His lip curled in a sneer, and I wondered if he could already taste blood. “Let me explain it to you in a way you might understand, Scout. Our news is the entertainment.”
And just like that, I’d gone back to being the goat. Thankfully, Andy got called out of the office, and Zion came back in, so I spent the next hour hovering at his desk, complaining about how I couldn’t ever win in this suckfest of a job.
“And if I could find another job—” My phone dinged, and I absently glanced at it, intending to finish that sentence, but when I saw the notification that Micah had followed me on Twitter, I lost my train of thought.
Directly on the heels of that, he sent another message: Can I get your phone number? It’s easier for me to text.
I sent it to him, and a minute later my phone buzzed with a text from him. What are you doing right now?
Working. I abandoned Zion and walked back to my desk with a smile on my face. I moved my mouse to wake up my monitors and tried to make myself focus on copyediting the document I’d emailed in earlier. Andy might not want to print an article about Miriam Blackwell, but someone somewhere might be interested in it.
Another buzz distracted me. Are you going to print this?
Maybe.
In that case, you should know I’m reading War and Peace and performing surgery on an orphaned puppy.
I bit my thumbnail and giggled. Pictures please?
When my phone buzzed, I held my breath hoping for a photo, but it was even better. Screw texting. When can I call you?
Zion and Leonard lifted their heads when I squealed. I had at least another hour left to work. But I wrote, Now?
I set my phone aside to flip through my afternoon shots, but my stomach felt like it might burst with rainbow-colored exploding butterflies. I barely dared hope that he was calling because he might be interested in me and not my camera. The last time I saw him, he’d been all business. But then hadn’t he flirted a little bit just now?
Minutes later, my phone rang, and I snatched it, but made myself wait for at least a second ring. “Hello?”
“Jo? It’s Micah.” His voice directly in my ear made me swallow hard.
“Hey, Micah. What are you doing?”
“Sitting in my backyard, talking to a pretty girl.”
I bounced on my stool. “Yeah?”
“Are you going to be able to come to the show tonight?”
“Planning to.”
“Cool.”
He paused, and I couldn’t think of anything to fill in the silence.
He broke in. “Hey, I can put a press pass in with the backstage pass if you want to take pictures. I think they’ll confiscate your camera otherwise.”
Like a punch in the gut, his intentions hit me hard. “You want me to take pictures?”
“That would be cool. But only if you want to.”
“Yeah, that would be great.” I wondered if he’d found out I hadn’t made Eden pay for her pictures. Now he’d expect me to show up wherever he wanted me to and give him free publicity. I started to tell him exactly what I thought of that, but he found his voice.
“So will you have time after the show to come out with us? It won’t be anything special, but we like to go out after and get some food and relax. It will mostly be the band guys, but you’d totally be welcome.”
“Will you need pictures of that, too?” At my irritated tone, Zion glanced up at me with a curious expression.
“What? I hadn’t thought . . . I mean, it will only be . . .”
Why was I blowing this? I changed my tone of voice. “Yes. I’ll be happy to come out. Can Zion come, too?” Zion waggled his eyebrows and continued to mess on his laptop.
“Zion? Oh, right.” He exhaled. “Zion’s just your roommate, right? I mean, he’s not—”
I chuckled. “Have you met Zion?” It suddenly hit me what he was asking. I pushed my hair behind my ear. “He’s just my roommate. And my best friend. But he’s not—”
“I’m sorry. That was pretty nosy.”
“You’re apologizing to me for being nosy?”
He laughed. “Yeah. I guess that’s a twist. But can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure.”
He cleared his throat and waited a beat. “Are you seeing anyone?” His voice cracked halfway through the question.
“Not at the moment.” I pressed my lips together to hold in the Yippee that threatened to escape. I ventured a volley. “And I happen to know that you’re not, either.”
“What else do you know about me?” He’d lowered his voice, making me feel like we should be alone.
I got up and walked to the window as if it would give me privacy. I looked down at the street below and talked low. “That you read everything anyone writes to you on Twitter. And respond.”
“Easier than answering fan mail.”
“I suppose it would be.” I glanced back. Zion peered at me over the top of his computer.
Micah said, “Now you have to tell me something I don’t know about you.”
“Okay.” I leaned against the windowsill for a minute to think what I should share.
“Come on, Jo Jo. I can’t just look it up in the papers.”
I wracked my brain for something that felt safe enough. “I’m kind of obsessed with the theater.”
“Oh yeah? Like musicals or plays?”
“Musicals mostly. I own all the soundtracks and love the performances. Is that corny?”
“Uh-uh,” he said. “You’ve never seen my band perform, right?” It sort of bugged me that he switched the topic back to him without even listening to what I’d said.
“Nope.”
“Do me a favor. Don’t look anything up before you come tomorrow night. Promise?”
“Sure.” I didn’t know where to go with the conversation. It was too awkward to return to the topic of theater, but then he’d just effectively shut down any questions about his band.
He hesitated a second, too, then said, “God, I’m no good on the phone. I’m all discombobulated.”
