Chapter Four
Remi slouched over the register to where he’d hidden his phone off to the side. He refreshed the screen to see if the views and likes on Tilted Haze’s social media pages had improved in the last thirty seconds.
They had not.
He’d become a little obsessed with checking it since he turned down Skye’s offer last week.
The starring actress in his sex dreams had been notably vacant from her role, but he tried not to think about her or her offer.
There was practically no one in the store today, so there wasn’t much else to do but refresh the pages again. He couldn’t stop himself, as if maybe by doing so, he could will his band’s popularity into existence.
Although if popularity had been that simple to manifest, he and West wouldn’t have had the shit beaten out of them in high school.
He’d been so confident then. So sure that it would only take a few years of hard work and their band would be recognized by the right person.
In a way, that was exactly how it happened, but they had been too young and stupid to realize how lucky they were at the time.
Remi tapped his fingers on the register and refreshed his phone again.
Nothing.
Maybe your band just sucks, the voice in his head said, sounding an awful lot like Emerson.
Impossible questions began to nag him. What if their tiny shows at bars around the area only did well because the crowd was mostly made up of women who wanted to ogle Remi or West or Liam or Ollie.
What if their music actually sucked? That had to be the problem, right?
Why else wouldn’t people on the internet find them?
Why else wouldn’t another A&R guy scoop them up?
If they were good enough—genuinely good enough—wouldn’t someone realize that and give them the chance they deserved?
And didn’t the fact that they didn’t have fame and success now mean they must not deserve it?
He shook his head to dislodge those depressing thoughts. They rattled around and didn’t dissipate completely—never completely. He knew it took more than talent to make it big. He just couldn’t give up.
He couldn’t give in to the dark void that lived within him.
The pit of emptiness that he first noticed yawn open when he was seven-years-old and his dad left.
That’d been the year everything went to shit.
The year Remi couldn’t do anything right.
He’d gotten into trouble almost constantly, couldn’t keep up at school, fought with his mom and Emerson daily.
He felt like he was still fighting Emerson—fighting the ghost of him in his head.
He didn’t blame his dad for leaving. Their house was toxic—the shadow that lived within Remi corrupted everything and everyone. He would have left too if he thought he could outrun it.
“Remi!”
He jerked into an upright position.
His boss stood in front of him with his hands on his hips, and Remi slid his phone back into its hiding spot.
“Sorry. What?”
His boss shook his head. “You’re fired. I’ve warned you several times about the phone. There are customers you’re ignoring—”
Remi furrowed his brow and looked around the empty checkout area. There were some customers in the aisles, but he hadn’t checked anyone out in at least forty minutes.
“I’m not ignoring anyone—” he interrupted.
“Don’t backtalk me. Just get your stuff and go.”
Something rebellious and sour jabbed him. He reigned in the defiant darkness pumping through his veins and put his palms up in surrender. “Wait. Please, sir, I’m sorry. I’ll go lock my phone in the break room. I need this job.”
The twelve dollars in his bank account reminded him of that this morning. He didn’t bother refreshing his bank account’s page over and over again. He knew that number wasn’t going to increase anytime soon.
“No. You’re done,” his boss said. “Look, I didn’t even want to hire you. Your”—he waved a hand down the length of Remi—“look is off-putting to the customers, and your behavior is equally appalling.”
“My look?” The acid churning in his stomach started to bubble as his rage overflowed.
“The handbook clearly states that all tattoos must be covered up and any facial piercings be removed—”
Remi snorted, his anger zapping away his rationality. “Off-putting? My look is off-putting?” Oh, he knew what that was code for. Remi could be considered a loose cannon on a good day, but when people started going after how he looked…
“You want off-putting?” Remi demanded, throwing up his arms. “I’ll show you fucking off-putting.”
He jumped over the checkout counter and ripped off his stupid blue polo, causing at least three women to suck in their breath.
His boss’s eyes widened, and his face reddened as he started yelling, “Put your shirt back on, young man!”
Remi threw the shirt on the ground and dug his foot into the corporate logo, grinding it into the ground, and then spat on it. The same ladies gasped again.
“You should all know you’re funding the corporatocracy by spending money here,” he said.
