This Is What It Feels Like

by Rebecca Barrow

  “They’re really good,” Hanna said.

  “Forget them.” Dia turned on her heel and started back to the dressing room. “We’re the shit, remember?”

  Hanna tried, but she was too nervous.

  It was better once they were back in the dressing room, door closed to the world. Jules played music out of her phone, a drop in the ocean of sound pushing up against the door, but enough for them. They spilled makeup across the dressing table and painted each other’s faces: gold cheeks and red lips, radiant highlights and clear, sticky gloss. They changed into shorts, boots, and high-tops, black shirts: one Nets jersey, one scooped black tank, one cropped, bone-illustrated top.

  In front of the mirror they stood together, and as Hanna smoothed her hands across the flash of soft stomach visible between her shorts and her shirt, she took them in. “We almost look like an actual band,” she said to their mirror selves, her shoulder knocking against Jules’s arm. “We almost look like we know what we’re doing.”

  Dia teased her fingers through the ends of her hair, big and loose for tonight. “Illusion,” she said. “The art of fooling everybody, including ourselves.” And then she turned to Hanna, half a smile on her face. “C’mere, you have lipstick right here.”

  Jules bounced on the balls of her feet. “I want to go see,” she said. “Only for a minute.”

  So they went out, crept around the side of the stage and inched back the curtain, stood and looked out on the swelling audience. Hanna’s palms started to sweat as she took it all in: the lights, the throbbing noise. People crowding right up to the stage, and filling up the balconies, and still more coming in. She needed a nicotine hit. “There’s a lot of people here.”

  “Glory Alabama are watching somewhere,” Dia said.

  “Where?” Jules asked. “Oh, I think I might throw up.”

  Hanna wiped her hands on her thighs. The last time she’d played in front of an audience this big, she’d been halfway to blackout and barely able to get through the song.

  Not this time.

  She scanned the crowd for Ciara’s tattoos, Molly’s blond halo, but couldn’t find them. They were here, though; she could feel it.

  And then the lights went down and the cheers lifted.

  “All right, people! Are you ready for a show?”

  They paced, prowled backstage while bigger local band Wednesday Street took to the stage and warmed everybody up with electronica-infused grunge.

  They stood in the wings as the MC introduced the contest acts, gave the whole spiel: Money! Fame and glory! Everything you could ever want!

  Knoxville Slums went out first. Rattling punk sounds, screamed vocals—this was the band they’d seen earlier. Hanna cracked her knuckles over and over, listening to Dia talk loudly, right in their ears. “It’s a Flogging Molly–meets–Rancid thing,” she was saying. “Basic. And so old.”

  “We’re better!” Hanna said over the noise, to her hands. “Right?”

  “Right!”

  Ursula Arrival were cleaner, to Hanna’s ears, but had way less stage presence. One of their singers froze every time she opened her mouth, her entire body still as she sang, but their guitarist could shred, Hanna had to give them that. “We’re better,” she said again, a mantra, rolling her sticks between her palms.

  Jules knocked her hip. “Say it again.”

  “We are better than them,” Hanna said, turning away from the stage. “Got it?”

  Dia ran her hands along the neck of her guitar. “This will sound wrong,” she said. “But—I almost don’t care if we win or not. I care, I want to, but—”

  “It’s more than that,” Hanna cut in. “Right?”

  “So much more!” Jules said, and they were all a breath away from yelling to be heard.

  Hanna pushed her hair back. “I’m really glad you made me do this,” she said. “I’m really glad I wasn’t too afraid to try! And that you see me now. I see you now.” Dia and Jules were looking at her, full attention, and Hanna’s heart was humming. “We made mistakes and we did terrible things but that’s not all that we are. That’s not who we are. Fuck. Am I even making any sense?”

  Jules laughed, hard, and Dia smiled as she nodded. “Total sense!” she said, throwing an arm around Hanna’s neck.

  Ursula Arrival screeched to a stop, and the crowd’s cheers were noticeably less than they had been for Knoxville Slums.

