14. Zak
Pretending to sleep was difficult with Chase holding her.
Zak wondered if he could hear her shallow breathing ruffle the hotel sheets, or if he could feel her heart racing beneath his muscled forearm. Night was never fully calm in New York City, but the darkness was so stagnant and enveloping that she wondered if he could hear her thoughts.
The understanding that she loved him, too, a whimper eclipsed by screaming doubts.
She had never said those words to anyone. Not to her mother, who had never so much as alluded to the existence of such an emotion. Not to her father, who came closest when he used to tuck her in at night with a simple, “Sleep tight, kiddo.” Not to her friends, who all knew how much they loved each other, but were never sentimental enough to talk about it. And certainly, never to a man she was in love with.
That she knew what to call this feeling was a small miracle on its own. Funny enough, she’d learned what love was from rock songs, thinking maybe the greatest ballads of all time would set a lofty enough expectation that she would never have to deal with the inconvenience of falling in love.
A feeling so overpowering, it could absorb all darkness. So debilitating, it turned free-spirited rebels into obsessive, emotional addicts. So divine, it kept people up at night counting breaths and listening to heartbeats and paralyzed by the thought of ever spending another second apart.
Loving Chase was all of those things. It was the best and worst feeling she had ever experienced. It was slow and creeping. The invasive species infiltrating the native ecosystem of her life. The small leak in the ceiling that one day spurred the entire roof caving in on her. A grand symphony, beginning at pianissimo and crescendoing to a thunderous forte.
There had been no big epiphany, no moment of truth. Her love for him was sewn second by second since the summer he reentered her life, stitched together until it was so heavy that it weighed on her chest every time she looked into his eyes.
And that was the problem. Love was where everything ended for Zak. It was the barricade on a dead-end street, the credits at the end of a film. Saying it aloud wouldn’t just make things serious. It would make their relationship as serious as it ever could be because she had nothing else to offer him.
What if he wanted more than she could give? What if he wanted to buy a beautiful house in the countryside and grow old there? What if he wanted a wedding? A family? Two kids, a boy and a girl just like him and his sister. Bake sales and sports games and PTA meetings. A minivan and a porch swing.
Zak felt the compulsion to hurl just imagining those things, which wasn’t at all helped by the nauseating idea of losing Chase on account of the one thing she could not, and would not, do to make him happy.
Loving him had been easy. Inevitable. But love was not the only thing that mattered. Only a fool could believe that.
The album dropped at midnight, Monday, March 9th, and by eight a.m., everyone was piled into Zak’s car, headed to the busiest music store in downtown Los Angeles for an album signing that had been arranged by the label.
Wind from the highway whipped past the open windows, where, in the passenger seat on top of Chase’s lap, Snickerdoodle stuck her fluffy face into the breeze and let her long tongue loll out of her mouth. Her tail thumped his chest over and over again, like she was a drummer and he was her floor tom. Not that Chase seemed to mind the intrusion.
Of all the people who had taken on this puppy project with her, Chase had fallen most in love with Snickerdoodle. He doted on her and cared for her like a child. Played tug-of-war with her every single time she shoved a slobbery, crusty toy in his lap, and had laughed it off when she gnawed off the rubber feet of his crutches like those were toys too. He chased her through the apartment and pleaded her case for more treats to Zak while wearing puppy-dog eyes of his own.
It made her heart slip in her chest.
And in a timely reminder that all good things did indeed come to an end, the breeze dissipated as their speed slowed. Then started up again… and slowed.
“Aw, shit.” Dallas, in the center seat, leaned forward to peek at all the brake lights flashing red ahead of them. “Traffic.”
“It’s rush hour,” Alex said. “What did you expect?”
“I didn’t have time to expect anything.” Dallas tugged at the hem of his inside-out T-shirt. “Didn’t even have any fuckin’ time to put my clothes on right. Nobody told me I’d have to wake up this early, this often to be a musician.”
“You do if you’re going to be in a band with me,” Zak quipped back. Not that she was a morning person either, but the time on the clock was irrelevant when it came to putting out their first ever album. “Besides, what else would you have done?”
“I dunno. Maybe I would’ve played sports or some shit. Apparently there’s some transferable skills there.”
“You have to wake up early for that, too,” Chase noted.
“And work out. And eat healthy,” Edge added.
Dallas made a sound of disgust.
“And I’m surprised you know the word ‘transferable,’” Alex said.
