Chapter Eleven #2
I shake my head to clear it. “No, let’s stay on task.” I flip to a clean page in my notebook, but Dax slides it out of my hands, tossing it onto the coffee table without looking.
“Tell me.”
He pins me with his gaze and I cave. It all comes spilling out of me—the Mike Song leak, the meeting with John, the article getting pushed back and made bigger all at once, my brainstorming session with Robb, my MapQuest directions that were definitely conspiring against me.
I’m aware this is unprofessional, but there was nothing normal about this situation to begin with.
“I don’t know,” I say heavily. “You may have made a mistake giving this to me.”
His face screws up in confusion. “I didn’t give you anything, Sloane. You earned it.”
I make a noise halfway between a honk and a choke. “How? How have I earned this? I’ve got, like, two articles to my name.”
His eyes bore into mine. “To your name, yeah.”
I inhale sharply. “You know?”
He nods. “I’d know you anywhere, Sloane. Even when you’re in a Mike Song–shaped trench coat. Besides, he doesn’t know words that big.”
A garbled laugh works its way out of me. “I can’t believe you read his stuff.”
Dax fidgets with his necklace, twisting the chain around the tip of his finger. “I don’t, normally. But I subscribed”—his finger turns purple, and he untwists the chain—“two years ago.”
He followed my career.
I can’t help it. My chin wobbles, and tears well, blurring my vision.
“Hey,” he calls softly. The cushion sinks as he moves closer, his hands cupping my cheeks as I blink, his thumbs wiping away the tears before they can fall.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, mortified. “This is so unprofessional.”
Dax smiles crookedly. “I don’t give a fuck about that.”
I laugh wetly, and he continues to wipe away my tears with his thumbs, saying nothing, letting me get it all out.
Once I’m confident my waterworks are done, I take a deep breath, finally meeting his gaze again.
He smiles softly, and it’s all a little too familiar.
It shouldn’t be. We haven’t been this to each other in years.
As if realizing the same thing, he dabs the last of my tears with his sleeve before scooting a normal distance away on the couch.
I twist each of my seven earrings in turn to ground myself. “You’re not gonna ask me why I did it?” I don’t want to talk about it, but I want to talk about how we keep falling into old patterns even less.
He shakes his head. “Not unless you want to tell me.”
This is how he gets me to tell him everything. He doesn’t push, lets it be my choice, and the less I’m pushed, the more I want to pull someone closer. I twist my earrings one last time. “You know how when you’re dreaming, and things don’t totally make sense, but you go along with it anyway?”
Dax nods.
“It was like that,” I say, speaking to my hands twisting in my lap.
“I was doing it, y’know? I was so close to making it to Rolling Stone.
I was going to shows every other night, writing them up, getting to cover bigger and better bands.
Sure, my name wasn’t on any of it yet, but I thought if I just stuck it out, got that referral from Mike, all my Rolling Stone dreams that I’d spent my whole life working toward would come true.
But then I woke up, and… I tried to slip back into it, but all I could see was everything that didn’t add up.
All the promises he’d made, the excuses I made for doing what I was doing…
Somewhere along the way, my dream had turned into a nightmare. ”
“Hey,” he calls, ducking his head and forcing me to meet his gaze. “Fuck Mike Song.”
I smile weakly. “Fuck Mike Song.”
He nods in approval. “I didn’t pick wrong,” he reassures me. “And I can prove it,” he begins softly. “How did you get into music journalism?”
I shake my head at him for turning my own question around on me. I brush my hair out of my face, trying to regain my composure despite feeling like an exposed nerve. “I’m supposed to be the one asking the questions here.”
“Oh, now she wants to be professional,” he mocks.
I make a noise of affront, laughing as I smack his arm with the back of my hand.
“Humor me,” he pleads.
I sigh, sinking sideways into the couch. I have an interview-ready answer to this question, but it’s not the real story. I don’t even consider giving him the prepared answer for half a second.
“When I was sixteen,” I begin. “I remember flying down back roads with Brooklyn, driving way too fast with my music way too loud, to get to a basement show for a band I’d never even heard of before that night.
The band was heavy. B hated it. I loved it.
” My gaze goes hazy, my mind half in the past, still able to see it all so clearly.
The dingy basement with its pale green walls, scuffed and fading.
There was no stage for the band to stand on, every member eye level with the hundred or so people that had shown up to watch them.
I can still feel the press of heat from that many bodies in a room with no windows.
“After their last song, following an absolutely brutal breakdown, the lead singer opens his mouth, and the most beautiful melody comes out.” I can’t help but laugh, reliving the shock of hearing it in such quick succession to near-demonic vocals.
“It was soft, slow. The crowd knew every word. I don’t know how.
I don’t think they even had an EP out. Everyone in the room is scream-singing their hearts out, repeating the verse over and over.
The band slowly fades out until it’s a cappella.
I look over at Brooklyn and she’s crying.
I realize I’m crying.” I sniff, my eyes prickling with the force of the memory.
“It’s special, the way music can instantly connect you with a room full of strangers, sharing in a moment that will never be re-created quite the same way ever again.
