38. Zak
Backstage before finals, the air thrummed with electricity. The crew moved around frantically, as they always were during these difficult-to-coordinate live episodes. Zak stood out of their way beside Chase. The two of them were entering from stage left while Edge and Dallas would join them from stage right, with Alex already seated behind the curtains at his kit.
Saint of Spades was the first band to go on, and Zak had been hyper-analyzing that placement ever since they went over the run of show earlier in the week. She’d determined it must be a psychological trick to enforce recency bias. The first bands to hit the stage almost always made the bottom two.
“Ten minutes!” A production assistant called out.
“How are you holding up?” Chase asked her.
She knew he was probably referring to the confrontation with her father, who now sat among the judge’s panel in a padded red leather chair like the esteemed guest he was. Scott Lee, not Scott Parker.
Although she had spent the past few days reliving their brief interaction, it wasn’t her current object of fixation. “I don’t want to go home.”
Win or lose, her entire life had changed while she was away. If she set foot on West Coast pavement again, only to find that none of it mattered and no one wanted to sign her band, she couldn’t face that reality.
“To your apartment?” There was a hopeful note to Chase’s voice. He had made no secret of hating her living arrangement, so she knew he would rejoice about what she had to say next.
“To the real world. I think we’re going to break the lease on that place. Assuming we’ll be able to book enough gigs now to pay for something better.”
The dim overhead lighting cast a shadow on his dimple. “That’s good. I was one crime scene away from begging you to move in with me.”
“Yeah, right. Could you imagine?” Moving in with Chase sounded like a bigger commitment than initiating a blood pact with him.
Chase nodded as he scanned the room, rolling his shoulders out to loosen up before they went on. “No, I couldn’t. You won’t even spend the night with me.”
He was still smiling, but she knew there was more he wasn’t saying.
“Five minutes!” came the next warning.
“It’s working out though, right?” she asked, for his validation more than anything. As well as Chase might know her dreams and desires and all her favorite things, he had no idea what he was getting into with these tiny hints and suggestions about the possibility of something more. “I mean, it’s easy. A good time.”
“Yeah. I have the best time with you,” he agreed, always swapping her words for more serious ones. “It’s just, can you help me understand—”
“Hey! Sorry. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Izzy’s voice sliced through the bustling room.
She was dressed in a tailored pair of trousers and a button-up waistcoat that lengthened to a cape in the back. The contestants didn’t have time to join the rest of the crowd for each other’s performances, but Zak had showed up at the other band’s dress rehearsal yesterday to watch their set and swap numbers with Izzy before they parted ways.
Abstraction was performing second, with a gothic carnival-themed show they had pulled out all the stops on. It was too bad their bands couldn’t swap places because Izzy still insisted that she wouldn’t win and had no desire to win, hence the unrestrained and unsellable creativity she had poured into their finale performance.
Zak looked at Chase. She wanted him to finish what he was saying, but his next words were a greeting to Izzy. Though Zak and Chase spent nearly every moment together, that was the first time she noticed his smile for her was different than the one he gave everyone else. The one he just gave Izzy.
“You’re not interrupting at all, but you’d better hurry. They’ll kick you out of here any second.” Chase climbed up a few steps to let them talk.
“I just wanted to wish you guys luck.” Izzy took hold of Zak’s hands in lieu of trying to hug her with a guitar flopping around between them. “I know it hasn’t been a fair fight, but that doesn’t mean you should stop swinging.”
Chase let out a laugh at Izzy’s word choice.
Sergio had kept a low profile and worn lots of makeup over the past week. As far as Zak knew, Izzy was just as oblivious to what had happened as all the other Amped contestants and staff.
Izzy’s brow ticked up. “What?”
“Two minutes!” That was their last verbal warning. The cue to get on stage would come from the IEMs.
“I’ll tell you later.” About everything but Scott Lee, that was. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“You better,” Izzy said. “I don’t care what they put out there about you, about your friends, about me. This business isn’t nice to people like us, so we might as well be nice to each other. You’re going to call me when you’re all rich and famous, right Zak Parker?”
“Only when you’re in the country, rock star,” Zak tossed back as Izzy walked away. “I’m not paying for an international call.”
The countdown began at ten seconds. Chase exchanged one last unspoken conversation with her. He was the one about to go out there and make headlines, yet his eyes glittered like he was starstruck by her.
