Chapter 13 #3
Ollie: Already on my plate. Knock them dead at rehearsal.
Me: We’ll miss your judging.
I mean it like a joke and don’t. He sends a photo of a sad-looking chicken breast and a mountain of rice. I send him a blurry video of Eli yelling at a hi-hat. He replies with a single laughing emoji. It looks like relief.
On day five, my mother calls. The screen flashes Mamá, and my stomach does the old pinball machine thing it’s been doing since I was fifteen and started answering to Rafe instead of Rafael outside the house.
“?Cómo estás, mijo?” she asks, and I can hear the sizzle of onions in a pan.
“Bien, Mamá,” I say, and mean it, and don’t.
I tell her about classes in a way that would make a guidance counselor proud.
What I don’t tell her is that in two days, my band’s stepping onto a stage that could change everything.
Call it nerves, call it superstition, call it self-preservation—whatever it is, I can’t have her there.
I can’t have any of them there. Not yet.
It’s mine, and if I say it out loud, I’m afraid it might disappear.
“Tu hermana dice que vas a venir en marzo,” she says.
I wince when she tells me Rosa said I was heading home next month.
“Sí,” I lie, because March is a century away, and I will deal with March when the calendar forces me to.
She sighs happily. “Te extrano.”
“Yo también.” I miss her too.
After, I sit on the milk crates behind the café and write four lines that feel like they came from the part of me that knows how to be two things at once: son and front man, soft and sharp, quiet and too loud. I send them to him on impulse.
Me: I keep a light on in the room you don’t like / so you’ll know where to leave me when you go / it burns the color of a warning sign / and I stand in it, bright as a bruise.
Three dots appear, vanish, return.
Ollie: That’s good.
Me: That’s because I’m disgusting.
Ollie: You’re disgusting and good.
I laugh in the alley until my manager shouts through the back door to ask if I’ve finally snapped.
The eve of our debut, we do a full rehearsal in the garage. Miles brings a cheap fog machine because he has a sense of humor no one expects. It huffs two dragon breaths and then dies. We cheer like idiots anyway.
“Tomorrow,” he says at the end, eyes bright behind his glasses. “Tomorrow we stop pretending and do it for real.”
We stand in a useless circle like a small team figuring out whether to be sappy. Drew breaks first. He throws an arm around my shoulders, hooks the other around Eli’s neck, and drags Miles in by the hoodie. “On three,” he says. “One, two—”
“Don’t,” Miles warns.
“—three,” Drew finishes, and we yell something incoherent and triumphant that sounds like we might be young.
After, I linger by the door with my phone in my hand until a text lands.
Ollie: Film ran long. I’m outside.
I step into the night and there he is, cap low, hoodie zipped, hands in pockets. We don’t touch. We stand shoulder to shoulder and look at the orange wash of the streetlights like we’re tourists.
“You nervous?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “But it’s the good kind.”
“Good.”
He doesn’t say he’s nervous too. He doesn’t have to. I can hear it in the careful neatness of his words.
“Be safe tomorrow,” he says.
I look at him. “At a rock show?”
His mouth tugs. “You know what I mean.”
I do: Be careful with your heart. With your body. With your mouth when you get brave.
“I will,” I say, and for once in my life, I mean it without wanting to ruin it in the same breath.
The day of, the world moves like it’s been waiting to catch me.
I don’t go to class. I pretend to study merch options for a band that doesn’t have money for shirts.
I drink tea because Miles threatened to confiscate my vocal cords if I showed up with coffee breath.
At four, I try on every black shirt I own and land on the one that fits like it knows how to lie about my chest in stage light.
At five, I retune my guitar. At six, we load the van, and by seven, we’re under The Lantern’s neon, the sign buzzing like a nervous habit.
The place smells like old beer and last chances. The stage is a foot and a half off the sticky floor; the lights are cheap and mean; the sound guy looks like he could tell you where he was when CBGB closed. In other words, it’s fucking perfect.
Carl is, in fact, wearing a vest. He shakes my hand like he’s surprised my palm is steady, glances at the guys, nods once, and points us toward the stage like the night is a job and we look like we might be hired.
We load in fast. Eli tapes down his kit like he’s wrangling a live animal. Drew tunes and then tunes again. Miles says something kind to the sound guy—“We’re loud, but we’re not cruel”—and is rewarded with a grunt that means we have earned 12 percent of his respect.
I plug in. The bass hums under my fingers, low and filthy and familiar. I tap the mic. “Check, check.”
“Sing,” the sound guy says without looking at me.
I sing a line I wrote last night on the edge of sleep: I’ve got my hands full of quiet; it keeps trying to make a sound. The PA throws my voice back at me bigger than I feel, and for a second, I believe I’m exactly the size of this room.
Doors open. People trickle in. The first wave is human driftwood: regulars, the bored, the curious.
Then a cluster from campus appears, faces I know from the café, from hallways, from classes I never sit through without sketching in the margins.
A couple of the basketball guys slip in, caps low, laughing, not staying close enough together to be photographed in one shot.
