Before

by KE Payne

  “So…how have you been?” I winced. Lame. How did I think she’d have been?

  Her answer, though, surprised me.

  “I’ve been good.” Nicole turned and rested a hip against the edge of her desk. “Being here has been good for me.” She laughed, and to me it sounded empty of any humour. “Even though I didn’t think that when they dragged me kicking and screaming in here.”

  “They dragged you?” I was horrified.

  “Figure of speech.” Nicole smiled. “I was glad to come here.” She paused. “Things had become…too much.”

  “And…you’re clean now?”

  “Yeah.” She looked away and swallowed. “Thank God.”

  “I’m glad.” I looked across to her, wishing there wasn’t so much distance between us, both emotionally and physically. “I never wanted—”

  “I know.” Nicole shoved away from the desk and returned to her coffee machine, and just like before, I noticed a shift in her mood.

  “I mean it.” It was important she knew. I loved her as a friend. Just because I never wanted to commit to her as anything more didn’t mean I pushed her into all this, did it? “If I’d thought everything would end up like this, then I would have—”

  “Told me you felt the same?” Nicole looked back over her shoulder to me. “No you wouldn’t. Because you didn’t.”

  “No.” I looked away, too ashamed to look at her. “But I would have acted differently if I’d known you’d end up like this.”

  “An addict?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it.” The tension in my shoulders refused to budge.

  “What else would you call it?” Nicole asked. “A bit of fun? ’Cos let me tell you, none of this has been fun.”

  “I did love you, you know,” I said. “I do love you.”

  “Just not in the way I want you to,” Nicole said as she handed me my coffee, “right?”

  “How long had you been using?”

  “Wow.” She cut her glance away. “Straight in there with the big one.”

  “What did you expect me to ask?” I asked. “Did you think I’d come here to drink coffee and reminisce with you?”

  “Like I’d want to reminisce about the past?” Nicole gave a shudder. “No, thanks.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me you were taking drugs?” I pressed. That had been the worst of all of it, the lies and the deceit. The revelation. The knowledge that I’d never known any of it, despite thinking Nicole and I were close.

  “Why would I tell you?” Nicole asked. “When you’d made it clear you weren’t interested in me.”

  “You were still my friend.” I heard my voice rise. “Do you know how hurt I was when—”

  “Oh, hurt?” Nicole’s raised voice matched mine. “You want to talk about hurt? I can give you a whole afternoon on hurt if you’ve got time.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Remind you?” Nicole’s face darkened. “Remind you how everything was okay until I told you I loved you?”

  “You said you didn’t blame me for what happened to you.”

  “I lied,” Nicole said. “Why do you think I took that first line?” She stood up and walked to her window. “And then the next? And the next?”

  “Thanks for that.” I put my coffee cup down.

  “Truth hurts, does it?” Nicole asked, not looking at me.

  “Don’t you think I feel guilty enough as it is,” I asked, “without you telling me this is all my fault?”

  But guilt for what? Putting Nicole into rehab? Or knowing it was Alex I wanted to be in the band rather than her?

  “Funnily enough, this isn’t about you.” Nicole turned and looked at me, looking lost and angry and a whole other range of emotions all jumbled into one. “It’s about me.”

  Oh, it was so about me.

  “I never wanted any of this,” I said. “I just wanted us to go back to how we’d been.”

  “Except, I couldn’t do that,” Nicole said. “Everything had changed between us and then everything seemed to happen at once. You and I had kissed and I thought you were The One”—she air quoted that, and it looked weird to me—“but you didn’t.” She shrugged. “But unlike you, I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” She looked away again. “Then I had to contend with girls throwing themselves at you.” Nicole seemed to focus on something on the wall beside her. “I was hurt. In pain. But then someone came along with something he said would make all the pain and hurt go away. Something he said would make me feel good.”

  “And did it?” I wanted to know.

  “Yeah. It did.” Nicole walked back to her sofa and sat. “So I took some more. Then a bit more.”

  “So why did you never tell us?” I asked again.

  My mind scuttled back. To the day Ed told us what had happened. I remembered the shock, the disbelief, the crying. There had been so much crying: Brooke hadn’t believed him, I recall. She thought Nicole had left because of something we’d done, a differing of artistic minds that she hadn’t been aware of. A desire by Nicole to move away from us and try something different.

  If only it had been that simple.

  Then, the disbelief. The mutterings of how it really wasn’t my fault. Honestly, Tally. Nicole chose to do what she’d done. You didn’t give her that first line. She chose to take it.

  I looked back to Nicole. To her gaunt face and shadowed eyes. And if only Brooke knew Nicole really had left because of me. Nicole had been right: I was to blame for her downfall. My rejection of Nicole had changed her overnight, and even though I hadn’t seen it at the time, I could now. I could also see that I’d been so immature in thinking we could have ever gone back to how we’d been before. How could we have? How could we have pretended that everything was okay? When the memory of our kiss stood in both our minds, but for completely different reasons?

  Drugs had never played a part in any of our lives before; sure, we’d been offered stuff while on the road, but I was confident none of us had ever taken anything, even when our schedules had been so ridiculously hectic and we’d all been so exhausted that it would have been really easy to take something just to see us through to our next gig.

