“Hate the crowd, Iggy?” LD teases with a crooked smile, slinging her arm around my shoulder as we make our way to our seats. Front-row seats. Middle.
“I feel like an awkward appendage,” I mutter.
She nods sympathetically. “Think of all the men with them. So much foreskin, so little foresight.”
I crack a smile. “You’re terrible.”
“But you still love me.”
“Forever and ever,” I agree.
She throws her head back with a laugh, hugging me tighter.
The usher points to our seats, and we make our way down the row to them. A guy in a backward hat and a “BLACKHEARTED” T-shirt gives us a side eye. “’Sup?” he asks LD.
She inclines an eyebrow. “’Sup, bro?”
Then he turns back to his friends and mutters something about who we had to screw to get these seats. LD pretends not to hear, tucking her purse under her seat. I sit down next to her and marvel at how close we are to the stage. I could spit and probably hit Jason Dallas if I want to.
“Jason Dallas must not hate you that much,” she says to me, trying to ignore the douche bro beside her. “I mean, these seats are killing it.”
“Maybe it’s all one big joke though? Maybe these are the worst seats. Maybe these are the spit seats.”
“Spit seats?”
“Yeah, you know when performers spit when they’re singing or talking? That spit goes somewhere.”
She cringes. “Thanks for that.”
“I still can’t believe I actually interviewed him, and I can’t believe . . .”
“I know, Dark didn’t call.”
“I was going to say I can’t believe Jason’s a fan.” I grin, and she grins, too. “It’s so cool!”
“Isn’t it?” she agrees happily. “And that was a damn good interview—”
Suddenly the lights flicker. She gasps, patting my knee. “Ooh, it’s starting!”
Then she jumps to her feet. She’s the last voice I hear before the screams from the crowd become deafening, the Garden so dark all I can see are the cell phones flashing in the darkness like high-definition lightning bugs. We get to our feet, and she grabs my hand and holds it tightly.
I close my eyes and revel in the noise.
All the noise.
Chaos multiplied. A hundred thousand earthquakes. A song no one knows and no one can write the lyrics to. The melody is every sound in unison, an idiosyncratic symphony of vibrations. It pierces straight through me, like a bullet wound, so loud and raw I can’t hear myself anymore. Not my heartbeat or my thoughts . . . only everyone else, screaming. For a moment, I can fool myself into being everyone else.
I suck in a breath. Hold it. I can’t help it. The stage lights blind us like white lightning. The band comes out. Takes their places. They break into the hit “Shotgun Heartache” and the crowd somersaults into the lyrics, screaming them so loudly they screech through their throats. Everyone knows the words. If you don’t know “Shotgun Heartache,” then you live under a rock.
“Roman Holiday didn’t show up,” LD shouts into my ear. “I don’t see them!”
“Then they’re missing out!” I reply.
Jason comes out from the wings and grabs the microphone on the stand. The blood-red scarf tied to the microphone glitters like confetti. He puts a hand up to his ear. “What, I’m sorry, are you people singing?”
And that just prompts everyone to sing louder. The stanza repeats. The band throws up their fists, howling the words as if their hearts beat to them. “This is our last stand. This is where we part. Follow your fortune first. It’s our time to start.”
The crowd is so loud now, their voices quake my rib cage. Everything and everyone are so full of music that it’s impossible to feel anything less than alive.
“This is my love song for all the lost, time to fire the warning shot!”
The Prince of Punk steps up, straightening, unfurling, and for a breathless moment he is made of nothing but music, and then his voice crackles across the speakers and swirls up into the rafters. The crowd breaks into celebration. They thrust up their fists, singing along, the first stanza carrying into the second, and then the third, the crowd pushing and pulling against each other in the rush of the music.
This is my first concert, and I refuse to do anything less than sing the entire thing. This moment is everything. It’s all the moments I thought it could be. I want to bottle it up and share it, tell the world Look at where I went. Look at what I did. Didn’t see that, did you?
