Purple Hearts Read online

  We caught each other’s eyes. Hers were a little wide, panicked, like mine, her lips trying to suppress laughter. “I love you, too!” she cried, and the call ended.

  I let out a slow, quiet sigh of relief as Rooster went to get something from his bag.

  Next to me, Frankie snickered. “Nice one.”

  Cassie

  I hung up with Luke and immediately pulled out my phone to cancel on Toby. Toby giving me the cookbook turned into him asking me out for drinks, and me somehow saying yes. But how was I supposed to move directly from saying “I love you” to my fake husband to going on a date-that-might-not-be-a-date? But when I pulled up his number, I reread our text message exchange again.

  So what do you think?

  After we had hooked up the first time, Toby had been the one to say he wasn’t looking for anything serious. I had told him I was fine with that, and from then on it was an unspoken agreement that I would occasionally hook up with him after practice.

  Why the sudden penchant for traditional romance?

  He wrote back right away, I’ve been wanting to hang for a while.

  Hang?

  Date? Go on one?

  So if I say yes, then what? I’d realized this could be read as a flirtation tactic. But I’d also honestly meant it. I had enough ambiguous male figures in my life. I was stalling.

  I would say how about Thursday night?

  He had basically saved my life. I didn’t feel so much that I owed him a date, because that was icky, but more that I was genuinely curious. What the heck would we talk about? The album? Nora? The state of our country? Plus we’d already slept together and not talked about it. I’d doubted this could be any more awkward. Ok, I typed.

  Rad.

  Rad, I had repeated, not sure whether I was making fun of him.

  I’ll pick you up at seven, he’d texted. Thinking we can eat like three steaks each, and then take naps, how does that sound?

  I laughed, as I had done the first time I’d read it. Sounds perfect, I had written. Meat and naps. You really know the way to my heart.

  I hadn’t been on a date for a while. I’d kind of forgotten how. When Nora and I went on “dates” we would usually spend the whole time talking across from each other with our mouths full at Mai Thai, fantasizing about ways we would murder John Mayer.

  I called her. She picked up on the first ring.

  When I told her, she screamed. “Toby Masters? Our little drummer boy?”

  I sighed. “Yeah.”

  “But why?”

  I thought of his long hair, his gap-toothed smile, his gushing compliments after shows. “He’s nice. He’s funny.”

  “So are lots of human beings.”

  “But most human beings don’t ask me out.”

  She laughed. “Probably because you spend all of your time playing piano and scheming the army for benefits.”

  “Yeah, the timing isn’t great . . .” I started.

  “Uh, yeah, no,” Nora said, her voice dry. “You get fake-married and all of a sudden you want to lock down your fuck buddy? Is this a contagious disease I should worry about?”

  “No, no,” I said, forcing a laugh.

  I was quiet, trying to quench the fire in my stomach with a sip of wine. Of course Luke was a factor. Maybe I’m trying to see what a normal relationship looks like so I can use my experience to fool the army police. Is that what I was really doing? No. And what if I actually got hurt? I changed the subject.

  “What kind of questions do I ask? Like, am I supposed to ask what his favorite color is? Or, like, what his relationship is like with his mother?”

  “Ask him to come in earlier after the bridge on ‘Too Much.’ ”

  “Seriously, Nora.”

  “Seriously, Cassie,” she echoed. “Do whatever you want. You’re a queen. Toby’s lucky to have you.”

  I smiled. “He doesn’t ‘have me’ yet. But, yeah. It’s been a while since I’ve been liked. Like, actually liked,” I said.

  “Awww—”

  “I’m experimenting,” I interrupted, feeling my face flush.

  “K. Well, good luck, Dr. Kinsey. Don’t fuck with our drummer. Seriously, Cass. Band comes first.”

  “I know.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  We said good-bye and hung up.

  I checked my lipstick in the camera. I checked my blood sugar to make sure nothing would happen like in the greenroom at the Skylark. I put on Nicki Minaj. When I was full-on rapping along to “Favorite,” Toby texted that he was downstairs. I turned off the music.

