, a broken heart, and only a week left before high school graduation. News of my disastrous performance had spread like wildfire, and it took all that I had left in me to pretend I didn’t hear the whispers or see how everyone stared between me and their phones. Because of course someone in the audience was filming. Multiple someones. I did all I could to avoid the sympathetic looks from friends and the barely masked smirks of frenemies.

As the weeks went on, words and snippets of nebulous lyrics raced through my mind, but I forced them away. Before the incident, I would have been racing to scrawl them in the margins of my physics notebook to be copied into my lyric book later. But not anymore.

Spring showers helped wash away some of my doom-and-gloom attitude, and now the summer sun is bringing wildflowers and new bud growth to the evergreens.

As Dad likes to say, “A little hard work never hurt anybody.” And there’s plenty of work to be found at Hidden Acres, even in the offseason. There are seeds to plant. Seedlings to transplant. Trimming and mowing and soil testing and fertilizing.

Unless it’s thundering or pouring rain, my days are spent outside—the fresh air in my lungs replacing the lingering acrid scent of the ashes of my self-esteem. I work myself to exhaustion in the hopes that I’ll fall into a dead sleep instead of lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling in the darkness of my room, unable to silence the what-ifs.

What if I hadn’t crashed and burned at the concert?

What if I hadn’t skipped out on graduation?

What if I hadn’t deferred my acceptance to Tennessee State University?

(I’d wanted to drop out entirely, but Mom managed to convince me to press pause for a beat and take a gap year instead. “You shouldn’t make any major decisions when you’re sad or snacky,” she’d said, wrapping me in a bear hug and handing me a Reese’s peanut butter pumpkin left over from Halloween.)

All in all, I’m holding it together just fine.

Or as fine as can be expected, considering…

At least, that’s what I tell myself as I hike back toward the farmhouse from the grove of Murray cypress I was tagging with different colors of plastic ribbon. Blue for trees less than three feet tall. Salmon for three- to four-footers. Orange, red, yellow, green, and white for the taller ones. The spools of soft flagging tape bump against each other in the canvas satchel at my hip. The scuff of my boots over the dirt adds a beat, and my brain starts filling in the rest of the song. A bass guitar comes in with a syncopated groove and then a driving riff from a rhythm guitar.

My fingers twitch as if looking for a guitar to strum. I swallow down the cottony lump building in my throat, suddenly in need of a cool glass of water. Or maybe something stronger, like Mom’s fresh-squeezed mint lemonade.