8. Late Nights and Early Mornings
NICKY
The view before me had such a nightmarish quality that I knew from the start that I was dreaming. Why don’t I just wake myself up? I asked myself as things began to go wrong.
But that’s the way with dreams. If we could control them, they’d never turn into nightmares.
I was back in the storage room at the Atlanta stadium, except the black ceiling was miles overhead and the boxes, unmarked and indistinguishable, were stacked to dizzying heights.
And tipping.
The dark pathway between the stacks was lined with ragged boxes and stretched into the distance.
At first, I was able to catch the tipping boxes and push them back into alignment, but something was shifting them. Some huge hand one aisle over was after me. I caught two boxes, one with each hand, and pushed them back, fighting the weight of the boxes on top.
And a box on the other side teetered.
I leapt ahead moments before it crashed to the ground, spilling out a blooming flower of Sheree T-shirts.
I could repack them. I’d find a tape gun. Get them back onto the stack. I could do it.
Until the next box wobbled.
And then the next.
And then I was running as an avalanche of crates thudded down behind me—crates like the one I’d lost. Heavy wooden cubes, each one holding forty-eight bedazzled jackets.
Soon I was gasping for air as I ran, but I was managing to stay ahead of the cascade of heavy wooden crates until the walls groaned as they creaked into motion, narrowing the path and brushing against my arms as I pumped desperately for more speed.
No! No, I had to get out!
I must have hit my head against Archer’s bunk above me in my attempt to escape, because when I jerked awake, my forehead was throbbing. Again. Just as it had when the guitar player had woken me the night before.
At least I hadn’t disturbed Archer. It was more important for him to be rested for concerts. He had to hold the whole world in the palm of his hand. Banging on the bottom of his bunk couldn’t help.
No—wait. He was across the passage from me, sleeping in the other low bunk with the puppy. Two curtains and a few feet of empty space were all that separated us. Archer and I were sleeping together.
If I could sleep.
Then I was thinking about how little space I had overhead. Too little space. Like the boxes collapsing on me. The space was crushing me.
I had to get out. Now.
I rolled out from under the curtain, landing with a quiet thump on the hallway floor. The air was immediately cooler. It filled my lungs. It slowed my slamming heart. It stretched out to left and right. To openness. To space.
Oof.
No one came to check on me. No godlike lead singer, no scarred guitarist, no smiling drummer. I was both annoyed and relieved that my panic had gone unnoticed.
With the exception of a wrinkled, sniffing, charcoal-gray snout poking out from under the curtain in the opposite bunk.
Charlotte slid out of Archer’s bunk as if she had no bones at all. She ended in a dignity-free puddle in my lap, her head on the rug between my crossed legs and her doggy butt up in the air, the long whip of her tail gently bouncing off my nose.
Oh, yeah.
Now I felt better.
And maybe Archer would wake up and wonder where she’d gone.
I cuddled Charlotte, and she wriggled in delight. Silence from Archer, which was fine. It was fine. He needed sleep.
Between us, Charlotte and I shifted her position and then mine until I was sitting in the kitchen banquette and she was against my chest, standing on my thighs with her puppy paws splayed over my shoulders.
I let her wiggling adoration fill me with the peaceful calm of dog therapy. I hadn’t been asleep long. She didn’t need to be walked yet. I kissed her heavy head and persuaded her to curl up on the bench seat beside me.
The good thing about the bus was that, generally speaking, every possession I owned was in arm’s reach. I fished my laptop out of my backpack and put in some time getting work done. There was plenty on the To Do list.
Charlotte rolled on her back and amused herself by banging her back feet into my arms as I typed.
“You naughty thing, why don’t you go to sleep?” I played with her paws, and she tried to gnaw on my fingers. We let the peace of the nighttime fill us.
“Is this a private party, or can anyone join?” The quiet voice spoke from the hallway. But it wasn’t gorgeous Archer. Just the scarred guitarist.
“Hey, Ian. Join us. We’re exercising our back teeth if you want the agenda.”
