Songs About a Girl

by Chris Russell

  “First time,” I confirmed, taking her hand. “She’s a huge fan.”

  “Hey, you girls fancy seeing the stage before they let anyone in?”

  Olly was gesturing toward the doorway. Melissa’s mouth dropped open, and her eyes began to flit from side to side. She didn’t know whether to gawp at Aiden or Olly.

  “I’d love to, Olly,” I said, “but I promised I’d … I mean, I said to Gabriel that—”

  “It’s cool,” said Olly, our eyes locking for the briefest split second. An energy passed between us, and it felt like he was trying to tell me something.

  I turned to Melissa.

  “You wanna stay here?” I said, feeling a bit like a parent at a theme park. “Hang out with the guys, maybe see the stage?”

  Melissa was dumbstruck. This was probably the longest she’d gone without speaking in her entire life.

  “Melissa? That sound good?”

  She nodded at me, very slowly.

  “Right, then,” I said, reaching for the door handle. “I’ll see you in a bit. Stay out of trouble, Mel.”

  Avoiding Olly’s stare, I slipped from the dressing room and closed the door behind me. Gabriel’s last message had told me he was, for some reason, up on the roof of the building … but how did I get up there? There were no maps on the wall, no signs to guide my way. Standing in the dark, I looked both ways for an exit, while through the walls I could hear Aiden strumming quiet chords on his guitar. This would surely be too much for Melissa. If he actually started singing to her, there was every chance she might drop dead on the spot.

  “Wait, Charlie.”

  I swiveled round to find Olly standing behind me, lit by a single spotlight.

  “He’s not in a good place tonight.”

  “Gabriel? What do you mean?”

  I might have sounded surprised to Olly, but I wasn’t. After Gabriel’s cryptic messages the day before, I’d half expected something like this.

  Olly glanced over his shoulder.

  “I don’t know what it is, but I’ve never seen him like this. Just … I don’t want you to get hurt, Charlie. Watch your back. Please.”

  A silence lingered in the air between us. Weirdly, I felt kind of ashamed.

  “Do you know how I get onto the roof?”

  “The roof…? Seriously?”

  “It’s fine, Olly. I’ll be fine.”

  He sighed and threaded a hand through his hair.

  “Yeah, sure. There’s a little staircase at the end of the hallway. Follow it all the way up.”

  As I climbed the metal stairs to the top floor, I chewed over Olly’s words in my head. He seemed genuinely worried about me, and I’d always trusted his intentions, but what had Aiden said to me last weekend, on the tour bus? Olly and Gabe … they’re always competing over something. I could believe that, I thought, I just never imagined that something would be me.

  At the top of the stairs, I pushed open a small door and found myself in a musty boiler room that was dark and smelled of wet metal. After fumbling for the light switch for a while, I noticed an exterior door, nudged it open, and stepped out into the cold. The wind clung instantly to my cheeks.

  Directly in front of me was a wrought-iron ladder, so I clambered up it and emerged onto the main section of the roof. Stretching out in every direction were the rooftops of London, the skyscrapers and chimney stacks, the church spires and construction cranes. And standing right in the middle of it all, his tall, lithe figure framed against the burning city lights, was Gabriel.

  “Gabe … Gabe! Christ, what are you doing?”

  He spun round when he heard my voice, and I saw that his face was ravaged with cold tears. There was a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hand.

  “What’s going on? Why are you up here?”

  I took hold of his arm, and he stared back at me. His eyes were ringed with dark circles.

  “Charlie Brown.”

  “Are you OK? What’s happened?”

  Gabriel shook his head, confused, and took a swig from the bottle. He stumbled, and I grabbed him by the wrists.

  “It’s not safe up here,” I said, trying not to think about how high up we were. “Come inside—you need to sober up.”

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said in a low voice, more at the rest of the world than at me. “This wasn’t … supposed … to happen.”

  “Gabe, please. Talk to me.”