I had to give him that. Still, I jabbed. “Hey, you’re the one who insisted on it.”
His laugh came across like a sigh. “I do like the sound of your voice.”
Down on the street, Andy marched head down toward the front of our building. I remembered I had a dozen things to finish if I wanted to leave early. “Hey, I’ve got to scoot. I’ll see you tonight?”
He quickly threw in. “Don’t forget to stop at the will call.”
“Oh, yeah. The backstage passes.”
“Right. And there will be a press pass.”
My budding hopes wilted. “Yup. I’ll be sure to bring my camera.”
Chapter 13
Knowing I’d be seeing Micah (and he’d be seeing me), I got home from work as soon as possible to kick off my street clothes, shower, shave, and change into something more alluring, hoping I might get him to see past the camera lens. I picked out a flirty skirt that would show off my long legs and settled on a loose-fitting blouse with a low neckline to flash a little cleavage. I tried on a pair of sling-back heels that would put me at eye level with Micah, but considering how long we’d be on our feet, I went with my Roman sandals. When I started fixing my makeup, Zion barged in on me and asked if he could borrow my mascara.
Neither Zion nor I wanted to sit through an opening act we’d never heard of, so we didn’t get to the venue until much later than the doors opened. Outside the theater, nobody waited in line or hovered near the doors. Loud but muted music pulsed through the walls. I could almost feel it more than hear it. The ticket windows were eerily quiet. The man behind the speak hole had no trouble finding our names and slid us an envelope with Wilder written on it in black sharpie.
I peeked in to verify it held a pair of backstage passes and press credentials. “How cool is this?”
We handed our tickets to another portly man on a stool right inside the doors. He scanned them and handed them back. Another checker had me o
pen my bag to make sure I wasn’t carrying a camera. Of course I had one, but I flashed him my press pass.
He pointed out a plastic baggie filled with small cookies. “Can’t carry food into the venue.” He indicated a trash can. “There’s food available in the concessions.” He sounded bored like he was repeating a script from rote. He didn’t even make eye contact.
“This is emergency food. I’m type 1 diabetic.” I said as sweetly as I could muster.
He lifted his eyes, and I could see him processing me as a human for the first time. He tilted his head toward the lobby like it made no difference to him. “Go on in.”
“Thanks,” I called from several feet away as Zion shoved me inside.
The lobby bustled with people milling about, buying tiny clear plastic cups of beer or wine. We found the main doors, showed our tickets again, and entered another world.
What struck me at first was the fluidity of the crowd. We had assigned seats, but nobody sat. Some people stood in the aisle, not entering or exiting, just dancing. We located our seats near the front and slid across to occupy them. I fell into mine, and nearly fell back out. The seat was broken and stopped about two inches below level. I jumped up. Zion did the same and complained that his seat was crooked.
I started to put my pocketbook on the floor, but my feet stuck to some syrupy glue. I wrapped it over my neck the opposite direction as my camera strap. I immediately hunted for something to eat. This experience promised to be far more draining than an evening with Eden Sinclair.
The theater was dark, but spotlights crisscrossed on the stage. The music coming from the speakers had a distant quality. Maybe the sound system sucked, or maybe the band did. A mass of black bangs obscured the lead singer’s eyes, and he sang with his mouth crushed against the microphone so that his lyrics came out muffled. Every so often, he’d bounce and spring in sharp angular motions. The rest of the band concentrated on their so-called craft. I couldn’t make out a melody at all.
When those sounds came to a stuttering halt and the audience applauded, the lead announced that they had one song left. He must have spoken the title or else people knew what to expect, but they started the next song to a roar. After a few bars, I realized the song sounded vaguely familiar.
“Who is this?” I yelled at Zion.
He reached into his back pocket and produced our tickets. “Halcyon?”
I’d definitely heard the song somewhere. It sounded awful live, and I wondered if all their music sounded better in a studio. I had low expectations for Micah’s band.
As the lead singer waved and ran off stage, a red curtain dropped, and the lights came up. I had a chance to take in the theater. After the last performance, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a burned-out shell of a hole in the wall. But in fact, the place was old school classy, with a focus on old. The seats were all red velvet but less posh and more scary. A pair of once shiny gold balconies peered down on us, now dull and decaying. I wouldn’t have trusted my life to the stability of those structures. The crowd in the venue would have looked more at home on a field at a festival. And they smelled like it, too.
After another fifteen minutes or so, the lights double flashed, and the people to either side of us pushed out of the row and into the aisle. At first, I thought they were taking advantage of intermission or maybe leaving before the show even started, but they moved forward, jamming in with others who now pressed against the stage. Security ineffectually directed people to move back. The crowd amassing in the aisles had to be a safety hazard.
“Don’t shout ‘fire.’ ” I whispered to Zion.
“No shit. What’s going on?”
I shrugged. My experience with rock concerts was practically nonexistent. My mom would never have let me blow out my eardrums and brain cells on rock music. Once, in an act of rebellion, I went with some friends to see a Nine Inch Nails concert, but I didn’t know their music and regretted the decision. We left after three songs. I had a suspicion tonight might be a repeat.