He slid into the booth by Charlotte’s snout, leaving me the wagging tail to contend with.
“Hey, pupper. Hey, you baby. Aren’t you excellent? What a good hound you are. You’re an Aftermath dog now, aren’t you? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good, huh? You want something to chew? Hang on.”
Ian was the tallest of us, and his wingspan meant just about everything in the bus was within reach. He snagged a rubber puppy ring from the floor and offered it to Charlotte. She seized it with a mock growl, which made him laugh, his ruined face raising in half a smile.
“Yeah, baby, that’s better, huh? You fierce warrior. You wolf pup. Oh, you’re so tough.”
Ian played with Charlotte, and I forgot about his scar as he and the dog wrestled.
Puppy though she was, her back feet were big and strong. I oofed when I took a big push in the belly. “Thanks, dog. Calm down, huh?”
Ian picked it up. “Calm, Charlotte. That’s a good girl. You’re just a baby. Time to sleep. Come on, calm down.”
His big hands stroked her as she gnawed her ring, and the energy flowed out of her with every caress. Her enormous head thunked against his hip, her whip tail wagged once against my leg, and Charlotte surrendered to sleep on the bench between us.
“Look at that,” he breathed as he fondled one of her silky ears. “Christ, I wish it was so easy for me to fall asleep.”
“No good with Mal, huh?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Mal. He sprawls, you know? Takes up a lot of space. And he’s not . . . I don’t know. Restful.” He shrugged and looked down the dark hallway to the back lounge. “He’s in there right now, sleeping like a baby. Like this baby.” His half smile was wistful as he stroked Charlotte. “And I’m wide awake. As usual.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you doing up? It’s five thirty in the morning.”
I was evasive. “Just don’t want to sleep right now.”
He nodded, narrowing one eye at me as if he was very wise. “Uh-huh. Nightmares again.”
I shivered and sniffed an inhale to clear away the tension. “Yeah.”
He acknowledged my laptop with a tip of his chin. “So you’re working instead.”
I shrugged. “I’m having classic anxiety dreams. I figured I might as well use this time to address my anxieties and figure out how to dial it back so I can sleep. And there’s a lot on the list too.”
His long leg came up under the table to rest on the seat beside me, bare foot sticking out from plain gray sweats. He settled more comfortably. “Okay, hit me with it. What’s on the list?”
I tried to shake him off, but he was focused on it now, and there was nothing on this bus that was going to distract him. Still, I was able to quietly backspace over item number one, which was—embarrassingly—just the name Archer.
As in, how to get on the same mattress as him. But I didn’t need to have it written down to know about it.
“Okay,” I said and crossed my arms defensively. “The first thing is my capstone project. I’m four days into a sixty-two–day tour, and I still don’t have my adviser’s approval.”
“Right. The T-shirt. What’s the big deal?”
I huffed, trapped between laughter and annoyance. “No big deal. At all. I just have to write up a description of the project, get Mr. Diventura’s approval, design the promotion that will make the shirt sell, design the shirt, and get it made and delivered. Oh, and get all the contracts signed by the near-invisible Bruce, who has to run it by Legal. Nothing to it, right?”
“What promotions?” Ian was now squinting at me in the low light.
“Well, that’s the second thing on my list—or rather, the third thing, since the contract itself is giving me nightm—stressing me.” I flicked a finger against my screen. “Bruce, the tour manager, gave me access to the Lyre Records drive with the concert contracts on them.”
“Yeah?” He wasn’t nearly as interested as he should have been.
“All of the contracts,” I stressed.
He raised a lazy eyebrow, and then his foot thudded down as he sat up again. “All the contracts? Like, you can see Sheree’s contract? Fuck a duck, let me see!”
He grabbed for the laptop, but I stopped him. “Right. Now you understand. But here’s the thing. I signed a nondisclosure agreement before I joined the tour. I bet you did, too, didn’t you?” He nodded. “Sure you did. Lyre Records is not made up of idiots. And you can bet there will be a log on this computer drive. They’ll be able to see who opens things and when.”
