Page 39

He smirks. “Seriously?”

“No? Drums, then?”

He unlocks his front door and gestures for me to go in ahead of him.

“Do I look like a percussionist to you?” he asks.

I snort. “Percussionist? Okay, you nerd. You’re obviously not a drummer if that’s what you call it.”

He closes the front door behind us but doesn’t move away from it. I walk into his living room, then turn around to face him. He watches me, his mouth curved up. “You don’t know what I do, do you?”

“Well, don’t keep me guessing. What do you play?” I strum a fake guitar. “Bassist? Or are you more of an acoustic band?”

He laughs. “If you must know, I played the saxophone in high school.”

Now I’m even more confused than I was when he told me he had band practice. “What does that have to do with now?”

He shakes his head, still laughing.

I pick up a pillow from his couch and throw it at him. “Stop laughing at me! What am I missing?”

He catches the pillow and throws it back at me.

“Wait,” I say, ducking out of the way. “Don’t tell me you’re actually in a famous band and I didn’t know I was hanging out with a celebrity all this time.”

“I’m a band teacher, you dork,” he says. When I frown, he feels compelled to continue: “As in high school varsity band. You know, like a marching band?”

“Oh. Wait, really?”

He nods.

“I had no idea you were a teacher.”

“That I am.” He finally steps away from the front door and joins me by the couch.

“So you, like, go to school every day?”

“That’s generally what a teacher does,” he says.

“And you hang out with teenagers… willingly?” I drop myself onto his couch, which is surprisingly comfortable. I pull my feet up so that I’m curled up against the arm rest.

He steps over and sits down in the middle, only inches from my feet. I turn my body to face him.

“Hang out with them? No,” he says. “Although band students are surprisingly more tolerable than most other high school students.”

“I thought you were a techie like Ryan,” I tell him.

He shrugs. “I was for a while, but I always wanted to teach, so I switched gears. And I love music.”

I look down at his leg. It’s so close that he’s almost touching me. I can’t handle being this close to him. I push my hair out of my face, and then I stand up and wander his living room. I examine his choice of artwork on the walls and the books on his shelves. There’s a photo of him with three men who look like clones of him at different stages of his future. Dad, grandpa, and great-grandpa, I’m guessing. Next to the photo is a painting of a giraffe taking a dump. If this were my painting, I would probably hang it in the bathroom instead.

I look over my shoulder at him. He’s still sitting in the middle of the couch. “So, you decided to quit a job that probably made you at least six figures a year and instead picked one of the most notoriously low-paid professions in the US?”

“I still dabble in tech on the side,” he says. “I’ve helped Ryan with a few projects.”

“Is that how you can afford to live here all by yourself?” I haven’t seen any sign that someone else lives here.

He looks around the room. “Yeah. It’s a bit much for only one person,” he says with a shrug.