I want to share it with—
The lyrics fall off my tongue, a sturdy realization coming over me.
I want to share this moment with Billie.
And then it hits me—it hits me like a bullet train or the whiff of sunflowers just after they unfurl in spring or the sound of a Cadillac cresting over the hill into town—I want to go home.
Home.
To Steadfast. To my radio show.
I want to climb into that watchtower with a bottle of Diet Coke and a pack of Twizzlers and tell Billie how much I really do like him, and I want to tell him before he leaves forever—and before I leave forever. Because if I learned anything from coming here, it’s that you only have one chance.
I want to be bold, and be brave.
I want to be my own North Star.
“Hey—watch it,” I hear the douche bro snap to another guy in the front row. They’re trying to get as close to the stage as possible, pushing and shoving. Someone elbows LD into me. We stumble into the swanky-looking people beside us. The douche bro says something incredibly nasty to one of the other fans, and then I see a fist—and then someone jumps onto someone else’s back. It turns quickly into chaos.
Jason Dallas’s guitarist—bless him—grabs his microphone and shouts, “Security! Security!” but it’s about two seconds too late.
I don’t even have time to blink before LD shoves me out of the way. The douche bro’s fist slams into her face with a crack, and blood goes everywhere.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Ow, ow, ow! That hurts!” LD cries, jerking away from the medic. Her entire right eye is purpling, her rouge-red lips split. She’s bleeding from a gash on her forehead, framed by her now-drooping victory curls.
The medic tosses around the words “CT scan” and “concussion”—words neither of us like. She winces when he shines a light into her eyes, and he mutters something under his breath. When LD took the punch for me, a medical officer and two policemen came and escorted us out into a medical area for the drunks who fall and bust their nose or fangirls who faint during the show . . . and saviors who get punched in the face.
The douche bro is sitting in a corner chair, handcuffed, until the police take our statement and they lead him out.
“Seriously, I don’t have a concussion,” LD tells the medic. “I’m good. I’ve gotten beat-up worse. You should see me on bad days.”
“I still think you need to go to the hospital,” the medic replies. He’s a youngish guy, maybe mid-twenties. He’s wearing a “BLACKHEARTED” pin on his stethoscope. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three.”
“Hmm.” He jots something else down, then listens to her heart. When she checks out, he still says, “I think you need to go to the ER.”
“Seriously, this is no sweat! If I start feeling worse, I promise I will. It’s just kinda cool I got punched in my first mosh fight.”
The doctor gives her a flat look before turning to me. “Look after her, yeah?” he says, and moves on to a girl who apparently fainted from either a lack of food or too much air coming out of her lungs.
Maybe both.
LD presses a bag of ice against her blackening eye and gives a hiss of pain. “Well, good thing I have VIP status at Sephora. It’ll take a miracle to cover this up.”
“You didn’t have to push me out of the way,” I reply. “I could’ve taken it.”
“Oh, please, let me be the hero for once.” She ro
lls her eyes. “I mean we are self-rescuing princess, aren’t we?”
“Except you saved me.”
She shrugged. “We’re princesses at least, then—
“Where is she?” A voice cuts through the small room.
The fainted girl on the gurney a few feet down snaps her eyes to the guy asking, and her face forms the perfect expression of astonishment. Then she begins to pale. The doctor hands her a paper bag exasperatedly and tells her to breathe into it. Then he motions toward LD and me. “Over there.”
LD and I exchange a look. She sees the person in question first, and her eyebrows shoot up into her wilted victory curls. “Oh, Iggy, don’t panic but . . .”
The sound of footsteps come closer. A whole army of them. Angry footsteps at that. A guy rounds the gurney to face me. His hair is shoulder length and jet black, but he’s wiggling his fingers into his scalp as if he’s trying to find something. With a click, he pulls a weft of black hair out and tosses it at one of his assistants, who is already holding quite a few of them. It looks like he buzzed half of his head some time ago but just never bothered to upkeep it, so he disguised it instead with clip-ins on one side. Which is funny. And vain.
