Backup Girl Sleepover Deal

So the whole thing started because of a guy named Trevor who took me to a pizza place and then spent forty minutes talking about his fantasy football league. I'm twenty-four, I've been singing in bands since I was nineteen, sneaking into bars before I could legally drink, and I still get stuck on dates like that, which is honestly the funniest and saddest thing about my life.

Here's the part that pushed me over the edge. At some point in the night, I mentioned I swam in college, like competitively, four years, conference finals my junior year, the whole deal, because it came up when he asked what I did besides music. And then twenty minutes later he asked me if I'd ever been athletic. Not like a joke. He genuinely asked. I said, well, I literally just told you about the swimming, and he laughed like I'd said something charming instead of correcting him.

Anyway. I biked home, and instead of being a normal person about it, I opened my laptop and emailed Harold. We'd been hooking up on a summer tour two years ago when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-three, and after it ended we somehow landed on being actual friends, the kind where you email dumb ideas at eleven at night and he actually reads them. So the email went out with the subject line bad date, new song idea, and it said something like: Trevor the pizza guy forgot I swam in college while I was telling him about swimming in college, and I wrote a chorus in my head on the bike ride home, and the hook is backup girl, as in I want to be somebody's backup girl, which makes no sense, but listen.

And then I pasted the lyrics, because that's what we do, and they were rough, like three verses where one of them was just the word backup repeated, but the chorus had something. The line that mattered was something like, put me second but put me somewhere, I've been first in no one's lineup for years. I remember typing that and thinking, okay, that one's real.

Harold wrote back the next morning, which was unusual because Harold never answers anything the same day unless it involves gear or money. The subject line was you wrote a whole song? and the body started with, you sent me four verses at midnight after a bad date, which is the most Andie thing that has ever happened, and then he got into it. He said the verses were fine, forgettable, whatever, but he said the chorus didn't sound like it was about Trevor. He said, and I'm paraphrasing but not by much, this sounds like you're writing about me, or at least about us, about the two summers ago thing, and if I'm wrong tell me and I'll shut up, but backup girl with that bridge idea you've been humming since Tucson doesn't read like a song about some guy who likes fantasy football.

Which, okay. He wasn't wrong, and I knew he wasn't wrong when I read it, sitting on my kitchen floor eating cereal at nine in the morning like someone who owns exactly one bowl.

I sat with it for a while. The honest answer, which took me three drafts to type out, was that the chorus was about wanting to be chosen for a change. That's the phrase I actually used, chosen for a change, and I told him I was tired of being the easy option. Because that's kind of been my whole dating run lately. I'm the fun one, the low-stakes one, the girl guys call when their actual plans fall through, and even with us, back on the tour, I was never the plan. I was the thing that happened between Portland and Boise, and I said yes to it and I don't regret it, but I noticed the pattern and I've never stopped noticing it since. I told him that. I told him I write songs about it because writing songs is the only way I know how to admit stuff without saying it to anyone's face.

He left me on read for a day, which for Harold is normal but which for me, in that specific window, felt like a month. Then Thursday afternoon, at practice, he was weirdly normal, which was its own kind of answer, and then that night he sent a voice memo.

The memo was two minutes long and it wrecked me a little, not gonna lie. It starts with him futzing with a capo, you can hear him muttering about the tuning, and then he hums this bridge, four bars, climbs up and then falls back down at the end like a wave losing its nerve, and he'd written it against my chorus so it slides right under the line about being first in no one's lineup and lifts it. It was good. Like, annoyingly good, the kind of good where I had to play it four times and then get up and walk around my apartment.

And then, at the end of the memo, after the humming, he stopped playing and just talked, quiet, like he was standing close to the mic in his room. He said, so I need to ask, because I keep rewriting the same sentence. Is this a real request or is it just songwriting? Like, are we writing a song, or are you telling me something and using the song to do it, because I'll do either one, I just don't want to guess wrong. And then there was this long pause, and he said, call me back, don't email me back, this feels like a phone thing.

I played it twice more. Then I sat on my bed and thought about how two years ago we never once had a conversation like that, we just sort of slid into each other one night in a van parked outside a venue in Sacramento, and slid back out by the end of the tour, and never said anything real about any of it. And now here he was asking a direct question with a direct question, like a grown-up, which was new for both of us honestly.

I called him. He picked up on the second ring, which meant he'd been holding his phone, which meant he'd been nervous, which made me feel weirdly better about being nervous too.

"Okay, you sent a memo that ends with a question," I said, lying back on my bed and staring at the ceiling. "That's cheating, by the way. You know I hate a question I can answer from a horizontal position."

"So answer it standing up," he said, and I could hear him smiling, that dumb half-smile he does during guitar solos he knows are good.

I took a breath and stood up, actually stood up, because apparently I do what he tells me now. "It's a real request," I said. "The song is real too, but it's a real request first. I'm tired of being the backup girl to everybody, Hal. I'd rather be yours and be in the lineup than be nobody's and keep pretending that's freedom."

There was a pause, and then he said, "Okay. Okay, wow. So here's my counteroffer, and I've been thinking about it since you sent the email, so don't laugh." He cleared his throat. "We have that gig next Friday, at the bar with the broken neon, and after load-out, instead of you getting in your car and me getting in mine like always, you come over. Sleepover. Not a hookup, I mean an actual sleepover, I'll make food, we'll talk, and we figure out what this is before anybody touches anything. Deal?"

I said deal before he even finished, and then we both laughed at how fast I said it.

I woke up the next morning still feeling like I'd signed something important, and also kind of stupid for feeling that way over a sleepover, which is a thing adults do with sleeping bags and popcorn, not contracts. But I had one more thing I needed to say to him, and I knew if I said it on the phone he'd do that thing where he goes quiet and then says something small and reasonable and the moment just dissolves. So I emailed him. Yeah, after he said phone things are phone things, I emailed him, because some things you want in writing so you can reread them at two in the morning and check you didn't imagine the whole thing.

Subject line: both, actually