“On your thousand-dollar phones and TVs that all connect to the internet and allow big business to spy on you and force more of their products down your throat!” Remi pointed to a lady holding a box in the aisle closest to him.
“That microwave better be capable of sucking dick because why else would you spend thousands of dollars on it?”
“I’m calling the cops,” his boss said.
“You fucking do that!” Remi said. “I’m suing you for wrongful termination, so the sooner they get here, the sooner I can file a police report.”
Remi didn’t know if that was how it worked, but the threat made his boss continue to bluster and bellow nonsense. Remi just raised two middle fingers in the air and walked backward out the automatic doors.
“Mommy, that guy has no shirt,” a little girl said, holding the hand of a woman walking in.
Remi gave her a big smile and pressed his palms to his knees to bend down and say, “Your mommy is a capitalist sheep! Save yourself while you can, kid.”
The woman’s face scrunched up into a confused fury. She tugged the little girl away.
Remi just laughed, a little deranged, and ran through the parking lot.
He pulled his leather jacket and helmet out of the saddlebags on his motorcycle, slipped them on, and drove the fuck home.
Fuck this place.
Fuck this job.
Fuck it all.
He fumed, squeezing his handlebars so hard his knuckles were white.
He didn’t give a fuck about what his boss thought of him or anyone in that store.
A shitty retail job was a dime a dozen. Remi was better than that place.
He was the singer of the best band in the world.
His band was going to be famous someday, and then everyone would be sorry.
Oh yeah? That’s not what you were saying five minutes ago.
“Shut up,” he muttered out loud, but the sound was taken away by the wind whirling past his helmet.
He’d cooled down marginally by the time he made it home. He tried to tiptoe in without being heard—something he’d thought he wouldn’t have to do again after moving out of his mother’s house—but Remi swore it was like West had supernatural hearing or something.
West peeked around the corner from the living room, where he had his desk set up. He worked freelance web design, so he was always home.
At first, West’s eyebrows were pulled together in concern, but his expression promptly shifted into annoyance when he saw Remi wasn’t wearing a shirt under his jacket.
“What the fuck did you do this time?” he groaned.
Remi grunted and threw a dismissive hand at him. He went to the kitchen, hoping against all reason that West wouldn’t follow him. The kitchen was a mess with empty pizza boxes everywhere and a putrid smell coming from the sink. Remi avoided that.
He grabbed a beer out of the fridge and popped the cap off.
West tilted his chin down and raised his eyebrows, waiting for an explanation.
Remi sighed. “My dickhead boss was looking for any reason to fire me, so I figured I’d give him something better than the shitty no-phone policy. Or no piercings. Or no tattoos. Actually, I don’t even know which one it was.”
West rubbed his eyes after Remi detailed what he would like to think was a stellar exit interview.
“Jesus, Remi,” West said. “That’s the third job in eight months. You can never just walk away from something. You have to burn the bridge and the whole fucking town.”
Remi shrugged, taking a hefty swallow of his beer. West wasn’t wrong. When shit went sideways, Remi could feel a creeping nihilism overtake him. The product of a hopeless childhood of never doing anything right and never being good enough. His dark void.
Remi went to the living room and plopped down on the couch. “It’s fine. I’ll get another job. Besides, I would have had to ask for two months off to go on tour this summer, and the asshole would have probably fired me for that, so it was bound to happen.”
Remi reached out to move the bong off the coffee table so he could see the TV, but accidentally knocked it over with the back of his hand, spilling bong water everywhere.
Someone’s dirty t-shirt was wedged between the couch cushions, so he soaked the dank water up with that, before settling back onto the couch with the remote.
West grimaced. “Yeah…so about the tour…”
Remi put down the remote and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “What? What happened?”
“Two promoters called to cancel some shows.”
“Why?”
West shrugged. “Poor ticket sales. Something about booting us for another act.”
“Okay…” Remi said, sipping his beer. “Well, that sucks, but it’s only two shows.”
West shook his head. “No. More than two shows. The promoters had multiple venues lined up for us, and these were the only ones with guarantees. We can still do the tour, but best-case scenario, we come out even. Realistically, we walk away a couple thousand dollars in debt.”
Remi hung his head in his hands. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath. He took a deep breath. “Okay, so we call more venues and promoters. We schedule other shows at different bars. We can still make this work.”