Chapter 17
Cassidy marched to the stage and summoned as much confidence as she could muster to approach the first person with a lanyard and a black t-shirt that read CREW across the back.
The last conversation with James still burned in her memory, and when the crewmember turned around, it felt counterintuitive to harden her features and hide behind her huge sunglasses to make a demand.
“I need to speak with the talent coordinator immediately.”
Possibly, Cassidy wasn’t the first person on the island to try to pull strings. The crew member acted as though Cassidy asked her to point out the bathroom. “Why?”
“That’s none of your business.” Cassidy tried to keep her features impassive. She was no match for the short brunette that held all the power and seemed to know it.
“If it’s none of my business, then it’s not my business to go get him for you,” she replied before turning around and moving a barrier to head into the off-limits backstage area.
Cassidy huffed. She stepped up to a muscular guy with a big belly behind the barrier and repeated her demand to him. He barely looked up from his clipboard.
“Are you with the talent?” he asked.
“Yes.”
This crewmember looked up then. “Where’s your pass?”
“I lost it.”
“Well, you’ll have to find it. I can’t have just anyone coming back here.”
“Just anyone?” Cassidy repeated. “I’m not just anyone. Do you have any idea who I am?”
The humble woman inside of Cassidy cringed at the words she swore she would never say again after she turned 20, but that woman could never have anticipated things as they were now. Cassidy needed to get off this island and was going to do whatever it took.
She ripped her sunglasses off her face and stared the crewmember dead in the eyes. Everyone always told her that she had her father’s eyes and her mother’s nose. The nose was courtesy of the same plastic surgeon as her mother, but the eyes were all genetics.
“I need to speak with the talent coordinator. But if you give me your name then I can tell Scot Burns that you were the one who kept me from doing my job just because I didn’t have my pass on me.”
The crewmember eyed her as the younger one had. His features remained impassive beneath his salt and pepper stubble, but he reached down and moved the barrier out of the way.
“Jimbo was on the loading dock last time I saw him. If he’s not there, check the dressing rooms,” he said.
Cassidy stepped through the gap in the barrier and put her sunglasses back on.
She gave a curt thanks and walked on like she belonged backstage.
Part of her felt like she did, since she’d spent much of her childhood in off limits areas like these, with crewmembers pushing ATA cases and musicians strumming unplugged electric guitars atop milkcrates full of cables.
A security guard with a yellow vest and a black t-shirt stretched tight over his belly locked eyes on Cassidy, and although she tried to continue past him with the same confident strut she’d entered backstage with, he immediately approached her and cut her off.
“Can I see your pass?”
Before Cassidy could answer, a nasally squeal cut in. “Oh my gosh! Cassidy, is that you?”
Cassidy turned to her right and saw a woman that wasn’t much older than Cassidy herself wearing a red tank top and purple leather pants.
For a moment, Cassidy had no idea who this woman was and thought that maybe it was just a fan, but the woman’s lips spread into a gap-toothed grin she recognized as the frontwoman for a band called Puerto Freakin’ that Cassidy discovered in their infancy and convinced her father to put on his label.
“Ama! Oh my gosh, I’m so glad I found you!”
The two women embraced. Cassidy felt genuinely glad to see another familiar face and hugged Ama a little tighter than she meant to.
“Do you know this person?” the security guard asked.
“Yeah, yeah, she’s with me, she’s good,” Ama said. “How have you been, girl?”
Cassidy watched the guard walk away from the corner of her eye. “Good, good, you know, just enjoying the festival and everything, but something has come up and I actually need to leave.”
“Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that,” Ama said, pushing out her lower lip and giving an exaggerated frown. “Is everything okay?”
“Eh, not really. My dad is like, really sick, and my phone isn’t working so I’ve had a hard time figuring out what to do, and I really just need to, like, catch a flight back to the states as soon as I can.”
“Oh wow!” Ama put her hand on Cassidy’s arm and squeezed gently. “I definitely want to help you and you can totally fly out with us. If your dad is sick then you should totally get home.”
A cool relief washed over Cassidy and she felt lighter on her toes. “Thank you, thank you so much, Ama.”
