Something Unexpected

When I came home from the tour, I was still riding the high.

I had played real concert halls with professional musicians. I had traveled on a bus, stayed in hotels, met people after shows, signed autographs, and heard audiences applaud.

For the first time, the life I had imagined didn’t feel like a dream.

It felt like a plan.

The California package had not arrived yet, but in my fifteen-year-old mind, the decision had already been made.

I was going back on the road.

I was going to travel.

Play music.

Meet interesting people.

Make records.

Become famous.

Live every part of the dream a fifteen-year-old kid with a guitar could imagine.

I wasn’t wondering whether it would happen.

I was waiting for the paperwork.

That certainty affected my attitude toward almost everything.

School seemed less important.

Homework felt like something I had to tolerate until my real life began.

The ordinary routines that had defined my world only weeks earlier began feeling like temporary inconveniences standing between me and the future I was certain awaited me.

It affected the way I treated people too.

Especially Maybe.

Before the tour, time with her had felt like the most important thing in my world. Afterward, some part of me began treating that time as something that would always be available whenever I decided to return to it.

She was still the same girl.

I was the one who had changed.

I had become cocky.

Self-important.

Far too impressed with myself and a future that had not actually happened yet.

To put it plainly, I had turned into a real little prick.

While I waited for the California package, the junior-high talent show arrived.

A few weeks earlier, I had been excited just to audition. Playing a song seemed like a good way to meet people and let the school get to know me.

Then I went on tour and, for two weeks, lived inside the dream.

Now I was supposed to get excited about playing in a junior-high talent show.

Honestly, I thought it was beneath me.

That sounds terrible.

It was terrible.

But it was also true.

One Girl in the Audience

I had been performing onstage for years before the tour.

Walking into the lights with a guitar no longer frightened me. I knew how to settle onto a stool, find the microphone, read a room, and begin.

The tour hadn’t taught me how to perform.

It had changed my idea of where performing might lead.

As I walked onto the school stage carrying my twelve-string Yamaki, I could hear people talking about it.

A twelve-string guitar was unusual enough to make an impression before I played a note. The other students were watching it—and watching me—expecting to hear what I could do with it.

I sat down on the stool and found Maybe in the audience.

She wasn’t sitting in the front row, but she was close enough that I could see her clearly.

And she was looking good.

Really good.

But a little nervous.

Maybe for herself.

Maybe for me.

Who knows?

Whatever attitude I had carried into the auditorium disappeared the moment I saw her.

I wasn’t nervous about playing.

But playing for her was a big deal.

She had never really heard me play.

Not like this.

And I was in love with her.

I may have thought the talent show was too small for the musician I imagined I was becoming, but the person sitting beyond those stage lights mattered more to me than every audience I had played for on the tour.

I didn’t need to impress the school.

I wanted to reach her.

Jim Croce understood the problem. Sometimes “the words just came out wrong,” and the only way to say I love you was in a song.

That was exactly where I was.

I could walk onto a stage without fear.

I could play for thousands of strangers.

But I still didn’t know how to look at this one girl and tell her everything I felt.

So I let the song do it for me.

A New Kind of Crazy

There was still one thing I had never done.

I had never professed my love for a girl in public…

onstage…

with a guitar in my hands…

while everyone she knew watched it happen.

That was a completely different kind of performance.

A new kind of crazy.

I started to play, and there was no turning back.

The Performance

I settled the twelve-string against me and played the opening notes of “My Sweet Lady.”

The auditorium grew quiet.

Not gradually.

Quiet.

Then I began to sing.

From that moment on, the room disappeared.

The teachers disappeared.

The judges disappeared.

The other students disappeared.

The talent show I had considered beneath me disappeared.

I locked my eyes on Maybe and sang directly to her.

There may have been an auditorium full of people listening, but I wasn’t performing for them.

I was playing for one girl.

The song was saying things I didn’t yet know how to say for myself. At fifteen, I could be cocky enough to imagine becoming famous, but I still couldn’t simply tell a girl what she meant to me.

I played the guitar.

I sang the words.

But the message was entirely mine.

Maybe watched me intently.

She was living on every word and every note.

I could see a tear in her eye.

By then, everyone in the auditorium understood what was happening.

They knew I wasn’t simply performing a song.

I was singing it to her.

Her friends stopped watching me and started watching Maybe.

Then the people around them did the same.

Hell, before long, it seemed like everyone was watching her.

And there she sat—close enough for me to see, surrounded by people who suddenly understood something deeply personal about the two of us.

It should have made me uncomfortable.

It didn’t.

I kept my eyes on her and continued singing.

For those few minutes, the auditorium held something that belonged to us, even though everyone else was witnessing it.

Someone in the audience later told me what they remembered thinking:

What is happening here? This is a junior-high talent show, but we are witnessing something so much more.

They were right.

For a few minutes, it stopped feeling like a school talent show. It wasn’t a kid trying to win a contest or showing off what he could do with a twelve-string guitar.

It was one person opening his heart to another in front of an entire auditorium.

Everyone could see it.

Something real was happening in that room.

The tour stages had been bigger.

The audiences had been larger.

The musicians had been professionals.

But none of those performances had asked me to reveal anything quite this personal.

The tour had shown me what it felt like to entertain a crowd.

Maybe taught me what it felt like to reach someone.

The Final Note

I played the final note without taking my eyes off Maybe.

Then I let the chord fade.

The auditorium remained completely still.

Pin-drop quiet.

For a moment, no one seemed willing to break whatever had just happened in that room.

I stood up from the stool.

Then the applause began.

Loud.

Long.

The kind of applause that doesn’t simply acknowledge a performance. It releases something the entire audience has been holding.

I nodded toward the crowd.

Then I looked at Maybe, gave her a wink, and coolly walked offstage.

At least, I thought I looked cool.

Inside, I was still fifteen years old, my heart was pounding, and I had just told a girl I loved her in front of the entire school.

But I had survived it.

More than survived it.

Backstage, the compliments started almost immediately.

Teachers.

Judges.

Friends.

One person after another wanted to tell me how much they had enjoyed the performance.

They kept going until it became embarrassing.

I had walked onto the stage feeling cocky and convinced the whole thing was beneath me. Now everyone was telling me I had created the moment of the evening, and I suddenly didn’t know what to do with all the attention.

So I smiled.

Said thank you.

Tried to act as though this sort of thing happened to me all the time.

The Walk Home

Later that day, I saw Maybe.

I walked her home from school.

We talked along the way, but I don’t remember every word. What I remember is the feeling between us.

Something had changed.

She knew the song had been for her.

I knew she had understood it.

And both of us knew we had shared something deeply personal in about as public a place as anyone could imagine.

There had been an auditorium full of students, teachers, judges, and friends watching us.

But somehow, the performance had still belonged only to the two of us.

That walk home was special.

Quietly special.

We didn’t need to explain everything that had happened. The song had already done most of the explaining.

For that walk home, the cocky kid dreaming about California disappeared.

I wasn’t thinking about touring.

I wasn’t thinking about making records.

I wasn’t imagining fame or wondering when the package would arrive.

I was walking home beside the girl I loved, knowing we had just shared something neither of us would ever completely forget.

The package from California would arrive soon enough.

Dad’s decision would change the direction of my life.

The porch was still waiting.

But that afternoon, none of that had happened yet.

There was only Maybe.

The song.

And the long walk home.

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