27. Zak
“Dallas, we’re going to have a talk.”
He was lying flat on his back, his arms and legs outstretched, in the center of the king-sized bed in his room. He might have been sleeping, but upon hearing Zak’s voice, his eyes shot wide open and he flew into an upright position. “How the fuck did you get into my room, you madwoman?”
Zak flicked her newly made keycard onto the mattress. “Told the receptionist at this fine establishment you were tripping out. And that she could either get me a key, or field questions from all the other guests about why there’s a naked addict roaming the halls and a fleet of police cruisers parked out front.”
“You’ve officially lost your mind, Z.”
“Has she? ‘Cause it doesn’t seem like that unlikely of a story. Considering what happened last night,” Alex said, as he, Chase, and Edge followed her into the room.
“If they’re here to block the exit, I don’t think you need to bother.” Dallas leaned back on the heels of his hands. “I might talk a big game, but I saw what you did to Sergio and I’m pretty sure you could beat my ass on your own.”
“I don’t wanna beat your ass,” she told him, though that had been true twenty-four hours ago. “But I do want you to cut the shit and be serious with us for once.”
He met her eyes, and she was pleased to see that his weren’t bloodshot. His movements weren’t sluggish. Good. He needed to remember every word of this conversation.
She sat at the foot of the bed to make room for everyone else. Chase sat beside her. Alex hopped on top of the dresser and Edge leaned on the nightstand.
Dallas’s eyes darted between the four of them like he wasn’t sure who to address. “Look, I messed up. I really messed up this time.”
“You did,” she agreed.
It took him a while to reply, which she interpreted as indecision over whether to brush the situation off with a joke, lie to everyone’s faces, or be honest. Finally, he picked the last option.
“I don’t know what happened. After rehearsal, I thought I was going to be fine. I was fine until I got back to my room. Alone.” He averted his eyes. “Alone in my head. And that always ends fucking terrible for me. I shouldn’t have gone to the bar. I didn’t even want to drink, I just wanted to be somewhere loud. But then I ordered one ‘cause it wasn’t loud enough. Ordered another one ‘cause I could still hear myself think. And I still had some shit in my pocket from the last time I bought it. Saved it in case I needed it, and I just… did.”
She wanted Dallas to be truthful the same way she hoped all of them could be with each other, but listening to him talk, she realized it would’ve been easier if he had lied or joked around. It would have been easier to yell at him than to grant him the same honesty in exchange.
Zak waited for his breathing to even out before she said the words she had practiced reciting to the others thirty minutes ago, “What you need is help. You need help that no one here can give you, and we can’t force you to get it, either. But I can tell you this.”
He met her eyes, and she realized it had been weeks since she’d last seen the warm light brown of his irises when they were so frequently swallowed by black.
“What happened last night can’t happen again. And if it does, you’re out.”
She’d gone over those words so many times, in different phrasings and tones, they came out clean and frigid. As if the mere ideaof losing another founding member of their band hadn”t devastated her.
This was the way things worked. Most groups underwent restructuring at some point, especially at this level. From greed to personal conflicts to creative differences, few bands carried on without losing or replacing members.
But she had always dreamed hers would be the exception.
It wasn’t only about the music. Otherwise, she would’ve spent those seven years of abject poverty auctioning off her guitar skills to the highest bidder. It was loyalty and trust. It was the five of them making a pact to reach the top together because, for one reason or another, they each had no one else.
“Out,” he repeated the singular syllable like a word he was learning for the first time. “Out—of the band? You would kick me out of the fucking band?”
His eyes made their rounds again, from her to Chase, to Alex, to Edge, whom he pinned with the most accusing stare of all. She brought everyone because this was a joint decision, but now she wished she would’ve taken the heat all on her own. She had been the one to propose the intervention, after all.
“Don’t blame him,” Zak said.
“Why not? You think I don’t know who this is coming from? Needed to take more drastic measures now that you can’t be around to babysit me all the time, huh?” Dallas laughed bitterly. “This one’s probably been waiting to kick me out for years.”
