“Here’s how I remember it.” He started rehashing the night’s events again. “We argued, like I told you. Roman and I. But he promised me we’d fix things—after Seattle. And then I got on board, and we took off, and it was storming, you know? And the turbulence got worse. And I was …” He turned to her like he’d just recalled something vital. “I’d made that wish.”
“Wish?”
“I saw the time, eleven eleven, and I wished”—his voice caught, his face a mask of excruciating pain—“that I wouldn’t die on that plane.”
His eyes were full of emotion, and she suddenly understood.
Oakley reached over and placed her hand on his. “You’re regretting now that you’d wished none of them would die on that plane.” It explained clearly why he took responsibility for their deaths.
His features twisted briefly, agonizingly. He drew a sharp breath. “I feel so selfish.”
“You couldn’t have known, Hudson.” She put her hand on his, where it rested on his knee. “How could you have?”
He let out the breath slowly. He looked out at the wide, calm river.
“I don’t know if the wish had anything to do with it. If not, then why did the time wave crest and pick me and not them? We were all on the same plane.”
Oakley gazed at him as he looked out at the water. He was a beautiful person, with a big love for his friends. Oakley couldn’t help admiring how much he cared about people. With all his charm, talent, good looks, and charisma, he could probably use people rather than love them, but he wasn’t like that. Like with his band mates and their pilot, and probably a lot of others, he wanted what was best for them.
Which was probably why all this hurt so much.
Hudson turned his hand over and laced his fingers through Oakley’s. She let him, since he obviously needed the support.
“As the plane went into a steeper dive, I—I felt something disconnect between myself and reality. In a blur, I saw the parachute, I saw the storm, I saw the guys with their oxygen masks, and I heard their screams.” He shuddered. The screams—Oakley hadn’t visualized that part. A sick feeling came to her throat, and she swallowed it down, her eyes shutting at the thought of the horror.
“But you …?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. I think my spirit left my body. Is that a thing? That’s a thing, right? Because it’s exactly what it felt like. That’s the disconnection I meant. But then”—he smirked—“then I remember floating in some cold water, gasping for breath, and scrambling to the bank. I lay there for a while, freezing, and I knew I had to get to civilization or I’d die of hypothermia. That, or I’d be dinner for coyotes.”
Oakley shoved that image from her mind. “You would’ve shooed them off.”
“Well, yeah, but I’d definitely starve. It turns out, I’m not great at foraging for wild berries or catching fish with my bare hands.”
“You tried that?”
“Sure. And I stunk at it.” He half-laughed, and the mood lightened. “At first I had no idea where I was, except that it looked like Oregon, since I could see Mt. Hood off in the distance.” Mt. Hood was a remarkably recognizable landmark, and it was visible from pretty much everywhere except the high-canyoned sides of the Gorge. “I went downstream, following the flow until I found a town. Wood River.” He aimed a thumb over his shoulder.
“You walked into town.” The day Oakley had met him, probably.
“Yep, and so hungry. I am a teenage boy, you know, even though in the shoe store you called me a forty-year-old man.” He squeezed her hand. She opened her mouth to protest or apologize, but he continued instead. “And you, beautiful Oakley Marsden, shared your precious Little Debbie snack.”
“Precious! They’re the cheapest baked goods in America. The chocolate is probably made of half paraffin wax.” But she loved it. Craved it daily.
“Regardless, I hadn’t been that desperate for anything ever before in my life. We Americans are just not used to going without pretty much anything. Be it food or water or shelter, we pretty much have it all the time.”
“Well, most of us.” She had known some less-fortunate people in her day. Oakley and Mom did a lot of work with the homeless during the Christmas break every year, gathering blankets and coats, mostly. Sometimes they worked at soup kitchens and stuff. “But you’re right.”
“What I’m trying to say is thanks for the Little Debbie. You had me at Swiss Roll.”
“Jerry Maguire, huh?”
“You still know that movie? It’s been a lot of years.”
“They show old romances on TV sometimes. Mom and I watch them when Sherm’s out of town.”
“Your mom is pretty great,” he said again.
A pang of jealousy whacked Oakley—one she never would have expected. She should not feel competitive for a guy, not against her mom. She saw him first, though. Okay, that was just ridiculous. They’d been over this. Mom wasn’t into Now Hudson, and Oakley decided to just lay that whole idea to rest.
Oakley probably needed some sleep. Or maybe a Little Debbie. Her sugar was obviously crashing if her logic had flown out the window so completely.
They scaled the rocks downstream a ways to where lay the remnants of the vigil earlier in the week. “What’s that pile of junk?”
Compared to the lovely river view, the colorful stacks of plastic and cloth and wood left a few yards down the river really did look anomalous. A lot of Diet Pepsi cups, their plastic glinting in the rays of the setting sun.
“It’s the vigil. They come every year. They bring memories of the band.”
“They do?” Hudson got up and started crossing the rocky area toward it, his face registering disbelief. “I mean, we had a couple of songs, but man. We weren’t popular long enough to even start getting into drinking problems or to even start thinking we were all that to the girls who screamed at our shows.”