  I opened the door and he smiled wide. “Hi, good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, too,” I said. I slipped on my Converses, waiting.

  He was still standing in the doorway, taking a big breath. “This is weird.”

  I laughed, covering a sigh of relief. “It’s not that weird, but, yeah, it’s weird.”

  “We’ll improvise. I’m supposed to, like, present you with a gift from my people, right?”

  “After we sing the ceremonial mating song, yes.”

  “Fuck it, let’s go eat.”

  • • •

  An hour later we were sitting on a curb outside of Lulu B’s, talking with our mouths full of bahn mi. After dinner, we’d go to a show at Swan Dive.

  He was telling me a story about a time when a venue manager in Tennessee accidentally double booked a night, and his old band got scheduled to play at the same time as a Christian rock band.

  “We did the only thing we could,” he said. “We played.”

  “You kicked them out?” I asked, laughing.

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s not very punk. It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said, looking away from me with a smile.

  “No one said you had to be punk,” I told him.

  “Well, they were a Christian rock band, we were a rock band, so we decided to play songs we both knew.”

  “Which were?”

  “Creed.”

  I almost spit out the bite I had just taken. Creed’s success was baffling to anyone in music, probably even Creed. Their sound was basically constipated-Kurt-Cobain-meets-youth-pastor-trying-to-be-cool.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, trying to keep it together. “I’m laughing with you.”

  “No one wants to admit they know all the words to ‘Arms Wide Open.’ ”

  I imitated Scott Stapp, the lead singer, and it was his turn to spit out sandwich.

  I took him in, trying to match the drummer with benefits I knew against the guy I had yet to know, the guy who was taking me on a surprisingly good date. Toby had grown up in a country song in Arkansas. His dad was a trucker, his mother a waitress, and he had basically raised himself. He never went to college, opting to take an apprenticeship with a well-known sculptor instead. He became a drummer when one of his fellow line cooks at Denny’s wanted to form a band. His car’s name was Sergio, which Toby pronounced “Surge-ya.”

  Things going for him:

  He didn’t ask me if it was all right if we sat on the curb, he just went ahead and sat, a paper-wrapped, greasy sandwich in each hand.

  He could wear the shit out of some boot-cut jeans.

  The boy could talk music. Because we were always practicing or otherwise-ing, I’d never known how much.

  “. . . well, it’s not that I’m opposed to Jeff Tweedy’s sobriety, it’s just that I don’t know how you could ever make another masterpiece like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot without being completely messed up. I mean, think about it, even the songs themselves were drunk. Drony and rambly and full of this electricity that you don’t get with the measured, composed country ditties in Sky Blue Sky . . .”

  “Mm-hmm,” I said into my sandwich. The thing was: He was right. Or rather, I agreed with him. We’re never going to get another Yankee Hotel Foxtrot out of Jeff Tweedy. The world was different then. Alternative rock had been clamoring for anything wi
th substance post-Nirvana.

  And he could discuss, at length, Portishead’s Roseland NYC Live, one of the greatest fifty-seven minutes of music that has ever taken place.

  “. . . it was the orchestra that did it, though. I mean, it would have been great with just the band, but, oh man, when it tunes up at the beginning.”

  “I get chills.”

  “Me, too.”

  I motioned for him to go on. I would wait to throw in my two cents once we circled back to Portishead. Or Björk.

  I wasn’t obsessing over aligning my opinions with his. I wasn’t trying to prove myself, because he knew me. I wasn’t performing. The only thing I had to prove to anyone would come in the form of the songs we were writing. The Loyal had played every night for the past two weeks and we’d started to record rough versions of our songs on GarageBand.

  “Ready to see this?” Toby asked, crumpling up his sandwich wrapper. “It’s going to be wild.”

  “Can’t wait,” I replied.

  When we stood, he took my arm like we were British gentry, and we laughed.

  As we parked on Red River Street, we could already hear the show beating through the entrance.