“You’re right, I hate you so much that I’ve chosen to hang out with you all the time and live with you instead of with my own family.” Edge knocked Dallas’s cigarette box and lighter off the nightstand. “Grow up. If you’re looking for someone to blame, you can look in the mirror. I had nothing to do with this. I didn’t even hear about the stunt you pulled until this morning, but I’m here because I agree with her. You need to get it together.”
“I always knew I wasn’t as good as the rest of you, but I still can’t believe you would do this to me. All of you.” He backed against the headboard and folded into himself like he couldn’t get far enough away from them. “After everything we’ve been through together, all it takes is one night for you to be ready to get rid of me.”
“No one is doing anything to you.” Alex threw his hands up. “Stay out of trouble and we won’t have trouble. If you think this was a one-night thing then you haven’t been paying attention the last couple of years, have you? You’ve been drunk on that stage more times than you’ve been sober.”
His scowl faltered. “I’ve been doing better. I’ve been drinking less. I’ve been trying to be better. I’ve been trying to be the fucking person everybody here wants me to be, but it doesn’t matter what I do, does it? None of our history matters, because of this one show—”
“Our history,” Zak interrupted him, “is exactly why we’re having this conversation right now. You aren’t going to protect yourself, so somebody needs to. And somebody needs to protect the band from you. This is what we’ve all worked for. And we’ve worked too hard for you to fuck it up. We deserve better, the people out there who are paying to watch us play deserve better, and you deserve so much better than the way you treat yourself.”
The color drained from his face. “Get out.”
She reached out to him, but he jerked away. “Dallas—”
“I heard you. Message received. I’ll be fucking perfect from now on. Now get out.”
She understood those biting words were more a reflection of his disappointment in himself than his disappointment in her, but that did little to lessen the sting. She wished she could shake him until the desire to get high and drown himself in whiskey flew away, leaving behind his humor and spirit.
For all his flaws, Dallas had always been there for her. He had been the one to find their first apartment and co-sign the lease with Link when she was sixteen with zero credit. He’d encouraged her and practiced with her, and never had an ego when it came to letting her shine. He’d been a friend and made her laugh when times were hard.
And now, being his friend didn’t involve laughter and happiness. It involved being the bitch who threatened to take away his only source of joy.
She just hoped she would never have to be the bitch who followed through with that threat.
Zak bought another magazine at a gas station outside of D.C. It was the tenth issue she’d picked up, and she was now at the point of questioning why she felt the need to spend her blossoming wealth on a paper that brought her nothing but petty disappointment. She was up to sixty dollars plus tax to look at a list of names every Sunday and not see her own.
She shouldn’t care.
By all metrics, her band was a success now, even if they hadn’t authored one of the most popular songs in the nation. That was a ridiculously high standard to have set for herself, but then again, ridiculously high standards were sort of her thing when it came to music.
She figured she had lowered all her other standards enough to compensate for elitism in that category.
“Oh, look!” Alex taunted when she got back on the bus. “There she is with this week’s rock obituary.”
She flopped the paper down on the dinette as she let the dog loose on the bus. “Glad one of us has a sense of humor about it.”
They all did, she assumed. It was easier to laugh it off when they were raking in the proceeds from the very songs that hadn’t made it on that list.
“Someone else look,” she said. “I can’t.”
She went to the fridge for a drink, ready to hear Dallas break his vow of douchey-ness to rave about how his queen and savior, Madonna, was still topping the charts. Or listen to Edge complain about how he couldn’t readthe words “Truly, Madly, Deeply” without getting the entire song stuck in his head again. But after the rustle of paper, it was quiet for quite some time.
“How long does it take to read a list?” her voice bounced around in the open fridge. “It’s the Top 100, not the Top 6,000.”
“Zak,” Chase and Edge, and maybe one or both other voices, said at the same time.
“What?”