  “We are going to rip the sky open,” Hanna said, and Dia leaned in.

  “What?”

  The MC walked out, mic to her mouth. “Okay! Now we have our last Sun City hopefuls. They’ve been around the block and they’re back again—make noise—”

  Hanna put her mouth to Dia’s ear. “We’re going to rip open the sky!”

  “—for Wildfire!”

  Dia

  Dia pulled away from Hanna, electricity coursing through every inch of her. “Whatever you say!” she yelled back, and then she looked at Jules. “Ready?”

  “We got this,” Jules said.

  Dia tugged her shorts up, shook her hair around her face. The MC was leaving the stage now, people were clapping and yelling and it was for them, this time, no one else.

  She steeled herself, pulled her spine up tall, and took a step.

  When she walked out, it was with the confidence of a girl who’d done this a hundred times before. Tonight the lights were bright enough to dazzle, throwing shadows into the corners of her vision, but it didn’t faze her.

  Dia stepped up to her mic, center stage. “Hi,” she said, to instantaneous cheers. Gratifying. “We’re Wildfire.” She laughed, raspy. “Maybe some of you here used to know us, before. But you don’t know us now. You’ll find out.”

  Without waiting for another response from the crowd, without having to check that Hanna and Jules were ready because she already knew they were, she ripped into the beginning of “Bones.”

  Two songs could be both an eternity and a gasp. Long enough to lay your heart bare, but so fast that if you blinked, you might miss it.

  Dia pulled words out of the back of her throat. She danced, on the spot, her legs shaking, and over to Jules, to Hanna, as far as her cables would allow. They ran into each other and landed back down, and the heat of her body set Dia alight.

  She played for the girls they used to be and the ones they were now, and all their fallen-apart pieces that had gotten lost or ruined or discarded along the way.

  She played for her baby at home, sleeping, dreaming dreams that Dia couldn’t even know yet.

  Her arms ached and her hips shook and every muscle in her felt awake.

  “Bones” became “Pretty Baby” before she knew it, and the lights shifted through the spectrum and she was performing now, not just playing: she was taking her hands off her guitar and lifting the hair off the back of her neck, closing her eyes and tipping her head to the ceiling, snaking her body to the thrum of Jules’s bass line.

  This is it.

  This is what it feels like.

  To be alive.

  Dia opened her eyes and looked out on the crowd, as far as the lights let her see. Opened her mouth wide enough to swallow the sun and sang.

  “‘Hush, little honey, I know you heard about the fight last night / the mess your mama don’t like—’”

  She turned up to the balconies, slapped her hands on the strings, a burst of perfect sound. “‘Wait till I get home, I’ll show you where to go—’”

  Dia felt alone and surrounded all at once in that moment, as she sweated through her shirt and smeared the makeup she’d so carefully painted on earlier.

  And though the crowd was giving her their everything, so much energy, Dia barely needed it. All she needed, she had, up onstage with her.

  “‘Everything I ever wanted,’” Dia sang, the truest words. “‘You don’t own what I give, when it breaks you, give it all to me, baby pretty baby—’”

  And then it was over. The lights, the purple and red and white strobing lights, flashed before cutti
ng out, plunging the whole place into blackness.

  And cheers, stomping feet, roaring applause.

  Dia bent double, breathless, spent, and then Jules was grabbing her hand, dragging her offstage, and the thought, again: This is it.

  This is what it feels like.

  They crashed into each other offstage, sticky hugs, breathless laughs. “Holy shit,” Hanna kept saying, over and over with her hands spinning through the air.

  “Holy oh my god,” Dia said. “Was that really us?”

  “It was the most us possible,” Jules said, lifting her hair off the back of her neck and fanning her face, laughing. “I want to do it again.”

  “I want to do that every night,” Dia said, throwing her arms to the ceiling and rising up on her toes. Her skin felt raw, too tight for her body, every movement testing her limits, every rub of her clothes burning. And this whole place felt too small to contain her, pushing back against her, and how dare it, how dare it try to put a limit on what she was feeling right now. “I need water. You coming?”