Ian sat back, pulling in his arms like the stove was hot. “Oh.”
“Oh. That’s right. So, I have access, but I’m not going to look at any of this stuff. Not the contract with the bus drivers. Not how much the dancers get paid. Nothing. Including anything that would tell me the industry standard for merch payouts.” I sighed, overwhelmed by the painful depths of my ignorance.
“Ask Bruce,” Ian suggested. “Or the guy with the porn ’stache.”
“Dean.” Dean the Leaner. “Those people are oddly reluctant to share any information with me. I don’t know why.”
“They let you into the contracts, though?”
“Yeah. That’s a little weird, isn’t it?”
We both fell silent, thinking our circular, useless thoughts. He slumped again, and a large bare foot reappeared by my thigh. “So . . . that’s confusing.”
“That’s what I think. Bruce says there are contract templates in here, but I’m not sure I want to be poking around looking for them, you know? I guess I could look at the Aftermath contract.” I brightened at the thought. “That wouldn’t be wrong. I’m supposed to do your promotions too. I need to know what your contract says about marketing. And there’s probably something in there about merch! Is there?”
Ian was blinking at my new enthusiasm. “Well, I know we didn’t get merch rights.”
“Yeah, but is there anything about merch in there? If it’s a standard contract?”
“I guess. Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Sound of a mental record needle scratching. Attention shift. “You don’t know what’s in your own contract?”
He shifted. His shoulders were now tipping away from me. “Well, it was really long. I mean, like, really long. Fifty pages or something.”
“You didn’t . . . you didn’t read it?”
“Morey read it.”
“Morey, your manager? He and I discussed what you need in a contract, but he doesn’t seem terribly, um?—”
“Yeah. Morey’s a good guy, though. He told us the Sheree tour contract was okay to sign.”
“Huh.” I didn’t want to scare him. “Does Morey happen to be a lawyer?”
He chuckled. “Morey is barely a manager. But what were we going to do, say we weren’t going to tour with Sheree?”
I blinked and tried to remember that not everyone was one capstone away from a Master in Business Administration. Take this slowly, girl. “Okay. Well, Ian, I’ll offer you a good rule of thumb for your entire life, okay?” He was grinning at me like I was cute. Annoyance fizzed through me. “Don’t sign legal documents until they’ve been reviewed by a lawyer.” He was still looking smug, and I had to resist the desire to pull out some insults from my childhood with my brother, like You numbnuts.
“Yes, teacher.”
I flipped my hands up dismissively. “Fine. Your problem, not mine. Anyway, I’m going to pull your contract out of here and see what it says about promotions and merch. That will at least give me a starting point.”
“Promotions. You mentioned that before.”
I inhaled to wipe away the yes, teacher annoyance and settled to Anxiety Topic Number Three. “Bruce put me in charge of your promotions. As far as I can tell, you don’t have anything at all to get in the way of a new marketing strategy.”
Now he was the one who looked annoyed. “Are you kidding? How about millions of views on TikTok and YouTube? That’s not good enough for you?”
His arrogance irked me, so I pulled up the band’s website and flipped the computer so he could see it. “This is you, right? The band’s website? Where the last post is from seven months ago?”
I hit the number of months with chilliness, and he felt the freeze. He hung his head. “That’s when Archer’s sister had the baby. She hasn’t done any updates since then.”
“Congratulations to Archer’s sister. And none of you thought you could add some news? Some little tidbit—something small for the fans? Like, I don’t know, you had a turkey sandwich for lunch? Or maybe that you’re touring across all of North America for two solid months with the biggest musical superstar in the world?”
Ian soothed Charlotte when my hiss woke the dog. It meant he didn’t have to look at me when he mumbled his reply.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t catch that. What did you say?”
His sudden brashness looked like my brother when he got caught doing something stupid. “I said we can’t remember how to get into the website. All right? Satisfied?”
“Jesus.” I rubbed my eyes. “How do you children come out of your homes without a mommy? Give me the contact information for Archer’s sister, please.”
