The Education of Hailey Kendrick - Eileen Cook [56]
24
I swallowed hard to keep myself from throwing up. I knew I didn’t like surprises. I had assumed Drew would have planned some sort of physical activity. Something that he thought would scare me. Bungee jumping off a bridge, ski jumping, or walking over hot coals. Now I realized there was something worse than putting myself in a life-and-death situation.
Karaoke.
A woman on the stage was singing some Top 40 song. The sound coming out of her was what I imagined would come out of livestock if you hooked them up to a car battery. More people would have been laughing at her, except she was doing this bump and grind number that was too hard-core for most porn movies, so the men in the audience were distracted. The bar wasn’t like anyplace I’d been before. I’d been to a few of the nightclubs in LA with Tristan, but they were all red-rope affairs where you didn’t get into the building if you weren’t already on the A-list. This place looked to be a bit less discriminating. There were a few people in the back of the room that I suspected didn’t even have a pulse. They appeared to be passed out in their beers. While the clubs I’d been to spent millions on décor and imported glass and marble from Europe, this place had a décor that seemed to be themed around plug-in beer signs.
I shifted in the seat. My glass of Diet Coke was making a puddle of condensation on the table in front of me. Drew jammed another nacho into his mouth. He’d ordered them with triple jalapeño peppers. It was a wonder his mouth didn’t start shooting flames. He pushed the laminated pages back over to me.
“You still haven’t picked a song,” he said with salsa in his teeth.
“I’m not sure there’s anything I like.” I held the song list between two fingers. There was something sticky on the pages. I had no desire to even think what it might be.
“There’s over two hundred songs on there. You can’t find anything? I’m all for being discriminating, but at some point it becomes picky.”
“I’m not sure I should be singing at all. My throat’s been a bit sore. I might be coming down with something.” I held my hand to my throat and tried to look wan.
Drew laughed. “Do not go into a life of crime. You suck at lying. You’re not sick, and your throat is fine. Either you pick a song or I pick a song for you. If you want to pick a duet, I’ll do it with you if you’re too nervous to be up there by yourself. Or I could pick something super-embarrassing and sing it to you.”
I slouched down in my seat, pouting. I pulled the list over and began looking through it again. Most of the duets were love songs. No way was I going to stand up in that bar and sing “Endless Love” with Drew.
“I don’t see why I have to do a song at all. Why can’t we just watch other people sing? That’s fun.” I gestured to the group of guys who had taken the stage and were belting out “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC. One guy was attempting to use his leg as a guitar. He fell over a stool, but popped right back up.
“Don’t you want to be a part of things?” Drew’s hand tapped the table to the beat of the music.
“Not if being a part of things means humiliating myself.”
“There are two kinds of people in this world. People who are a part of what happens and people who sit back and watch other people make it happen. Life isn’t supposed to be a spectator sport. It’s supposed to be messy.” Drew took my hand and leaned closer. His hands were rough with calluses. “Tell me the truth. When you were a kid, did you always color inside the lines?”
I went to pull my hand away, but he held it tighter. His hands were warm. I looked around to see if anyone noticed us touching. With my luck there would be some magazine reporter in the bar who would take a picture. “Coloring in the lines is the whole point. That’s why they have lines,” I said.
“That’s where you’re wrong. The lines are there just to hold you in. Like a prison. Think what you might have created if there hadn’t been any lines. To quote my friend Thoreau: ‘I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,