He joined me in looking down at his hand. “Yeah.”
“Huh.”
“Are you going to say something about how nail polish is for girls?”
He sounded like he’d heard that a lot. “Oh my God, no. I would never do that. It’s…”Uncannily attractive.“I’m justsurprised.” It occurred to me that I was using the wordssurprisedandshockeda lot today as they related to Teddy Knight. He was being sonice. I didn’t know if I could trust it.
“My sister used to paint my nails sometimes when we were kids,” he said. “She went through this nail art phase, and I’d let her practice on me.” He shrugged. “When you play guitar, you look at your hands a lot.” He pulled his hand out of mine, which, I’m not going to lie, was disappointing, and held it up to examine his nails. “I liked seeing an interesting color rather than my own boring nails. And honestly—this is going to sound gross; I’ve never said this out loud, and if you tell anyone I will have to murder you.” I got a little thrill at the idea of being about to hear something that Teddy Knight had never told anyone else. “The water at our building was often shut off. So we were… well, we were dirty sometimes. I’d have this dirt under my nails that was, like, a permanent feature. The polish covered it. I preferred being the weird arty kid people slung homophobic insults at to being the dirty kid.”
I didn’t say anything. Being cool over this revelation seemed like the right move, so I didn’t react with outrage or concern or anything, though I felt all that stuff swirling around inside me.
“But I did actually like it aesthetically,” he went on. “So I kept it up. Not all the time but occasionally when we had a day off on this last tour, I’d go get my nails done.”
“In a salon?”
“Not salons. No-frills nail bars where you don’t need an appointment—you know, like in a strip mall? I’d just look up the closest one to wherever we were.”
“I’m trying to imagine a nail tech in, like, Cincinnati, looking up at her next client and it’s Teddy Knight from Concrete Temple.”
“Oh, no, they usually had no idea who I was. Scott was the face of the band. And anyway, nail techs in Cincinnati weren’t generally our demographic—nothing against nail techs in Cincinnati.”
“Who do you think was your demographic?”
“Good question. One thing I noticed is that our fans grew with us. Aged with us. You didn’t really see teenagers or people in their early twenties at shows.”
“So Concrete Temple wasn’t a growth proposition?”
He barked a laugh. “I guess not. I would have said I didn’t care. If you’re lucky enough to have an audience, who cares if they’re the same age as you? In our case dudes—and I feel like they were mostly dudes—in their thirties and forties. Maybe some a bit older.”
“You would have said that, but you don’t anymore?”
“Well, at the risk of ruining my image as a curmudgeon, this week has been eye-opening. I have this one kid. She’s… well, she’s fantastic. She’s basically a songwriting prodigy, and I’m not throwing that word around lightly. I’m learning so much from her.”
This must be the girl I’d heard him singing with. “Nice.”
“It’s like this for you all the time at your studio, isn’t it?”
“No. Definitely no. But I know that energizing feeling that you sometimes get when you’re teaching.”
“But no dance prodigies at your studio?”
“It’s not really that kind of place. A lot of my kids, and I say this with love, are not natural dancers. Which is fine. More than fine—it’s kind of the point. I pride myself on running an inclusive studio that doesn’t deal in a lot of the garbage that many dance studios do. I have this sign that displays my—you’re going to think this is dorky—philosophy of dance. It’s distilled into three rules I call Miss Miller’s Morals.”
“That doesn’t sound dorky. What are they?”
Well, look at me: lost in the woods, telling Teddy Knight about Miss Miller’s Morals. I started ticking them off on my fingers. “Number one: ‘Everybody is welcome at Miss Miller’s.’ Two: ‘Everybody can dance.’ Three: ‘Dancing is supposed to be fun.’ Then there’s a joking number four that just reads, ‘The end.’”
“That’s great.”
“Itisgreat. You probably don’t know much about how dance culture messes with kids’—girls’ mostly—mental well-being. And physical.”
“I can imagine. Am I sensing a ‘but,’ though? You have this great, inclusive, evolved studio, but…?”
I sighed. I hadn’t even articulated this to myself, so I didn’t know how to explain it to him. But we potentially had hours of time to fill before our rescue, and Teddy had proven himself a not-bad listener on several occasions now. “I think I have to start from the beginning for this to make sense.”
“I’m afraid we might have a lot of time to fill,” he said, echoing my thoughts. But the prospect wasn’t so scary anymore.
“OK, so, I’ve already told you about my shitty childhood.” He nodded. “When I was in high school, I decided I wanted to be my own boss. I looked at my parents, and I thought about what they did. My mom waited tables for forty years. Forty years! Not that there’s not honor in that job, but you know. She took a lot of shit, worked long shifts, often at night, and income was up and down because it depended on tips. And I told you about my dad.” I sighed. “Sometimes I think I’m too hard on him. I can see some of myself in him. He was really creative.”
