The Girl in That Song

She was a picture of perfection, pretty enough to put on a postcard with some cheesy line like “wish you were here” scribbled across the front.

The California sunshine caused her hair to shimmer and her face to glow. Her arms were outstretched towards the sky above, and her voice sang along with the song that was playing on the radio. Even though Carlos loved singing, he remained silent in the driver’s seat; his hands gripped the steering wheel as he watched her.

Every time he saw her, he got that same warm bubbly feeling as he did when he first met her at Rocque Records on that chilly October morning almost a year earlier…



Carlos had been sitting in the lobby of Rocque Records, flipping through Sports Illustrated while he waited for the other three guys to arrive. Even though they were all coming from their shared apartment, Carlos always seemed to be the first to get to the recording studio.

He hadn’t noticed her in the room before, but he happened to catch her glance. She had the most gorgeous aquamarine eyes, and he felt as if he were drowning in them. In that moment, he was just trying to keep his head above water, trying to hold her glance for as long as he possibly could. That was what they did in the movies, right?

But the girl quickly looked away as someone entered the lobby to take her back, and Carlos snapped back to reality. But he could’ve sworn he saw her peek at him from the corner of her eye.

Millions of questions sprung up in Carlos’s mind: who was she? what was she doing here? was she a singer? what was her name?

All of those questions momentarily vanished from Carlos’s head as soon as he spotted Kendall walking through the big glass double doors. He threw up a half-hearted wave as he approached the couch where Carlos was sitting.

“Hey, where’s everybody else?” Carlos asked as he carelessly tossed his magazine onto the coffee table.

“James had to stay after class, and Logan has a sinus infection,” Kendall sighed as he quickly racked through the magazine selection, even though he had no intent of reading any of them. “You know rehearsal’s going to be complete hell today, right? There’s only two of us today, so the songs’ll be off, plus Gustavo’s gonna bitch the entire session because Logan and James are missing.”

“Yeah,” Carlos sighed, not really thinking anything of it. Gustavo bitched at them anyway; the only difference about today was that he actually had a reason to. “So how are things with Jo?” he asked, almost simultaneously noticing that he had never really cared before.

Kendall realized this too and shot Carlos a suspicious look before he replied, “We’re good. We just rarely get to see each other anymore.”

Carlos saw the look of disappointment spread across Kendall’s strong features and automatically wished that he hadn’t brought it up. He was just curious; Carlos had never really had a girlfriend…and it had never really bothered him until that day.



Kendall was right, rehearsal was hell that day, but the encounter afterwards made Gustavo’s yelling seem to melt away.

Back at the apartment building, Carlos was just coming in when he saw her, the girl from Rocque Records, waiting for the elevator. Even though Carlos was already on his floor, he went to wait with her.

They exchanged awkward glances as they both stood there, looking up and watching the numbers light up as the elevator approached their floor.

The silence was so nerve-racking that Carlos couldn’t stand it anymore, so he said something.

“Hey, I’m Carlos. Are you new here?” he asked, anxiously awaiting the pretty girl’s response.

She smiled at him, and her entire face lit up. “I’m Kayleigh, but just about everyone calls me Kay, and yes, I just moved in last week.” She ran a hand through her silky chocolate locks, still smiling at him.

Her grin was infectious, and Carlos felt himself beginning to loosen up. “Well it’s nice to meet you, Kayleigh. I’ve been living here for around…six months now, so if you need some help getting around, feel free to ask.”

“Alright, do you have a phone?” she asked as she grabbed her own cell phone from the back pocket of her worn-in jeans.

“Yep,” Carlos grinned, grabbing his Blackberry from his pocket. He pulled up the new contact screen and handed the phone over to her as she handed hers to him. He watched for a moment as she delicately punched her number in, almost hesitant to look away.

“Here,” she spoke softly, returning his phone. Carlos smiled a little to himself when he saw her name in his contact list.

It was just as he tucked his phone away in his pocket that the elevator dinged!, announcing it was time for them to get on.