But she knew what, inwardly. Nothing else could make them sound so serious, so shocked. Either it was the cruelest prank they’d ever pulled on her, or one of her songs was on that list.
She amended her question. “Which one?”
“Which ones,” Chase corrected.
Alex held up two fingers.
“What?!”
She was back at the dinette so quickly, it bordered on teleportation.
She snatched the paper out of Edge’s hands and found “Kerosene” and “The River” at thirteen and thirty-eight respectively, wedged in between a few heavy hitters in the rock genre and a spattering of RB artists she didn’t follow. And Madonna, of course.
“Seriously?” She wasn’t asking so much as cementing herself in reality, but that didn’t stop Dallas from answering.
“Well, yeah, seriously. You’re the one who bought the paper, right?”
He had, predictably, been in a shitty mood since their talk. But for the first time in the past three days, he was sitting with the group instead of laying in his bunk playing depressing songs on his guitar. It was enough of an improvement that Zak decided to give him grace by not rolling the magazine into a baton and whacking him upside the head with it.
She shook her head in disbelief. Their album had to be selling like crazy. She wondered how many radio stations were playing their songs on repeat.
The acoustic show had given them a massive publicity boost, and Izzy and Chase’s staged relationship continued to bolster both bands’ ratings among the sports crowd and the metalhead crowd. Between all those little things and the one big thing—people enjoying their music—these songs had made it to the top of the top.
There was making a living, and there was making history.
Zak lost her shit.
One minute she was reading the paper like a normal person. The next, she was launching herself onto the table and gathering everyone in the sloppiest, most painful hug any of them had ever had.
Elbows knocked. Her knee struck Dallas’s chin. Edge’s face got jammed in her armpit. And there were some grumbles and complaints, but there were also four ecstatic grins looking back at her when she finally let go. Even from Mr. Pity-Party.
The door to the bus rattled shut, and she turned over her shoulder to see Scott climbing the steps. He gave Chase a nod. “You gonna pay for the table if you break that, too?”
“Yes, sir.” Chase nodded back.
Her brows furrowed. “Sir?”
“Too?” Edge asked. “What else did you break?”
“Nothing,” she and Chase said in a chorus. She flung the magazine at her father, shouting, “Look!” in a borderline offensively shrill voice.
Scott caught the paper and tucked it under his arm, holding up his other hand where an identical copywas wrapped around his coffee cup like a second insulating sleeve. “I know.” He smiled. “You think I haven’t been keeping tabs? I had my money on ‘Kerosene’ from the first episode. People love the fast, fun, catchy stuff. It’s a jam. The other one’s a surprise, but not really. It’s good, just different. And different doesn’t always hit. You probably have the Pittsburgh show to thank for that. I’d release an acoustic single if I were you. Only thing that Audio Insider bitch said that you should pay attention to.”
Zak slid off the tabletop. “You listened to the interview, too?”
“Course I did,” he said, sitting in his usual corner against the wall behind the passenger seat. “You’d think with all that time you two spend together, Chase could give you some PR coaching. You answer music questions like a pro, but everything else like it’s a personal attack.”
“Maybe he can trade me some interview lessons for the guitar lessons.”
A total lie, and Chase called her out on it. “As if you care about your public image.”
“You’re right, I don’t. I just wanted to segue into guitar lessons. Come on over.” She plopped down on the couch and patted the seat next to her. “We’ve got work to do.”
Her friends all laughed at Chase as he made his way over. The bus started up, pulling out of the gas station and back onto the highway. Hinges creaked and items shifted within the storage cabinets.
“Are you ever going to give him a day off?” Edge asked, more than likely already knowing the answer.
“Not if he wants to learn barre chords in this century.” She pulled out Chase’s guitar and rested it in his lap, where he practiced the hand shapes they’d been working on. Every strum was littered with buzzing and muted notes. “See?”
Scott had been privy to plenty of their lessons along the way, usually riding in their bus, but on some occasions riding with Abstraction in the nicer one. He had never chimed in while the rest of them had fun ribbing Chase, but she’d caught him smiling down at his planner every once in a while.
