Chaos

by Jamie Shaw

  What I need is for Mike to go back there and get me another beer.

  Instead, the closest curtain opens, and my head jerks in that direction. Groupie One and Groupie Two emerge, unsteady in their heels as they make their way down the aisle.

  “Are you two leaving?” I ask with unrestrained surprise in my voice.

  Groupie One presses her bare knees up against Mike’s leg. “Unless you want us to stay,” she suggests with her eyelashes batting down at him.

  He holds up the empty beer bottle that somehow got passed back to him. “Can you toss this in the trash on your way out?”

  She rolls her eyes but doesn’t stop smiling, and when she and her friend begin leaving the bus without taking the beer bottle, I call after her, “What about your friend?” Three gold diggers came on this bus, but only two are leaving. It’s been a long night, but simple math says they’re forgetting someone.

  Groupie One tosses her blonde hair over her shoulder and stops only long enough to giggle and answer, “We’re going to the other bus. Shawn said he was a one-girl kind of guy.”

  I STAY PARKED on the benches long after the first two girls leave and the last one’s giggling behind the curtain dies down. Long after Mike ventures through it with his eyes covered to get to the TV in the back. Long after my eyelids start to droop and my head starts to roll forward.

  I stand up, take a deep breath, and move to the heavy curtain separating me from the bunks, imagining what I’m going to see on the other side. Clothes on or off? Shawn on the top or bottom? Ugh, I should just sleep on the fucking bench.

  Instead, I grit my teeth and yank the curtain back—to find Shawn lying fully clothed on top of his bedcovers, his long legs crossed at the ankles and a book on his lap. His reading glasses are low on his nose, his pillows are piled behind his head, and he definitely does not look like someone who just spent the past hour playing rock god with queen of the groupies.

  My confused gaze travels from him to the bunk across from him—my bunk—which now holds said queen, also fully clothed. She’s passed out under my covers, drooling on my pillow, and when my gaze slowly swings back to Shawn, he’s smirking at me over the top of his book.

  “What the hell is she doing in my bed?” I snap.

  “You’re the one who invited her on here. What was I supposed to do, let her sleep in mine?”

  I hear Mike laugh from back in the kitchen, but I ignore it and bark at Shawn. “You sleep with her and then put her nasty ass in my bed?”

  The girl under my covers stirs and mumbles something in her sleep. Then she goes back to smearing lipstick all over her drool-coated cheeks.

  “Who the hell said anything about sleeping with her?” Shawn asks, closing his book and uncrossing his ankles to sit up.

  “Then what the hell have you been doing for the past hour?”

  “Cleaning up the mess you made.”

  “What about her?” I snap, pointing to the body attached to the widening puddle of drool on my pillow.

  Shawn has the nerve to smirk at me. “Figured I’d leave some of the mess for you.”

  He leans back, recrosses his ankles, reopens his book . . . and I stomp over to him and slam it closed. “No fucking way. Get her out of my bed.”

  “Do it yourself.”

  “SHAWN.”

  “Yes?” he says sweetly, and my fingers itch to strangle him. Instead, I growl so loudly, Mike laughs from the kitchen again.

  I turn to the girl and yank my covers off of her. She’s curled up with her glittery silver heels still on, and I poke her shoulder with the tip of my finger and then wipe it on my jeans. “Hey.”

  She groans in her sleep and turns her pink-stained mouth all the way into my pillow.

  “Dude,” I say, “get up.” I poke her again, harder this time.

  She starts snoring, and Shawn chokes back a laugh from where he’s lying comfortably behind me.

  “She drank like half the bottle,” he says. “She’s not waking up anytime soon.”

  I turn around and glower at him. “Then get up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m taking your bed.”

  He casually flips the page of the book he’s reading. “Don’t think so.”

  Adam and Joel appear in the doorway, Adam rubbing his elbow like he nearly cracked that instead of his head open when he climbed down from the roof of the bus. “What are you two fighting about?” he asks.

  “Her.” I point an accusing finger at the skanky lump in my bed, and Joel raises his eyebrow.

  “Why is she in your bed?”