It felt good to feel so righteous while Ian was humbled. It felt even better when Archer’s sister (my future sister-in-law) responded to my email immediately.
“There. See? Here’s the information. That’s all it took,” I said.
“She’s awake?” Ian seemed astonished that the username and password for their website was so easy to obtain.
“She has a seven-month-old baby. She doesn’t sleep. Ever. Okay, I’m in your website. I’m going to post your tour dates.”
“Good. You do that. I’m going to . . .” he fumbled, but then brightened. “Let me see that tour schedule, huh? I can work on city-specific songs for Sheree to consider.”
His shoulders came down as he spoke. Just the idea was relaxing him. I shook my head as if I was disappointed, but in truth, I liked the enthusiasm I heard in his voice.
We shared the printed schedule, and it wasn’t long before he untangled himself from Charlotte and retrieved his own laptop and earbuds. We worked companionably in silence. I made a pop-up banner for the concert schedule and changed the band’s cover image to a photo I’d taken of Archer cuddling Charlotte. That image would draw anyone with a heart into the site.
Should I have asked them before I got to messing with their website? Maybe. But they hadn’t even known how to get into it. I decided they’d lost the right to criticize.
Ian certainly wasn’t interested. He was bent over his computer, typing like a fiend and then listening raptly. Occasionally, he’d mutter in satisfaction under his breath. I heard “Lee Ann Womack” and “Duke Ellington,” which told even someone with as little musical knowledge as me that Ian was not limiting himself to any particular era or genre. Sheree would probably love it.
I was putting links to all the Aftermath videos on their website (how could they have missed that?) when Ian leaned back.
“Done,” he said. “Until I run some ideas past Sheree.”
He looked happy. At least on half his face.
“Good.”
The half smile fell. “What? What’s the matter? I miss something? What else is on your list to do?”
“Hmm? Oh, nothing. Just Aftermath training.” They were getting a fan newsletter whether they wanted one or not. I set up a subscription landing page.
“Aftermath training?” I didn’t respond quickly enough, so he reached out and tapped a finger on my screen. “Hey. What’s that mean? Aftermath training?”
“Hang on. Just setting up an email service provider . . . okay. What now?”
I got the half grin. “What did you mean when you said Aftermath training? Are you getting us a mommy for when we leave the house?”
I laughed. “Aftermath training will be easier than dog training, that’s all. I need to teach you guys how to have a dog that weighs a hundred and fifty pounds and will look down on any dining room table.”
“I think we’ve got time.” His hand was a blanket over Charlotte’s sleeping body. I had to remind myself that the dog was an unusually large puppy because the guitarist had unusually large hands, and the scale of the two of them looked entirely normal.
“You don’t have time. The bad habits she gets into now are going to be miserable to train out of her later. You have to start now, or she’ll be out of control. And that will be a lot of out-of-control dog.”
Ian’s eyebrow went up in consideration. Both his eyebrows moved. The scar only cut off movement to his cheek, apparently. “I guess that’s right. Mal will be okay with training, but Archer is a free spirit. You’re going to have trouble with him.”
I should be so lucky. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”
Ian looked up at me slyly, and I knew he knew. Knew I was crushing on Archer.
I refused to blush or shift uncomfortably. I was who I was.
“Nothing else on the anxiety list? You’re just going to make us famous, train our dog, and get an MBA at the same time? That should keep you busy for a day or two.”
“And figure out what I’m doing wrong with the inventory system,” I sighed. “And find out why Bianca hates me. And carve out some time to get a taxi or something. I need to buy some chamomile tea so I can sleep at night.”
He nodded with a frown. “Chamomile. Tried that. Good luck.”
All-knowing. Smug. I can take you down a peg. “Let’s talk about this website.”
He winced. “I thought we finished that topic. Aren’t you taking over?”
“I’ll pin a photo of you guys with Sheree as soon as her manager approves the shot. But I’m talking about your background information. None of you have anything to put on here to make you more . . . followable?” That had to be a word.
“Followable?”
