On the Road: (Vagabonds Book 2) (New Adult Rock Star Romance) (8 page)

Chapter Twelve

WE WERE IN Oregon, I think, and the weather was getting downright cold.  I’d since taken to drinking two or more beers before going onstage, because they kept me warm in the skimpy tops I had to wear.

Vicki and I were talking over our beers before the show, and I was shocked that she hadn’t remembered my confrontation out by the van with the carny-looking dude earlier that week.  I didn’t know if she was pretending she didn’t remember or not, but I suspected she truly had no memory.  That was another reason for me to worry.

But she was speaking first about drugs in general.  She hadn’t said it, but I knew it to be true:  there was never a drug she didn’t like, never a taste she would turn down. Then she started talking about how much she loved coke, but she couldn’t afford it, not with the cheapskate stipend Peter gave us.  She said she was considering crack because of that.

“Are you fucking kidding, Vicki?  That shit is so addictive, you can never quit.”

“That’s just what they say so you don’t take it.”

I wanted to slap her.  Hell, I wanted to beat my head against a wall.  She was so fucking stupid sometimes.  “And why do you think they don’t want you to take it?  You ever think about that?”

“‘Cause the man wants to keep us down.”

Wow.  She really
had
been doing too much shit.  I had to try another tactic.  “How do you think your mom would feel if she knew you were taking hardcore shit?  That you were considering crack, for Christ’s sake?”

She huffed and rolled her eyes.  “My mom’s not perfect, Kyle.  She’s done her share of shit.  Believe me.”

“Crack?”

She shrugged her shoulders.  “I dunno.”

God, she was so full of shit, but I didn’t want to call her on it, didn’t want to call her a liar.  She was an addict and fighting with her wouldn’t do shit.  I let out a long breath of air and took my last swig of beer before crushing the can in my hand.  “Vicki…just look at it this way.  Crack is to coke like meth is to speed.  Seriously, Vick.  Don’t do that shit.  It’ll kill ya.  For reals.”

She frowned.  “Would you stop worrying about me, Kyle?  This is supposed to be fun.  It
is
fun, but it’ll stop being that way if you lecture me like a fucking teacher all the time.”

That was when I knew I couldn’t save her.  All I could do was try to protect her, try to encourage her to not do the worst things…and be there to catch her when she fell.

I just didn’t know that I would be around when she did.

* * *

As if Vicki’s drug bullshit wasn’t enough for me to begin to hate the whole band drama, Liz was going to do her damnedest to pile more on.  A couple of days later, we’d just finished lunch.  Vicki and I had gone outside to have a smoke and Liz joined us, but she said to me, “Walk with me, Kyle?”

I almost started laughing, because it sounded so dramatic, so much like something a movie character would say.  But something was bothering her, so I kept my smile to myself and said, “Sure.”  We started walking away from the restaurant, and I heard one of the other girls come out and start talking to Vicki.  I couldn’t stand it anymore.  Liz was a woman of few words—so if something had been nagging at her enough to want to have a quiet conversation with me, I didn’t want her to beat around the bush about it.  “What’s up?”

“You were talking a while back about
the elephant in the room
.  So I want to know—are
you
the reason Barbie wants nothing to do with me anymore?”

I felt my brow furrow before I shook my head.  “No.  She’d already made up her mind long before that.”

“Yeah, but did you say something to her before?”

“No.”

She stopped walking, so I turned to face her.  “I saw you guys the other day—you seemed pretty cozy.  Are you guys—?”

“Oh,
hell
, no.”  Yeah, Barbie was a pretty girl, but it was no secret that she and I weren’t even friends.  Sure, I’d felt bad for her and I had grown to respect her as our frontwoman, but there was nothing sexually appealing to me as far as she was concerned.  I hadn’t said it to hurt Liz’s feelings, but just the fact that she thought I wanted to steal Barbie from her was comical.

She squinted her eyes, almost as if she was trying to decide if I was telling the truth or not.  Her lips were pursed, as though she couldn’t trust herself to breathe any words, but she finally nodded her head.  “Okay.  Just checking.”

“We cool?”

“Yeah.”  We started walking back toward the van without even agreeing to do it.  “You’d tell me if that changed, right?”

“Uh, yeah.  Yeah.  Of course.”  But it wasn’t going to happen.  I just hoped Liz would let it all go and focus on the music.  It was what she was best at.

* * *

Vicki was getting worse, and I was worried enough that I decided maybe I needed to go to Peter—and even threaten to tell her mom…and our parents, if need be.  Christmas was just a few short weeks away, and our parents would find out soon enough if we couldn’t contain our shit.