  “Because Shawn’s an asshole!”

  Shawn chuckles, doing nothing to erase the confused expressions from Adam’s and Joel’s faces.

  “Where are you going to sleep?” Joel asks me, and I turn on Shawn again.

  “Get up.”

  “Nope.”

  “Shawn, I’m not playing.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have started this game in the first place.”

  I’m not sure what possesses me, but I grab his book and he grabs it back, and then I grab his hands and pull. Mike catches me around the waist before I can yank Shawn’s arms off, manhandling me into the middle bunk on the other side. “Take mine, for God’s sake.”

  He yanks the blankets off of the passed-out chick on my bed and drags them toward the benches at the front. “Now everyone shut up. I’m going to bed.” I move to hop out of the bed and stop him, but he yells at me without stopping or turning around. “Go the hell to sleep, Kit!”

  I freeze with one leg hanging off the mattress and watch him close the curtain behind him, flinching backward when Joel nearly knees me in the face to climb into the bunk above me. Adam crawls into a top bunk too, and I glare at the smirk still planted on Shawn’s stupid face as I settle back into my cubby.

  “You realize this means war.”

  “Your face means war,” Shawn counters, stealing my insult from this morning.

  “Oooh,” Joel and Adam mock in unison.

  “Them’s fightin’ words,” Adam adds in a deep southern twang.

  Shawn holds his middle finger out high enough for them to see, and both of the idiots up top start laughing.

  “What part about SHUT UP did you fuckers not understand?” Mike shouts from the front of the bus, making the other three giggle so immaturely that I almost laugh too.

  Almost. Instead, too bone-tired and too irritated to climb back out of bed, I crawl under the covers and slip out of my jeans, stuffing them into the corner of my bunk and rolling away from Shawn. If he wants war, I’ll give him war. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to replace the sugar for his coffee with salt, or burn every pair of boxers he owns, or . . .

  I fall asleep thinking of a thousand forms of payback, and later, I wake up to the demons of hell trying to escape from Joel’s mouth. Or at least that’s what it sounds like. It sounds like his soul is being dragged into the ninth circle of hell and his body is barely clinging to life. From Mike’s middle bunk, I roll over and glance down at Shawn. He’s still awake, still reading, and in the dark, I doubt he can tell I’m awake. I keep it that way as I reach for my jeans and root a pair of stolen earplugs from the pocket.

  In complete silence, I fall asleep quickly, but I haven’t slept nearly long enough when someone nudges me into the wall. It’s still dark outside, and uncompromising fingers are pushing and prodding and begging to be broken.

  I’m scowling before I even turn around, my eyes dry from not taking off my eye makeup before bed.

  “Where are my earplugs?” Shawn growls in a voice that barely makes it to my eardrums.

  I pull one of his earplugs out of my ear just to get him riled, keeping the confused and irritated expression on my face even though it’s taking everything I have to not smile or start laughing. I stole his earplugs from his bag this afternoon, long before groupies or tequila or snoring, and now I’m only glad he did something to deserve it. “What the hell are you talking about?”

/>   “Where did you get those?” He pulls my fingers closer to his face and then glares at me.

  “What is your problem?”

  “Did you steal my earplugs?”

  “Why would I steal your earplugs when I have my own?” I yank my fingers from his grasp and stick his earplug back in my ear, shaking my head pityingly. “Are you getting paranoid already? Because I haven’t even started messing with you, Shawn. If you’re losing your mind already, that’s really not a good sign.”

  I roll away from him before he can glare at me some more, hiding my troublemaker smile in Mike’s pillow and making a mental note to switch my dirty sheets with Shawn’s clean ones as soon as I get a chance.

  Chapter Eleven

  WAKING ON A moving bus isn’t the same as waking in a moving car. You’re in a bed, complete with pillows and warm blankets—and you’re moving. When you roll over and look into the aisle, you can’t figure out exactly where you are. When you attempt to crawl out of bed without being careful, you smack your head on the bunk above you.

