Chapter Two
Micah could trip into being ten minutes late for anything, but for this meeting? She’d given her rideshare driver a generous tip to let her sit in the car for the extra fifteen minutes it would take to ensure she was really late.
When Ian, the band’s old rep at the record label, had contacted her about performing on this Nightshifters cruise, she’d initially said no.
Absolutely not. No way. She even hung up on him, although she’d immediately felt bad and blamed it on poor cell coverage when he’d called right back.
He’d assured her that the focus of the cruise would be on the show’s cast reunion, and that ElectricOh!
would only have to perform a few songs for the ship’s “prom night,” and that would be it.
“How does that sound?” Ian asked, a thread of desperation in his voice. “Take a nice beach vacation, catch some sun, sing a couple old ones, and then you’re back on land and can return to your real life.”
“No.”
Ian had named the sum of money the band would get for appearing on the cruise, which—even split five ways. Not bad.
It had been enough to make Micah hesitate just a little bit.
Her “real life,” after all, wasn’t nearly as glamorous as people might think.
She owned an apartment in L.A., which was something—paid for with royalties from the very song that got her this cruise opportunity in the first place.
But the apartment sometimes felt more like Rapunzel’s room at the top of the tower, and Micah was the princess who would sleep all day and only venture out at night to roam around a harshly lit drugstore where she could pretend to be a normal person just making an emergency run for tampons.
Micah was mixing up her fairy tales. She couldn’t remember the one that involved CVS.
“No, thank you,” she’d said to Ian, and then offered a quick goodbye to send the message not to call back.
Of course, the next phone call had been from her father. Or not really her father , since he’d called in his capacity as band manager for ElectricOh!. She’d made that mistake before.
“You’re doing this cruise,” he’d said without preamble. “You need to do something with your life—and before you start, you know Hailey appreciates your help with her salon, but she can hire her own people. That’s not where you belong and you know it.”
The past few years, Micah had been flying back to Ohio to spend weeks at a time helping her younger sister open her own hair salon.
It hadn’t been particularly grueling work—slapping a new coat of paint on a wall, organizing supplies, driving around town to drop off stacks of glossy postcards advertising the salon’s services.
Micah had even let Hailey blow up poster-sized images showing off Micah’s hair to put in the shop, which wasn’t a hardship because Hailey’d always done a great job and Micah loved her sister…
but which had still made her feel weird and sad in some indescribable way, seeing her smiling face plastered on the walls.
And that was just about some fucking pictures in a hair salon, so how much worse would it be to do this cruise, with all the renewed attention it might bring?
But because Micah always felt sixteen again the minute she got on the phone with her father, she’d at least heard him out.
“And consider your bandmates,” he’d said.
“You don’t think they might be able to use this opportunity?
I know they weren’t happy with the way things ended, but this could be a chance to put some of that to bed.
Ryder and Frankie are still in the industry, and then there’s that boy who practically lived at our house—”
“Okay,” she’d said finally, as much to get him to stop talking as because she knew he was right. “Okay, I’ll do it.”
Since then, the scope of the cruise had ballooned a little—per the contract, they were now committed to two performances, a short set and then the one song at prom night, and were also supposed to host “two (2) Activities to be named at a later date, but in no event to last longer in duration than two (2) hours each, with the Band to have final approval over the Activities, such approval not to be unreasonably withheld.”
Contracts weren’t supposed to be funny, but that line had made her laugh.
Approval not to be unreasonably withheld.
What a joke. She’d scrolled to the bottom to see the digital signatures already added—Steve, their happy-go-lucky drummer; Frankie, the bassist and all-around comforting presence; and Ryder, the lead guitarist and her ex, topping the list of reasons why she hadn’t wanted to do this cruise in the first place.
Micah had at least gotten to a point in her life where just seeing his name wasn’t a jump scare, so that was something.
Publicly, his narrative had become that ElectricOh!
broke up because no one else in the band cared about the music the way he did, which used to make her blood boil and now just made her laugh.
She was glad that their romantic relationship had never been officially confirmed, so she could sidestep any questions with coy non-answers without going into all of it.
How stupid she’d been to let herself get caught up in him, how stupid she still felt for not extricating herself earlier, for the sake of the band if nothing else.
Maybe she could’ve cut out the rot before it spread.
The only ones who hadn’t signed the contract yet were her and John.
John. He’d been her best friend once. Now she had no idea what he even looked like, if he bothered to run a comb through his unruly dark hair, if he’d filled out or if he was still all knobby elbows and too-long legs, if he’d ever managed to grow a beard like he used to desperately want to.
“My family’s Italian,” he’d say. “It’s my birthright. ”
And she would’ve made an Olive Garden joke because they’d had a whole bit, and he would’ve grabbed her around the waist and threatened to tickle her, which was such a farce because she knew he was the ticklish one, if you could get him around the neck…
It had been a long time since she’d allowed herself to think about John like that , dredging up the visceral memories that could make her feel like she was right back in seventh-grade homeroom.
And it had been even longer since she’d felt like she’d had anyone in her life that she knew that well, who knew her, who she had that kind of shorthand with, who she’d been able to be completely and utterly herself with.
Now the driver spared her a glance in the rearview mirror before making a not-so-surreptitious grimace at the blinking app open on his phone screen. “Uh, miss?” he said. “There are other requests coming in, so…”
Micah looked out the window at the nondescript concrete building that housed Tasteless Art Studios, the niche subsidiary of a major record label that had given them their start sixteen years ago.
The building hadn’t changed at all, which seemed impossible.
She hadn’t seen anyone walking up to it in a while, which she hoped meant that everyone involved in today’s meeting would already be inside.
“One more minute,” she said. “Promise.”
—
When Micah finally walked into the building, she immediately saw everyone there for the meeting through the open glass wall of the main conference room.
She would’ve preferred a more private space—she’d feel like she was in a fishbowl the entire time they were talking—but she supposed there was a benefit to it now that she was on the outside looking in.
Ryder had taken a seat in the center, which she knew he’d done on purpose, and was talking animatedly to a woman with red lipstick next to him who Micah didn’t recognize.
Must be one of the label reps. Ryder looked exactly as she’d expected him to, but then of course he did—she’d kept up with him a bit, watched a few of his new band’s music videos.
She told herself she kept tabs on him in a self-defense sort of way, in the same manner you might track a spider you weren’t going to kill but didn’t want to bite you again.
But then she would also sometimes click back and forth between those new videos and ElectricOh!
’s old ones, getting a sick thrill when she compared how many views each had.
She was positive he’d kept tabs on her in the same way, could probably tell her more about how badly her solo singles had charted compared to her contemporaries than she allowed her own self to admit.
Across from him was someone whose back was to Micah, but who from the big hair and swinging earrings she already knew was Frankie, the band’s bassist. Of all the people she’d lost touch with, Frankie was probably the most inexplicable.
They’d been close while in the band together, and Frankie had reached out to Micah several times after everything had exploded.
Frankie had been collateral damage, an unfortunate victim of Micah deciding to go scorched earth and start completely over.
It hadn’t been fair, and Micah wondered how things could’ve been different if she’d just once picked up her phone and texted to say, Hey, thinking of you, let’s hang out . She bet Frankie would’ve.
At one end of the table, as if leading the meeting, was Steve, the band’s drummer.
She recognized him because he looked exactly the same, just a little softer around the edges and with the ripped cargo shorts he used to wear traded out for a pair of businesslike khakis.
Somehow she knew that he’d chosen his seat not because he actually wanted to be at the head of the table but just because he was oblivious to any implications a particular seat might have.