Chapter Thirty-One
When they woke up for the second time, it was well into the last full day of the cruise, and suddenly the event that had seemed so far away now felt like it was coming up too fast, before they had the chance to get ready.
Micah went back to her room to start her own preparations—apparently some designer she knew had supplied the dress for her to wear, and it was being held somewhere else on the ship where it would be steamed and altered in any way she needed it to be.
And John had his own things to do to get ready, which helped keep him occupied so his nerves couldn’t get to him.
No matter how much he’d assured Micah that they were good, that their performance was going to go off without a hitch, he couldn’t help the butterflies in his own stomach when he thought about that night.
He also was very conscious that no matter how close he’d felt with Micah, no matter how easy they’d left things when they’d parted to meet up later at prom…he’d told her that he loved her and she hadn’t said it back.
He wasn’t sorry that he’d told her. It was past time, and it had felt good to get it off his chest, to know that everything was out in the open.
He’d been prepared for the possibility that she wouldn’t feel the same way, and had told himself it was still worth it to say the words even if they only ever went in one direction.
John finished his last errand and decided to stroll the deck of the ship, already feeling a bit of that painful nostalgia that hits when you haven’t yet left a place you know you’re going to miss.
He’d spent the past four days on a cruise and had barely had the chance to scrape the surface of what it offered.
He hadn’t hit up the soft serve machine once.
Maybe he should book himself on another cruise, once this was all over, one where he could just sit by the pool and stare out at the ocean and sit in the back row of the Starlight Theater to watch someone else put on a show.
“How late did y’all sleep?” Frankie asked, coming up on him. They’d ended up at the shuffleboard court, he realized, although nobody was playing.
“I don’t even want to admit to it,” he said. He realized that he’d probably already admitted to something, just by responding in that way to their query. But he’d gotten the impression last night that Frankie already knew about him and Micah, and that they weren’t bothered.
“Piece of shit o’clock?” Frankie said, grinning at him.
It’s what they’d used to call it, when they slept past noon while on tour, even though there was almost no way around a fucked-up sleep schedule in those kinds of conditions.
With Micah, especially. She’d always been able to stay up the latest of any of them, and he’d always wanted to hang right there with her.
“Piece of shit thirty,” he said. “What about you? Did you head to bed right after you left?”
“I could barely keep my eyes open,” Frankie said. “I know I’m going to have to get used to it again, if I end up doing that summer tour after all, but for right now this millennial likes to be in their pajamas and watching their programs by nine o’clock.”
“Well, I hope you do the tour,” John said. “If there’s a date in Orlando, you know I’ll be there.”
“Not L.A.?”
He smiled but didn’t have anything to say to that. “Do you think there’s a way to make music and not have it get warped somehow? Like a way to make something and share it with people, but avoid all the pitfalls of record labels and critics and sales and promotion and all that?”
“No,” Frankie said, the answer so quick and deadpan he couldn’t help but let out a surprised laugh.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough.”
“I mean, there are different paths,” Frankie said.
“Like if we’d had more time to just be a band , and had signed to some tiny indie label, sure.
Everything would’ve been different. But no, I don’t think you can ever avoid all of it.
The minute you take a song from your bedroom to a record where anybody can hear it, it doesn’t belong to just you anymore.
And that lets a lot of people in, all the voices that tell you it’s not good enough or not selling enough or not as good as your last one, or worse sometimes, telling you that it’s brilliant. ”
John rocked back on his heels, thinking about how true that was.
The praise could fuck you up as badly as the criticism; that was one part he hadn’t been prepared for.
He thought about those people crying in the front row at the concert the other night, how many years it had taken for him to feel grateful for that instead of uncomfortable and weird.
“You can keep everything small,” Frankie said. “And then you let fewer people in. But the flip side is that you let fewer people in. And what’s the point of music if you’re not sharing it with other people?”
He thought back to the night before, how good it had felt just to play songs and sing them with his friends, no microphones, no set list, nobody carefully arranging the schedule so they played three hits, recorded a radio bumper— This is ElectricOh!
, and you’re listening to THE Ninety-Seven X, Home of Tampa Bay’s New Rock Alternative —and then moved on to the next thing.
“It really didn’t fuck you up, did it,” he said. “What happened with the band?”
“Hell no,” Frankie said. “For a few years it was an absolute dream . We got to fly across the world! When we couldn’t even legally drink yet!
And then the shine started to wear off, and yeah, I was mad when Micah blew it all up, but I was relieved, too.
It freed us all up so we could do our own things.
I’ve never been sorry we started the band, and I’ve never been sorry that we ended it, either. ”
Hearing Frankie put it that way, it seemed obvious. John felt almost stupid for all the years when he had been fucked up by everything that went down. The band had been fun. Until it wasn’t. Simple as that.
Frankie touched his arm. “It was always more emotional for you,” they said. “And for Micah. We knew that.”
“Well, I’m glad we did it with you,” he said. “And with Steve…and even Ryder, when he was on his best behavior and not being a complete prick.”
Frankie made an exaggerated expression of confusion, their brow furrowed, looking up to the sky.
“My memory must be going,” they said, “because I’m having a hard time accessing ones of Ryder not being a prick.
But maybe he gave ElectricOh! the edge that everyone wanted it to have, who knows.
I guess sometimes you write a discordant note into a composition on purpose. ”
“And then sometimes you write it out,” John said, thinking back to the moment yesterday when he, Steve, and Frankie had all joined together to tell Ryder they wanted nothing more to do with him. It had been one of the most satisfying moments of his life.
“I don’t think she ever loved him,” Frankie said.