  But then the guy with the amazing eyeliner was there, directing them away from the stage and talking a mile a minute into his headset. “No, they can’t come in without their passes. I don’t care who they say they are, we have security for a reason. If they’re Glory Alabama people—wait, how many lights are out? Call Karla down, she’ll take care of it—”

  Dia slipped away before they got to the dressing room. “I’ll be back,” she called in Jules’s direction, and then she was half running away. “I’m coming back!”

  She headed through the familiar maze of darkened back hallways and out into the empty lobby, pushed through the doors to the main room, the other side of the stage where people now were yelling and clapping for Violet Ocean as they came onstage to close out the night.

  The crowd was looser right at the back, where Dia was, and it wasn’t so hard for her to work her way over to the bar that ran along one side of the room. “Hey!” she yelled when she got there, leaning her elbows in something sticky as she signaled the bartender. “Water?”

  “Dia!”

  She turned at the sound of her name. Wasn’t expecting to see Jesse standing down the bar from her, saying her name again, but there he was.

  “What are you doing?” he said, raising his voice over the band and closing the three feet between them. “Shouldn’t you be—”

  Dia cut him off, yelling at him. “You came!”

  “What?”

  She couldn’t tell if it was the high from that performance, or being tired of the pretending, or pure adrenaline that made her do it. Made her grab his arm and pull him toward the door so fast that he spilled his drink, through the lobby and into a corridor lined with posters. “You came,” she repeated, the door swinging shut, leaving them in this private space. Muted noise from the stage, dimmed red lights over the doors. “That’s what I said.”

  Jesse was wiping his spilled drink from his black shirt, but he looked up at Dia when she said that and kind of shook his head, and when he spoke he sounded so frustrated. “Like I wouldn’t, Dee.”

  She allowed herself a long look at him, all of him, his broad shoulders and warm brown skin and his pretty eyes all confused.

  “Dia,” Jesse said. “Can we—”

  “You want the truth?” she said suddenly, her voice raw. “Okay. It’s not about Lex or the band or college or whatever of the thousand excuses I’ve given you. It’s the way you look at me, Jesse, and no one else ever looks at me like that, and what if I lose that? What if I lose you?” She shook her head. “And I don’t mean what if we don’t work out, or we get together and then hate each other in six months, or anything like that. I mean what if I lose you.” She held her hands out, palms turned up like some kind of prayer. “The last boy I was with died, Jesse. He died, and I never got to know what we might have become, and more than that, who he might have become. I am so scared that if you and me happen, something terrible will happen to you and then you’ll never get to become the person you’re supposed to be. And I’ll be left here wondering what’s so wrong with me that every boy I touch dies.”

  Jesse looked at her. “That’s what you think? Dia. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “You cannot know that. And I can know that this fear is not reality but it is so real to me.” She closed her eyes and tipped her face to the ceiling. “I had this dream, this nightmare, that you died, and it brought back so much of what happened to Elliot and—it didn’t matter that it wasn’t real. Because it was real in the moment I woke up, the moment that I knew that you were both dead. And then I remembered that you’re not, that you are still here, and in that second I thought I would do anything to keep you here. So, if that meant us not being together—I had to do that.”

  “Why are you only telling me this now?” Jesse said, his confusion evident in his voice and his posture and everything about him. “Why didn’t you say any of this before?”

  “Because I was scared,” she said, her blood rushing. “But I’m tired of being scared, and I’m tired of not telling you the truth, and I love you, Jesse, I love you.”

  She let the words hang there between them, heavy enough to almost be tangible, and Jesse looked stunned. “What?”

  “I love you.” Dia took a breath, took in the quiet all around them, opened her eyes and look at Jesse again. “Some days I see you and I feel like—oh my god, I love this boy, and I just want him to be okay, and what if these bad things come true and I never told you the truth and I never said sorry and I never said that I love you so much it doesn’t feel real, sometimes. What would I do then?”