  “Motherfucker,” I hiss, rubbing my forehead while dangling both legs over the edge. I slide off Mike’s mattress, underestimate how far my sleepy legs have to drop, and narrowly avoid plowing teeth-first into the bunks on the other side of the aisle.

  “Go awaaay,” Adam whines from the top bunk, blindly swinging his arm out and nearly smacking me in the head. His face is buried under a pillow, and his covers are hanging mostly off his bunk. I bat his hand away with one arm and rub my sleep-filled eyes with the other.

  Joel’s face peeks through the curtain separating the bunks from the kitchen, and he smiles before dipping back inside. “She’s up!”

  I cast a quick glance at the bunk below the one I slept in, relieved when there’s no sign of the drool machine who got her nasty all over it the night before. I scrunch my nose and grab my bag from storage, removing and reapplying my makeup in the bathroom before growing some balls and joining the guys in the kitchen.

  I plop down in a bench next to Mike, across from Joel, and avoid eye contact with Shawn as he pours me a coffee I didn’t ask for.

  “I’m hoping you guys dumped that chick’s body somewhere along the interstate,” I mutter while staring at the steaming cup in front of me.

  Mike shakes his head. “We only did that once. Shawn said it’s bad for publicity.”

  I grunt and take a reluctant sip of my coffee, which tastes so good that I almost want to thank Shawn for making it. He’s leaning against the counter, not saying a word, and I’m busy pretending he doesn’t exist.

  I pretend he doesn’t exist the whole way to Philly. I pretend he doesn’t exist at soundcheck. I pretend he doesn’t exist while I’m washing my hair before the show, in a shower that he just climbed out of. He always smells so fucking good, I’m tempted to replace all of his sexy man-scented body wash with my vanilla-jasmine exfoliating wash—and then I do.

  After drying my hair and reapplying my makeup, I emerge from the bathroom to find that I’m alone. And seeing my opportunity, I make quick work of switching my nasty bedsheets with Shawn’s. I even make sure the lines are crisp when I make the bed back up, just like Driver had done while the rest of us were at soundcheck. The guy is spacey as hell, but he can make a bed like no one’s business. He fixed everyone’s up but Adam’s, who apparently prefers that his covers be just as messy as the rest of him.

  I’m sitting at the booth in the kitchen, munching on the peanut butter cookies that Joel tried to hide for himself in the back of the cabinet, when the guys pile back onto the bus and commandeer my snack.

  “Where are we going for dinner?” I ask as I get up to follow them back through the bus. My stomach growls, and Shawn stops in his tracks to turn around and face me.

  “They’re going to a burger joint. But you,” he says as he starts stripping the sheets off his bed, “are coming with me to the Laundromat.” When my face twists with confusion, he glances over his shoulder and tosses a pillowcase at me. “Did you really think I wouldn’t notice? Every inch is covered with glitter.”

  “And drool,” I add with a chuckle that he mocks.

  “Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, and a million other things I don’t want to sleep in.”

  He finishes stripping the bed, grabs a bag from the closet, and ushers me off the bus. And outside, I begrudgingly fall in step behind him, dangling the pillowcase from my fingertips like it’s covered in something I could catch—which I don’t doubt it is. “Shouldn’t you be used to it by now?”

  The frays of my cutoff shorts tickle my thighs along with a strong summer breeze. After all the trouble that wearing that safety-pinned dress Dee made me for our first performance at Mayhem caused, I’ve decided it’s easier—and safer—to just be myself, mismatched wardrobe and all. My oversized My Chemical Romance tank is tucked into the front of my shorts, my hair is twisted up into a clip, and my boots are eating the sidewalk one crack at a time.

  “Used to what?” Shawn asks. His shirt is just as timeworn and dark as mine, but he lets it hang loose over the aged threads of his worn vintage jeans. His long arms are full of black bedsheets, his green eyes full of question as he waits for my answer.

  “Sleeping in groupie-whore filth,” I reply bluntly while discarding the pillowcase on top of the pile he’s carrying. He doesn’t even try to fight me, the teasing mood between us shifting somewhere in a fleeting second I feel like I missed.