My chest tightens. I don’t look for him. I don’t not look for him.
Backstage—really, a corner with a curtain—we form a lopsided huddle. Eli taps his sticks against my shoulder. “Hey,” he says. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I answer.
He grins. “Don’t suck.”
“You either.”
Miles looks at all of us in turn, the way he does right before he counts us into something complicated. “Don’t try to be bigger than the room,” he says. “Just fill it.” He nudges me. “You—sing like you’ve got something to lose.”
“I do,” I say, and it’s not about music at all. And I think he knows, because he nods like I told the truth.
The stage lights blaze. Carl lifts a hand. Nine twenty-nine becomes nine thirty, and then there’s nothing to do but walk out and be the version of myself I like best: loud, honest, ruinous.
We start with noise. Thirty seconds of teeth. The room looks up like it felt the temperature change. Then “Blackout” punches through, and The Lantern becomes a throat we pour ourselves into.
I see a girl in a leather jacket mouthing the chorus by the second verse. I see a guy at the bar stop mid-text and turn around. I see Drew make eye contact with a stranger and grin like an invitation. I see Miles bend over his guitar like he’s praying to something that’s listening.
Between songs there’s no silence, just the satisfying buzzing of the amps and the rumble of people trying to clap on a downbeat that keeps moving. We slam into “Cinder,” and when the chorus lands, I feel the floor bounce with bodies that forgot they were tired.
Then finally, after five songs, we end on “Crimson High.”
I look up on the first verse because I’m a masochist. And there he is, halfway back, shadowed by a pillar like he could be anyone. Cap low. Hood up. Hands jammed in pockets. He’s flanked by two teammates, one I recognize, one I don’t. He shouldn’t be here.
He’s here.
I don’t falter. I don’t hurry. I let the lyric do what I wrote it to do—hound and haunt and open a door I can’t close.
The bridge drops out, and the room holds its breath, and I play the note that feels like a wire drawn tight between what I want and what I can have.
When the last chorus explodes, somebody shouts like they got an answer to a question they didn’t know they were asking.
We end on a dime. I step to the mic, voice ragged. “We’re Steel Saints. Tip your bartenders. See you soon.”
The noise that comes back is bigger than we are. It hits my chest and rebounds; it carries me offstage on its shoulders even though my feet are doing the work.
Behind the curtain, the four of us stand grinning like thieves.
“We did it,” Eli says, dazed.
Miles blows out a breath. “We did it.”
Drew headbutts my shoulder like a drunk goat. “You did it,” he says in the tone of a man who cannot and will not be sincere, and yet somehow is.
Carl appears, the vest smug. “Not bad,” he says, which, translated from Lantern-speak, is fantastic. “We’ll talk.”
I nod like I’ve heard worse. My heart is sprinting. My body hums like power lines. Sweat runs down my spine in a polite stream.
I check my phone because I’m weak. A single message waits.
Ollie: Proud of you.
I want to run into the room and find him. I want to walk into the night and pretend I didn’t see it. I do neither. I stand there breathing like I just finished a race and text back.
Me: Where are you?
Three dots.
Ollie: Had to go. Team’s splitting.
Me: Okay.
Ollie: You were… good.
Me: You looked alive.
The dots flash, pause.
Ollie: So did you.
I put the phone away because if I don’t, I’ll say something like come over and he’ll say I can’t and the high will stutter.
I walk back onto the floor and let strangers slap my back and tell me we were loud in the good way.
I drink water. I pretend water is beer. I help Miles break down because it keeps my hands busy.
When we load out to the alley, the night is damp, the neon buzzing like it learned our set. A couple of guys stop us to ask when we’re playing again. Drew says, “Next week,” and Miles says, “Follow the account,” and Eli signs someone’s jacket with a Sharpie because he’s an asshole.
I step aside to breathe. The door opens. For a second, my heart leaps, stupid and eager. It’s not him. It’s one of his teammates, the one from the café with the soft mouth who asked me if we had groupies. He nods at me like we share a secret and disappears into the night.
I laugh under my breath at myself and look up at the slice of moon between buildings. The ache is sweet and mine.
Ten days ago, we were noise in a garage. Tonight, we were a band in a room that mattered. Tomorrow, we’ll be a rumor that grew legs. And somewhere out there, the captain who doesn’t make promises sent me three words that feel like one.
Proud of you.
Drew claps me on the back so hard my lungs change zip codes. “Lantern,” he says into my ear like I forgot where we were. “We did it.”
“Yeah,” I say, and let the truth sit in my mouth. “We did.”
We shove the last case into the van. Miles checks the bungee cords like he’s strapping down a dragon. Eli hums “Crimson High” under his breath without realizing it.
I get into the van with my heart beating like a kick drum and a text on my phone I will not delete even when my storage is full. We pull away from the curb, and The Lantern’s neon slides across the windshield like a blessing we pretended not to want.
“Next,” Miles says, already making a list.
“Next,” I agree.