All Strings Attached

4. Zak

“You can’t be serious.” Zak rested her mouth against her pointer fingers to cover the shit-eating grin on her face. “I mean, this was a joke, right?”

“God, I fucking hope so.” Dallas polished off his third glass of whiskey and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sounded like cats having sex.”

A middle-aged man stood before them, sweat cascading down his hairy chest, fully exposed beneath an unzipped leather jacket. He gawked at the guitar in his hands, a new, rather expensive model, despite being worn like an unloved antique. It was scratched, dented, and missing a string, though it would have sounded better if it were missing all six.

Was there a hotline for instrument abuse? This guy needed to be fined and stripped of custody. Stat.

“I hope you have something else lined up. Because I would give every penny I have and then take out a loan to never hear you sing again.”

Normally Zak wouldn’t have been so mean to someone whose name she hadn’t bothered to learn, but he had curled his lip at the notion that a woman could be a lead guitarist after they made their introductions, and she had waited for five excruciating minutes to return the criticism in full.

“Didn’t want to work with you either, you miserable cunt.” He packed up his things and stormed out of the restaurant.

Now, she wished she’d been meaner.

“Why am I always the miserable cunt?”

Dallas gave her a crooked smile. “Isn’t that the question of the century?”

“Keep talking.” She flicked a tortilla chip at him from the basket at the center of their table. “Next time, I’ll leave you passed out on the terrace instead of dragging you inside.”

“You propped me up on the stove and drew a dick on my face. I wouldn’t call that an act of compassion.”

“No, the dick was me. Zak hasn’t seen enough of those to get the detail that accurate,” Alex said. “Where the hell did you guys find these people anyway?”

Edge looked up at the portrait of Jesus hanging above the takeout counter like the very act of witnessing some of these auditions had been blasphemous. None of them could sing. Heck, they were lucky when someone showed up who was fully clothed, old enough to bein a bar without a legal guardian present, and not holding a pet reptile.

“Open mic nights,” she said over a mouth full of salsa. “While I was applying for jobs.”

“I gave out fliers to anyone who asked.” Dallas groaned. “Link is rolling in his fucking grave right now.”

“I’m jealous. I’d rather be in my grave than here, listening to whatever that was.” The only good thing about being unemployed was that even though she had wasted an entire day getting desensitized to unusual moaning noises, at least she hadn’t forfeited a shift to do it.

“Don’t jinx us.” Edge got up to refill the dip bowls. “You saw how today went. Imagine if we had to look for a new guitarist, too.”

Zak chuckled. While the auditions had been a spectacular failure, it was nice to have something to concentrate on besides the empty spot at their favorite booth.

“As fun as this was, I’ve gotta get to work.” Alex slid out of the seat, twirling the keys to his motorcycle around his finger. “Same time next week?”

Zak nodded. “I’m hoping for partial hearing loss by then.”

Alex backed out the door with his fingers crossed over his heart. Outside, his bike roared to life, nearly drowning out the sound of Dallas’s voice.

“Maybe you were right.” He looked at her from across the table, lids sagging over his honey-brown eyes. “They were all losers. Every single one of them.”

The band may have been a shared passion, but it was also his last living connection to his lifelong friend. She still wasn’t optimistic at all, but he needed hope more than she needed to be proven right.

“Yeah, but most people would call us losers, too,” she said. “We just need to find the right loser.”

The question remained in her mind, though: did the right person even exist? None of them had been searching for anything the day they met, and yet, they found the answer to life’s purpose and the means to achieve it. All wrapped up in a neat little bow. Fate, chance, whatever spiritual people called it; theirs had been a once-in-a-lifetime collision.

So, what were the odds of it happening again?

After two weeks of searching, Zak still didn’t have a job. She suspected the only reason Dallas hadn’t also gotten fired yet—his bloodstream was half alcohol at this point—was because no one else was daring enough to work the graveyard shift at the gas station on the corner.

Edge and Alex were doing all the damage repair. They took on whatever extra shifts came up, paid the bills, and stocked the fridge with groceries without saying a word. None were necessary. She was already sickened by the fact that she had become as useless as the deceased fifth of their friend group, hyperaware that she owed her breakfast to someone more stable and responsible than herself.

In fact, she would rather starve than accept any more handouts from her friends, but they had been crafty enough to buy plenty of food only she would eat.

Alex ventured out from their shared room, coppery brown hair sticking up in all directions from second-day wax. Edge, Dallas, and Link, before he passed, had carved out their own sections of the living area with room dividers. Being the only one with an innate aversion to the sight of a naked woman, Alex was stuck with the most annoying roommate of them all. Her.

She did her best to keep the late-night songwriting sessions low-key, but skimming the strings instead of strumming, or scribbling chords under a dying tap light instead of using the lamp, still made for an unconventional sleeping environment.

