35. Zak
The week before the live finale, Zak and her band headed to the Brownstone Tavern again to catch the airing of the eighth episode.
She still wasn’t sold on the experience of watching herself on TV, especially not after finding out what they were doing with her interview footage, but she decided to focus on the bright side. They were not only in the top three, but they’d also demolished the competition so far.
The other two finalists—Izzy’s band, Abstraction, and a group called Bitter Scandal—were good enough to make it mainstream, and the judges had seemed divided after the past two performances, but viewers had taken to Saint of Spades. Audience polls consistently placed them at the top by a substantial margin. The win was so close that Zak saw visions of their debut album, tour ads, and music videos every time she blinked. Heard arenas full of cheering fans in the urban noise when she stepped outside.
Now nearing the end of October, the autumn colors were in their full glory. Zak had never seen the leaves change, had hardly traveled at all in her life, and only knew of fall from textbooks and television shows. In person, it was breathtaking. Trees in vibrant red, orange, and golden hues lined the sidewalks and filled local parks with color that didn’t look real. The brick building that housed Brownstone Tavern downstairs, and a few apartments for rent upstairs, looked like a quaint slice of history amid the pockets of nature that persisted in the booming city.
Zak nuzzled into the lapel of her jacket as a gust of wind threatened to topple her over before they could get inside, where a reserved booth awaited them. Saint of Spades was far from a household name, but at this singular local pub, they were guests of honor tonight. A free round of drinks lined the table for them when they arrived, and before they were seated, more than one stranger stopped to ask for an autograph.
Each of those people had been holding pens out to Chase, but the details of who got recognized were irrelevant. For years they had played dives across Southern California where no one remembered them. Three months here, and people clean across the country knew about her band.
Chase stood next to her as he finished scrawling his name yet again. His signature, though still recognizable, was now punctuated by an asymmetrical spade symbol at the end.
“Excuse me?”
The voice came as Zak turned her back, primed to slide into their U-shaped booth. The excitement of people knowing who they were in public had waned when she felt her stomach violently gurgle and remembered that she hadn’t eaten all day. She assumed it was another fan of their singer, but then Chase’s signing hand was on her shoulder, spinning her around to face the teenage daughter of the man whose hoodie he had marked.
“I think someone wanted to meet you,” he said.
She could register Chase’s proud smile out of the corner of her eye, but her full attention was now on the marker in her face. Held out by a girl who presented Zak with a small, sticker-plastered instrument case.
“Hey,” Zak said, suddenly self-conscious. Teenagers were just people, obviously, and it hadn’t been that long since she was one herself, so why did she not know how to talk to one? “Sorry about that. Thought you were here for the big star like everybody else. What’s your name?”
“Ashley.”
“You play the trumpet?”
The girl gave her a beaming smile. “In my school marching band, yeah. I want to join the orchestra someday though.”
“I love marching band. Wish I could’ve been in one when I was in school, but I only knew guitar back then.” Zak uncapped the marker and tried to remember how she signed her name. Was her normal signature good enough?
“Do you know trumpet now?”
“Not very well. I’m sure you’re much better than I am.” The oversized uppercase Z and intersecting line of her k came out shakier than they ever had on lease agreements or government documents. The note she left above read, For future first chair, Ashley. You rock!
Ashley skimmed the signature and thanked her with those sparkling eyes, the ones Zak still wore herself for all the musicians who came before her and inspired her to persist.
She had a feeling Ashley’s words of gratitude were for more than her sloppy penmanship and thirty seconds of her time. Seeing artists like Melissa Etheridge, Joan Jett, and Heart make it big when she was an aspiring guitarist had meant everything to her. It was surreal to think she might be that idol for someone else.
“How was it?” Chase spoke into her ear as they took their seats.
She smiled back at him. Incapable of concealing the giddiness. “Unexpected.”
“You’ll always remember the first.”
She couldn’t imagine forgetting anyone who supported her music like that. “And your first?”
“Training camp right after I moved to Washington,” Chase answered as if he had already been thinking back to that day. “A kid named Bryce, the Zamboni operator’s son.”
Zak enjoyed hearing about his time in the pros, though she always felt selfish asking for glimpses into a past that he had yet to accept for himself. He always let her in readily, but the look of bittersweet solace in his eyes afterward was like a papercut to her heart.
