Chapter Fifteen #3
“One more, just in case,” Isaac says, holding up his hand to count it down. It feels infinitely more doable now, knowing I’ve done it once.
Dax rubs his hand across my back before letting it fall to my side, giving my hip a reassuring squeeze, the ghost of his handprint still between my shoulder blades.
I find Barrett behind the camera and smile, delivering the line to him when Isaac’s fingers drop from three to two to one, pointing at me to start.
“Hi, guys! Sloane Donavan from Alternative Press here with Dax and Marcus of Final Revelations to let you know that we have an exclusive two-part interview with these guys dropping next month. In it, we talk about their new album, the upcoming tour, and the future of Final Revelations.”
I can write hundreds of words no problem, but saying fifty words in a row without stuttering? It feels like my greatest accomplishment to date.
“Okay,” Isaac says cheerfully. “I think we got it.”
I launch myself off the couch so fast that everyone laughs.
“Take five,” Isaac says around a low chuckle.
Barrett hands me a water bottle, which I chug immediately, not realizing how parched I was. He makes himself scarce before I can thank him. I’m about to follow after him when I realize why he slipped off.
Dax slots into place beside me, everything we haven’t said hanging in the air between us.
“Thank you,” I say genuinely, jerking my head back toward set.
He smiles softly at me, and I know what he wants to ask, now that we’re mostly alone.
“I’m not mad anymore, but I need to focus, and to do that, I need some space.
So,” I say with a heavy exhale. “I’m going to work out of my apartment from now on. ”
He nods in understanding, brushing my hair back from my face. His fingers catch on the hinge of my jaw, and I lean into his touch, his palm cupping my cheek.
“We’re okay?” he asks.
“We’re okay,” I confirm.
“And you’re sure you can’t focus better on my couch?” he asks with an adorable scrunch of his face, his thumb stroking my cheek.
A laugh gusts out of me, and I shift out of his touch. “I’m one hundred percent positive I can’t. You’re very distracting, Nakamura.”
He smirks at that. A laugh rings out, and we turn to watch Daisha fussing over a reluctant Barrett. “Wanna meet my sister—properly?”
“And how would you introduce me?” I ask, arching a brow. “As your ex?” A muscle in Dax’s jaw twitches in displeasure. “As your reporter?”
Dax grunts in understanding.
“I’d love to meet your family,” I say sincerely. “Properly. But not while we’re—” I gesture between us. There’s no word for what we are, this unnamable in-between thing that’s not quite a thing. “But right now, I need to focus. I’ll never be able to look them in the eye if I botch this article.”
Dax shakes his head. “You’re not going to.”
“Y’know what would help?” I hedge, fluttering my lashes at him. “If you brought me that unreleased album…”
A series of emotions flash across his face in such quick succession that I can’t get a read on them. “Right.” He nods.
Dread fills me to the brim. If that’s his reaction…
What the fuck is on that album?
[Excerpt from Sloane Donavan’s Final Revelations interview transcript]
2000: Beautifully Insane
BARRETT: Everybody wanted to sign us after that tour.
CAIN: Well, not the major labels. What we were doing was not cool on that level yet. But the big indies were interested. We were getting offered royalties on album sales for the first time ever. We were like, Wait, we’re gonna make money?
DAX: I remember being in Barrett’s basement, writing songs for the second record, and Marcus asked my opinion on something vocally and I was like, Oh, I guess I’m officially in the band.
MARCUS: I wanted our band to be successful more than I wanted to be successful. And to do that, we needed Dax.
DAX: I got writing credit on that album, but it was mostly Marcus.
I tried writing a few things on my own but didn’t think they were good enough, so I focused on making Marcus’s stuff stronger.
I was so drained after each writing session because I felt like I was cosplaying as someone who’d lived this gritty, existentially questioning existence and not a middle-class kid from the burbs.
MARCUS: I don’t think any of us realized how smart Dax was until we started writing that album. He would take my half-formed ideas and be like, Oh, this is like Sisyphus, and dress up my lyrical whining in metaphor until it felt like this sweeping but devastating epic tale.
JONAH: Our songs on that second album were ten times better than anything we’d ever written before.