The lights dropped. A moment later, loud music broke out through the speakers at the same time the red curtain opened. Micah stood at the mic, wearing a ridiculous pair of bright blue pants and a ratty T-shirt. Somehow they’d fixed whatever technical issues had plagued the first band. The sound system functioned perfectly. Micah’s vocals came through clear.
I sucked in my breath at the sight of him. It was one thing to sit beside him while he was just some other guy, but seeing him onstage, lit from above, in complete control of his audience made me want him in a weird, visceral way. I wondered if that was the feeling other people got when they went to church. It was nearly spiritual, and Micah was the cult leader.
And the mystery of the crowd behavior resolved itself as Micah grabbed his mic out of the stand and walked to the edge of the stage, touching all the outstretched hands and then pulling one person up on stage with him. This guy immediately fell backward off the stage into the waiting arms of the fans, who carried him on a wave all the way to the back of the group. When it happened a second time, I noticed Micah wasn’t pulling people on stage. He would give a tug, and whatever guy climbed up on his own. But every time someone had surfed to the middle of the crowd, Micah would choose the next volunteer victim.
“You should go up there,” Zion yelled.
“Hell, no. You go.”
It was a moot point. When the song ended, many people in the crowd returned to their seats. Clearly this was an insider first-song-only stunt. But when the second song started, an inflated ball appeared out of nowhere. I craned my neck up to the balcony and watched as another dropped into the audience.
Micah’s band was living up to its name: Theater of the Absurd. I remembered my press pass and slung my camera around to start shooting. The show went on, half rock concert, half performance piece, with more crowd interaction. Zion followed me as I moved around the venue, trying to get the best angles. I almost considered testing out the structural integrity of the balconies but decided I didn’t need to risk my life if I wasn’t getting paid.
When Micah announced the last song of the night, people moved up to the stage, and Zion and I returned to our once-upon-a-time seats. I expected more of the same crowd surfing, but they all jumped up and down in time with the music—until Micah started into his last verse. At that point, he fell backward into his sea of fans, completely trusting them to catch him and deliver him unharmed to the back of the theater. And he continued to sing. When he finally landed on his feet again, he said, “Good night!” and walked out the door.
The band stopped playing without winding down or fading out. They just stopped and walked off stage. Then the theater erupted in a chorus of “Encore.”
Zion leaned over. “Is that the same guy who sang with Eden last week?”
“That is a guy who does whatever he wants.”
“Probably a guy who gets whatever he wants, too.”
It took me a minute to process what we’d just seen. Now I understood why Micah had asked me if I’d ever seen him perform after I told him I loved theater. His band had taken a page from some of the musicals I’d seen where the stage actors moved through the crowd or where they came in and exited from the back of the theater rather than the stage. What I’d interpreted as a non sequitur so he could talk about himself made sense now. He knew I’d appreciate his show. And I did.
The band came out and wrapped up with a few more songs. He’d saved his radio hit for the encore. Everyone in the crowd sang along. Me included. It felt like a communal event. I wanted to hug the strangers around me.
And then the show ended, and the lights came up. People left the theater, laughing and singing. Normally, leaving a theater had an anticlimactic, returning-to-normal isolation to it. But I overheard people talking to each other, already reliving their favorite parts of the night. I’d noticed the crowd consisted mostly of guys, but there were a handful of girls, giggling together over how hot Micah was and trying to figure out if they’d be able to catc
h the next show.
I smiled, smug in my knowledge that I had backstage passes and feeling so special until one girl said, “Do you have the backstage passes?”
Zion nudged me to keep walking since I’d come to a complete halt to eavesdrop, but the girls were moving with the crowd.
“Yup. I’m gonna go for Noah.”
“Not Micah?”
“As if.”
Their voices drifted away, and the crowd swallowed them up. A surge of adrenaline had left a strange metallic taste in my mouth. The girls had triggered some kind of competitive drive in me. I had an overwhelming urge to rush backstage and stake a claim on Micah to show those girls up. And I didn’t even know what they looked like. They were a pair of voices.
“Remind me not to get involved with a rock musician,” I said to Zion.
“As if,” he giggled.
The laughter helped diffuse the pent-up nervous energy. “Maybe we should just leave.”
“And miss this weird experience? No way.” As we merged into the lobby, he tucked a hand under my elbow and navigated the crush of exiting people.
“Where are we going?”
“Following those girls.”
Then I saw them. They both had two-toned blond hair and wore interchangeable clothes. They might as well have worn T-shirts that said “Sleep with me.” I glanced down at my skin-baring outfit and wondered if I looked any less obvious.
We followed them through a plain red door and down a narrow hallway to another door covered in peeling black paint. Through this door, we were confronted by a member of the theater staff who studied our backstage passes and handed them back to us.
“Vince, take these two to the visitor room.”
We eventually entered a kind of surreal cocktail party where groups of people clumped together around band members like they were planetary objects. I scanned the room for Micah, but since he didn’t seem to be there, Zion and I hung back to figure out the dynamic.
A Crazy Kind of Love Page 12