She bumped his shoulder with her own. “All these years later and you still haven’t gotten carpal tunnel syndrome?”
“Oh no. My leg may be a goner, but my hands are just fine.”
Dishing out her very first autograph had knocked all the carnal daydreams about bacon cheeseburgers out of her head. And one of those hands in question, sneaking in between her legs to grip her thigh under the table, continued to suspend the hunger pains. Almost more than she enjoyed the sex, she enjoyed everything else that came with it. The stolen touches, the burning glances, the anticipation, but perhaps most of all, the way his presence enhanced every experience, every success.
Nothing could bring her down tonight. Least of all another episode of Amped, wherein she embezzled money from a child cancer non-profit and used it to hire a hit against one of the other contestants. Or whatever else they’d concocted for her TV-villain storyline.
At least that was what she thought, until their finals-advancing song ended with footage that shattered everything good about the performance preceding it.
“While rebel rocker Zak Parker has seemingly turned over a new page, and more than a few heads, it turns out that her ongoing feud with the band’s lead singer was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems going on backstage for Saint of Spades.”
Zak’s heart stopped as a shaky clip of their first trip to this very bar appeared on the screen. The picture quality was poor, but there was no mistaking the identity of the man buying heroin from a dealer outside and passing out in a pile of his own censored vomit. Or the man practically fucking another man against the wall of the very same establishment, the very same night.
“Though the recent fan favorite has been holding on strong to the champion’s title with their charismatic stage presence and trailblazing instrumentals, it seems this group of longtime friends has yet to shake the vices that stole their first singer from them at a tragically young age.”
Dallas cursed up a storm. She could hear him peripherally, but her eyes were glued to the screen as stills of her and Dallas day-drinking at the hotel bar after check-in flashed past the screen. Followed by shots of Alex innocently brushing arms with one of the guys or laughing at something they’d said, passed off as flirtation.
“No wonder former athlete, Chase Payton, is considering alternative careers, like the rumored coaching opportunity with the Atlanta Raptors hockey team, when this band is a ticking bomb just waiting to explode.”
That ticking bomb? Exploded right now, in everyone’s faces.
Two minutes of commentary. That was all it took to unravel the years of hard work that went into developing their sound, writing their songs, replacing Link. Zak was vaguely aware of Chase saying, “It’s going to be okay,” repeatedly, but even if it would be okay, it would never be the same.
People who were already famous had built-in immunity—and more importantly publicists—to minimize scandals like these. For a barely known band signing their first autographs in a New York City bar? This kind of reputation was a death sentence in a scene that had already said goodbye to countless icons since the turn of the decade.
“I can’t believe this.” Dallas’s lip curled. “When did they film that? Are they even allowed to do that?”
His rambling continued against the backdrop of the stark silence at their table. The rest of the bar carried on. The other patrons only paid absent attention to the show as they held their own conversations. But across the nation, other people were paying attention.
No matter what consequences the band faced on the show, their public identities in the real world had already been stained. This image of them was a permanent installment in their history, unlike all the other terrible choices any of them had made in the past. Anyone and everyone could be watching right now as their fa?ade of easy, frictionless friendship fell apart on screen.
Edge was right. They had all been pretending, and doing such a good job that it took a smear campaign on national television for her to notice.
Alex slammed his beer glass down on the table. “Just shut the fuck up for once, will you?”
Dallas did, restlessly perched on the edge of the bench seat.
“I can’t listen to it anymore. I just can’t.” Alex’s chest heaved. “Like everything only happened to you. Like your problems are so much bigger and badder than everybody else’s that you have to get drunk and high all the fucking time to deal with them. And now you’re the victim? Shooting up is a choice. Being gay isn’t.”
Dallas took a slow swig of his bourbon. “Making out with some random guy in public is, though.”
“Dallas, seriously?” Zak got involved, throwing out an empty wish that he would sober up long enough to think of his friend first. “You’re out of line.”
“What? I didn’t start this shit. I thought we were in this together.” He gestured at the TV, now on commercial break. “I drink too much sometimes. Alex can’t keep it in his pants. We’re in the same boat, after all.”