  The duo was called Hella, and was more noise rock than anything I liked, but had the dynamic sound of a band of six. I closed my eyes, rocking back and forth with the dips and switches of the drumming. This drummer took me to the forest, but instead of foraging for notes, new plant life was sprouting in front of me, leaves and petals on fire with color: 9s, 7s, 5s, all over the place.

  I opened my eyes to look over at Toby, whose eyes were closed, too, long brown hair behind his ears, unaware of anything but the music. For a second I thought of Luke, and the way he looked off into the distance somewhere, his thoughts in a faraway place. I wondered what he thought about.

  “This is fun,” I said into Toby’s ear, calling above the noise. “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”

  He looked amused at the prospect, and brought my hand to his mouth, kissing it. Then he leaned close to my neck, his warm breath sending shivers down my back. “You tell me.”

  Luke

  Sometimes, when we were high into the hills where the roads stopped, I’d jog ahead, my feet digging into the ground because of the fifty extra pounds of ammo on my back. It was mostly scrub and rocks, but when you’re rolling through the landscape long enough, you start to notice the difference between light brown and dark brown and red brown, between opium and cotton, the difference between 100 and 105 degrees. Out of the city we’d hit tobacco or sugar beet or poppy fields. We’d pass donkeys or camels on the road, or other vehicles whose horns played a little song each time they sounded. Depending on who was driving or who was riding, we’d pause at prayer time. Our interpreter Malik would get out and face east as he bowed his head on the road.

  It’s hard to run when you’ve got to gear up practically everywhere you go, but I found ways. I started to get up before the heat hit to run around the makeshift track at the FOB that some hardcore marathoners had worn into the earth. A few of them did something called shadow runs, where they timed themselves running the same number of miles as a race back in the States. They got T-shirts and water stations and everything.

  I preferred to run alone. Most of our days were hard and long, too hot or too cold, hours and hours waiting on the decisions of our superiors. Alone, running, was the only time when I had control. I could run for as long as I wanted. I could escape into my running dreams.

  I imagined I had returned home to Texas, running at the high school track in Buda. I listed jobs in my head that I could do, as unrealistic as I wanted. Firefighter. Gym teacher. Radio DJ. I composed letters to my brother and his wife and my nephew, which I tried to remember as I wrote them later in my Moleskine and mailed them off. I wrote letters to Cassie in my mind and then got nervous when I went to write them down. But I’d send one soon.

  When I’d return to our room, Frankie would be Skyping with Elena, or in the community room playing video games with Rooster, or we’d have a briefing before a mission, and he’d have brought me some toast and a warm, dusty bottle of water if I didn’t have time to eat before we had to go.

  Sometimes we annoyed the shit out of one another. Sometimes Rooster snored and we had to throw pillows at him. Sometimes Frankie had to yell at me to get my laundry done because there wasn’t enough ventilation to handle the smell of sweaty clothes.

  But we did everything together. We got the same food poisoning, we hit the floor at the same time if there was an explosion close by, we went to the Hindu barber together in Lashkar Gah, watching the muted Bollywood videos while we got a shave.

  It was like having brothers. Friends. It was like having a life.

  Cassie

  Behind me, Toby was wailing on 7/8. Nora and I got closer to our mics, poised, bouncing, looking at each other, waiting to come in. He paused, dipped into 6/8, and we stepped into the forest, breaking down a G-minor chord, hocketing like birds, until I opened my eyes and we hit the full F so hard I almost lost my breath. We’d been working on this technique for a month, and it came and passed as easy as water. It was October, four weeks since our last show, and we were back at the Skylark, sharing the bill with Popover.

  Every day had crystallized. Every day I would:

  Wake up, prick myself to check blood sugar.

  Make something that wouldn’t kill me. Crack an egg and whisk it with one tablespoon of milk. Sprinkle in some garlic powder and ground pepper.

  A slice of whole grain toast topped with fat-free margarine and a plum.

  A small bowl of bran cereal with a half cup of low-fat milk (or sometimes I’d use unsweetened almond milk or unsweetened soy milk, which had fewer carbs and calories per serving than regular milk).

