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Raleigh
How the hell does one sibling shoot out of the uterus fanny pack and turn into a literal rockstar with millions of screaming fans, while the next kid sludges out of the hoo-ha of life and turns out like me?
Someone make it make sense, ’cause the math ain’t mathing. Like, please? I’m not above begging. Just give me some kind of explanation as to how my brother was awarded all the good DNA, and I was left with the scraps. Like, come on! There are a good three years between us, so surely the incubator chamber had plenty of time to cook up some of that good DNA, and yet, it decided to pop out a dud instead.
My brother, Axel Stone—the best friend I’ve ever had—is quite literally one of the biggest rockstars in the world. He and his best friend—He Who Shall Not Be Named—started a band as teenagers, and now Demon’s Curse is the number one reason for panties dropping all over the globe.
Axel is out dominating the world with the devil spawn and their bandmates while I’m out here failing every college class I signed up for. Okay, that might be an exaggeration. I’m not failing all of them, but the dean has one hell of a good excuse to kick my ass out of here if the mood strikes, but she won’t because her phone wallpaper is a photograph of my brother in his tighty-whities for his big Calvin Klein campaign. Don’t ask me how I know that. It was an awkward encounter for both of us. I’m just glad she didn’t come at me with a printout and ask me to get it signed like my high school biology teacher did.
On the other hand, I don’t have a single talented bone in my body. That was obvious the day Axel handed me his guitar with the grand idea to turn me into a little rockette. Or rock chick. Or . . . Wait. What do they call a girl version of a rockstar? You know what? Who fucking cares? All that matters is that Axel isn’t a quitter. He pushes himself until his every dream is in the palm of his hand. That much is clear by his successful career, and yet, the asshole took one look at me scrambling to hold his guitar and gave up within two minutes. He’s only a quitter when it comes to me.
Okay, that’s not fair. I suppose I’m a little sour. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not jealous of my brother, I really couldn’t be prouder of him. He has everything he’s ever wanted, and he worked his ass off. Me, Axel, and Devil Spawn sat around our tiny little coffee table back home in Michigan and hand made flyers for their very first gig, and now those stupid little flyers are billboards in Times Square that lead to sold-out arenas across the globe.
It’s insane.
I just wish he took me with him.
Fuck, I miss that asshole.
Life back home . . . Well, there’s a reason I worked my ass off to get into the farthest college from my hometown. Being away from that place was the only dream I’ve ever had, and now that I’ve achieved that, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with myself.
The grand plan is to make it to New York or Los Angeles and go from there. I want to be in the music industry, working behind the scenes on tour prep. I always loved that when I was helping the boys. I excelled at it, and even though I was three years younger than them, I was the one running the show. That’s where I was in my element, and while I know Axel will pull all the strings in the world to make it happen, it’d be cool if I could somehow do it on my own. I want to know that I earned it, and I wasn’t just handed success as a favor to my big brother.
Letting out a heavy sigh, I push back from the table and tear my gaze away from my laptop screen. I can’t look at my shitty grade for another moment. My communications class was my strongest class last semester, and in the space of a few months, I’ve crashed and burned.
It’s depressing. What big label is going to want to hire me on my own merit like this? I’ll be the laughingstock of the music industry. Just what I wanted!
“How’d you do?” my best friend Madds asks as we spend our Thursday afternoon sprawled across our cramped apartment.
“I did just about as well as you did on your business exam last week.”
“Shit,” she says, sucking in a breath and cringing. “That bad, huh?”
An unladylike groan rumbles through my chest, and I drop my forehead to the hard table, instantly regretting it as pain shoots through my brain. “I’m a mess,” I tell her, talking directly into the table, my lips smooshed against the wood.
“You’re not a mess,” she tells me. “You just need a little retail therapy.”
I lift my head and stare at Madds as I resist rolling my eyes. By retail therapy, she means candles. She always means candles. It’s a sick obsession. They’re everywhere and take up every available surface, but there’s no denying our home smells like a fortress of magical wonder. But after tripping over a box of them for three months, I had to put my foot down, and now she tries—and fails—to keep them within the confines of her bedroom, but who am I to tell her she can’t live her best life?
Getting up from the table, I go to find my bag, knowing that once retail therapy has been mentioned, there’s simply no avoiding it. “And to think, I could be on a world tour right now.”
Madds scoffs. “Stop trying to kid yourself,” she says. “You and I both know you were never going on that tour.”
This time there’s no resisting the eye roll. She has a very valid point.
Demon’s Curse is currently making their way around the globe for their third world tour, and as long as He Who Shall Not Be Named is the front man, I’ve made a point to stay away. Hell, I know Axel is hurt by the fact I won’t listen to their music anymore, but he understands why and forces himself to be okay with it.
Their first tour was huge. They were already experiencing international stardom once their first album dropped, but by the time they wrapped the first tour, they were household names. I was only sixteen and there was no way Axel was going to let me drop out of high school just to go on tour with them, but by the time the tour had wrapped, it didn’t matter anyway because everything had already changed.
Ezra Knight. The lead singer of Demon’s Curse, A.K.A. Devil Spawn, and Axel’s best friend. Also often referred to as He Who Shall Not Be Named, but I suppose I ruined that now. Maybe it should be He Who Shall Not Be Named Out Loud.
He may or may not be the man I’ve been desperately in love with since I was thirteen years old, the one I still can’t seem to shake all these years later. He was sixteen when he first came around, and every time I looked at him, I knew that he would be someone special.
He was everything to me—the other half of my soul. We were the sweetest symphony, so perfectly in sync, but we were too young. I was too young.
Ezra is the textbook definition of right man, wrong time.
