Golden State: A Novel by Michelle Richmond Page A

bouncer,” I said.
    “Nope.”
    An awkward silence followed. I was relieved when the next band arrived. The giant whispered something to the lead singer just as they were going onstage. “We’d like to dedicate this one to the girl in the sky!” Ken Block shouted, and with that, the band launched into “All for You.”
    I elbowed the giant, unbelieving. “Did you do that?”
    He shrugged.
    “You did that,” I said, stunned.
    “I’m Tom,” he said.
    “Julie.”
    After the last band had played, Tom made some promotional announcements and, much to my relief, came back to me.
    “Do you need a ride home?” he asked.
    When we pulled up in front of my apartment building, he got out of the car to open the passenger-side door. “Thanks for rescuing me,” I blurted out.
    “Sure,” he replied, cuffing me on the shoulder a little too hard. Athought raced through my head, a thrilling notion of what it would be like to make love to him, like going a practice round in the ring with someone who didn’t know his own strength. I must have been smiling, because he demanded, “What’s funny?”
    “Do you want to come in?”
    Upstairs, in my apartment, he wandered around as if he belonged there, checking out my books and CDs, complimenting the view. He picked up a photo of me and Heather taken when I was ten years old and she was an infant; I held her in my arms, beaming. “It’s you,” he said. “You look just like yourself. Who’s the baby?”
    “My sister, Heather.”
    “Where is she now?”
    “Mississippi. She hasn’t had an easy time of it, really.”
    “Why’s that?”
    I sensed he wanted to hear the whole story, not just a stripped-down, small-talk version of it. So I grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge, and we sat down on the bed that doubled as a sofa. I told him about Heather’s missing father, and about my dead one. I told him about shopping for school clothes at the Salvation Army; about sitting in the muted light of my childhood church, feeling horribly out of place, while the preacher lectured furiously to a rapt congregation; about finding my mother alone in her room, sobbing, staring at photos of my father, years after he had died. I told him how desperately I’d wanted to get away, to start a new life where no one knew me.
    “I suppose I wanted to reinvent myself.”
    “And you did.” He pulled my feet into his lap and began rubbing them. “You live in the most beautiful city in the world. You’re putting yourself through school. You’re on your way to becoming a doctor.”
    “All true.” My mouth felt cottony; my whole body had gone limp and warm. “But the thing about reinvention is, no matter how much you change everything on the outside, you still know where you came from. You’ve still got all that stuff from middle schoolclanging around in your system. It’s almost like you’re living a double life, just waiting to be caught. Waiting for someone to walk up to you and say, ‘I know who you are. Enough with the charade.’ ”
    “It’s not a charade,” Tom said. “It’s your life. You made it.”
    “You make it sound so simple.” I glanced at the clock, yawning.
    “Too early for breakfast?” he asked hopefully.
    I reluctantly pulled my feet out of his grasp. “Come on, I’ll make you my special drop biscuits with cheese.”
    The following night, I tuned in to KMOO. Around midnight, Tom dedicated a song to me: Al Green’s “Here I Am (Come and Take Me).”
    I turned up the volume on my crappy radio, and I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time. I danced alone in my apartment.
    There’s so much about that time of my life that I’ve forgotten; the whole phase feels like a blur of sleepless nights soaked in coffee, a whirlwind of patients and procedures and emergencies, one seminar blending into the next, ambulatory care conferences and frantic days in the acute care clinic, endless presentations by the faculty in which I took notes furiously and