“Yeah, of course! Hey, let’s get out of the way of all this though,” she said, using the hand on Cassidy’s arm to pull her out of the path of a tall trunk getting pushed by two crewmembers. “Why don’t you come back and hang out with us until the show? Ooh! Do you want to watch from the stage?”
Cassidy shrugged loosely and felt another weight lift from her shoulders. “Yeah, sure, that sounds great.”
Since signing with the Black Burns label, Ama’s band had changed.
They now called themselves Rico Pinqueens and the only other original member was the rhythm guitarist, Drew.
He picked Cassidy up when he hugged her, and she noticed he’d gotten a lot taller and lost weight since the last time she’d seen him.
The other two members of the band introduced themselves as Terry, the drummer, and Roxanne, the bassist. The rest of the band was hanging out in an area separated from the chaos by sheets hung up on rope and secured with heavy duty plastic clamps.
All they had in their space, aside from their instruments, were some folding chairs and a little blue drink cooler.
“Cassidy is, like, the reason anyone has heard of us,” Ama told the newer members. “Gosh, it’s so cool that you’re here! I’m so sorry about your dad, though.”
“What’s wrong with your dad?” Drew asked.
“He’s just not feeling well. I mean, he’s not, like, dying or anything, but I really just need to be with him right now, and I’ve had a really hard time with making phone calls off the island.
” Cassidy bit her lip. “Like, I dunno, maybe it’s just my phone not working right, but it seems like we’re super isolated here. ”
Roxanne grabbed a bottle of water and twisted the top off, then sat back down on one of the folding chairs. “That’s the point of having an island fest, right?” she asked, then took a swig with her whole mouth on the bottle top.
“Yeah, but … What have you heard about the festival?”
“Just that it’s amazing and everyone is having the time of their lives seeing all these amazing bands and swimming in the ocean every day,” Ama said.
“So, you didn’t hear about Ryan LeHane?”
“Who’s Ryan LeHane?”
“He’s like a YouTube prankster kid, but he fell off a waterfall and died the first night and like no one is talking about it,” Cassidy said. Ama’s jaw dropped.
Terry sat hunched over with the wind blowing through his muscle tee, but Cassidy’s comment made him sit up slightly straighter. “Someone fucking died the first night everyone was here, and no one is talking about it?”
“So, like, no one is reporting on it or something?” Ama asked.
“If you haven’t heard about it, then it seems like not.
And like, my friend also went missing and they won’t help me find her, and I don’t think we can make phone calls to anyone off the island,” Cassidy said, all the facts just rushing out of her.
The band looked like they didn’t know what to make of any of that, but Ama was completely shocked.
“It’s like you’re being held hostage here!” she said. “Oh my god, we should do something. We should tell someone!”
Cassidy’s face grew hot as the tears gathered in her eyes. “I would actually love it if you could tell someone, because I’ve tried and no one is doing anything.”
Ama gave Cassidy another hug. The other band members stood and joined in.
“We’ll tell someone, okay? And we’ll get you home,” Ama said. She pulled away from Cassidy and the five of them stood in a circle.
“When does your plane leave?” Cassidy asked, wiping away tears with the back of her hand.
“Three in the morning, something like that,” Drew said.
Cassidy nodded.
Music rose up so loud it sounded like nothing but noise.
“The opener is starting!” Ama shouted. She led Cassidy around backstage to the side of the performance, where they stood among the guitars and monitors and were both given a pair of ear plugs.
The band wasn’t fantastic, especially stage left where the mix favored the bass and Cassidy barely heard anything else.
She stared out into the crowd of expectant faces and hoped that Apricot was still among them.
Then, she noticed something that made her blood run cold.
A woman stood completely still in the crowd of moving bodies and stared directly at Cassidy, and the woman looked like Daisy.
Cassidy stepped forward, ready to leap off the stage and crowd surf to her if she had to, but a roadie stepped in front of her.
She stepped around him, but when she searched the crowd again, Daisy was gone.
Cassidy began frantically searching the crowd for her, but when she stepped out from behind the informal line of the wing, Ama put her hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, let’s stay back here, okay. Do you see your friends out there or something?”
Cassidy stepped backwards and tried to pull her eyes away from the crowd. “No. I guess I just thought I did.”