Free American Goth by J. D. Glass

hurtful as it rose from my throat while I forced myself not to think about anything or anyone else who might have had a different experience. “They don’t actively mistreat her—they ignore her. They named Fran for her mother, then forgot her.” Ah, fuck it, I thought, and speared some of the leafy stuff onto my fork. “She’ll have a much better time with us,” I assured Elizabeth, then focused on swallowing the bitter taste that filled my mouth.
    With my uncle’s help and guidance, we made arrangements to have the house I’d grown up in appraised by a real-estate company for possible sale, arranged for storage for most of the contents of the house, and the items of importance that had been left behind were shipped to the London address in Soho on Dean Street, a large two-story apartment above a shop, the shop, as he said.
    When we finally arrived there after a four-hour drive on a late-August afternoon, it was to discover a place that was much less industrial than the part of Leeds proper the other shop was in, and completely unlike the suburb the house was surrounded by. Soho itself was a little seedy: a complex mix of music, art, and sex, though to my eyes and senses it was more of a vibe, a feel to the air, than anything open or advertised. Honestly, it reminded me of Greenwich Village in New York, and I liked it a lot.
    The new apartment, even with its two floors, wasn’t nearly as large as the house had been, though it was sizeable. It had its own entrance from the street, and a flight of steps led from the front entryway up to another door that led into the apartment proper. My room, a nice-sized sunny space painted in stark white, was on the floor above.
    “Now that you’re all settled in, you should go out, explore the city,” Cort said over breakfast a few mornings later as he passed milk over to me. “Make some friends.”
    “You need to have a real life, a full one—not everything is about training,” Elizabeth added in response to the questioning glance I gave them.
    “Uh…okay?” I answered. I wondered just exactly how I was supposed to go about doing that a little while later as I sat on the bed in my room with my guitar.
    I hit the tuning fork and let it vibrate against the body, matching the tone to the harmonic as I turned the gear, and in my mind’s eye I saw Nina sitting next to me, her complete focus on the note that rang through the air.
    I played every harmonic to finish tuning and ran my fingers across the fretboard, reviewing scales I could play with my eyes closed, but as I did, I watched her hands pluck through the same beginning chords, the strain along her forearms as they adjusted to the angle, the pressure, the simple playing… I couldn’t, I just couldn’t anymore, and those sharp blades I’d used in Leeds still sat in my drawer, but I didn’t want to use them, and didn’t want to give up music either: it had been such a big part of my life for so long.
    I fled my guitar, my temptation, and my room to run straight down the hall, past the spare bedroom to the library. I needed to do something, something different, and it hit me as I sat immersed in a text with some tunes I enjoyed playing in the background. The solution was obvious: if, as Uncle Cort and Elizabeth had said, I was learning to bridge, to walk between worlds, then as above, so below: I’d switch from guitar to bass, the bridge that moved between the melody and the beat, something different than what I’d done before, but still taking advantage of the skills I’d spent years building. I told Uncle Cort.
    After picking through some ads in the newspaper and the phone book, then several phone inquiries to discover what various shops carried and what they knew about what they had in stock, one place sounded both reputable and knowledgeable to me. “Electrohill,” I told my uncle, “they know what they’re about.”
    “North London it is, then,” he agreed, and packed me off with money and a map once