For the Prince of Punk.
“I give you free tickets out of the goodness of my heart and you pick a fight during the first song?” he snaps, and then gives LD a once-over. “She looks fine to me,” he adds to the doctor, who gives an innocent shrug.
“Have you seen my face?” LD accuses and drops the ice pack. The punk rocker’s eyebrows jump up in surprise. “See, not as pretty now, am I?”
“If you’re that vain, then you’ll never be pretty enough,” he replies.
“Maybe I’m just vain enough to know I don’t need to be pretty; it’s just a perk.”
“Then what are you?”
“Besides pretty?”
“Besides not as pretty,” he corrects.
She looks up into his face, searching it, her lips curving into a smile she only ever gives to me—and now, to him. “I’m the girl who’s going to make sure you know that you were way flat coming into the second chorus.”
His eyebrows shoot up into his hairline.
She goes on, “And your guitarist came in half a note late. It wasn’t really the best opening, so I don’t think I missed much.”
I stare at her like she’s grown another head, darting my eyes between her and the shocked look on the Prince of Punk’s face. But then slowly it settles into a half smirk, and he outstretches his hand. “And what’s your name?”
“Lorelei,” she replies, and hearing her say her name for the first time since Erin left unfurls the knotted strings around my heart. “I’m Lorelei Darling.”
“Lorelei,” he echoes, and accepts her hand. “I was actually a quarter-step off and Paul meant to come in late.”
“So you mean to sound terrible?”
“So the audience doesn’t get the same thing from the recording,” he replies.
I watch them watch each other for as long as I can stomach it before feeling awkward, and turn to his assistant. “So, did Roman Holiday ever show up?” I ask her.
His assistant shakes her head. “Not once. We heard a rumor they were in North Carolina playing a show instead . . . at a bar—”
“But it doesn’t matter,” Jason Dallas interjects, releasing Lorelei’s hand. “They didn’t come to the show tonight. Their contract is void. And I am going to go celebrate it. Would you two care to join me?”
We give each other a surprised glance, but my best friend recovers with the grace of a cat. “You know I don’t swing your way.”
“And we’ve established I don’t swing yours, but I’ve been in the market for an instrument tech and you have calluses on your hands. Fiddle?”
“Violin,” she replies. “Well, we have a flight in the morning . . .”
“But it’s not morning.”
“And will you pay for us if we miss our flight?”
He shrugs, hands in his pockets. “Yeah.”
Hesitantly, my best friend looks from me to Jason Dallas and back to me. On one hand, I don’t want her to go. I want her to come home with me. I want her to stay. But then I see the miles and miles of possibility stretched between her handshake with Jason Dallas, and I want to see where her story takes her, too.
“I . . . think I’m going to bow out,” I reply, making the decision for her. “I can go home alone.”
“But Iggy,” she begins.
“I’ve got someone waiting at home,” I apologize, and I take her hand and squeeze it tightly. “Go get into some trouble,” I tell her.
She winks and slings the purse over her shoulder. Even with a nose splint, she’s fierce enough to slay dragons with just her eyeliner. “Obviously it’s my middle name. Are you sure you don’t want to come . . . ?”
“I’m positive,” I reply, and give her a tight hug. “Go have some fun. See what sort of possibilities are out there.”
“There’s a few of them,” Jason agrees. “I find more every night.”
Lorelei unravels from me, turns without a moment of hesitation, and wraps her arm into his like a new partner in crime. “So, Jason Dallas, where are we heading?”