Oakley watched him go a few steps and then followed him. “You mean you really didn’t party?” He’d claimed not to do drugs, and that was great, but she’d only half-believed him.
He turned around and looked at her like he was hurt. “Uh, hello?”
“Hello, what? Rock stars party. It’s like … required.” She kicked a smaller stone and it plopped into the river a few feet away. “They let every girl paw at them, they indulge in controlled substances, and they have no rules.” Especially if they were estranged from their parents, which Hudson clearly had been.
“Yeah, maybe that’s true nowadays, but Roman kept the Girl Crazy guys on very short leashes. There were groupies that were hired to go to our concerts and scream, but we were never allowed to see them any closer than from the stage.”
Well, that resolved one question—of whether or not Mom had ever actually hung out with Hudson or the band members, or if she’d just pined for them from afar. Maybe I shouldn’t feel so relieved by this revelation.
“We weren’t even allowed to read our own mail—bills or from fans or anything. He didn’t want us getting any wild ideas that we could have any girls we wanted. He sheltered us from all that, told us he wanted to preserve us from the storm of fame.”
Oakley took a second and processed that. So he wasn’t a typical pop star, complete with the stereotypical vices that had kept her worrying about what kind of life he might have lived. Something about that comforted her more than anything she might have guessed. And it made her think maybe her mom had better taste in crushes than she would ever have imagined.
If so, then maybe somewhere out there, my dad is actually a really great guy.
“It sounds like Roman cared about protecting you.”
“Yeah.” Hudson smirked. “That was why we trusted him. In fact, we trusted him more than our own families.” He picked up a stone and chucked it.
“Did your families … do something?” It was hard for Oakley to imagine a parent exploiting a kid, but she’d read about it in People magazine, the rock star kids whose parents took piles of dollars from them and used thei
r kids to improve their own lifestyles, when that could have been put into trust funds and college funds and future-use funds, or whatever. “Weren’t they trustworthy?”
Hudson looked up at the sky. A few fluffy clouds puffed along in it. Black-winged birds scream-sang in a tree from a congregation in a tree that had already dropped all its leaves. Somewhere along the river, someone had a campfire going, and its tendrils of cozy smoke mixed with the tangy-fresh autumn air.
“I don’t know now. Roman said they weren’t.” Hudson shrugged. “He’d kept us sheltered, like I said, from all our bills and other mail, including from our parents. I guess they’d been pretty insistent on talking to us by phone, but always right during recording sessions, so we couldn’t talk. Then they’d started asking for money, and then they started sending nasty letters. Roman had been fighting them off for us.”
That didn’t sound good. What a world where a kid couldn’t even trust his own family. Oakley had never thought about how horrible that must have been.
“After a few months of this, he got the boys and me to declare ourselves emancipated.”
“Like, as in declared legal adults?”
“Yeah, I guess it happens all the time in show business.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility.” Oakley could barely trust herself to not use up her college fund on cute boots. What if she’d had far more money to blow? “I wouldn’t be ready.”
“Yeah. Roman agreed, and I did too. So, he encouraged us to give him power of attorney, so we would have someone we trusted looking out for us.”
Oakley had lived with Sherm the lawyer long enough that she’d heard this phrase a few times, and she knew that it meant someone could make all legal decisions for someone else. Someone underage or incapacitated.
“You signed something allowing that?”
“Of course.” Hudson kicked a stone on the ground next, following just what Oakley had done. His stone made a bigger plunk. “He always gave good, solid advice. The only thing I think I ever did without his knowledge was reroute a bunch of my cash based on that hunch.”
A wolf howled somewhere afar off. Oakley picked up a rock and threw it in the river, her thoughts wandering. “I wonder what he did after the plane crash.”
If he’d lost his biggest act, based on his own decision to send them out into the night on a plane during the storm, Roman must have been racked with guilt for years. Oakley’s eye stung when she thought about lifelong implications of a brief, tragic decision.
Hudson pointed to Oakley’s phone. “Sorry.”
“Sorry about what?”
“I used your smart phone. I looked up Roman and what he’s been doing. There was a whole page about him on something called Wacky Encyclopedia. It was shocking.”
Oh, she knew what site he meant. “You can’t trust everything you read there.”
“But it’s on the internet. I saw it.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century. We trust but verify—on sites that aren’t allowed to be altered by anyone with a computer.” She didn’t even want to touch fake news.
He nodded his head slowly. “So you think it might not be true, then?”
“What?”
“About Roman starting his own record label the spring after Nick, Chris, and Al died, getting insanely rich, and then producing his own television show. Because if it’s a lie, that would make a lot more sense.”
“What do you mean?” Oakley wasn’t following him. “If he was part of the music business, it would only make sense that he would continue in it, even after his famous band died.” After a proper mourning period, of course. “I mean, he might change jobs after a tragedy, but he might have just gotten more famous or whatever. I mean, he propelled you guys to success.”
“Well, how much money does it take to make a TV show? Has to be a ton.”
How times had changed. “Nope. Sure, network or cable still gets expensive, but it depends on the TV show, but if it’s just online, anyone can. Penniless five-year-olds can. It’s called YouTube. Little kids have their own channels talking about their favorite Christmas presents and making up stupid stories on their backyard trampolines. In fact, people film each other watching people watch other people play video games—and people watch that.”
