The Big Rewind by Libby Cudmore Read Free Book Online Page A

knew, had never returned to Loring.
    It was the first mix CD anyone had ever made me. His dad was a lawyer and made good enough money that he had a stereo system with tape-to-tape transfer and a CD burner built in that, more often than not, would tack on the last song three or four times before the CD ran out of space. Jeremy started a CD-burning business for our classmates, which, at ten dollars a pop, paid for more than one date at the one-screen movie theater two blocks from his house.
    I opened the case and took out the track list. It was almost all show tunes: “If Ever I Would Leave You” from Camelot; “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” from Guys and Dolls; Jeremy singing “All Through the Night” from Anything Goes, his soulful, beautiful tenor distant and obscured by poor recording equipment. But he’d thrown a handful of pop songs on there, too, because it was the late nineties: the gag-worthy “Truly Madly Deeply,” by Savage Garden; Faith Hill’s dippy “This Kiss”; the 10,000 Maniacs version of “Because the Night”; and “2 Become 1” because he’d had an irrational love for all things Spice Girls. Once, I spent all night by the phone, trying to be caller ninety-seven at Sweet 97.7 to win us tickets to see the Spiceworld tour at Madison Square Garden. I never got the tickets, and anyway, we’d broken up by their July tour date.
    Of all the musical-theater nerds in the J. C. Kevlin High School drama club, Jeremy was the most likely to have reallymade it onstage. I hoped he had. I slid the CD into my laptop and hummed along as I searched for him online. And sure enough, there he was, starring as Amos Hart in Chicago . He was there, in my city, doing what he loved. He’d made it. And maybe, I thought as I yawned and closed my laptop, he might even want to see an old friend.

Chapter 9
EVERYDAY IS LIKE SUNDAY
    I was still drying my hair with a Batman beach towel when I answered the door to a starry-eyed Sid, one earbud dangling loose.
    â€œListen,” he said, pressing it to my ear. “Doesn’t that just sound like love? Right there, that jangly guitar right before the first verse, that’s what it sounds like when you’re walking back from a party and you’ve just met the love of your life; you’ve got a few drinks on your brain and her number on your phone and it’s just the happiest goddamn feeling in the whole world. Bernard Sumner captured that feeling and distilled it down to six minutes and fifty-nine seconds of pure magic.”
    I loved the narratives Sid created for his music. It was never just, “I like this song”; he always had an elaborate scene to describe how it made him feel.
    â€œWhat is it?” I asked. I wasn’t as up on my eighties music as I probably should have been, especially for being friends with Sid.
    â€œNew Order, ‘Temptation,’” he said, putting one arm around my waist and waltzing me in a circle. “Just hearing it makes my heart swell—I’ve listened to it twice since I got off the subway.”
    I wished I shared his early-morning musical enthusiasm. I hadn’t gotten much sleep after Facebook-stalking Jeremy; Baldrick had woken me up by ramming his hard fluffy head intomine around nine, and it hadn’t seemed worth it to go back to sleep if we were going to Egg School at eleven. I had barely put together a decent brunch outfit—a black pleated cheerleader skirt, vintage plaid double-breasted jacket, fourteen-eyelet Doc Martens with rose-print knee socks poking out like I was an extra from Clueless —while Sid had on an effortless ensemble of dark blue jeans with the cuffs turned up and a tucked-in flannel shirt in purple and gray check. Anyone else trying to pull it off would have looked like a hipster lumberjack, but Sid carried it off with a cool, straight-backed elegance. He only wore his black-rimmed glasses on