Today, he watched closely, neglecting whatever he had been writing entirely. Zak wanted to know what he was thinking with an all-consuming curiosity, but couldn’t work up the nerve to ask.
It turned out she didn’t have to.
Scott tipped his chin to the guitar, held out his hand, and said, “Do you mind?”
Chase stopped playing immediately, but wasn’t so quick to hand over the instrument. “Sure. I promise you, the terrible sound is coming from me, though. Not the guitar.”
“I know.” Scott smirked as he grabbed the guitar by its neck and hauled it onto his lap.
“Yeah. I’m sure you do. You’re Scott Lee. And I’m dumb,” Chase said low enough that only Zak could hear him.
She chuckled, even as her heart plummeted in her chest.
Zak remembered the way her father used to look with a guitar in his hands—the same way he looked now. She forgot how to blink, how to breathe, as he began to play a song she recognized from his first album.
“You really did all this work yourself?”
“Yeah,” she said over the lump in her throat.
“It’s beautiful. Plays beautiful, too.”
“Thanks.”
Everyone else was still there. Edge was pretending to read the paper, Dallas may or may not have been pretending to sleep, and Alex was barely pretending to focus on his breakfast. She wished one of them would say something instead, so the burden of conversation wouldn’t fall entirely on her shoulders.
But Scott spoke to her with an air exclusivity that made her feel like the only one in the room. The only soul for miles.
She watched him play, watched his fingers press desperately against the frets and glide effortlessly down the neck. He’d only been with her for the very beginning of her musical journey, and yet his style seemed so familiar as she studied it. His hands were larger and tanner, his fingers more stout, but the motions were identical to her own. The sharp, aggressive jabs of his strums, the tension in his wrist when he fingerpicked.
Maybe she did end up with more than just his eyes.
“Do you have yours?” he asked.
Zak was so entranced by his playing that it took her a moment to understand his question. Her guitar. His old guitar. “Always.”
He smiled at that response. She wondered if it was because he was considering all the ways she was like him as well. If that was one of them.
He addressed Chase. “You don’t mind if I steal this for a minute to play with my daughter, do you?”
My daughter.
She sat frozen on the couch, thinking she couldn’t have possibly heard that correctly.
She should hate it. He hadn’t earned the right to use that title when he had never been a father to her. When they’d missed out on nearly every possible father-daughter memory as a result of his addiction and neglect.
So, why did she want to hear him say it again? Why did she long for new memories to make up for lost time as much as she hated him for robbing her of the old ones? This one in particular, she wanted more than anything.
“Steal it for as long as you want. I think I’ve had more than enough humiliation for today,” Chase said.
Zak dragged out her own guitar and bumped the tuning knobs on purpose so that she could take an unreasonable amount of time to fix them. “What did you have in mind?”
She had played live for hundreds of thousands of strangers at this point. Likely over a million. And she had never been this nervous before.
“Teach me ‘Sunset Strip’.” He tried his best to mimic the intro from memory. To his credit, he wasn’t far off. “I really did like that one. You should put it on your next album.”
“All those songs, and the only one you like is one that didn’t make the first album?”
Scott assessed her, which was when she realized he couldn’t tell she was joking. Every sarcastic remark she’d ever made to him had been with heated malice. She offered him the slightest of smiles to give him a hint.
“You don’t need me to tell you you’re a brilliant songwriter. I think you already know it.”
No. She didn’t need him to tell her that. But hearing it from someone who she thought was a brilliant songwriter wasn’t a small deal either.
“It’s the rests,” she said. “The notes are mostly right, but you’re missing the eighth rests here”—she demonstrated—“and here. I do a triple upstroke, not two ups and a down. And you’re missing the hammer-on B-flat and G.”
She started playing through the song, thinking it might help him learn, but instead of watching silently, he jumped in on the rhythm guitar part. Adding his own style to Dallas’s line.