I didn’t have words to describe it—that feeling—but I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life chasing it, trying to find the words. ”
Dax smiles softly at me, and I glance away, feeling vulnerable.
It’s one of my favorite memories, which is why I rarely share it, not wanting anyone to paint over my childhood wonder with the jaded hues of adulthood.
It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments where I thought, Yes, this. This is the point of living.
“That,” he says quietly. “Is it really a question why I—why we’d—want you?”
I meet his gaze, still confused.
“You know how to tell a story, to turn the ephemeral into something eternal. You are rare, Sloane Donavan.”
I want to sink into his praise like a warm bath.
I want to prove him right. “Thank you.” Mostly, I’m grateful to him for deftly hoisting me out of the emotional quicksand I’d fallen into and putting me back on my path.
I’ve broken all my usual professional protocols, but maybe that’s okay.
I can’t be Reporter Sloane with Dax, and I shouldn’t try to be.
No one else can get what you can, Robb said. It’s hard to let go of the ways my previous mentor crushed my spirit, but Dax has always been a safe space for me to do the things that scare me. I trust him, believe in him, and if he trusts and believes in me, then perhaps I can learn how to again.
Tucking my hair behind my ears, I retrieve my notebook from the coffee table. “But now”—I click my pen purposefully—“it’s your turn.”
[Excerpt from Sloane Donavan’s Final Revelations interview transcript]
1999: The Beginning of the Beginning
DAX NAKAMURA, VOCALS: When you’re a kid, you don’t expect to find your life’s purpose behind the dumpsters of a Mexican restaurant.
I was, like, twelve or thirteen years old, and I’m pretty sure I had food poisoning, but the bathroom stalls were locked so I went out the emergency exit so I could puke, and I did, but that’s not the point.
There was this punk show happening in the gravel lot out back.
I’d never seen anything like it. Bunch of big, scary-looking dudes with tattoos and metal in their faces, shoving each other around in a pit.
I was one of the only mixed kids at my school, and I didn’t really fit anywhere.
I did well in school—I had to—but I never fit in with the nerdy kids.
Do you know how weird you have to be to not even be cool enough to be a nerd?
Anyway, I was standing there in my puke-covered school uniform—navy polo and high-water khakis that I’d outgrown months ago—and I thought, Oh.
This is where the people who don’t fit anywhere go.
It was the beginning of the end for me. Or the beginning of the beginning, I guess. Depending on how you look at it.
That was my first hardcore show. I was hooked.
I saved up all my allowance and blew it on CDs that I hid from my parents.
I think in early interviews I said I stole the CDs because, I dunno, I thought that made me sound edgy.
But I was, like, this scrawny fucking mixed kid.
I wasn’t stealing shit. Store owners watched me like a hawk.
Anyway, I bought the CDs, and I didn’t want to be a singer—the thought hadn’t really crossed my mind yet at that point.
Singing was just a thing my mom and sisters did around the house.
But I wanted to know how those vocalists were doing that with their voices—the growls, the screams, the raspy edge.
So, one day, I was in the shower and decided to go for it.
[fry screams, laughs] Scared the absolute shit out of my mom. She thought I was being murdered.
The summer before high school, I stopped playing piano and picked up guitar because it was more “metal.” That was when I first started wanting to be in a band.
Like, the guys I knew in bands were all really fucking weird, but because they were in bands, they were cool, y’know?
I don’t really know if I was obsessed with being cool so much as I just really wanted to belong somewhere, and a band felt like my best shot.
I worked my way into the scene by going to shows.
I lied to my parents, saying I was in a study group or something.
I remember almost getting caught by my dad once.
I’d been at a basement show, so I smelled like stale beer and cigarettes, but I’d stashed a change of clothes in our old tree house.
My dad came to take out the garbage—we had one of those motion-sensor lights—and it lit me up, half-dressed in the middle of the yard.
I think he assumed it was just some teenage shit he didn’t want to know about and pretended not to see.
But then my grades nose-dived, and they knew I wasn’t going to a fucking study group.
They grounded me for a month. I was so bored that I got really good at guitar, started writing my own stuff, with god-awful lyrics I’m glad are lost to time.
In a way, me being grounded helped me get into my first band.
The guys were a lot older than me—in their early twenties or something, which, when you’re fifteen, seems so old.
But they’d had trouble keeping a guitarist, so they let me have a shot.
I bounced around between a few bands after that, playing guitar, before I found one I kinda liked, but then the vocalist went off to college so I was like, fuck it.
I can kinda sing? So I was in this melodic, whiny punk band for a bit.
After that, I sang in every band I was in.
Then I joined this metal band. It was my first time screaming in a band and also the first time I wasn’t playing guitar onstage—I felt so vulnerable.
Everyone’s just looking at you. All of you.
No guitar to hide behind. And I was, like, well, this can’t be worse than getting walked in on while screaming in the shower, so, I just let it rip.
Before, I would get kicked out of bands when someone better came along. After that, I wasn’t getting kicked out of bands anymore. I was getting poached by bands. It was the first time I felt wanted. Like I belonged. It felt really fucking good.