Chapter 7 #2
“Hey, Fred! Where’ve you been?” the redhead—the one I’d last seen stumbling from the stage in misery—was walking over to us with a happy smile, a paper plate in his hand.
I stared at him, trying to hide my surprise.
It was unsettling, to know what would happen to him later, whereas he had no idea.
For the first time, I felt a kinship with the ancient forebearer of my name—Cassandra, who could tell the future.
In her case, though, nobody ever believed her, which I was hoping wouldn’t be the same with me.
“Sorry I’m late,” Freddie said as he set his messenger bag down and glanced up at the wall clock.
“Hi!” the redhead said cheerfully to me. “I’m Alfie.”
“Cass,” I said, tilting my head to the side as I tried to place what I’d just heard. All I knew for sure was that he did not have a British accent. “Are you…Australian?”
“Naur,” Alfie said, then he grinned. “Guilty. They couldn’t find enough Brits who could get work permits fast enough, so they turned to the better country.
” At this, Freddie snorted, and Alfie shrugged.
“At least I’m from the Commonwealth, though.
Not like ‘Tristram.’” He put air quotes around this, and I frowned, just as the dark-haired drummer emerged from a door at the back of the room.
“Speak of the devil,” Freddie said, giving him a nod.
He looked at me, then pointed at himself, his eyebrows raised. “It’s okay,” Freddie said. “Cat’s out of the bag.”
“Oh cool,” the drummer said, in an unmistakable American accent. He nodded at me. “Hey, I’m Doug.”
“Cass,” I said, trying to figure out what exactly was happening.
“He’s Tristram in all our official bios,” Freddie explained, picking up on my confusion. “The execs who put this group together think it’s better if we’re all Brits.”
“So I just don’t talk much,” Tristram/Doug said with a shrug. “I’m actually from Chicago, but if someone asks, I’m supposed to say…” He paused, furrowing his brow. “Hertfordshire?” he asked, pronouncing every consonant separately.
“Close enough,” Alfie said, scooping up a forkful of food from his plate.
“What are you eating?” I asked, my voice sharp, refocusing on our mission.
Alfie glanced up, surprised. “Uh—a stir-fry. I got it from a strip mall down the street.”
“What kind of stir-fry?”
Alfie blinked at me, his expression hurt. “What? I’ll have you know that I’ve been really good about my carbs.”
“We don’t care about that, mate,” Freddie assured him.
“Well, Niall does,” Alfie said with a sigh. I took a step closer, trying to see what was in his dinner, and he tipped the plate slightly toward me. “It’s prawns. All right?”
“Prawns?” I echoed.
“He means shrimp,” Tristram/Doug explained from the couch, and I nodded, feeling like I’d discovered the reason Alfie had gotten sick.
Any time either of my dads got food poisoning, shrimp always seemed to be the main culprit.
And if Alfie had brought this with him, who knew how long it had been unrefrigerated.
“They have all kinds of crazy words for food,” Tristram/Doug continued. “It took me forever to understand what they meant. Courgettes, aubergine, rocket…”
“Rocket’s normal.”
“No. To them, it means ‘lettuce.’”
“Wait, what?”
“I think we might be getting off topic,” Freddie said. He took the plate from Alfie and tossed it in the garbage.
“Oi!” Alfie yelped. “That’s not on. That was my dinner, wasn’t it?”
“It’s for your own good,” Freddie assured him, clapping him on the back. “Trust me.”
“All right,” Alfie said, looking a little weirded out as he wandered over to the craft services table. “Suit yourself.”
Freddie turned to me, eyebrows raised. “What do you think? Did we do it?”
I looked over at Alfie, who was now sitting on the couch next to Tristram/Doug and opening up a mini bag of Ruffles. He certainly didn’t have the look of someone who was going to be violently ill soon, and I let myself breathe a sigh of relief. I smiled up at Freddie. “I think maybe we did.”
“Well, thank you,” Freddie said. “You really saved the day.”
“Hopefully,” I said, not wanting to get too far ahead of this—after all, the day wasn’t over yet. But before I could say this, the door flew open and Niall sauntered in.
I recognized him right away. His blond hair was a little long and pushed back, and he was wearing sunglasses, despite the fact we were indoors.
And it was night. But he also had something else—a kind of swagger, an anticipation of attention, like he was already performing and expecting an audience to appreciate him.