  I pulled him toward me to block out the wind. Even though he was only in a T-shirt up here, his skin felt warm and soft.

  “They were supposed to stay buried.”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I said gently. “Please.”

  Beneath us, huge crowds of people were waiting to be let into the building. Lights flashed and cars honked, and music blared from inside the main entrance. I recognized the song immediately: it was “2 a.m.”

  “All these people,” he said, huskily, his voice barely there, “they’ve got me wrong. They think I’m worth something. They should go home … get out of the cold…”

  As Gabriel spoke, familiar lyrics floated up to me through the night air. It’s 2 a.m. and I am here alone … empty bottle and a silent phone … I can feel you, when I’m without you, even now …

  “You’re not making sense,” I said. He took a long, slow breath.

  “It’s today.”

  “What is?”

  “The twenty-ninth. My dad killed himself on the twenty-ninth of November.”

  The coincidence stung. The anniversaries of my mom’s death and Gabriel’s dad’s were one day apart.

  I shook it off.

  “Gabe, maybe you sh—”

  “How do you do it?” he said, looking down at me. His eyes were skittish, unable to focus.

  “Do what?”

  “Get on with life … without her.”

  I pictured my mother in the beach photograph, standing on a low wall, smile lighting up her face. Hair tumbling from her hat.

  “I don’t, Gabe.” I took his hand. “I don’t.”

  He stared out over the rooftops.

  “That reporter, Charlie … he’s on to me. And when he figures out the whole story, he’ll print it. He’ll tell everyone that Harry West killed himself because…” The words stuck in his throat, and his eyes glistened in the dark. “Because he couldn’t face being my father.”

  He clenched his jaw against the tears.

  “I know this doesn’t make it any easier,” I said, “but he must have had a reason.”

  “I was five,” Gabriel choked, wiping his eyes with the back of his arm. “I didn’t have anyone. Who leaves a kid on his own like that? Who…”

  His voice stumbled and died, replaced by blaring music from the streets below. The final words of his song soared out over the rooftops.

  I don’t know if I can take it … the sound of your heart breaking …

  “You don’t know why he did it,” I said, and Gabriel blinked at me, looking lost, his face strangely blank. I thought about his stage fright, the way he hid himself from the world before going onstage. The fact that people thought he was this indestructible force, but really, underneath the pop-star armor, he was as scared as anyone else.

  “Maybe your dad was just afraid.”

  Gabriel searched my face, his eyes red and stinging. Sirens blasted somewhere in the city.

  “You always see the best in people, Charlie Brown.”

  My hands closed tight around Gabriel’s bare arms, and I looked up at him underneath the vast black expanse of the sky. Pulling me in, he ran his thumb around my chin and down the contours of my neck, sending little rivers of warmth right down to my feet. I longed for him, but something didn’t feel right. The freezing wind, the half-finished whiskey.

  I pulled away.

  “Don’t you think … I mean, the whiskey?”

  He lifted the drink to his mouth again.

  “I need this.”

  “You don’t,” I said, reaching for the
bottle. He dodged me, so I grabbed for it again, batting it away from his lips, and a few black drops spattered across the rooftop. Gabriel half hid the bottle behind his back, and something changed in his face; a darkness closed over him, like a blind being drawn.

  “I’m not worth it, Charlie. You shouldn’t waste your time.”

  “You’re wrong,” I protested, squaring up to him. “You can’t do this on your own.”

  “But what if I’m no different than him?”

  “That’s your choice, not his.”

  “I’m turning into him, Charlie. I can feel it.”

  I thought about my mother, how I’d stared at her photograph and seen myself, and I knew there was a chance that Gabriel was right. But he was stepping backward now, nudging ever closer to the edge of the roof.

  “Don’t think like that, Gabriel. Don’t ever think like that.”

  “He’s part of me,” he said, his voice hoarse, brittle. “He’s in my blood.”

