Chapter 6
Noah
The mountains behind Love Hollow were most beautiful in summer, and Noah had a perfect view from his perch next to the creek.
If he could just sit there, bathing in the beauty of nature, he wouldn’t mind meditatively watching the seasons pass.
He longed to go up in the mountains and hike, forgetting about all the pressures that were converging on him.
Noah kept track of the time using his old-fashioned watch, the kind that had to be wound, and he kept it as a sort of talisman.
The higher he went in the music world, the more he noticed that everyone around him had expensive watches.
His hadn’t been cheap, setting him back over thirty thousand yen on his first trip to Tokyo, but it wasn’t nearly as expensive as some of the status symbols he saw other guys wearing on their wrists.
And it helped him maintain his hipster image.
Of course, if things played out the way he was afraid they might, he wouldn’t be able to sell it for much.
He remembered some story he’d read about New Orleanian musicians pawning their instruments then buying them back.
If his label kept refusing his ideas, his earnings wouldn’t be high for long.
Coming back to Love Hollow was supposed to ground him, to make him feel like it wouldn’t be so terrible to get a “real” job if he had to.
Instead, it had done the opposite. His parents had relatively good public school jobs, and even they had been struggling mightily.
If they had just accepted help from him, they could both have quit.
Then again, because of how Noah’s career was going, it was probably good that they hadn’t.
And apart from his parents, nobody else in Love Hollow seemed to get it.
They saw him as rich because he’d had enough commercial success to get famous.
They didn’t see how much he had to pay—agents, security, all sorts of costs.
And a lot of the costs didn’t go away when he stopped bringing in money.
He knew he was late for the meeting, but he couldn’t bring himself to go down to the house.
The idea of Aya sitting there with his parents, the way she used to many years ago, was painful.
And they were just going to have to battle out the festival thing, which was maddening.
Aya of all people should understand what he was trying to do.
She probably hadn’t even voted the previous year when his brother, Nobu, was running for mayor and certainly never came to a single campaign event.
Granted, neither had he, but he’d offered to make a donation—though he ultimately couldn’t, since it counted as outsider money.
He could have contributed if he’d lived in Love Hollow, but as a nonresident, he was barred.
His parents had hinted more than once that Aya was “still” single, but he couldn’t believe that was true. Even if it was, she hated him, and apparently had never been quite as interested in him back in high school as he’d let himself believe.
No need to make that mistake twice.
According to his watch, he was ten minutes late, so he forced himself to his feet. A few years ago, he’d developed a technique to get himself to go to interviews. First, he counted to ten, then he started walking or driving. And he didn’t stop until the damn thing was over.
Celebrity had taken him by surprise. He’d always expected it to be the one thing that could give him the recognition he’d craved in high school.
Freed of his Love Hollow identity, he could be cool, even impressive.
Instead, he shied away from the attention, which only seemed to make it worse.
And starting a festival had come with way more hassles than he had ever expected.
It was almost like when he was just starting out and learning how to deal with renting recording studios and borrowing thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment.
Now he had people to make those decisions for him, but since he was officially in charge of a festival in his hometown, most things seemed to fall to him.
Noah was still walking, but the path petered out as he got closer to the creek.
He swore under his breath. Once upon a time, he would never have made that mistake, but he hadn’t been home often enough lately to remember.
He would have to go into the creek to get home the short way.
Otherwise, he’d have to backtrack and somehow scramble down the dirtiest and rockiest part of the foothills behind his parents’ backyard.
Well, no reason to stop walking. He made his way through the water.
It was higher than the last summer he’d been there, but he couldn’t remember when that was.
With work being so crazy, he preferred that his family visit him in LA.
The result was that his parents visited, his siblings almost never came, and he rarely made it home.
He had almost convinced himself that his conversation with Aya could be just a conversation.
After all, he met all kinds of people through work, and many of them were so self-absorbed they could hardly be bothered to look up, let alone learn his name.
At least that wasn’t true of Aya. Though she didn’t seem to respect anything he had achieved, at least she wasn’t a fellow celeb.
Noah’s feet stopped. When he started to take another step, he realized he was sinking in the mud next to the creek. The hiking boots he had worn seemed perfect, and they were certainly very expensive, but even they were not a match for the mud that was nearly up to his knees.
“Mom?” he called. “Dad? Hello!”
But there was no answer.