  “It was my secret.” Nicole’s voice sliced through my thoughts. “The only thing you lot knew nothing about, and that made it the one thing I had control over in my life.”

  “Then you went out of control.” I regretted the words as soon as they’d left my mouth.

  “Thanks for that.”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “You did.” Nicole held my gaze. “And you’re right.”

  “How did you even get in here anyway?” I asked, looking around her room. “At your age?”

  “Ed pulled some strings.”

  “Of course he did.” I frowned. “And your parents?”

  “They complied.” Nicole looked away and I knew me mentioning her parents had hurt her. “They knew it was this or…” She shook her head, as if to shake the thought from it. “Ed told them he thought it was better to keep me out of the public eye for a while.” Nicole pulled a face. “You know how it is.”

  Of course I knew. Remember, everything Ed did, he did for the band.

  “So when do you think you’ll finish your treatment?” I asked.

  Nicole pulled a face. “Another four weeks at least.”

  “And then?”

  “No idea,” she replied. “I…” She paused and I waited for her to make some grand revelation. Instead she shook her head and said, “Maybe I’ll go home. Back to Brighton.” She picked up her coffee. “Ed says he’ll work to get me a deal as a solo artist, but I don’t know.” Nicole looked at me. “It’s not like I can come back to Be4. Not now you have this awesome new singer everyone’s raving about.” A shadow fell across her face.

  My thoughts of Alex, until now locked away in the back of my mind, crashed forward again. I didn’t want them to. I’d been happy to have her out of my head, even if it had only been for a few hours.


  “She’s not you,” I said. Boy, wasn’t that the truth?

  Nicole smiled but didn’t answer.

  “She’ll never be you.”

  I tried again, but all Nicole said was, “Congratulations on ‘After the Rain,’ by the way.”

  “You heard it?”

  Nicole nodded. “So it seems as though Be4 are doing okay without me,” she continued.

  “It’s not the same.” Who was I trying to convince—me or her?

  Me.

  “But we’re doing okay,” I said. “We did a festival last week which was all types of awesome, and yeah, I’d say things are pretty amazing for us right now.” At the look on Nicole’s face, I regretted the words as soon as they’d left my mouth.

  “Are you for real?” Nicole’s mood changed in an instant. “You come in here, telling me how fabulous your life is, how well the band’s doing? I’m stuck in here, just trying to get through each day, and all you can tell me is how wonderful your life is right now? I mean, are you for fucking real?”

  Her words stung me as if I’d been hit. How could I have been so inconsiderate as to tell her how great my life was when she was here?

  I got up and walked towards her. “Nicole, I—”

  “Get off me.” She slapped me away. “I really am only in here because of you,” she spat. “What part of your thick skull still can’t get that?”

  “Because I couldn’t commit to you?” I started to get angry. “Nic, you know you mean everything to me. Everything.”

  “But it was never enough, was it?” she asked.

  “How could we have been together?” I shot back. “The minute we had an argument or disagreed over something, the band would have suffered. Relationships in a band just never work.”

  “Because it’s always been about the band for you, hasn’t it?” Nicole said. “Nothing—or no one—is as important to you as the band.”

  “Wasn’t it like that for you too?” I asked. “We had a chance—we have a chance—to make something of ourselves after so long trying.”

  “You might have,” Nicole said. “What have I got now? Nothing.”

  “And whose fault is that?” I asked.

  “It’s yours,” she replied. “All this?” Nicole spread her arms out. “All your doing. So congratulations for totally fucking up my life and my dreams.”

  My legs felt heavy. I stumbled to a chair and sank down into it.

  “Truth too much for you?” Nicole walked over to me. “Look around you. Around my room. See what I’m reduced to.” She stood in front of me. “A ten-by-ten room. Daily inspections in case I’ve managed to smuggle something in. Meetings where I have to spill out my thoughts to other people,” she said, “and it doesn’t end when I finally leave. Oh no. Then—get this—then I have to attend weekly sessions, just in case I relapse.” She air-quoted again. “I’m seventeen, Tally. Seventeen and trapped.”

  I looked up at her, unable to speak.

  “So don’t rock up here and tell me how fabulous your drug-free, perfect life is,” Nicole said, finally turning away. “Because I don’t need to hear it.”

  She walked to the other side of her room and stared down at her desk.

  “Nicole…” I stood up.

  “Go,” she said, not turning to look at me. “You know the way out.”

  I hesitated, hoping she might turn and look at me, but she didn’t. Finally, when her silence was too much to bear, I left the room and hastened back down the corridor, Nicole’s words ringing in my ears and burning on my cheeks.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The notes wouldn’t gel. My guitar wouldn’t listen to me. The music I was trying to write sucked.

  I’d stumbled from Croft House with Nicole’s words raging after me and gone straight home, knowing I needed to do the one thing I’d always done when things were getting too much for me.

  So I came home and started writing music, because music was the only thing that ever seemed to make sense in my life.

  I don’t know how long I sat on the floor of my apartment, papers scattered around me, my guitar by my side. Minutes? Hours? All I did know was I needed to get it out. Get my pain out. Get the smell of Croft House off me. Get Nicole’s hate out of me.

