Page 29

The venue seems even larger from up on stage. Even with her contacts in, Luca can barely make out the last row of seats. The stage, too, feels ridiculously large. They’re used to playing between beer crates and cleaning supplies in Earl’s basement—as they scatter around on stage, no one seems to know what to do with so much space.

“All right,” says Dave. “In-ears in? We start with the drums.”

Luca dutifully strolls over to the drum set. Every piece of it looks brand-new, glossy black and expensive. There are a few more add-ons than she’s used to on her own kit, but at least most things are in the same place. Her mouth goes dry as she steps onto the drum riser and sits, looking out at the stage. The venue sprawls in front of her, only the first few rows visible with the way the stage lights are angled. Everything beyond fades into shadows. Luca is grateful for that; it’ll be overwhelming enough to see the standing area once it’s packed, when there’s people looking up at them and pressed up against the barricades.

“Luca?” Dave prompts, and she snaps back to what she’s supposed to be doing. “We already checked the drums with Mikey earlier today. This is just to make sure you’re comfortable with the setup.”

Luca grips her drumsticks a little tighter. The monitors feel strange in her ears. She’s suddenly very aware of all the eyes on her. From her spot by the mic stand at center stage, Florence gives her an encouraging nod.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Dave says.

Luca looks down at the drums in front of her. The first beat of the bass drum reverberates all the way through her chest. The snare drum is crisp and the toms are full and weighty, and after the first out-of-body lurch of hearing her own playing fill an entire hall, Luca’s limbs move on their own, falling into a familiar mid-tempo beat. It’s the type of thing she’s played a thousand times to warm up, and her heart settles a bit. Nothing about the venue is familiar, but this is—the weight of the drumsticks in her hands, the gentle strain in her muscles, the easy rhythm that pours out of her without any input from her brain. She’ll be okay as long as she doesn’t think too much about any of it. When she closes her eyes, she’s nine years old playing in her childhood bedroom and seventeen jamming to Nirvana and twenty-three rehearsing with the band just a week ago. This is the part she knows; beneath the adrenaline, there’s her muscle memory, reliable as a safety net.

“How does that feel?” Dave’s voice sounds in her in-ears.

She stops. “Um. Good, I think.”

“Sounded good on my end,” Dave confirms. “Keys next, please.”

Luca sets her sticks down, feeling like she just passed some kind of test.

From her perch at the back of the stage, she watches as Miray plays a few tentative scales. She mostly spaces out, her eyes drawn again and again to the vastness of the hall, the rows of seats stretching farther than she can see. Once all the individual instruments have been checked, Dave runs Miray, Toni, and Florence through vocal check. Florence jumps as her voice echoes through the venue, and Luca has to press her knuckles to her mouth to suppress a grin. Florence settles into it as quickly as Luca did—on the second line she sings, her lips break into a fierce little smile, and all Luca can think is that it feels right seeing Florence up here, hearing her voice amplified loud enough to echo in Luca’s bones.

After a few minutes of tinkering with the sound, Dave asks them to run through the first verse and chorus of a song together. Luca takes a deep breath before counting them in and launching into the drum intro of “big teeth.”

It’s the same as the way it is in their practice room, and yet completely different. They’re standing so far apart, and for the first time, Luca can’t see the others’ faces as they play, but she can feel them. Miray’s keys are like fingers trailing up her spine and Toni’s guitar whines in her ribcage and Izzy’s bass settles under her skin like a metronome and when Florence opens her mouth to sing, Luca feels the air humming with it as much as she hears it through her in-ears, close and unbearably intimate.

She thinks she might be laughing, bright and giddy. They surge into the chorus and the music gets impossibly louder and for the first time today, Luca isn’t scared. As she looks out at the venue and tries to imagine the rows filled with people, the standing area a sea of faces, the only thing she feels is anticipation, bright and champagne-fizzy, filling her to the brim.

12

Thirty minutes before they’re due to go on, the atmosphere in the dressing room is electric. Over the music blasting from a Bluetooth speaker—they put on ABBA, for comfort purposes—Florence can make out the flurry of voices, the pounding of footsteps a level below them. Fans have started to be let in. Fans who are going to hear them; the first real crowd that’s ever going to see them on a big stage.

Florence feels a little bit sick to her stomach.

She wants to ask the others what they think will happen if this goes terribly—if her voice cracks or she forgets the lyrics or simply throws up the second she sets foot on stage—but she doesn’t want to worry them. This whole thing was her idea. The least she can do is not lose her head minutes before they go on.

So she does what she has done before every other gig they’ve ever played. She paces. She changes her hairstyle three times. She goes through her vocal warm-up with Miray. She eats a tablespoon of raw honey, as she’s done before every choir performance since she was thirteen, cloying sweetness that she imagines glossing over her vocal chords as it goes down her throat.

“What’s that for?” Luca asks. She’s sitting on the beat-up leather sofa. Her legs haven’t stopped jiggling since they were deposited here an hour ago.

“It makes my voice sound better,” Florence says.

“Allegedly,” Toni adds from where she’s sitting cross-legged on the rug, softly strumming her guitar. If Florence didn’t know her, she’d think she was wholly unaffected by the entire affair. As it is, she can see the subtle signs of tension in Toni’s shoulders, in the way she keeps checking and rechecking that her guitar is in tune.

“One time I didn’t do it,” Florence says, “and I sounded awful.”

“You were thirteen years old singing a part meant for a soprano,” Miray gently points out.

She has a point there. In the beginning, Florence was unwilling to admit to herself or her exasperated choir teacher that she was, in fact, an alto. It was a hard pill to swallow for a prepubescent girl with Primadonna tendencies who fancied herself the next Kate Bush.

The door opens, and Izzy slips back into the dressing room after her third nervous smoke. Florence’s own fingers are itching for a cigarette, but she has a feeling all the honey in the world couldn’t cancel out the effects of tobacco this close to showtime. “How is everyone feeling? Are we ready?” Izzy asks, flopping down next to Luca on the sofa.

The answers are variations on Not particularly.

Florence strides over to the mirror to check her makeup. Her uniform for any gig so far has been a black suit with a white button-up, platform boots that give her another inch or so, and deep-red lipstick. The tarot card she tucked into her bra presses against her skin as she leans forward and uses her pinkie finger to wipe a trace of wayward mascara from her eyelid.

She jumps when the door opens again and Amy pokes her head inside. “Five-minute warning!”