  Top the cereal with fresh berries if I hadn’t spent too much on records at End of an Ear.

  Walk at least two miles down to South Congress or to the university, sometimes with Toby, most of the time alone, listening to various playlists.

  Midmorning, check my blood sugar.

  Play and write.

  Lunchtime, check blood sugar.

  Mix together some cooked quinoa, white beans, chopped bell pepper, carrots, and broccoli to make a grain salad. Toss with some olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

  Or canned tuna, light mayo, diced celery, lemon juice, and freshly ground pepper.

  Or a whole wheat tortilla wrap with rotisserie chicken, hummus, sun-dried tomatoes, feta cheese, and greens.

  Or a hard-boiled egg, with a peach if the blood sugar allowed, maybe some string cheese and five, count ’em, five whole wheat crackers.

  Play and write.

  Midafternoon, check blood sugar.

  Before work, check blood sugar. Drive to work. Sling cocktails. Notice how I wasn’t as tired by midnight. Notice how I wasn’t as fazed by customers. How my car was cleaner. How I was beginning to form another layer of calluses on my fingertips from the needle.

  Toby always helped me remember before I went to bed. Sometimes he brought almonds or a nectarine to rehearsal, just in case I forgot. He was so tender.

  Tonight, The Loyal’s set was so tight we had barely talked to the audience between songs, launching into new styles and tangents without explaining this was “something new that we were trying,” not trying to make them like us but just releasing the sound that had lived in our heads like a hungry animal. Now people were crowding the stage, almost on top of the amps. We were a different band altogether.

  “Dance!” Nora yelled on a downbeat, and we swung in again on the 6/8. Like a miracle, they did. The shadows jerked and twisted and bobbed their heads, spraying sweat and spilling their drinks. I looked back at Toby and he was in ecstasy, lifting shoulders up and down with the snare, eyes everywhere like a revivalist speaking in tongues. I signaled for him to loop around the last part of the chorus again. He read me, instinctively slowing so that I could extend the notes and growl the final verse again. Yes. Exactly what I wa
nted.

  The bodies fell into a sway, and we thanked them. They screamed their approval.

  Backstage, we descended into a damp, smelly hug.

  “What the hell, dudes?” Nora said, out of breath. “What the hell did we just do to the masses?”

  “We slayed them,” Toby said, his arm sliding around my waist as we pressed our foreheads together.

  “We did,” I said, and kissed his cheek. “And with what’s probably going to be our album.”

  “Yes,” Toby said, pulling me closer. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “And Cass survived this one!” Nora joked.

  We laughed. Nora went to grab a celebratory beer. Toby jogged over to peek his head out to the front, to see if the crowd had cleared enough so we could take down our instruments.

  I flopped down on one of the greenroom’s ratty couches and took it in. I had survived. There wasn’t a second when I felt too tired or too fried. I’d begun to think of my diabetes like one of my more demanding plants. One of those expensive, rare flowers you had to talk to and water and move in and out of the shade, except now I had no choice, because it lived inside me.

  Toby crashed half on top of me, half on top of the cushions, and we kissed, the rush of the show still ringing in our ears. When we leaned back, we laughed a little. Toby picked a piece of hair off my shirt, suddenly shy. Being public was still new. But so good. I thought of his long arms bashing the beats, drawing the eyes of every woman in the front row. I kissed him again.

  “We probably sold it out, huh,” I said.

  Toby nodded, face lifted, too happy for words. We sold out the Skylark. My diabetes wasn’t a total monster. Everything was falling into place. I couldn’t wait to tell Luke.

  To: Cassie Salazar

  From: PFC Luke Morrow

  Subject: Hello

  Hello Cassie

  Just thought I would test this out. I don’t see why this wouldn’t go through but it seems crazy that I can write this from a laptop in the middle of [REDACTED]. shows you how good i am at the internet. You don’t even want to know how long it took me to set even this up. Next thing you know I will be yelling at you to get off my lawn.