It was wholly missing from Freddie’s way of moving through the world, and I found that I really didn’t love it.
“We ready, gents?” Niall asked, but in a Scottish accent—very different from the one he used onstage.
He flopped into one of the chairs and pushed his sunglasses on top of his head.
He looked around the room, and his eyes widened when he saw me.
“Are you…” he asked, sitting up straighter, suddenly looking nervous as he glanced from me to Freddie.
“That’s Cass,” Freddie said, and I lifted a hand in a wave. “She’s here for Grad Nite.”
Niall nodded, and it seemed like this information put him at ease. He relaxed back into his chair again and pulled a phone out of his tracksuit pants. “Fredward,” he said, holding it out, “you forgot your phone again. I found it in the hallway.”
“Oh bollocks.” Freddie sighed as he took it from him. “I really do have to keep better track of it.” Every other member of the band nodded at once, clearly in agreement. “Cheers.”
“Sure,” Niall said with a smile. It seemed a little forced to me, but maybe that’s just what his smiles were like? I didn’t have a big enough sample size to tell. Then he looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. “We do have to get to rehearsing.”
“Of course,” I said, nodding. This was a professional band, after all, here to do a job, and I didn’t want to get in the way of that.
Especially since the performance going well was crucial to Freddie impressing this manager.
“Good luck,” I said, glancing around at all the band members. “Break a leg!”
Alfie waved at me cheerfully. “Nice to meet you, Cass,” Tristram/Doug said, giving me a smile. But Niall didn’t look up, just scrolled through his phone, clearly otherwise occupied.
“I’ll walk you out,” Freddie said, holding the door open for me.
I thought I saw Niall roll his eyes at that, but I was already walking through the door and couldn’t be sure.
Freddie glanced down at his phone, then looked up at me with a smile.
“The manager confirmed,” he said. “She’s going to be there. ”
“I mean, I could have told you that.”
“Oh right,” he said, shaking his head. “I keep forgetting you know the future.”
I laughed at that. “Just for this one specific instance. But I think we should be okay now. We stopped Alfie from eating the shrimp, you’re not going to eat anything…”
“I’m really not,” Freddie said fervently. “I wonder what it was last time?” He pondered this for a second, then shook his head. “Who knows.”
“I’ll let you rehearse.” Niall had seemed annoyed enough about losing time, I didn’t want to make it even worse. “It’s an important performance, after all.”
Freddie nodded. “It’s strange, isn’t it? To know that your moment of destiny is just around the corner.” He blinked, and his expression was one I recognized. Sure enough, a moment later, he was patting his pockets, like he was looking for his notebook. “That could be a good lyric.”
“Here,” I said, pulling the pen out of my bag, along with the piece of paper.
“Freddie,” he read off it, then looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“I just wanted to make sure I remembered,” I explained, feeling my cheeks get hot. “When I was trying to tell you that we’d met before.”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever given me a list like this before,” he said, looking back down at it, a smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “It’s really…”
“Weird?” I finished with a half-laugh.
“Amazing,” he said at the same time, and I looked up at him in surprise. “I mean,” he said, and I could see that he was also blushing slightly. “It means someone likes you, right? If they’re paying attention?”
I looked at him, feeling my heart beat faster.
He took a half step toward me, and I took one toward him, closing the space between us.
He reached out and tucked the lock of hair behind my ear.
He didn’t pull his hand away right away, but let it rest there, right by my cheek, turning my hair around his fingers. “Cass,” he started, then took a breath.
“Oi!” Niall stuck his head out the door, making both of us jump, and I took a step back. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, even though his tone said the exact opposite, “but we do have a show to do, superstar.”
“Right,” Freddie said, nodding. “There in just a moment.” Niall disappeared back into the greenroom, the door slamming behind him harder than seemed strictly necessary. “I really should go.”
“It sounds like it,” I agreed.
“But maybe I’ll see you afterward?”
I nodded, smiling at him. “I hope so. Good luck—you’ll do great.” I gave him a nod, then started walking out the way we’d come in.
“Cass?” Freddie called, and I turned around. I couldn’t help but notice how much I liked the way he said my name. It might have been the accent, but I didn’t think it was just that.
“Yes?”
“What’s this?” he asked, pointing toward the bottom of the page. “This thing about home being a sweatshirt you’ve outgrown?”
“It’s a song lyric.”
“I love it,” Freddie said, looking down at the paper. “Who wrote it?”