  My visit to Croft House had been a disaster. But what had I expected? That Nicole would welcome me back with open arms, like I was an old friend visiting her in her swanky new apartment?

  I’d come to see her, seeking forgiveness. I’d left with the guilt clawing at my insides so hard that I could physically feel it in my stomach and I hoped no one had seen me hurling into the long grass once I’d reached the sanctuary of the trees in the car park.

  Nicole hadn’t wanted to listen to me, so the only thing I knew I could do now was put my guilt into music.

  If only my brain would switch off long enough to function properly.

  I snatched up my guitar again and strummed a few chords, formulating a tune with each change of key. That worked better. I slid my pencil from behind my ear and jotted down the chords I’d written, then strummed another chord. I frowned. That didn’t work so well.

  Sighing, I placed my guitar down and concentrated on the lyrics instead. Perhaps if I could get those written down, the music would follow naturally. What was I feeling right now?

  Haunted.

  Guilty.

  Empty.

  Dead inside.

  I wrote a sentence and nodded. It worked.

  Friendship.

  Caring.

  Hate.

  It wasn’t right. Nicole was in Croft House and I was sitting on the floor of my expensive apartment, writing about her. She never left me. She would never leave me. I wrote those sentences down and felt my throat close. She was my best friend and I’d abandoned her on so many different levels.

  I don’t know why I did what I did next, but I was glad I did. I lunged over and picked up my phone from the floor, found her number, and called her. Somehow I knew she’d make everything better right now.

  She answered and I felt a warmth spread across my chest.

  “Alex?” I asked. “Are you busy?”

  *

  “Wow.” Alex stepped in through the door and took in the scene of chaos that was my apartment. “And I thought this place was a mess the first time I ever came here.”

  I assumed she was referring to the paperwork. Okay, so there was a lot of paperwork, screwed up pieces of manuscript paper, tossed around the floor, but it was mostly sheets with scribbled notes. Pages and pages of writing. Of thoughts.

  “I kind of had a Saturday morning brainstorming session,” I said sheepishly.

  “No shit.” She looked around her as she followed me to the sofa. “And three guitars out. You really mean business, don’t you?”

  “I was messing around with sounds.”

  “Did you decide on one?”

  “Electro acoustic, maybe.” I picked up my guitar and played a chord, just for the hell of it. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “So…you’re writing.” Alex sank down onto the sofa with a grin. “I’m astute like that.”

  “I’m writing.” I put my guitar back and flopped down next to her. “You’re very astute.”

  “You always make such a mess when you’re writing?” Alex asked.

  “Oh, I suppose you sit at an oak desk with a fountain pen, do you?”

  “Something like that.” Alex let her head fall back against the sofa. “So what are you writing?”

  “I’m going to call it…‘Perspectives.’” I’d thought of the title a few hours before. “Yeah. ‘Perspectives.’”

  “Slow or fast?”

  “Slow.” I nodded. “It has to be slow.”

  “And you called me over to…what? Help?” Alex asked.

  “You weren’t busy, were you?” I screwed up my face, suddenly worried I’d dragged her over to my apartment.

  “Never too busy to write music.” Alex laughed. “Never too busy to write music with you
, more importantly.”

  “You’re a star.”

  “I know.”

  I caught her eye and smiled. I loved that she was with me. I loved that just by her being here she’d made the anxiety that had followed me from Croft House and back to London, and which had dogged me ever since, magically disappear.

  I was right; Alex really did make everything better.

  *

  “So I thought at this point,” Alex said, as she leant over to grab a piece of paper off the floor, “you should pick the start of the intro rather than strum.” She scooted back up closer to me. “Then go into your strumming pattern after that.”

  We’d somehow managed to end up sitting on the floor together, side by side, backs against the sofa. Just as I’d thought, Alex’s input had allowed my music to flow faster than it had all day.

  “I like it.” I tapped my pencil against my bottom lip. “Leading to the first line which would sound something like”—I sang a line—“then everyone harmonizing into the chorus.”

  “With me coming in on guitar”—Alex tapped my piece of paper—“right here.”

  “Perfect.”

  “See how it sounds.” Alex lifted her chin to my guitar across the room.

  I tucked my pencil behind my ear, then scrambled to my feet and grabbed up my guitar. I gave it a quick tune while Alex scribbled something down on my piece of paper, then went and sat back down next to her.

  “Right, so. The intro will be something like this”—I picked at the strings—“moving to this.” I strummed the next chords. Alex nodded. “Then a modulation.” I changed key.

  “Sounds good.” Alex lurched across the sofa and snagged my other guitar. “Then when I come in here later,” she said, strumming her guitar, “you move back down a key.”

  We played together, our guitars working in sync with the other. It sounded awesome.

  “Then Brooke sings this line, as our guitars fade,” I said as I finished playing. I sang a line, then said, “With Robyn and you coming in here.” I sang another bit. “You think that could work?” I asked afterwards.

  “Or maybe Robyn could sing her part first,” Alex said, “then I come in on the next part, just to add some harmony.”