BARRETT: I would sit back and let them flip-flop between bickering and getting high on their own genius, like, Let me know when you need me to drum something.
CAIN: I felt smarter just being in a room with Dax and Marcus. I always wanted to be in a band, and of course I wanted to do well, but… That was the first time I thought we actually stood a chance, that I let myself really want it.
MARCUS: Wanting things is dangerous.
JONAH: And we all really fucking wanted it.
DAX: We’d heard the rumors about Dropkick Records, but they offered us the most money, and every band on their docket was doing well. We wanted a piece of that. They were the label in the hardcore scene. In hindsight—
MARCUS: I don’t know if I’d do it any differently. Like, no one else was pushing what we were doing at the time.
JONAH: Legally, I don’t know how much we can say.
BARRETT: Dropkick was a bunch of predatory motherfuckers who knew rock was about to have a moment again, and they gobbled everybody up and then fucked ’em all.
DAX: I mean, we didn’t know we’d signed a deal with the devil—not at first. We recorded Covenant, which we were so proud of, and they booked us as the supporting band on a national tour—our first time not being bottom of the bill.
We had sick fucking merch. An actual tour van—not a sleeper bus or anything fancy, but it was a step up from the moving van, so we felt like kings.
JONAH: Ahead of our fall tour, we got invited to play Punkapalooza.
CAIN: Punkapalooza was a grind. So many cities, crisscrossing the US in the span of, like, two months. But if you were in a hardcore band, that was the summer festival to book. If you were a small band like us, that festival could be the thing to break you out—or break you.
BARRETT: We made Dax and Marcus work the merch booth because they were the prettiest.
DAX: [shrugs] I didn’t mind being pimped out if it meant people actually showed up to our set.
JONAH: [laughs] Girls would walk by the merch booth, do a double take, and then double back to buy merch for a band they didn’t even know just to talk to Marcus and Dax.
MARCUS: I flirted with everyone who came to the booth—guys, girls, I didn’t care.
I knew if we could get them to show up to our set, we could turn them into fans.
We were often playing at the same time as much bigger bands, so getting people to pick us to watch was an uphill battle and we fought it, in the blistering fucking heat, every single day of that tour.
CAIN: Marcus was such a little slut.
BARRETT: Marcus can charm anyone. He could feed you shit and you’d thank him for the sundae.
CAIN: Dax is Marcus’s opposite, so they were a good duo in the merch booth.
Where Marcus was charismatic, Dax was quiet, but he’s got these, like, eyes.
That sounds dumb, but if you’ve ever met him or seen a video of him, you know what I mean.
You know there’s shit going on inside that brain of his, and everybody wanted to be the one who “got” him.
MARCUS: Dax’s stage presence evolved that tour. Before he was this chaotic gremlin running around, like he thought more movement made him more interesting to watch?
DAX: I moved around a lot the first tour because I was shaking with nerves. If I didn’t stop moving, no one would know.
MARCUS: The first Punkapalooza set, we were on one of the smaller supporting stages so Dax couldn’t move around as much and it was, like, all that energy still had to go somewhere, and it just emanated off him.
We all fed off of it—especially the crowd.
There weren’t a ton of people there to watch us, but I didn’t even care, because the people that were there?
Were so into it. It was easily the best set we’d done to date.
JONAH: Dax is stupid tall and kinda slouches around most of the time, but when he’s on stage, he becomes this whole other guy. Wolfish, the way he prowls around. He really came into his own as a frontman that tour.
DAX: I was playing a character. It felt… safer than being myself. Like, if they hate me, well, it’s not really me. It freed me to act in ways I don’t normally. Well, that and I, uh, was not sober most of the time, so my inhibitions were nonexistent.
BARRETT: The way Dax works a mic stand… Every girl in the audience wanted to bibbidi-bobbidi-boo themselves into being a mic stand.
MARCUS: We were selling out of merch so fast we almost couldn’t get more fast enough. Dropkick was sending boxes of CDs ahead of us every few cities. It was… insane. Beautifully insane.
CAIN: We started the summer on the smallest side stage. We ended it on the big one.