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“Owww owww!!!” He howls loudly into the night, and I erupt into giggles.
“Shhh!”
“What? Nobody’s around.” He grins at me. I survey the area—he’s right.
“Well, your howling might wake up some dormant werewolf instinct in someone.”
He raises a brow at me.
“Anyway,” I change the subject quickly, realizing I’ve just revealed part of my werewolf smut reading habits. “How are you?”
He tilts his head and smiles. “Fabulous.”
I scowl. “Don’t,” I say. “You don’t have to do that. I saw you up there. You didn’t look happy.”
The grin stops halfway up and comes back down. He looks at me a moment longer, then back at the grass.
“Yeah,” he says.
We sit. It’s cold. March here is cold, dry and total, and our breath hangs in the lamplight.
“You were good though, seriously,” I say. He was. He was really fucking good.
“Thank you. I’m always good.” I’d usually roll my eyes at that sort of comment, but he doesn’t sound cocky. “That’s the job. Eighty people or eighty thousand, you’re good, you’re on, the room gets what it came for.” He rolls the cap brim through his fingers. “Did you see the guy talk to me before the set? Jonny?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”
He takes a deep breath. “We started a band together. Me, Eli, Jonny, and Miles. We spent hundreds of hours in Eli’s basement, all of us sixteen years old, two amps and a drum kit Miles’s dad bought at a police auction. Jonny was the frontman. He was— honestly, he was the best musician of the four of us. Probably still is.”
I don’t say anything.
“We got scouted at eighteen. A showcase in Denver—a manager came backstage and bought us all burgers and talked for two hours, and the whole time he was talking, he was only looking at me and Eli. I didn’t realize it then. But three weeks later, when the offer came through, it was for a band, but there were only two open positions in it.” His jaw works. “They wanted us to find two new guys in LA. And they didn’t like Jonny’s attitude, didn’t think he was the right frontman. It was my shot to get out of Mountain Springs on my own terms, and the deal was: this configuration or no deal.”
“And you took it.”
“I took it,” he says it fast. “I was eighteen, and somebody was offering me the only thing I’d ever wanted. I told myself Jonny and Miles would get their own thing going. They were good, even better than us. It wasn’t personal.” He looks at the grass. “I was the one who told them. In Miles’s garage. Jonny didn’t say a word the whole time. Miles cried. And then Eli and I got in Sheila and went to LA. Jonny’s still here, and tonight, he stood in that room and watched the whole town clap for me when really, I still wonder if it should be him up there.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Cal.”
“It doesn’t matter what he said.”
“Okay,” I say.
He glances at me. Something in his shoulders comes down an inch.
“The stupid part,” he says, after a while, “is that I’d do it again. That’s the part I can’t say to anyone. Everyone wants the story where I’m torn up about being the frontman—and I am; some days. But some days, I’d give anything to be Eli, standing in the dark on the left side of the stage where nobody’s phone is pointed, just playing. Nobody asks the drummer why he walked off at Cascade. Nobody puts the drummer’s face on the—” He stops. “But then, there’s the other side. Where the room goes quiet in the middle of a song, and every person in it leans toward you a half-inch at the same time, and you did that—you’re doing it—it’s coming out of your own chest in real time. And I love it. I love it so much. I love it, and it has cost me every other thing I’ve ever had, and I keep choosing it, and I don’t know what that makes me.”
“It makes you a musician,” I say
He huffs.
“It’s just true. I don’t know if Jonny is any good or anything, but Cal?” He looks at me with wide eyes. “I know you’re a brilliant, talented, incredible musician. You had the crowd in the palm of your hand tonight, and you weren’t even performing at your best. That guy saw something in you, and he was right. You’re meant to perform.”
He turns his head.