“There was some sort of toxic thing there, and as long as they were in the band together she was going to find herself drawn back into it. That’s why in a way I wasn’t surprised when she blew it all up.
On some level I was proud of her for doing it. ”
He was proud of Micah, too, even if he wished it had all gone down differently. But he definitely understood it now more than he had then.
The sun was starting to get low in the sky—not touching the horizon yet, but not too far off.
People were already gathering on the main deck, some in full Nightshifters costumes, many others in formal prom gear.
It was supposed to kick off at sunset, with him and Micah to perform a couple hours in after night had taken hold.
He knew he didn’t have much time before he needed to be ready, and he had something he needed to pick up first before he made his way to Micah’s room.
“It was good doing this with you,” John said. “Talking, I mean, but also the whole cruise. I’m glad we did it.”
“Me, too,” Frankie said, cuffing him good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Now go do your thing, and I’ll see you out there.”
—
An hour later, John stood outside Micah’s room, adjusting the left cuff of his shirt.
He was wearing black dress pants and a crisp white button-down with a thin black tie, but at the last minute he couldn’t stand the feeling of the cuffs buttoned tightly at his wrists, and so he’d rolled them up to just below his elbows, trying to keep everything still looking clean and nice.
He couldn’t quite get the sleeves to be the exact same length, and it was bugging him.
The door flew open before he had a chance to knock, and he glanced up to see Micah in the doorway.
She was wearing a sparkly silver dress that draped softly over her curves, looking somehow like she’d been dipped in liquid metal.
It went down to the floor, but there was a slit all the way up her thigh, showing a glimpse of her tattoo when she moved.
He could see that her feet were still bare.
“There you are,” she said, like she’d been looking for him.
“Here I am.”
Her gaze swept over him from head to toe, and she gave him a smile that let him know she liked what she saw. “If you even knew what it does to me when you wear white. You look like an angel.”
He remembered her saying something that first time they’d seen each other, at that meeting at the record label.
He hadn’t known how she’d meant it then—whether she was commenting on the color of his shirt in a good way or a bad way.
It had seemed like such an odd thing to notice.
But he liked thinking that it had done something to her even then.
“I’ll throw out all my black T-shirts,” he said.
She looked genuinely alarmed. “No, don’t do that. It’s the contrast , the surprise of it. I like seeing you this way because I feel like I don’t often get the chance.”
He could understand that, because it was part of what took his breath away now, seeing her in that full gown.
And then she turned around, and he saw that it was backless all the way down, showing off her smooth skin, the delicate curve of her spine down to where the fabric draped right at the top of her ass.
“Everything okay?” she asked, which was his only sign that he must’ve groaned out loud.
“Yeah,” he said, then remembered the box he was holding in his hand. “I, uh, got you something.”
Her eyes lit up. “You did?”
He opened the box to show her the corsage nested inside, a simple pink rose surrounded by a few smaller white flowers and some sprigs of greenery.
He’d had his heart set on a peony, but he supposed he was lucky they could do anything at all on a cruise ship where they couldn’t just have any flowers they wanted sent at a moment’s notice.
“It’s supposed to go on your wrist,” he said. “But I know that’ll be hard to play with, so you don’t have to actually wear it. I just wanted you to have it.”
“Pink,” she said, touching the petals of the rose gently, almost reverently. “My favorite. Help me pin it in my hair?”
He had no idea how to do that, but she sat in front of the vanity mirror, positioning the rose at her temple and holding it in place while he grabbed a few bobby pins from where she indicated.
When she was done, it looked like she’d planned it as part of her outfit all along, sweeping one side of her hair off her face while the other side fell in soft waves past her shoulders.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Thank you. I feel like I should’ve gotten you something.”
“Nah.”
She rifled through her makeup bag until she came up with a short black pencil. “I could do your eyeliner? I mostly use the liquid stuff now, so this has never even been used—see, it still has the little plastic on it—so no risk of an eye infection, I promise.”
“Sure,” he said. “Go for it.”
He sat down on the edge of her bed, and she spun on the stool so she could face him, scooting closer when she was too far to get a good angle.
At one point, she braced her hand against his thigh, leaning in until he could see the shadow between her breasts, could smell that rose in her hair.
He drew in a ragged breath, and she paused, her fingers still pressing against his brow.
“Almost done,” she said. “You have such pretty eyes.”
“Yeah?”
“You have very kind eyes,” she said. “It was one of the first things I noticed about you. Why do you think I felt bold enough to just talk to you out of the blue like that? I could tell you wouldn’t be one of those boys who laughed in my face or made me feel weird or made me feel silly.
I could tell you’d be easy to talk to, and I wondered what you’d have to say.
You were always reading or using homeroom to actually do your assignments, which was wild to me. ”
It had been hard for him to concentrate at home. Even when nothing had been happening, he’d always felt like he had to stay vigilant. It had made him grateful for any time he could get to himself in class or on the bus, not wanting to waste those precious moments of quiet.
“Look up and to the left,” she said, going back in to continue her work.
It felt strange, that slight pressure, but he was determined to be good for her and sit still.
He followed every direction she gave him, until eventually she told him to close his eyes.
He felt the soft pencil tip sweeping once more along his lash line, and then she blew gently on his eyelids.
“There,” she said.
He leaned over her to get a better view of himself in the mirror behind her, but then he used the excuse to press a kiss to her hair, careful not to disturb the rose. “Perfect.”
She reached down to unroll his left shirt cuff a bit, smoothing it into a clean line before folding it back up until it matched his right one better. “ Now it’s perfect,” she said, and smiled. “Let me finish my own makeup and get my boots on and then I’ll be ready to go.”