  I thought suddenly that he might jump, and so I ran for him, pulling him back toward me. He dropped the bottle, and as it clattered to the floor, I closed my arms around him, holding him tight. He fought me at first but then surrendered, burying his face in my neck, his hands clamped to my back. Together, we listened to the crowds on the street below, shrieking and laughing, singing their hearts out to Gabriel’s songs.

  For a long time, his body shook, silently, against mine.

  29

  “This is the greatest day of my life, EVER. Please, God, let me die tomorrow so I never have to live another day not hanging out with Fire&Lights.”

  Melissa and I were watching the concert from the side of the stage, and she’d been in a constant state of jiggle since the music began. I was still shaken from my encounter with Gabriel.

  “Mel … Mel.”

  I poked her four or five times on the shoulder. Eventually she turned round.

  “Yip?”

  “Will you be doing that all night?”

  Her jiggling sped up as the boys leaped on to a moving platform, and red lights flashed all around them.

  “Yes. Yes I will.”

  “Good to know.”

  I’d seen the moving platform trick several times by now. In fact, I pretty much knew the show inside out, which was why it was all the more obvious to me that Gabriel was missing his cues.

  Before the concert began, there’d been a collective effort to sober him up. Pepsi and black coffee, ice-cold washcloths on the face, people fussing in every direction. Gabriel insisted he was fine, but even so, the stage crew were keeping him as far away as possible from Barry King. Mr. King had no idea his star performer was intoxicated and, after last weekend, the crew was determined to keep it that way.

  Later, onstage, though the thousands of screaming Fire&Lights fans were blissfully unaware of it, Gabriel was not himself. The person I’d found on the roof of the building, that wasn’t the Gabriel I knew. There was a new monster in him tonight, and it was pulling his strings. Singing his songs.

  And that was the thing. It wasn’t just his lazy choreography, or the artificial smile that painted his face throughout the show. It was the way he sang certain lines, lines I’d heard before but that tonight sounded, somehow, darker. He was missing out words, fluffing lines, and standing motionless for entire songs. In between numbers, he barely spoke.

  One of Gabriel’s talents, I knew only too well, was convincing girls in the crowd he was singing directly to them. He would move to the edge of the stage and perform a whole verse to a single fan in the front row, one hand outstretched toward her, her fingers grasping for his, her eyes filled with longing. Tonight, though, he shied away from this, and sang the lines inwardly, with a quiet malice, as if the music was consuming him, controlling him.

  On the big screen, his eyes had lost their shine.

  An hour and a half later, to the flashing of lights and thundering of drums, the four members of Fire&Lights were soaking up the final, deafening applause of the tour. Yuki was walking backward, pointing both hands at the vibrating upper levels. Aiden was holding an acoustic guitar, which he always played in the last song of the set, and when he threw his plectrum into the crowd, a scrum of girls collapsed in on themselves, scrambling for the prize. Gabriel waved halfheartedly to the fans, lost in his own head, and I wondered, as I so often did, what he was thinking. What was it like to feel isolated, to feel alone, while being adored by twenty thousand people…?

  Finally, behind Gabriel, walked Olly; and it was Olly who drew my attention. He wasn’t looking at the crowd, he wasn’t applauding the backing band as he normally did at the end of a show, and he wasn’t staring straight ahead, into the wings.

  He was watching Gabriel like a hawk.

  * * *

  “Gather round, troops. Who here reckons I can sink this beer pong backward? Huh?”

  The Fire&Lights end-of-tour after-party was a raucous affair. Crates of alcohol were stacked high against the walls, and champagne bottles were popping in every corner. Yuki was standing on a table in the middle of the room, surrounded by a rapt audience of VIP fans and Fire&Lights musicians, while noisy pop songs played on the sound system.

  Aiden threw a muffin at him, but it missed.

  “You’re all talk, Harrison.”

  “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?”

  “I bet you can do it!” called Melissa, who had finally come out of her shell. “I bet you can do anything.”

  “Well, Melissa,” replied Yuki, juggling briefly with his Ping-Pong balls, “you are one special lady, I’ll tell you that.”

