Thirty-One
The tour bus was dead quiet when Ashley let herself back in through the electronic keypad door. The driver, Dave, was up front in his cab with a tabloid newspaper folded over the steering wheel. The rest of the band hadn’t come back from their snack run/romantic distress walks yet.
Ashley walked down the narrow-carpeted aisle, her trainers squeaking softly. She stopped outside the bunk section. The curtain to Molly’s lower berth was pulled wide open and empty. Not so much as a charger in there.
Had she left?
Ashley checked her storage cupboard. Nothing.
‘Hey?’ she asked Dave. ‘Did Molly leave?’
He didn’t look up from his paper. ‘Yep. Packed and went.’
She was gone. She wasn’t supposed to leave until tomorrow, audition day. She’d left a day early, without a word.
Ashley stood there for a minute, her hand flat against the wooden edge of the empty bunk. She’d missed her chance. Again.
She moved back to the lounge area at the rear of the bus, picked up her acoustic Gibson from its stand, and sat down.
She didn’t bother opening a notebook. She didn’t check her voice notes for old hooks.
She didn’t need it. She was brimming with feeling, which was all she’d ever needed to write something.
She knew why her second album sucked now.
Because she hadn’t dared to write about the only thing she wanted to—Molly.
She’d allowed herself one song for her, and it was the highlight of the album.
If Ashley had let herself be real on that album, every track would have been about Molly.
It might have had a shot at being decent.
She tuned the low E string down to a flat, heavy D, her fingers moving by instinct. She struck a single, open chord that rattled the loose plastic cup in the drinks holder by her knee.
The words came out before she could think about whether they were clever or radio-friendly. She started singing to the small, tinted window that looked out over the services.
The song was called ‘Coward’.
By the time she reached the final chorus, her throat felt raw, and her left index finger was bleeding slightly where the edge of the high string had caught the cuticle. She played the last D-minor chord and let it ring out until the vibration died against the hum of the bus’s generator.
It was the best thing she’d written in years. It was completely honest and entirely useless, because the only person who needed to hear it was running away from Ashley as fast as she could.