I don’t hear his response as they leave me behind.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Once, back in third grade, Mom came to visit. She just showed up one evening with Hawaiian flowers in her hair, and when she pulled me into a hug she smelled of suntan lotion and coconuts. In that moment, I thought she was home to stay. But the next morning she was gone again, having caught a cab to the airport. I cried—I was inconsolable because I didn’t understand why I was always left behind. I wanted to go with her, I sobbed. I wanted to be in every part of her life—no, I just wanted to be a part of it. A small part. Just big enough to leave a hole in her heart if I ever left instead.
This doesn’t feel like that, not wholly, but it’s another person leaving—if only for a night—and I remember what Grams told me when Mom left.
Meetings sometimes break your heart more than good-byes ever will.
Because when one door opens, another closes, and you just hope you’re not still in the room when it does.
I gather up my things and leave, too. The fans have already cleared out of the Garden. Trash and glow sticks and ticket stubs litter the parking lot as I make my way down a street. I don’t know where I’m going, but it doesn’t really matter.
I just walk.
There aren’t any stars in the sky, or if there are I can’t see them from all the light pollution. In Steadfast, there are so many stars it looks like a map of constellations wallpapered to a very tall ceiling. I begin to miss it—just a little—and then I look down.
And the stars are beneath me. The sidewalk glitters in the sleepless lights of the city. A little piece of home. I want to tell Dark about everything. I want to know who he is, I want to say good-bye . . . and I want to never have to.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
My flight leaves the next morning back to Nebraska. Without Lorelei. She texts telling me she’s staying a few days in the city, but she’ll come home. She promises.
I text back that some promises are meant to be broken.
When I land, I have three missed calls from Rooney Quill, wondering if I’ll take the internship. The last voice message is a little more than groveling.
The taxi drops me off in front of my house, and I slide out, pulling my duffel bag higher on my shoulder. Home. But not. Darker, different. Grams isn’t home yet—I’m going to have to go get her from the Darlings—but right now I don’t want to live in that reality yet. I need a little time.
Just a tiny bit more.
As I walk toward the porch, someone stirs in the darkness of the stairs.
Micah.
He gets to his feet, his hands in his pockets. He squints against the evening sun. “Hi,” he says.
I take a deep breath, I climb the steps beside him, looking through my duffel for the
house key. My stomach isn’t full of butterflies anymore when I see him, and I can’t remember when they started fluttering for someone else. “Been waiting long?” I ask.
“Just a few hours,” he jokes, not really joking at all. I see two soda cans and a candy wrapper pushed between the porch pillars. “So, how was New York?”
“Busy, full, wonderful.” I find the key and insert it into the lock, jiggling the handle to get it to open. The door yawns open into the dark, and vacant, house. Is this how this house will feel without Grams? It doesn't feel like it used to.
I drop my things inside and close the door again. We stand awkwardly on the porch for a moment, unable to meet each other’s gazes, and then I can’t stand it anymore. I turn and head back down the steps.
He follows me. “Going to get Grams?”
"Yeah, from the Darlings."
"Where's LD?"
"Lorelei stayed."
"In NYC?"
"Yeah."
At the end of the road, we turn down Corley toward the Darlings' house. It's a white house on the end of the street with a white picket fence and Grams framed in the window. I climb the steps to the Darlings' front door, and pause before I ring the doorbell. I turn back to him. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Yeah, what?"
"Do you love her?”
His shoulders stiffen. He drops his gaze to his scuffed Converses. “Yeah, Igs. I think I do.”
“And she loves you too, right?” When he doesn't say anything, but doesn’t deny it, either, I return back down the steps to where he's standing and kiss him on the cheek. “It's okay. I'm glad."
"You are?"
"Now I am. I'm just glad I have my friend back."
He kicks the ground bashfully, and looks up through his dark lashes. "I've missed you, too."
"You know what I learned from all this?”
"Don't fall in love with friends?"
"No, just don't fall in love with you."
He smiles, and I realize with a pang of sadness that I’ll never see the smile Heather sees. I’ll never find out how wide it is or how bright it shines. But I think it’s going to be okay, because this smile is just as good—and this smile, for this moment, is for me.
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