  Jesse pulled in a ragged breath, took a step back from her. “You’d do fine,” he said. “Exactly like you are now. Without Elliot.”

  “Elliot is not you,” Dia said. “And I wasn’t fine for a long time. I’m clearly not fine now, unless my brain is trying to tell me something else with this death dream.” She touched her hands to her face, ignoring the sticky sweat under her arms. “But tonight I feel like I can do anything. So I’m telling you, before I get scared again and let you go.”

  He looked at her and she couldn’t tell whether he was believing her or not, the way his mouth was set in such a straight line. “Dee.”

  “Jesse.”

  “You love me,” he said. Statement, no question.

  Dia answered him anyway. “Yes.”

  “Dee,” he said.

  “You came to my kid’s birthday,” she said, lowering her voice. “You came here. You are too good, Jesse Mackenzie.”

  “Dia, stop,” he said, and her heart skipped a beat and her brain said, This is it.

  This is where we end.

  And if it was: at least she had been unafraid.

  But then he closed the space between them again, the electric air keeping them apart, and she felt his touch on the back of her hand. He shook his head, looking down at her. “Dia Valentine, you are a pain in my ass.”

  And then his hands were holding her face and his mouth was on hers and it was the thousand times they’d never kissed in one moment. It was the hours spent watching him ride and the late-night texts and the things she’d told only him.

  It was her hands on his hips and his tongue in her mouth and her heart at a thousand beats per minute. The dim recognition of her back hitting the wall, his body pressing her into it, and a noise of disappointment when he stopped kissing her, a noise that became a grateful sigh as his lips touched her throat.

  And it was a thousand hours in three minutes of the most delicious kissing Dia had ever experienced. She wanted to keep doing it, all night. But she had other things to do, other people to be with. So even though it physically pained her, she pushed him away. “I’m calling a time-out,” she said, breathless. “I have to go back, I have to find Hanna and Jules and—I don’t even know. And so this is time-out.”

  Jesse slid one hand from her waist to the small of her back and used the other to c
atch her chin. “I didn’t get to say,” he said. “You were fucking amazing up there.”

  Dia resisted the urge to kiss him again and instead ducked out of his embrace, laughing as she twisted away and began walking down the hall. “I know,” she said. “We were fucking amazing.”

  Jules

  Jules watched Dia run back into the dressing room and grab Hanna’s hand. “Let’s go dance,” Dia said. “It’s Violet Ocean. Remember when we used to come see them here?”

  “Can’t forget,” Jules said. “Let’s go.”

  They left their instruments and wound their way out of backstage and into the crowded main room. They fought their way through until they found Ciara and Molly, and screamed and shook and made themselves a place in the heart of the crowd. Dia’s lipstick was smeared and her eyes wild, and she spilled a plastic cup of water over Jules as she pulled Dia in to jump with her, but Jules didn’t care, only laughed and danced harder.

  And then Jules found Autumn, in one of her pastel dresses with her rainbow hair, and kissed her like she’d never meant anything so much in her life. She brought her into their circle and they danced as the Violet Ocean bassist climbed up on a riser, caught up in the heat of everything, wrapped up in momentum and movement and sheer exhilaration. And it wasn’t the moment she’d ached for; it was a thousand different, infinitely better and sweeter moments, every single second of it.

  So they danced more, sang along with the crowd, became messes of sweat and pounding feet and raw throats.

  And then the band finished their encore, left the stage to be replaced by the MC, and holy shit there was Astrid Parker, the lead singer of Glory Alabama, standing and breathing and existing in the same room as Jules. The crowd died down a little, and Jules felt a squeeze of her hand, looked to see Hanna standing next to her and staring at the stage. “All right, you’ve been patient,” the MC was saying, a teasing lilt to her voice. “Very patient! But now, finally, it’s time to announce the winner of this year’s Sun City Radio Originals contest. The winner of fifteen thousand dollars!”