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I opened my arms, threw my head back, and shattered myself to pieces for them, until there was nothing left.
* * *
—
“It’s a phenomenal opportunity—a real honor,” Dougal, our manager, was saying as we sat in Coco’s dressing room after the show. I was so exhausted I was hardly listening to him. Still floaty from performing, I was already gone, back to New York and my apartment, blissfully alone.
“It would just mean extending by three more weeks. Easy-peasy.”
My blitzed brain caught on the absurdity of “easy-peasy,” before it got around to processing the rest of his sentence.
“Extending?” I croaked around my cherry menthol cough drop.
“Just for three weeks or so,” Dougal confirmed. “The Scandinavian leg of the tour would end the first day of the DeadBeat Festival. Done.”
I looked around at the rest of the band, expecting to see that they were equally horrified at the idea of extending the tour. But Coco looked excited, her foot tapping like it always did when she was plotting; Ethan was nodding, and Ven had leaned forward, elbows on knees.
My heart began to triphammer and suddenly the taste of the cherry threatened to make me sick. I shook my head.
“You guys, no way. I can’t.” My throat felt raw, a metallic taste lurking beneath the cherry and menthol.
“But, the DeadBeat Festival!” Coco crowed, at the same time Ven said, “It’s a major ask, and major sales after the festival.”
Coco shot him a look, as if they’d already discussed the tack they were going to take and that wasn’t it. Had they discussed it? Had Dougal told them but not me? She went on. “Cavalcade and The Runny Whites are playing. DJ Romulus is gonna be there. If it’d make people think of us as being in the same league as artists like them, how can we turn it down? Besides, it’s only three more weeks. What’s three weeks after four months?”
Ven, Ethan, and Dougal nodded their agreement and my heart sank.
This date marked in my calendar had been the only thing getting me through the last month. The Boston show meant the end of the tour. The promise of home, of the familiar streets of my neighborhood, the warmth and solitude of my own bed, and the chance to just…be, without being under constant scrutiny. I longed for it.
But I couldn’t say any of that to the band. They had been living for this tour. After all, it was what they’d always been working toward—long before they’d met me.
I was opening my mouth to say that I just didn’t have another three weeks left in me, when Ven fixed me with a cool stare.
“Come on, bro. Everyone says you’re the star. Well, stars have to pay their dues.”
And there it was. They were all looking at me. Coco’s expression was pleading, Ethan’s hopeful, Ven’s a challenge, and Dougal’s the studied neutrality of calculation.
“You all want to?” I asked them, and was immediately met with a chorus of yeses.
“I—”
How could I let them down? We were a team; we were supposed to look out for one another. Usually, we were friends, too. I needed to be on the same side as them or being in Riven was beyond lonely. If I said no, I ruined it for all of them. Besides, Coco was right about what it meant for us to be asked to play the festival, to be asked to add dates to our tour. It meant we’d arrived.
If only I wanted to be at the place where we’d arrived.
“Okay,” I said, my voice a whisper. “Sure. It’s only three weeks.”
* * *
—
We had a day and a half back in New York to gather our stuff before flying to Europe. It was just enough time to be reminded of all the ways that tour wasn’t real life, but not enough to actually feel rested before leaving again. The second the car dropped me at my apartment I fell into bed, so relieved to know that no one would knock on my door or try to interrupt me that I slept for hours before waking, ravenous, around 10 P.M.
I felt almost human again after a quick shower and a quick bowl of pho at the Vietnamese restaurant around the corner from my apartment, the one where I could sit at the counter with my back to the other diners and my hat pulled low, so no one could recognize me. Since it was late, I decided it was safe to brave a walk after I ate.
One of the worst things about being recognizable was that I practically had to run a recon mission just to know if it was safe to grab a damn slice of pizza. I couldn’t pop out for a bite or go to a movie without risking being set upon by people snapping pictures or grabbing at me. I had to know the places where I could hide in plain sight, like the Vietnamese restaurant, or enter through an alleyway to avoid a crowd. More often than not, I didn’t even bother, because getting caught in a flurry of photos and whispers left me frazzled, drained, and too anxious to want the pizza or the movie by the time the crowd had passed.