“Something that makes you humans. A behind-the-curtain glimpse of life with Aftermath, so a potential fan can become a superfan. An ambassador for your brand.” That sounded good. My marketing professor would have been proud to hear me trotting out his favorite concepts.
“Huh. You want something more than a photo of Archer? That usually does it. What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing personal here. Like . . . how did the band form? How did you meet each other?”
Ian’s nose wrinkled. Both sides. No problem from the scar’s nerve damage. Studying his face was fascinating once the shock of the scar wore off. “I’ve known Archer since kindergarten, but I can’t tell you how we met Mal. You’d post it.”
Ding-ding-ding. Now I was interested. “Go on. You have to tell me now.”
“I don’t.”
“Why? Is it bad? Did you all meet in juvie or something?” I tried to bite back my grin but was probably unsuccessful.
“Worse than that. It’s not scary, it’s cute. And cute is death in the world of rock ’n’ roll.”
“Oh, come on. Now you have to tell me! You had a meet-cute? Like a rom-com?”
He rolled his eyes. “Swear you won’t put it on the website—or anywhere—and I’ll tell you.”
I crossed my heart, locked my lips, and threw away the key. Then I waited impatiently.
He sighed. “We met him in the high school marching band.”
I squealed. The giggle escaped before I could stop it. “You’re kidding!” Ian looked like a Halloween mask. Archer was the epitome of a rock god. Mal would wade into a bar fight to rescue someone. These guys were badasses and their music was phenomenal. “Marching band? Oh god, I love it!”
He shook his head, the cheek on the healthy side of his face bunching as he tried to hide a rueful smile. “You can shut the hell up. I told you it was cute.”
“Oh, it’s cute, all right. It’s adorable. What did you all play?”
He sighed. “Mal was on the drum line, of course. Probably the only cool position in the band.”
I remembered. “The drum line guys were incredibly fit,” I said. A cheerleader like me could’ve dated someone from the drum line if necessary, but no other instrument had been cool enough. I didn’t point this out to Ian. Clearly, he knew it already.
But . . . Archer. He had to have been smokin’ hot, even in high school. “You weren’t all drum line?”
He groaned. I wasn’t letting it go, so he gave up resisting. “Archer played the trumpet. He was pretty good. By popular demand, he’d take that trumpet to basketball games and baseball games and everyone would get him to play ‘Charge,’ you know?”
He sang the song, immediately identifiable from every high school and college game I’d ever gone to.
“But you didn’t play the trumpet. Let me guess. Saxophone?” His discomfort was delighting me.
He paused before finally confessing. “Sousaphone.”
I blanked. “What’s a sousaphone?”
He ducked his head and made the duh face. “Marching tuba. The one worn in a coil over the shoulder?” He held his hands out as if playing a huge instrument, and I laughed so hard, I woke up Charlotte. Ian chuckled unwillingly along with me. “You take that to your grave, Nicky,” he said sternly.
“Oh, I will,” I said, hiccuping. “You think I can market you guys if anyone knows you can play the marching tuba?”
“I’ll have you know that only the biggest and strongest can play the sousaphone.”
“Oh, I’m sure!”
“Stop giggling.”
“Who’s giggling?”
“Cut that out. Or I’ll never tell you how Aftermath got its name.”
I was having a hard time inhaling through the laughter. I rolled my hand at him instead, in the universal spit it out gesture. He tried to look cool but lost it when he began to snigger.
“Well, once the three of us formed a rock band, we needed a name. And we settled on Aftermath because . . . don’t tell anyone, okay? It’s because,” he said, “we met to practice after math.”
For a moment, paralysis stopped me cold. Then the gusts of laughter shook me on the seat. It took me three overwrought tries to get out my comment, which was, “It’s a good thing you didn’t practice after social studies!”
And then he was howling along with me.
The hysteria faded, but the warm feeling lingered. The sun was coming up and I probably could have tried sleeping again, but I started a strategy document for my adviser. There were things that needed doing, including the first Aftermath newsletter.
Which ought to at least mention that Archer played the trumpet . . .?