Kayleigh quickly stepped between the two massive metallic doors and glance back at Carlos. “Aren’t you getting on?” she giggled shyly.

“Oh, this is my floor,” he grinned and confidently walked away, though he was squealing like a teenage girl inside his head.



A week seemed to fly by, and Carlos and Kayleigh had been texting each other almost nonstop since their meeting at the elevator.

And Carlos felt…different…he felt truly happy, like he was on top of the world and nothing could bring him down. He hadn’t felt that way in a while, to be honest, not since his first live performance. It was that high, that rush of pure ecstasy that made him pursue his relationship with Kayleigh. He just couldn’t get enough of the way she made him feel, but he knew that there was no way for him to express that to her without sounding like a complete sap. Do girls even really like cheesy guys?

Carlos was almost certain that they didn’t. Although he felt uncomfortable confessing this sort of thing to his friends, he wasn’t very experienced when it came to the girls and romance sort of thing, so he went to the one person that seemed to have it locked down in that department: Kendall.

Out of the four of them, he did manage to win over Jo, so he had to have some sort of secret knowledge concerning the opposite sex. Carlos just had to catch him alone, which was as hard as he thought it would be. Logan was basically holed up in his room sick, and James was always down by the pool hitting on random girls. So that night, while Mrs. Knight and Katie were out shopping, Carlos knocked on Kendall’s bedroom door.

“Hey Carlitos, what’s up?” he asked as he looked up from his math homework.

“Hey Kendall, can I talk to you about something?” Carlos asked cautiously as he stood in the doorway.

“Yeah sure, what’s going on? Is something wrong or something?” Kendall asked, eyeing Carlos as he sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. He wasn’t used to his friend’s peculiar behavior.

“No, nothing like that,” Carlos said, adding in a chuckle so that Kendall wouldn’t be too worried.

“What is it then?”

“Well…Kendall, how do you tell a girl that you like her?”

Kendall let out a long sigh, his green eyes focused on the blades of the ceiling fan spinning above them. “Well…I mean, it depends. On you, on the girl, on how you feel, just a bunch of stuff.”

“How did you get Jo then?”

A grin formed across his thin lips. “I just got lucky,” he chuckled. “I’m sure you’ll find some way to let this girl know that you’re into her.”

“Okay, thanks,” Carlos said, flashing his friend a smile before he retreated into the room he shared with Logan.

Noticing Logan was asleep in his bed, a tissue shoved up one of his nostrils and a puddle of drool collecting on his pillow, Carlos slowly opened the door and tiptoed over to his own bed, stopping to switch on the lamp beside his bed.

For a while, he laid in bed, just staring up at the small cracks and indents in the ceiling above him, thoughts drifting in and out of his mind. It was one teensy little thought, a fragment of a brilliant idea, that became stuck in his head. It was that one thought that turned this seemingly typical teenage romance into a full-blown love story.

Carlos wanted to put Kayleigh in a song, to somehow capture the way she made him feel in a catchy melody, but he didn’t know how.

Carlos stayed up that entire night, scribbling lines of cheesy amateur poetry into one of his composition notebooks, but nothing seemed to be good enough for her. He was constantly ripped out pages of lyrics at a time and tossing them into the trashcan across the room. He was doing it so much that it almost became a game, but Carlos tried to stay focused on the task at hand.

It was at six am the next morning, two hours before he had to be at school, that he finally came up with something that was worthy of the girl’s time.

Before he left for school, Carlos took a detour to the fourth floor and slipped a wrinkled sheet of notebook paper under Kayleigh’s door. Scribbled on the paper in Carlos’s almost chicken-scratch handwriting was her song and a note tackled onto the end.

Kayleigh,

Will you go to the movies with me this weekend?

Carlos



Almost an entire year later, Kayleigh was riding in the passenger seat of Carlos’s convertible, her hair blowing in the wind, singing along to her song.

“I wanna put you in my car and drive and turn you up loud, roll down all the windows and shout it out, ‘I love this girl!’”