  Melissa spun round to look at me when he said this and opened her mouth very, very wide.

  “… But there are some things I can’t do, if I’m honest. Nuclear fission, basket weaving. Beer pong, though?” He held aloft one of the balls. “I will RUIN you people.”

  He turned round and threw the ball backward over his head, and it landed in one of the assembled cups. Everyone went crazy. Melissa looked like she was, as threatened, about to pee her pants.

  “Game on, Roberts,” laughed Yuki, as he and Aiden squared off at either end of the table. Meanwhile, I was perched on a desk in the corner of the room, nursing a lemonade, chasing ice cubes round the glass with a straw.

  “Hey, Charlie Brown.”

  Gabriel was walking over to my little corner, hidden behind his aviators. He seemed perkier than when he’d left the stage, although that might have had something to do with the bottle of red wine swinging in his hand.

  “Hey.”

  He hopped onto the desk next to me and slid along until our legs were touching. I edged away.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “That is a scandalous accusation,” he replied, but when he saw the expression on my face, he hung his head.

  “Listen…” He slid his glasses back into his hair, his eyes a beautiful mess. “I’m sorry about earlier. I shouldn’t load all that stuff onto you.”

  He fixed me with that deep, hypnotic stare, the one that, right now, girls all over the world were gazing at on their bedroom walls. Even after all our time together, it still had the power to make my pulse race.

  “You don’t have to become your dad, you know.”

  Gabriel picked at the label of his wine bottle.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “No, come on. Our parents don’t get to decide what kind of people we are. That’s up to us.”

  I knew this was what Gabriel needed to hear, but I wasn’t quite sure I believed it. Weren’t our lives, in some way, written into our blood?

  “I meant what I said last week, you know,” said Gabriel, setting down his bottle. “You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever met. Not one single person in the world. Where did you come from, Charlie Brown?”

  I kicked my heel against the leg of the desk, and my mouth curled into a smile.

  “Reading.”

  Gabriel nudged my shoulder with his.

  “That’s funny,” he said, our bodies pressed
together. “You’re funny.”

  On the far side of the room, Melissa was playing beer pong, blindfolded. She was missing all her shots but getting a cheer every time.

  “I’ve been listening to your new song,” I said, peering into my lemonade. I could feel Gabriel watching me.

  “Do you like it?” he said.

  The lyrics from “2 a.m.” broke free from their moorings and floated into my memory. Charlie, I know how your heart beats … Quietly, with secrets that you can’t keep …

  “That first line … it’s…”

  I trailed off. Even now, I wasn’t sure I could say it.

  “I’ve been trying to finish it for months,” said Gabriel, picking up my thread. “I could never find the right words, so we had to scrap it from the album. But then, something happened.” His eyes flickered upward. “You happened.”

  My chest tightened. I tried to sound casual. “You know, there’s a rumor going round that you wrote it about Charlotte Stevens…”

  “Is there?” said Gabriel, innocently. “Nothing to do with me.”

  We both smiled.

  “Did you guys actually date?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? I’ve never even met her.”

  I looked down, swinging my legs beneath the desk. I didn’t need to ask him why he’d done it, because I already knew.

  He’d done it to protect me.

  “Listen, Charlie…” Gabriel set down his bottle of wine. “I know it was wrong of me to steal Dad’s lyrics. He owed me for walking out, but that doesn’t excuse it. Thing is, until now, I’ve never had the confidence to finish a song without him.”

  He reached out and curled a lock of hair behind my ear.

  “This song, it’s the first one I’ve written that’s totally my own. It’s the first one that really means something.”

  A heat gathered inside me.

  My heart was shaking.

  “You changed everything, Charlie Brown.”

  Gabriel guided my face forward, breath rushing into my lungs, and kissed me. Softly at first, then hard and urgent, his fingers sliding round to interlock with my hair. My shoulders fell, my back arched, and blood powered through my veins.