I am standing with my back to it all, tuning Mom’s guitar and swallowing buckets of air. They’ve crammed themselves around wobbly tables that Joe himself moved out through the open doors and onto the deck. But there are so many people clinking cups and scraping forks on plates. She also tacked on the “you have a gift to share with the world” speech for good measure. Mom’s already given me the “stand tall, be brave, keep it together” speech. Everybody always feels sorry for me after they see me melt down. Maybe he heard about what had happened in front of the restaurant. I can’t believe Mom finally talked Joe, the owner, into it. It doesn’t help that Bagels and Joe is also “the place” to come in Lake Tahoe to find undiscovered talent.

Do I want to throw up more or less than I normally do before a performance? It’s too close to call. I can’t tell if the time off has made the fear better or worse.

But that doesn’t mean she still hasn’t been trying, like always, to land me the “next big gig.” And today we’ve got a show. She has a job now too, at the diner down the road, so we’ve usually got enough leftover hash browns and day-old donuts to keep us fed. I suppose I should be grateful for the four-week break with no shows along the lake. I can still feel the terrible panic, hear the confused voices of the crowd, and see Mom trying to gather our money and run. It’s been a month since our last show and my most recent episode. Ordinarily I love it here, curled up with a book and headphones in a corner where I can be any age at all in the low light.

No one looks for a truant in a place like this. It smells nutty and warm on this cold September morning. For Paula Flautt, the best theater teacher a girl could ask forīagels and Joe can’t be more than the size of your average motel room, but it is wall-to-wall jars of roasted coffee beans.

Tune It Out by Jamie Sumner