“Fuck you,” Alex spat, ignoring everyone else at the table. “If you made out with a stranger it wouldn’t make the cut for a TV show. You wouldn’t be outed to the entire world for the sake of drama and scandal. It would be a regular Friday night. Instead, you have to nearly kill yourself to be flaunted up there with the likes of me.”
“Oh, are we pretending that guys aren’t killing themselves by fucking other guys, now? Hope you used a condom with that bartender, bud.”
Alex’s face screwed up, arms shaking with anger. A second bomb detonated. “Well, I used a condom every time I fucked your best friend and he’s still dead anyway, so where did that get me?”
Wind knocked from her lungs, Zak surveyed the table.
First Alex, to verify he was as dead serious as he had sounded. He was.
Then Edge, to wordlessly ask if he knew about it. He did not.
Then Dallas, to gauge how he would react. Wild card.
Then Chase, who was staring at her already. Probably trying to figure out what stew of simmering bullshit he had just chopped himself into pieces to join.
In the seven years she’d lived with Alex and Link, she had never seen, heard, or suspected a thing. Whatever happened between them had been carefully tucked away and hidden from view. But why?
They accepted each other for everything. They’d accepted too much from Link. Finding out about his relationship with Alex would have been an easier pill to swallow than finding out he had stolen the rest of a bag from a homeless man who OD’d outside their apartment complex. Or that he’d woken up in the hospital with no recollection of how he got there and eleven stitches from where a stranger had beaten him over the head with a beer bottle.
Or at least, it would have been easy for her to accept.
“You’re a liar,” Dallas said.
“I wish I was.” Alex’s chin fell, but the set of his eyes remained firm. “Because then I wouldn’t have to feel like this for the rest of my life.”
“He was with girls all the time.”
“Think back a year or two. Was I ever there when he was off with a ‘girl’?”
Dallas’s hand closed into a fist.
“Was I?” Alex leaned across the table that kept the two of them from ripping each other’s heads off. “Or was I with him, at that disgusting pay-by-the-hour motel down the road?”
“Link wasn’t gay.”
“Well he wasn’t fucking straight either.” Alex’s laugh was sour. Sharp. A few tears fell from his eyes. “You and everybody else, you all think your best friend was so perfect. I loved him, Dallas, but I hate him too. He’d tell me all the time how brave I was for being true to myself and how he wished he could be like that. And he could have been. He could have been himself, and he didn’t. Because he was a coward and a druggie, just like you.
“The thing is, I should be mad about what they did tonight. And I am, but only for you guys. Only because I know what this’ll cost the band. But when it comes to me, I’d tell the whole world myself. I’m done caring. I’m done hiding from my asshole parents, I’m done being anybody’s boyfriend behind closed doors.”
Alex got up and grabbed his jacket. “You aren’t the only one still dealing with this shit, Dallas. I loved him. I loved him so much that I kept his secret even after he was dead. Even though I’ve blamed myself for what happened every night since then. I knew what he was doing, and I never forced him to get help because under all of it he was still Link. Funny and charming and always sunny and nice to everybody.” He gave Dallas a hardened stare. “How are people going to remember you when you kill yourself, I wonder?”
Then, he was gone. Moving through the crowd deliberately, desperately.
Zak got up to follow him.
Dallas tried to go with her, but Edge stood and shoved him back down. “Don’t you think you’ve made enough of a mess, asshole? Stay with Chase and try not to do anything stupid for the next ten minutes.”
They rushed out the door together, but didn’t have to go far. Alex was parked on the street curb in front of the tavern with his head in his hands. Surrounded by fallen leaves and littered cigarette butts.
Zak sat to his right, Edge on his left. And thankfully Alex spoke first, because her past, present, and future realities had all taken a hit, and she had no idea where to start.
“I can’t believe I said that.” Alex knotted his hands in his hair. “What the fuck was I thinking?”
She put her arm around his shoulders. “I can’t believe you didn’t say it sooner. That’s a lot to keep to yourself.”
“It never felt like my secret to tell.”
“It’s as much yours as it was his.”
They watched the traffic lights cycle through green, yellow, and red. Cars piled up, filtered through, then piled up again.
“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to him,” Zak told Alex the same thing she told herself every day. “He didn’t care. He thought he was invincible.”
Alex stared aimlessly at the street. “I miss him.”
Green, yellow, red.
“I’m sorry.”
Green.
Yellow.
Red.