“Wait. That’s, wait. What? Are you serious?”
“Dead serious.” The sun had set now, and the sky was turning purple.
“That’s, like, four levels removed from actually playing the game.”
“I know, right?” Oakley couldn’t help laughing when she had the opportunity to tell Hudson how messed up some parts of the world had become. Not the sad, depraved parts of the present day, because those were obviously there too, but the dumbness of it. “But just so you know, no one is into Beanie Babies anymore.” She’d seen some old spoofs on the price pop of the Beanie Bubble. Thank you, YouTube, for letting me waste so many afternoons gleaning useless knowledge about pop culture of the past.
“Aw, too bad. What about the Macarena? Is that still around?” He smiled when she pantomimed the dance, hugging herself around her hips, and they started walking back to the car. He was obviously feeling a little better, for whatever reason. Bringing him to the Gorge had been the right thing to do. “I’m glad it’s cheap to make movies and TV channels now. I’d hate to believe what I had been fearing about Roman for a split-second—that he’d somehow financially benefitted from Girl Crazy’s demise.”
The air whooshed out of Oakley’s lungs. She’d seen more than one headline with that theme in the scrapbook’s pile of foul play conspiracy articles. However, now, at the crash site, was not the time or place to mention that, not when Hudson was looking so much more chipper than he had been in a while.
“Yeah,” she said, nerves setting a quaver in her voice. “That would be terrible.” They were at the car now. Hudson got the door for her.
“Right? I wouldn’t want to think the worst of someone who had been my greatest champion, based on one disagreement.”
Inside the car, Oakley put on her seatbelt and tugged a blanket around herself from the back seat. “You’ve made your toughest journey,” she suggested, hoping he’d agree.
“Maybe. I still need to find my family.”
“Yeah,” she said, sorry that seeing a family would be so difficult. As they pulled onto the dark highway, she ventured a question. “Do you think we could find any of the guys’ families? Would they know how to find your parents?”
“Actually, as soon as we can get access to a truck, that’s exactly where I need to go next.”
Oakley’s cell phone buzzed a text. It was from an unknown number, but the content sent her skin pinging.
Oakley. It’s Blue. The producer from the TV show? Oakley’s heart flipped over. She scrolled fast to see what the text said. We need to do some rearranging for the show, and we need to cancel your callback for a week from Wednesday.
“No!” Oakley moaned. Her eyes stung with tears. She should have seen this coming, what with the awfulness of her audition, and the fact she’d become a viral video shame for the whole TNRS franchise.
“What’s wrong?” Hudson slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road. “Is someone hurt?”
“Yeah, me.” The words came out like scrapes. If only she’d sung better at the beginning of her audition song, if only she’d controlled her nerves. If only, if only. The whole sky and earth filled with “if onlies.”
“What happened?” Hudson touched her chin to turn her face toward him. “You look stricken.”
“I could write a song about how I feel right now, and it would be called ‘If Only, If Only.’” The melody rang in a plaintive cry in her mind, and a few tears stung in the corners of her eyes, and even though she noticed that she’d divulged her deeply guarded secret of writing lyrics, she couldn’t even care. She took a shuddering breath and told him, “They’re canceling my callback for the singing audition.”
“No! They can’t do that.”
“They can. It’s their show.”
“I’ll call them up. I’ll tell them they’re making a mistake. I’ll … I’ll sing with you. When we were at the piano I could tell we harmonize well. It’s a surefire win. Come on. Give me the number. I’m calling them right now.” He reached for her phone, but she gripped it.
“It’s a solo audition, not a duet.”
“I’m not letting them do that to you, Oakley. It’s not fair. It’s—”
Another text chimed, cutting him off. It was from Blue again. Wincing, Oakley let her eyes go back there to the painful place.
But it turned out to not be painful.
Instead, it struck terror in her heart.
It turns out one of our contestants has dropped out. You tied with another singer for the next highest score, and you will both be considered for live show, based on audience pre-show feedback. Please come to the studio dressed for the camera on Thursday. Makeup is at two p.m. The live show begins at seven.
Dressed for the camera! Makeup! Oakley grabbed the car door’s handle and gripped it for dear life. Then, just when she thought she’d hit her limit, another text hit.
Oh, and that’s this Thursday, not next.
Scene 10: “10,000 Promises”
Cell reception wasn’t good enough in the Gorge to do any research, so Oakley told Hudson to book it home. He wasn’t as fast of a driver as Mom. Mom took canyon curves like Hélio Castroneves in his IndyCar, practiced as she was from years of traveling the winding road.
But the fact that Hudson Oaks took the road seriously, watching for deer, keeping both hands on the wheel except for the occasional pat of Oakley’s hand or swipe of his curved knuckles down her cheek, made Oakley’s heart get fluttery. It wasn’t that she didn’t like adventure, but she also really, really liked a safe guy.
Who would have pegged a pop star as safe?
My 90s Boy Band Boyfriend: A YA Time Travel Rockstar Romance (Teen Queens Book 2) Page 16