“Please welcome to the stage, from the City of Angels, Saint of Spades.”
Ambient thrums pulsed from the speakers, fading in during the last few seconds of the emcee’s introduction. As they walked on stage, thick mist from the surrounding fog machines curled around their ankles and flowed over the ground like rolling waves.
Crimson stage lights painted over their grayscale costumes—Dallas, Alex, and Zak clad in black leather, while Chase and Edge wore white.
Leaning into their namesake and hometown, their three-song set was themed Angels and Demons and led with a number titled “From Hell.” The song wasn’t really about religion at all, but a piece that Zak, Link, and Edge had pulled out of their asses on a Sunday morning to torture their other two hungover bandmates with ear-splitting dissonant chords, pick-scraping, and distortion.
They never intended to make it part of the setlist at any of their gigs, but whenever the audience seemed to be enjoying some of their heavier songs, they’d unleash it out of the box for an encore. It turned out to be a fan favorite, with its slashing, headbanging tempo, and simple, catchy lyrics.
“For the devil with love
Signed the man up above
A package with a note
Wrapped in a pretty bow
What’s it say?
No one knows”
A runway jutted out from the center of the main stage, and pyrotechnics lit up the length of it in time with Chase’s stride. For the first time, they were allowed to interact with the studio audience, and he hunched over to clap hands as he reached the end of the platform. During the bridge, Zak and Dallas joined him there, turning back-to-back to shred out a call-and-response guitar duet.
The crowd absorbed their energy and reflected it tenfold. After their last controversial appearance on people’s television screens, Zak expected more division in person, but there was a balanced spread of support for them, Abstraction, and Bitter Scandal, the third band in the running for the title.
They had yet to be booed. In fact, people were screaming out for them. Lips synced with the final chorus, and clusters of merch with their logo on it moved to the music.
There were too many T-shirts to count, but she could have sworn she saw more black and red than gold, the color of Izzy’s carnival-themed merch, or royal blue, the color used for Bitter Scandal’s space-themed show. It was promising to know they weren’t hated universally, but she wouldn’t let that raise her hopes. These people were Amped mega-fans who had paid seventy dollars a ticket to be here. Not a random sample of the general public.
When Saint of Spades’ first song ended, the lights cut off to buy them thirty precious seconds, during which they all hurried back to the main stage. Zak and Dallas changed guitars, and Chase snuck in a rushed kiss behind the cover of the drum set that set her skin on fire.
They dialed back the tempo for song number two, “Possession,” which again had no real meaning rooted in the spiritual, but fit the theme in title and verse. The lyrics were a metaphor for being possessed by people, not by demonic forces.
“On a hollow evening
You may hear me
Sleepwalking lived-in halls
You breathe me in, uninvited
We knock the portraits from the walls
We read a dusty book about death
And in the lampshade glow you rest
While I take control
Close your eyes, no need to see
Handed me a rope and key
You’re safe and warm here
Better than free
You’re safe and warm
With me”
Chase’s kiss still tingled on her lips. His voice painted pictures from the words. And as she watched him, she questioned whether she had handed him a rope and key.
Their band meandered through the storyline together, a conversation between every instrument and the vocals. To her, this song had always sounded like five voices in one mind, all talking at the same time in harmony. She and her friends had worked for years to hone it into the intricate piece people were listening to today.
Then there was no pause between it and the final song of their set, “Not Your Savior”.
For the first time, Zak looked at her father.
She had spent the past ten minutes telling herself that she didn’t care what he thought about their show, but it turned out she wasn’t any better at lying to herself than she was at lying to anyone else. His opinion as a parent meant jack-shit, but his opinion as a musician was paramount. He was a legend for a reason. Forsaking the family life had given him ample time to carve his name in rock history.
The awe on his face as he stared, rapt, at the way she played like he couldn’t make sense of how she’d written the guitar part was the highest compliment he could have paid her.
So why did it make her feel like screaming?
She turned away. She wouldn’t be able to finish the show if she kept paying attention to Scott.
Chase took notice and engaged her in a theatrical sort of competition, his voice versus the screech of the guitar between each line of the chorus. She let go of everything but the now. Feeding off the thrill of the crowd, experiencing every second with every fiber of her consciousness.
She had always dreamed big, and for once, she wanted to believe in those dreams. If not for herself, then for Link. In her mind, she dedicated their last song to him.