Chapter Twenty-Four
Play guitar onstage? In front of everyone, at arguably the most iconic live performance of their entire career?
“But you play rhythm,” she said stupidly, still trying to catch up.
“Normally,” John said. “But I’d take over Ryder’s lead part, and let you play rhythm. You know the song, Micah. You wrote the song. We’d have the next twenty-four hours to practice, and I know you could do it. What do you say?”
Despite what Ryder had loved to charge her with, it wasn’t that she couldn’t play any instrument.
She’d written songs on both guitar and piano, after all.
In high school, she’d played flute in the marching band, so long ago that she barely knew that she’d be able to play “Seven Nation Army” like they’d once performed.
But she’d definitely never felt confident enough to play live, in front of people, while also trying to sing at the same time.
“Frankie would probably be a better choice,” she said. Frankie might primarily be a bassist, but the instruments were close enough—Micah knew they could do it.
“Frankie’s ready to step up if we need them to,” John said. “But we agreed that we thought you’d be perfect. We can practice, at the very least, and see how it goes. I’ll be right there with you, every step of the way.”
“You’d have to do the harmonies,” Micah said. “On the chorus. If we were really going to make it good.”
She could tell from the expression on his face that he hadn’t thought that far ahead. But his gaze settled on hers, and she could also tell that there wasn’t going to be any getting out of this. “I can do that,” he said.
She touched his bottom lip, which looked tender and swollen but had already started to scab over. He sank his teeth into the pad of her thumb, giving her a wicked grin. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Just the two of us.”
It had always been the two of them, hadn’t it?
Playing guitar in her room, trying to figure out chord structures to their favorite songs.
When she’d introduced John at last night’s show and called him the beating heart of the band, she’d meant it.
He’d always been the one holding everything together.
“ We wrote the song,” she said. “I’m in.”
—
There was so much to do that it was only after Micah was back on the ship that she realized they’d never even gotten to swim in the ocean. She almost wanted to go back, but she knew they didn’t have time.
John walked with Micah to the medic so she could get her hand looked at, and then he split off to go see about reserving the Starlight Theater for rehearsal space for the night.
There hadn’t been anything on the schedule after a trivia event that had been hosted there earlier that day, so they were hopeful they could secure it as a private area to practice the song.
Regardless, they made plans to meet back up in front of the theater in an hour so they could figure out next steps.
Micah was a few minutes early to their rendezvous point, but still she saw John already leaning against the doors, looking down the hallway like he thought she’d come from the other direction.
How many times had he waited for her, just like that, standing outside a classroom with his backpack, leaning against the bike rack in front of the school, pausing at the bottom of the stairs as they ran off the stage after an encore?
Suddenly she did feel tenderness for the kids they were then, but even more she felt an overwhelming ache for the people they were now.
She’d known John so well back in those days, but she wanted to know more about the man he’d become. She wanted him to know her .
“I still can’t believe that Henry Rollins shit,” she said as she walked up. “All this time, I thought you’d come up with that.”
He turned around, giving her a smile that made her heart skip a beat. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” he said. “And that one is mine. How’s the hand?”
She held it up, showing where they’d wrapped a bandage around her knuckles.
If the medic had noticed that one of the members of ElectricOh!
had a broken nose and another one had busted-up knuckles, she didn’t say anything.
She’d given Micah the okay on her hand, since Micah could make a fist, could move all her fingers, and felt more of a dull ache than any sharp pain.
“Just some bruising,” she said. “Should be fine. Are we all set for rehearsal?”
“Right this way,” John said, opening the doors for her.
John must’ve gotten the cruise to sign off on them using the theater fairly early, because he’d already had time to set up all their equipment on the stage, including two chairs, various guitars, and a small boom box.
“In case we want to listen to the recorded version, or play along to it,” he said, seeming to catch Micah’s gaze. “It might help.”
“Makes sense.” He really had seemed to think of everything. She felt bad that she hadn’t been able to contribute anything herself. “I feel rude showing up empty-handed. Like the least I could’ve done was pick us up a pizza or something.”
John gestured toward a cooler at the corner of the stage. “I, uh, had them package up some chicken and fruit and stuff like that. I didn’t know how long we’d be here.”
Micah was touched, not only that he’d thought about dinner already, but that he seemed to remember how carefully she used to eat while they were touring, to preserve her voice. She’d already forgotten all those ways she used to take care of herself, but he hadn’t.
She climbed the stairs to the stage, circling the equipment gathered in the center. There were two acoustic guitars, which she’d expected—that was how they’d play tomorrow night, after all. But there was also his amp and pedalboard and electric guitar, all set up, and she stopped when she saw them.
“I know we probably won’t need to do anything with those,” he said. “But again, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Better than wishing we had them and them being stowed away somewhere below deck. Plus, I don’t like to be too far away from my emotional support Haunting Mids.”
She looked at him, and he nudged the toe of his Converse against one of the pedals on his board. It was black, with a little white ghost printed on it. “Haunting Mids. That’s the name of the pedal. It pairs well with fuzz, especially—”
“Is that my guitar?”
She’d barely clocked the guitar he’d been playing since he’d arrived on the ship—it was black with a white pick guard, a common enough Telecaster.
But now that she saw it on its stand, now that she was walking behind it, she saw the distinctive Amnesty International bumper sticker she’d placed on its back sometime after he’d given the budget-version guitar to her for her fourteenth birthday.
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah.”
“How do you— why do you…”
She wasn’t mad that he had it. She couldn’t remember the exact chain of custody, but she had no doubt that she’d given it to him once they’d started touring and she realized the chances that she’d need an electric guitar would be slim to none.
Either she’d given it to him to borrow—he’d always said it had a surprisingly good tone, for such a cheap guitar—or she’d given it to him to work on and set up and get back to her.
Regardless, she had no doubt he’d gotten more use out of it than she ever would’ve. She was just surprised to see it here.
“I guess it was my version of your tattoo,” he said. “My fantasy that you’d reach out, when you wanted it back.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, but he didn’t seem to want her to say anything. He gave her a rueful smile, like Dumb, huh? And then he sat down on one of the chairs, bending to pick up a piece of paper and a Sharpie.
“So these are the chords to start,” he said, writing the word VERSES in all capitals and then scribbling down a series of letters underneath.
“And for the chorus…” He wrote the word in all caps as another label before transcribing those, too.
“And then the bridge…” He looked up like he was thinking for a minute, and she could tell he was running through the bridge in his head, trying to recall what his muscle memory already knew.
“The bridge starts on F,” she said. “I remember that part.”
She watched him write those chords down on the sheet of paper, and it was like they were right back there, when they’d written the song together.
The band had all been staying in a rental while they recorded at the Orlando studio, a soulless stucco house in a neighborhood filled with copies of the exact same place, to the point where Micah sometimes accidentally started to turn into the wrong driveway when she went for walks to clear her head.
It had been the only place they could find with enough bedrooms for all of them.
Recording that first album had been fun, for the most part—they were still energized by the fact that they had a record deal at all, that their dream was actually coming true.
But Micah had already started to feel the pressure, and she was having trouble sleeping, too keyed up every time she lay down, her mind going a mile a minute with critiques of what she’d done that day, ideas for what she’d do differently tomorrow.
She’d gone down to the kitchen one night to refill her glass of water when she’d looked through the window and seen John sitting on the back porch, leaning over his guitar while he played a tune she could only barely hear but didn’t recognize.
“What is that?” she’d asked when she’d come through the sliding glass door to join him.
He’d stopped playing abruptly. “Just something I got in my head.”
“Play it again.”