“I know plenty of words. But ‘fuck you, asshole,’ are still my favorite three.”
“Here.” Edge handed over his travel cup. “Have some of this. You’re fucking annoying in the morning.”
Alex snorted. “He’s always annoying.”
“Consistency, baby. That’s another one of them fancy words I know.”
Zak checked the rearview mirror in time to catch Dallas’s face screw up as soon as the first taste crossed his lips.
He dropped the container back in the Edge’s lap as if it had personally insulted him. “Gross. What the hell is that?”
“Lemon and ginger tea, you hick.” Edge took a noisy sip of his own. “It has fifty milligrams of caffeine.”
“And what am I supposed to do with that? Open one eyelid?”
“You know, for the person with the easiest job, you seem to do the most complaining.” Alex’s head made a soft thunk as he rested it against the window.
The backseat jostled as their bickering continued. “Everybody knows bass is easier than rhythm—”
Rubber screeched against the pavement as Zak brought the car to a halt, just as they had gotten back up to speed. Her seatbelt locked, digging into her sternum.
Chase was still holding the dog tight to his chest as she pulled onto the shoulder. “Is it the car? What—”
“No.” She couldn’t believe her eyes.
Zak clasped one hand over her mouth to stifle what otherwise would have surely been an ear-piercing, Izzy-inspired shriek. With the other, she jammed her pointer finger against the windshield, leaving a fingerprint smudge behind.
“Holy fuck,” she said as she slowly let off the brakes. “Look.”
Ahead of the next exit was a billboard they didn’t know existed. A billboard featuring Chase and Izzy, gazing flirtatiously into each other’s eyes, with their band logos on either side and the tour information scrawled underneath in a gothic script.
A hush fell over their group as the wheels started turning again, bringing them closer and closer to the massive advertisement.
Zak was all about extremes.
She listened to albums she loved until the lyrics rang in her ears. She got so worked up about her best song ideas that workshopping with the others could easily devolve into her lecturing, insulting, and fighting with the musicians she most respected—her band. Good food, especially Marisol’s cooking, made her stuff herself until she passed out sometimes. And the worst of arguments set her down a war path.
But nothing, nothing had ever given this feeling of unrestrainable, childlike giddiness.
“You see Chase all the time.” Alex gave a relieved chuckle. Fair enough, she had probably terrified everyone. “No need to get so excited.”
“Yeah. Shit.” Dallas rubbed his shoulder. “I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.”
Zak almost wished she hadn’t been either. She brought a hand to her sore neck.
“I didn’t even think the brakes worked that well on this thing,” Edge said.
A few weeks ago, they hadn’t. The band’s last trip to New York had apparently provided plenty of time for a certain someone to collude with his sister to get Zak’s car to the mechanic.
“They didn’t. Chase is rich and sneaky,” Zak said. “A dangerous combination.”
Chase’s wide eyes told her he thought his plot had gone undetected. “How’d you know?”
She made a motion toward the seat adjustment bar. “Lydia is five inches taller than me.”
“Well.” He paused sheepishly. “That was an oversight.”
“Thank you, anyway.” She gave him a smirk and a shrug, which he took as a pardon, but was really an inside joke because Chase wasn’t the only sneaky one, and she had money now too. Not nearly as much as him, but enough to slip a wad of cash to cover the repairs into his nightstand drawer while he’d been asleep.
They all craned their necks for one last glance as Zak veered back onto the highway. Edge’s eyes caught hers in the rearview mirror.
“Remember the day we designed that logo?” he asked, knowing full well she did. When it came to the things she cared about, she remembered every detail.
She remembered the five of them staying up all night making shitty drawings on notebook paper. She remembered Link spilling a beer onto the best one and distorting the shape of the devil horns so they were no longer symmetrical—a shape they had kept as they traced the final design onto a sheet of vinyl to apply it to the head of Alex’s kick bass.
Two high school students, one recent graduate, and two immature adults with no diplomas, they hadn’t had the money for professional printing, so they’d drawn hundreds of fliers to put up around town ahead of their first gigs. Then, they made their own T-shirts with garments from the thrift store and scraps of that same vinyl, cut into song lyrics and crappy doodles, and even more inconsistent logos.
“No one’s going to buy that,” she had told Link when he held up a highlighter-yellow muscle tank with a choppy cut-out of the Saint of Spades logo ironed onto it. “It’s the ugliest fucking shirt I’ve seen in my entire life.”