  Shawn’s eyes are back on the littered Philly sidewalk when he says, “Would it make you hate me more or less if I told you I didn’t sleep with them?” I have no answer to give him, but he doesn’t wait for it anyway. “I’m not going to lie, Kit . . . Yeah, I’ve fucked groupies before. A lot. Too many to count. But it’s not like we cuddle after.” He looks over at me again, his gaze unreadable in a way that makes me wish I still had something to carry. “So are you going to hate me more or less, Kit? Because I don’t know what to say to you to get you to stop looking at me the way you do.”

  I don’t know how I look at him now, but I know it’s not how I looked at him a few weeks ago.

  And I guess he knows it too.

  “I didn’t invite those groupies on the bus,” he adds.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Shawn stops walking to question me with a piercing gaze.

  “Why didn’t you want them to come on?” I repeat.

  “Because I didn’t want you to look at me like you’re looking at me now.”

  “How am I looking at you?”

  Shawn’s thick eyelashes fan down over his eyes, and then he opens them back up to look at me, everything about him calling to that thing in my chest that used to beat for him, that thing that still beats fast even now. “Like there was never a time when it was just you and me hanging out up on your roof,” he says. “Like I never made you laugh or smile or . . . ” He sighs, and those fissures in my heart start to pull again. The regret in his eyes breaks them open. “Just because we kissed in Mayhem doesn’t mean things have to be like this.”

  It mattered to me more than he knew, more than he can ever know, and that’s exactly why that kiss meant things did have to be like this. I couldn’t keep falling and letting myself do it.

  I can’t.

  My defense mechanisms go on high alert, the alarms in my head drowning out the sound of that pounding behind my ribs. “You’re getting awfully sentimental, Shawn.”

  We’re walking shoulder to shoulder in the heart of the city. There are cars passing and sirens in the distance and people shouting back and forth—but I hear none of those things, not one, when Shawn says, “Maybe I miss being on the roof with you.”

  My eyes flit in his direction—hoping to catch a smirk or a glint in his eye or something else that would tell me he’s just teasing. But when he won’t even turn his head to look at me, I know he’s telling the truth.

  “That was corny,” I reply.

  “I meant it.”

  In a signature Kale move, I twist my bottom lip betwee
n my teeth. What exactly does he want from me? He misses being on the roof with me? What does that even mean?

  When Shawn opens the door to a place called Laundrorama, I refuse to go in. “How am I supposed to look at you, Shawn?”

  This time, when our eyes lock, he doesn’t look away. “Like you did before,” he says. “Like we’re friends.”

  I don’t tell him that never—never—have I looked at him like we’re just friends. Instead, I silently walk through the door he’s holding open for me, and with my back to him, I quietly say, “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’ll try to get my eyes to . . . I don’t know, what are they supposed to do?” I turn around with my eyes intentionally as crazy and wide as I can get them, and when Shawn laughs, I ignore the way that sound calls to my heart again, and I force a smile back at him.

  I pick up a pillowcase that drops to the floor as he sets the sheets at the side of a machine and opens the lid. He unties the bag he brought with him and pulls out two mysterious, unlabeled plastic containers—one with white powder, one with blue.

  “Detergent and fabric softener?” I ask while I gaze around the Laundromat. Washers are lined in the middle, with dryers stacked along the walls. The place is mostly empty, save for a woman smoking right next to a No Smoking sign and a leering old man in a robe and pair of jeans.

  I shrink closer to Shawn, my shoulder pressed against his when he says, “Mmhm.” He measures the powders out in marked cups and empties them into the machine.

  “What kind?”

  “Some shit I can’t pronounce. Something Italian.”

  “Is that how you get your clothes so soft?” I ask, and he turns a tender smile on me that makes my cheeks redder than the No Smoking sign being ignored at the corner of the room.

  “Yeah. It also makes them smell really good.”

  Uh, yeah, I’ve freaking noticed. But that does nothing to stop me from wanting to turn into him and bury my nose in the neck of his tee.

  “Want to smell?” he says, shifting toward me like he’s offering to let me do just that. His collarbone looks good enough to eat, just begging to be nibbled on under the thin black fabric of his T-shirt.