Free Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols

spotlight—but he was ultimately responsible for all our obsessions with it. And he was the one taking this gig away from me. If he wasn’t my ally against my parents anymore, I didn’t have a friend left.
    He watched me uneasily for a moment, then added, “I’m just doing what your grandmother would have done.”
    At his mention of my grandmother, I felt a heavy shroud of failure descend across my shoulders. I wouldn’t argue with him when he invoked my grandmother. He loved her too much, living his life as if she were still around. She’d been dead since I was eight, but I remembered her as a lady who liked pretty things and propergirls and never clapped loudly enough when Julie and I performed for her, as if music wasn’t what she was after.
    “Dinner’s ready,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down at the table, and you can tell me about work.”
    Usually I helped him with dinner when I came in. If he was offering to serve me, he felt bad about forbidding my gig.
    I wasn’t sure how far I could push him, though. We were close, but I still couldn’t pitch a fit to him like I had in the past to my parents. Getting angry and rebelling against my granddad because he wouldn’t let me play a gig, which I wasn’t supposed to play anyway, was another in a long line of reasons my parents could give for pulling the plug on my future.
    “You know, Granddad . . .” There was no way I could sit down at the table and eat with him now. But I wanted him to know I appreciated the dinner, and I was sorry he seemed so lonely without my grandmom. All I could manage was, “Not hungry,” as I ducked out of the kitchen, rounded the banister, and jogged up the stairs. I felt like a bitch—because I was one.
    As I burst into the room we pretended was my bedroom, I had an urge to chuck my fiddle, case and all, as hard as I could into the bookcase laden with sheet music and festival awards nobody had cared about in thirty years. The adrenaline rushed to my fingertips.
    Face tight with an expression so ugly I could feel it, I closed the door behind me, carefully set my fiddle case on top of the dresser, then fished my phone out of my purse to call Sam.
    First, though, I quickly scrolled through the texts from Toby that had accumulated while I was at work. Since spending Memorial Day at the lake, he’d been sending me insults when he was drunk, and apologies and pleas to see me after he’d sobered up. I’d thought about blocking him. I’d already written my fill of songs about him, and I didn’t need more material. But now he had thepower to take away my college education if my parents thought we were still together. Keeping tabs on Toby seemed like the best way to avoid him. Fear of him had consumed big parts of my week, but I’d obsessed about him less today, since I’d met Sam.
    And now my night with Sam had gone south, too. I texted him. Seconds later, my phone rang in my hands.
    “What do you mean, you can’t go?” He sounded outraged.
    “My granddad doesn’t want me to play a gig in the District.” That was as much of the truth as I could tell him without explaining way more about my sad life than I wanted to reveal to a guy I would never see again, except at the mall.
    “What about your parents?” he insisted.
    “I’m staying with my granddad this summer. Look, I can’t go. I’m sorry, Sam.” I clicked the phone off.
    At some point while I’d talked to him, I’d sunk to the floor with my back against the bed. Now I looked around the room that wasn’t mine, used as a bedroom so long ago and piled with so much impersonal junk that I honestly wasn’t sure whether it had once been my mother’s room or one of my uncles’. The time was almost seven and the room had grown dusky, but by comparison the windows looked bright with daylight. The twilight seemed infinite in Nashville this time of year, like summer in Alaska, one day merging into another in an endless wash.
    An hour must have passed—now it