“You just watch, rocker girl,” he had said, popping a cigarette into his mouth. “This ugly fucking shirt is going to be a priceless collectible someday.”
And it was, though maybe not for the reason Link had imagined. Because she kept that ugly fucking shirt he made when it didn’t sell, and now it sat at the bottom of her dresser drawer.
Priceless.
Zak smiled through the sting. “I remember your mom accusing us of being devil worshippers.”
“Oh, God.” Edge groaned. “I thought she was going to make me get re-baptized.”
She noticed Chase had been especially quiet since the billboard popped up, and she waited until the next pile-up to take his hand over the center console. “Pretty crazy, huh?”
Zak had thought about what fame would be like countless times, but it was difficult to prepare for the unimaginable. Elated as she was for the chance to be recognized for what mattered most to her, being recognized for anything wasn’t something she was used to.
For Chase, it was already a way of life. He got approached regularly in public, and though he handled it with sportsmanlike poise, Zak could tell he was always in limbo. Waiting for every interaction to be soured by a prying question or judgmental comment.
The man had a memorized schedule of the best times to go to the grocery store, the laundromat, and the gym. Staying over at his and Lydia’s place had taught her that he dressed like a hip dad not only because his sense of style was questionable, but also because whenever he needed new clothes—when the old ones were stained or ragged beyond repair—he ordered them indiscriminately from whatever catalogs arrived in the mail.
And she was fairly certain he’d grown his hair out partially for the look, but mostly because that look was, at present, less recognizable to anyone who’d seen him give a post-game interview.
“It’s crazy, alright,” he said. “And you’re sure? It doesn’t bother you?”
In other words, it still very much bothered him.
“It’s your face, you know,” she pointed out. “You’re allowed to be bothered by it.”
“It should be your face.” He turned briefly to the backseat. “All of your faces.”
“Fair enough. I am strikingly photogenic,” Alex joked. “But if I wanted to be a billboard model, I would’ve spent my money on Botox and Tommy Hilfiger polo shirts instead of a drum kit, all those years ago.”
“And I would have picked a different instrument,” said Edge.
“And the face tattoos aren’t helping my case,” Dallas pitched in.
“So, in conclusion, we’re all fine,” Zak reassured Chase. “You’re one of us now, too. Remember?”
“Yeah. We may have written the songs, but someone has to make them sound good.” Alex smacked the back of Chase’s headrest. “You’ve heard all of us sing before. It’s tragic. No one would buy that.”
Zak nodded her agreement. It took Edge and Dallas the same degree of focus to hone their small snippets of backup vocals on some of the tracks that it took Chase to perfect a four-minute song.
“It is exciting,” Chase conceded. “It’s just a lot to take in. I mean, you’re all about to find out, but it’s weird to still feel like your normal self on the inside while the entire world changes around you. People treat you differently. Every little thing becomes the biggest deal.”
“Here’s hoping I don’t feel like my normal self,” Dallas thought aloud. “Crazy how famous you are. Who knew hockey was so popular?”
“Everyone,” Zak, Alex, and Edge said in tandem.
“Damn, okay then.” Dallas huffed skeptically. “Hey, and speaking of rich and famous, why didn’t we take his car? It’s faster, better looking, and doesn’t smell like old shoes. Plus, you get handicapped parking, right Chase?”
Edge turned. “Are you serious?”
“What? He obviously knows he’s missing a leg. If that’s not enough to get you a handicapped sticker, I don’t know what is.”
“Yes,” Chase said, choking back his amusement. “I have a disabled parking permit.”
“Lucky.” The backseat creaked as Dallas slouched. “Parking is shit in this fucking city.”
Edge took a breath of tested patience. “Do you hear yourself right now?”
“It’s fine,” Chase said. “I actually do feel pretty lucky.”
“Yeah.” Zak couldn’t contain herself. Her cheeks hurt from smiling. “Me too.”
It was the raw elation of seeing their band’s name, their first tour, in mega-size on the side of the Long Beach Freeway. It was an appreciation for the four people in the car with her and the one person who was not. It was the validation that all their wildest dreams were possible and all their hard-fought battles were worth it. It was the anticipation of playing for crowds only her wildest imagination had ever indulged.
Chase was wrong about one thing, she didn’t feel like her normal self. Her normal self had hesitated to believe any of this was possible.
Now, she was living her dream.