57
Sasha
Our next gig is even better.
We repeat the show from the Pilgrim when we play at Initialism a couple weeks later. But this time, it’s all on purpose and planned, from quieting the audience to ending wit.
“Hangman Forever.”
I don’t stumble, and I don’t try to forgo my cut of what we get paid, which I tried at the Pilgrim. That was highly suspicious.
At the Channel, I was surrounded by wealth. Here, being paid is like a happy coincidence, the amount determined at the end of the night. Half of the musicians who are older than us are still living in their parents’ houses, and none of them are doing music full-time. Or they’re doing music full-time and then also working somewhere else full-time. It doesn’t involve a lot of sleep.
Lillian complains about the Initialism show afterwards, but anyone who knows her can see she’s glowing. She just expects more now that we’ve had another two weeks of rehearsal.
I doubt that will ever really stop. It doesn’t for me. As unforgiving as it was, I’m a person who loved rehearsing every day for weeks and putting little bits of tape all over the stage, choreographing the show song by song.
Emelia isn’t at Initialism. I can’t tell if that’s better or worse for my friends.
Last week, waiting together for a bus on a slushy day when I knew I’d die if I tried to bike, Quinn asked me how it was meeting Emelia. He looked at me doubtfully when I said it was totally fine.
“She’s Lillian’s ex.”
“I know.”
“I thought maybe with you and Lillian …”
I elbowed him.
“Don’t trail off at me. You’d know if we were together.”
“I know she finds reasons to touch you with a very non-Lillian cuddliness. And I know that when you described who you’re attracted to —”
“That was ages ago. I’m a quickly evolving person —”
“— you literally described Lillian.”
“I’d just met all of you.”
Quinn started counting on his fingers.
“Confidence, swagger, passion, fierceness of being yourself. Oh, and queer, and not automatic.”
I looked over at Quinn, who seemed prepared to keep listing things until I got the point.
“Well shit.”
“Well shit indeed,”
agreed Quinn.
He must have seen I was a bit rattled by this realization, because he laid off on the teasing once the bus arrived.
My mind was skipping through tracks.
Lillian doesn’t think of me sexually. At least, I don’t think she does. I see myself that way though. I feel the most attractive I’ve felt in my entire life. Except sometimes I feel ineligible, too strange and hard to pin down to be anyone’s crush or desire.
Platonic, Lillian said.
All the times we’ve been close. In her room alone, Cyprus’s basement, the edge of the parking garage. Lillian’s not a coward. If she had a move to make, she would have made it by now.
When the bus stopped by my house, I wanted to show Quinn where I live. I’d love for him to see the space I’ve made, but I couldn’t. I claimed homework and my parents — always blaming my parents. I wanted to talk to him about Lillian, but what was the point?
I can’t tell him the main reason it’s all a bad idea.
I was Alexander Ash.
Though I’d die to see Quinn’s reaction.
At Initialism, Christensen wasn’t there for our show, though he asked Cyprus to video it for him. I guess he takes nights off too. It made me more nervous. I’d rather have him in my sight and be able to see how he looks at me. Now I know who he is, I can monitor for recognition. Watch for whether my singing and movement tip him off.
Isabelle’s been silent.
On the tabloids in the grocery store aisle the other day, I saw she’s pregnant and it’s Augustus’s baby.
The sheer absurdity of that concept almost made me laugh out loud.
I started reading other gossip magazine covers, and they seemed stretched to manufacture decent lies, which is good.
Maybe it means the initial breaking news of Augustus’s scandal is losing momentum and a verdict is too far away for people to care.
Maybe it means my absence is becoming less notable and there’s no official info being released by the Channel.
I could be getting away with it. Every day, that old life gets closer to the horizon line.
Then a splash of red writing caught my eye. A cover with bold letters across a paparazzi picture of me in my helmet looking away from the camera.
WHERE IS ALEXANDER ASH?
I tucked it behind a magazine with reality TV stars on the front and checked out.
Here, with Wavelength after our show at Initialism, we’re all embedded in the present.
We’re inside live music.
We focus on who’s here and who’s not and what choices to make right now.
Cyprus is talking about who’s following us and how the streaming numbers for Wavelength’s music are up.
Sef slipped Quinn his phone number.
Quinn’s saying he might call it, and Lillian’s writing lyrics on napkins.
So Emelia’s the past too.
She’s not here right now, and her and Lillian aren’t together right now.
That’s what counts.
If any part of my past shows up here, there will be more than some awkwardness.
But that’s not the present.
Let us scream “I am”
and turn away from “I was” no matter the cost.
I say that part out loud and it goes on the napkin of Lillian’s lyrics with my name in brackets beside it.
“In case you sue me for royalties,”
says Lillian.
“For you,”
I say.
“all my words are on the house.”
She kicks at me underneath the table.
“That sort of mixed metaphor is why I’m the main songwriter.”
Then Lillian looks right at me, turns the rest of the world down to a backing track.
“To hear your words,”
she says.
“I’d spend a fortune.”