He held up a damp lock of her hair and watched the water drip onto the linoleum. “It’s cold now, isn’t it?”

They had about seven minutes of hot water in the shower every three hours. Normally she was willing to do whatever it took to secure that scalding bliss for herself, including using the bathroom door as a battering ram, but she hadn’t contributed to the electricity bill this month, so lukewarm it was.

“Nope. The full spa experience is all yours.” She popped a jalape?o bagel in the toaster.

Alex held the back of his palm to her forehead. “You feeling okay?”

“I can’t simply do something considerate for a friend?”

“A friend, sure, but we’re way done with that stage, Z. We practically sleep in the same bed. Mi personal space es su personal space.”

Zak snorted. She once hid in the closet for two hours to avoid being a cockblock while he had a guy over, listening to sounds that vastly overwhelmed the max volume on her cassette player. Alex had changed her clothes for her twice on the night of her twenty-first birthday when she drank nearly an entire bottle of Jose Cuervo and threw up so hard that she pissed her pants every time she heaved.

“I hear cold water is supposed to be better for frizzy hair. You know what a mess mine always is.”

Using only complimentary hotel products she picked up by pretending to be a guest probably wasn’t helping either. The shower was an explosion of two-ounce bottles. All shapes, colors, and scents. Toothpaste residue from ten different brands’ travel tubes had tie-dyed their sink blue, white, green, and gray.

“It’s rock star hair,” Alex said. “You’re not still beating yourself up about the bills, are you? ‘Cause it’s no big deal. You’ll find something else.”

“If you want something to bitch about, I can wake Dallas up and he can use all the hot water,” she offered, nodding to their other friend, who had only gotten home an hour ago and would remain passed out indefinitely without intervention.

“You’re banking on him showering if he wakes up?” Alex pulled back one of the bar stools and grabbed an orange from the fruit-plus-other-miscellaneous-items basket. “Not a safe bet, I think he’s going on two weeks without. I’ll have to find something else to bitch about.”

Fair point.

“Plenty of things to choose from. Want me to make a wheel for you to spin? Maybe a BINGO card?”

“Finding our friend OD’d on the living room floor” makes for a great FREE space!

Zak propped the fridge door open with her hip as she scanned for cream cheese and pickled peppers. She tossed Alex a couple of hard-boiled eggs and poured them a mug of coffee each. Hers with a splash of vanilla creamer, his with three teaspoons of sugar, and both clouded with specks of charred beans. Their coffee maker was as old as the grandma they’d purchased it from at a yard sale.

Nothing hit the spot in the morning quite like the zing of caffeine combined with the mouthfeel of sand.

“How are you doing?” She sat next to him.

Alex froze, staring down at his coffee mug. It was an old piece of promotional merch for one of the cafes they used to play at that read GET WIRED with a skeleton holding a broken guitar in one hand and a crushed to-go cup in the other.

“Fine. What makes you ask?”

“I realized I haven’t in a while.”

That, and she had noticed he was barely sleeping at night. Barely awake during the day.

“Ah.” He took a stalling sip. “Well, how are you doing?”

“Fine.”

Seconds passed. Neither of them touched their food.

“So, we’re both lying to each other, then,” Alex stated.

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

The truth was, she was freaking the fuck out. Last night she had stayed up until the sun rose, penned fifteen garbled verses, and paced back and forth for so long that her feet were sore when she woke up.

Life rarely turned out according to plan, but still, she preferred to have one.

“But if you think about it, telling an obvious lie is basically the same thing as telling the truth,” she rationalized.

The corners of Alex’s lips curled against the rim of the mug. “I love the way you think.”

They ate breakfast together, talking about anything but their dead friend and dying band. When the coffee ran out, he finally indulged in the shower he had planned to take an hour ago.

Since she had nothing better to do, Zak pressed play on their answering machine to see how many more job rejections she’d received since yesterday.

The first message was one of her mother’s semi-annual guilt trips, right on schedule: “I was hoping we could talk, but I don’t know if this is even your number anymore. My own daughter, my little girl, never answers me…”

“Yep. And I’m not about to start now,” she grumbled under her breath.

Delete.

The second message, though, started with the pop of chewing gum. A sound more signature to Janet than the weathered Valley accent that grated through the machine next: “Look, Zak, I won’t waste your time like you love to waste mine. We’re understaffed for this last-minute catering request, and I need all hands on deck. You can have your job back if you can manage not to fuck this one up. It’s the Laurel Park High School Reunion coming up on Saturday at the Civic Center. See me in my office before then for your uniform and prep.”

Zak bit down on the side of her finger, unsure whether she wanted to curse, cry, or let out a sigh of relief. Unsure whether she wanted her job back after all.

As nice as it would be to have money again, one pounding migraine stood between her and that first paycheck. The Laurel Park Reunion was her high school reunion, and the thought of attending it suddenly made unemployment seem dignified.