Loud is How I Love You Read Online Free Page B

with an entire spaghetti meal, including garlic knots and salad and meatballs that we all sat and ate right in my dorm room, picnic-style. And through all of that, Travis never left my side.
    After going through the assorted travails one goes through in their later formative years with a support system like these guys, it’s damned painful to even imagine life without them around. In fact, I can’t bring myself to even try. And that bond that we’ve got going on is a part of our sound, too. You can hear it when we play. We play like we’ve been playing for ten years already and we know it. We’re good. If we just keep it together and keep working, we’re going to make it, and that’s what we all want more than anything.
    And that’s why I can’t keep fucking Travis, even though part of me definitely, absolutely, and positively still wants to. I can’t deny that. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it. But I can’t risk it.
    We’ve got everything to lose.

Chapter Two
    I’m in my old bedroom at Mom’s house in Flemington, the little blue cape where I grew up, where she and Granny live. The walls of my room are still that dawn-pink color I had to have when I was eight so it would match my Hello Kitty comforter set, and I can still see old Scotch tape marks in a few spots where my Cure and Gang of Four and Smiths posters hung in high school. Mom keeps my room just how I left it, minus my favorite posters and the constant pile of laundry in the corner, but my Hello Kitty comforter is still on the bed (and yes, I did sleep with it all the way through high school because I still unironically loved it). I’m glad my room is still here, but it makes me kind of sad to think of my room without me in it. It was hard enough to move out as it was, even if I’m only forty-five minutes away.
    My father died when I was fifteen and whenever I tell people this they get that sorry look in their eye and I have to decide whether to tell them not to be sorry because the man was dead to me when he walked out when I was ten. He was a guitarist, too. He played in a mid-level touring act called, ironically enough, Consequence. He died in a car accident while driving drunk, but by then we hadn’t seen or heard anything from him in five years. My mother didn’t need any more incentive to dissuade me from a career in music than that, but for better or worse I guess I was born with the bug because I got my first guitar from him the year he left and I figured out how to play it all by myself and then I couldn’t stop playing it. Much to my mother’s consternation and disappointment.
    When I got to Mom’s this afternoon, I told her that I had a headache and then felt bad because I didn’t really, I was just in a shitty mood.
    Now I’m lying on my bed while she gets the Advil. She comes in with a cold washcloth and drapes it over my forehead.
    “How was the show?” she never asks. I’m just lying here, wishing that she would. Instead I get: “When do your midterm grades come out?”
    “I don’t know,” I say. “The semester just started a few weeks ago.”
    “How do you think you’re doing?”
    “I’ll keep the scholarship.”
    “I don’t know if you understand, Emmy. If you lose that scholarship, we won’t be able to afford your senior year.”
    But I do understand. Completely. Because she never, ever lets me forget how close I came to losing it last semester when I was “too damned busy playing Madonna.”
    “Kim Gordon,” I say.
    “Who?”
    “Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth—that’s who I want to be.”
    “How about Sally Ride?”
    “Mom, I’m an English major. Not a future astronaut.”
    “Erica Jong?”
    Nothing like having expectations to live up to, that’s what I always say.
    “You’re too skinny,” she says, looking worried. “Spending too much going out to bars and not enough on food.”
    This is where I shut up because anything else coming out of my mouth is going to make more things come out of