She launched into the solo prematurely to play around with it, but a solo turned into a duet. Turned into a key change. Turned into a different song entirely.
They improvised together, recovering from fumbles here and there with a laugh and an adjustment. Zak made mental notes of the lines she loved and repeated them a few times to stow them away in the mental branch of her songbook.
But really, she wasn’t just living in the moment. She was healing through it.
Her wall around Scott eroded with every passing second of the experience she had dreamed of from the day he left—playing guitar with her dad.
Not only being able to keep up with him, but being able to outplay him because, where they matched one another in speed and technique—
“Your tone is incredible,” Scott said over the song. Then the music softened, and it was only her playing. Him watching. “It sounds like you’ve already been filtered through sound editing.”
She wrapped up, a bit awkwardly. “What about one of yours? ‘Ink and Blood’?”
Scott spoke the words to the first song on his first album. Not quite singing, but soft and broken like the sound of his strumming.
“Handcuffed through rolling lands
A fugitive, a traveling man
A slave to crystal masters
Weak of hand and weak of eye
Before ink and blood had dried
I left six-string and my heart behind”
“You know that one was about you, don’t you? Or ‘Coastlines’?”
“In every breeze
Waves of green
Her smile comes back to me
A reflection in the empty bottle
A phantom in the call I follow”
“Hell, it’d be easier to list the ones that weren’t about you.”
Some part of her had always known. But it was a dangerous hope to hold in her heart. Believing he hadn’t loved her enough had been easier than imagining he still did.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked him. “What do you want from me?”
“It breaks my heart that you think I want anything from you, kid.”
Kid. She hadn’t felt like she’d been anyone’s kid. Not since he left. To her mother, she had been a servant. A babysitter. A paycheck. More often than not, a nuisance.
“I owe you everything. You’re the reason I’m still alive, Zak. The only thing that kept me from drinking and snorting myself into an early fucking grave was the hope of someday seeing you again.” Scott bent the guitar pick in his fingers. “Every day I wondered where you were, what your life was like. It’s fucked up to say I left out of caring. I cared too much about the damn drugs. I passed all my problems onto you, and because of that, I’ll never deserve a chance to be a part of your life again. But I want one anyway.”
“You are”—his voice splintered—“the greatest thing I’ve ever made in this world. You’re dedicated, talented, smart as hell—don’t know where you got that from—and so much better than me in every way. The way you look out for your friends, the way you stick it to assholes like Trevor, the way you don’t let anything stop you. I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting all those years I lost with my head up my ass. Not getting to watch my daughter grow up to be the coolest fucking person I’ve ever met.”
By the time he finished, Zak’s cheeks were wet and hot, and she had barely processed any of those words he’d told her. She saw it clear as day this time. He loved her. He loved her enough to keep trying.
She groaned. “Can you stop fucking making me cry?”
“I don’t wanna make you cry,” he said. But he was crying again, too, and she didn’t know what to do about it.
So, she crossed the aisle to sit next to him. And she hugged him before she lost the nerve to forgive. The guitar she’d refurbished for Chase dug into her gut until Scott decided to move it.
The hug was supposed to calm her tears, but all it did was turn her into a blubbering mess because she remembered this embrace. It was the one that used to greet her when she got home from school.
She remembered the shape of his arms, though bigger and slightly softer now. She remembered the smell of hot coffee, whiskey, and cigarettes clinging to his clothing. She remembered how stubbly his face always was, and how her hair had always gotten caught in it, and he’d say, “Gotcha, kiddo,” as he pulled the strands away from his face.
Zak had no idea how long she held onto him, but his shirt was damp at the collar and wrinkled at the bottom, where she’d grabbed fistfuls of it to hold onto him.
And her hair was caught in his stubble.
The corners of his weepy eyes creased as he untangled it. “Gotcha, kiddo.”
As always, she lost her filter, and the question came out. “Will you stick around this time?”
His grip tightened. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And though she still didn’t trust easily or naturally, she chose to believe him because of how badly she wanted it to be true.