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“Yeah,” I agreed hollowly. “Sure. I’ll make sure that our tour manager arranges the whole tour so that next time we can play a weekend show.”
Tears had burned my eyes. Shame and anger and resentment and self-pity. But I’d burned with something else, too. Determination. To prove to them that I was worth something. That hundreds or thousands or millions of people wanted me. Wanted to listen to my music, and come to my shows, and talk about me online, even if I never saw what they said. To prove that while, to them, I might have been a burden, an unexpected and unwanted hassle that they felt obligated to shoulder, to the world, I was something else.
They would appreciate me. They would see me. They would love me.
Well, the world had done all those things.
And I’d hated every single fucking minute of it.
Somewhere over Pennsylvania, on a late flight home from Chicago to New York, I was running that memory over and over in my head. I was alone in my row, staring out into the night, watching as wisps of high-altitude cloud swept past my window, gauzy white in the dark sky. I hated that it still hurt me to think about my parents. That had been years ago, and with every measure of our success, I’d thought I could leave a bit of the pain behind. Paint it over with something bright, shining, happy.
But, instead, here I was, choosing that memory to wrap around myself, knowing how much it hurt.
Fuck you, I thought. Fuck you. I don’t need to try and earn your love, because I found someone who gives it to me freely. Fuck you. I don’t need to prove shit to you anymore, because I’ve flown as high as anyone could fly and it didn’t make one bit of difference.
I watched the fury on my face reflected in the window, and then I watched it soften as my conscious mind caught up with my ranting one. I started to realize why I had chosen that particular memory at this particular moment. And I started to realize what I could do about it.
* * *
—
I parked my rental car outside Caleb’s house and didn’t even bother to grab any of my stuff. I vaulted up the stairs and knocked on the door, desperate to see him.
“Hey!” he said when he opened the door. “I didn’t think you’d come right here. You’ve got to be exhaust—”
I jumped on him, kissing him before he could finish the sentence. Then I threw my arms around his neck and just hugged him, hard. His palm slid up my back, his other arm wrapped around my waist, and he buried his face in my hair.
We clung tight for a few minutes, reassuring each other we were there. Caleb couldn’t have been awake for long, since it was still early. There was no smell of coffee brewing, always the first thing he did upon rising, and the smell of sleep clung to him. I hadn’t even showered after the Chicago show, then had gotten on a plane and come straight here, so I was sure I didn’t smell great, and I hadn’t eaten anything in about twenty-four hours but handfuls out of a tub of staling pretzels backstage.
Still, I couldn’t bear to tear myself away from Caleb, and I tugged him down on the couch with me and tangled our fingers together. I was buzzing with adrenaline and no sleep, but it felt so much better than the numb blankness I’d felt since I played my song for the band in Philly. My head was all fuzzy and my eyes were dry.
“Hey, hey, take it easy,” Caleb said, smiling and squeezing my thigh. “You’re vibrating.”
I nodded and made an effort to calm down, but it didn’t really work.
“I figured it out,” I told him.
“Figured what out?”
“I was miserable after you left. And before you got there, but worse after you left. And then we were in Cleveland—fucking Ohio—and I was thinking about my parents, and about the band, and I realized—I realized, why? Why the fuck am I doing this when I hate it?”
I pressed in closer to Caleb, whose brow was furrowed, and grabbed his forearm.
“I hate it, Caleb,” I insisted. “It makes me miserable eighty percent of the time. Who would want to do something they only loved twenty percent of the time? Like, if that’s how you told people you felt about your job, you know what they would tell you?”
“Uh, to quit, most likely.” He sounded nonplussed.
“Exactly. To quit. To fucking quit! That’s what I want.”
I threw my leg over him so I was facing him on the couch and his hands came up to curl around my hips.
“I want to quit Riven. I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s so obvious, you know, but I just had all this noise in my head, of all the people being like ‘Everyone wants to be famous,’ and ‘People would kill to have your life,’ and, like, ‘You’re living the dream,’ and all that. But just because other people want something and like something and wish for something doesn’t mean that I have to.”
