Ashley touched my arm and I tensed, but then she smiled at me and I tried to relax. God, I was wound up tight these days. Everything just seemed to bother me lately. Spinner and Jimmy especially, but Marco’s whining was getting on my nerves. This friendship with Ashley was kind of trying, too. I wanted more. I guess I didn’t deserve more, not after what I did to her.

I had my camera and figured I could take a few shots of this thing before we played, maybe get them into the school paper. Or maybe the real newspaper, but was a high school cheerleader car wash really news? Who gave a shit? No one. But I snapped pictures, and I remembered when taking pictures had been my thing. Trapping everything in the photo, making it look how I wanted it to look. Yeah. It was kind of delusional.

Spinner. Fuck. He was all over Manny and it just made me so mad, I wanted to go over and shove him away from her. I wanted to say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Spin?” But I didn’t. Manny wasn’t my business this year. But I snapped a few pictures of them.

So we played a few songs and we screwed up every one of them. I looked over at Ash in a panic every time we fucked up, and she plastered a smile on her face.

“Just keep smiling, no one will notice,” she said, so I smiled and continued singing, and continued hearing Jimmy and Marco miss notes and skip the tempo and continued to listen to Spinner dropping the beat. God, we sucked.

After that disaster we went to Marco’s house for some Italian food. His mom looked at us with her sad look. We were all angry. We were all irritated with each other. Well, maybe not Ashley and Marco.

“That sucked,” I said, taking a bite of something that was pasta and cheese and green seasoning. It was good. I could drown my sorrows in Italian food.

“Shut up, Craig. Jesus, you’re so negative,” Jimmy said, and Spinner agreed with him.

“You thought that was good?” I said.

“It wasn’t so bad,” Jimmy. He was defiant.

“Not so bad? We didn’t play one single song the right way! It was so amateur it was unbelievable! It was the worst single gig we’ve ever played,”

“So all this complaining is helping?” Spinner said, wiping mozzarella cheese from his chin.

“Guys-” Marco piped in with his patented whine. I whirled on him.

“Marco! You can’t smooth over everything all the time! We screwed this up, and we have to deal with it-”

“Are we going to deal with it by you yelling at us?” Jimmy said, setting his fork down with a clang.

“Look, we should discuss this,” Ashley said, and put her hand on my arm. We were connected by this circuit of electricity, “but not now, okay? Let’s just eat and not think about it for now, okay, Craig?”

“Yeah, fine,” I said, sounding sullen. I couldn’t seem to help it. My moods were all over the place. I was either annoyed as hell with everyone around me or else I felt almost deliriously happy, like when Ashley looked at me a certain way or touched my arm, which she liked to do, or hugged me since we were friends now and friends hugged. I couldn’t seem to just calm down, to just chill for once. I was always on edge.