Just watching Vicki do what she was doing to herself made me back off a lot of the drugs I’d been experimenting with.  I didn’t want to ruin my life, especially when it had just started.  So many of my rock heroes had died from drug overdoses—or had, at least, ruined their lives because of drinking or drugs.  I wasn’t going to be another rock star cliché.  No fucking way.  I was going to stick with cigarettes, pot, and alcohol.  Yeah, there’d been rock guys who’d fucked up their lives with alcohol too—the one I thought of off the top of my head was Steve Clark of Def Leppard but yeah…I thought maybe drugs had something to do with it too.  It was a chance I just didn’t want to take.  If I was going to kill myself, there had to be better ways to go.

So, one afternoon before we headed to our latest venue, I went to Peter’s room.  He was unpacking his luggage and Andrew was in the room too but texting or doing something else on his phone.  The expression on Peter’s face looked droll as it often did, as though he was trying to communicate to me that he was “not amused.”  “Yes, Ms. Summers?”

“We need to talk.”

He raised his eyebrows, and, even though he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to communicate his boredom with me, I could feel it coming off him.  “About?”

“Vicki.”  I sighed and looked from him to Andrew and back again.  I was more than a little pissed that I had to tell him to do his goddamn job.  I shouldn’t have had to watch Vicki’s back.  Peter and Andrew should have been.  “I’m afraid she’s turning into a full-blown addict.”

Peter was silent for a few minutes as if pondering what to say before he finally replied, “Every band has to have one.”

I know my brow furrowed, because his answer—while typical Peter—was nothing like any of the possible responses I had expected.  I paused while I tried to figure out where our conversation was going.  Finally, I said, “We have to do something.  We can’t just let her do that to herself.”

Peter cocked an eyebrow again and said, “And what do you propose we do, Ms. Summers?  If you know anything about addicts, then you know that they need to realize they have a problem.  Until they do, there is no fixing them.  There is no helping them.  They will fight every step of the way.  Interventions are nice but they’re not lasting if the addict doesn’t
want
change, doesn’t
want
the help they’re being offered.”

His voice turned sinister then and that was when I realized he
was
a salesman.  He’d learned each of our weaknesses and knew how to exploit them, twist them, and manipulate us.  He knew our hopes and fears and understood exactly what kinds of things to say to us to keep us in line.  If someone had told me Peter had a psychology degree and had chosen to use it for evil, I wouldn’t have doubted it for a second.  His voice was quiet when he put his hands on my shoulders and said, “If we get her the help she needs, then this tour is over before it’s even started.  The Vagabonds?  Maybe people will remember you when she’s out and clean, but there’s no guarantee in this fickle world.  People are worshipping you one moment and then, two weeks later, they forgot they’d called you their favorite band.  They’re off following some other act and you’re left in the dust.  But if you keep plugging away—if you stay in the limelight, if you stay on the road, pausing long enough to record new material—they don’t have a chance to forget you.  They have no choice because you’re in front of their faces all the time.”

Yeah, he knew exactly where to hit me to make it hurt.  After he’d filled my head with dreams of fame, nothing else would satisfy me in my life.  There was no way I could go do what others would consider a “normal” job because my place was on the stage.  My job was perfecting Liz’s songs and then playing the shit out of them live for an adoring audience.  I hadn’t lived that damn dream long enough to have it ripped from me.

Still, I was struggling.  I’d grown to love Vicki like a sister and her behavior had me worried.  Peter could see my internal turmoil all over my face.  “When she comes around and is ready, we will take care of her.  We will get her the help she needs.  For now, let her enjoy this taste of freedom and this chance to try new flavors of life.  We’re
assuming
it’s a problem, Ms. Summers, but she hasn’t had a chance to decide she doesn’t want those things yet.  Let’s let her party behavior play itself out”—yes, he’d said that for my benefit too, because he knew I liked to cut loose and have fun too, and that was all part of what I considered my new rock star experience—“and then, if it still seems like she has a problem, we’ll consult with the experts.”  He could see my defenses weakening.  “Okay?”

How could I fight when I had no one in a position of power and authority helping me?  I didn’t want to be the bad guy to my best friend.  Then she wouldn’t even talk to me.  At least now, I could try to talk sense into her on occasion and try to keep her safe.  If she was pissed at me or decided she hated me, she wouldn’t listen to me at all.  For now, at any rate, I at least had a chance.

I let the air out of my lungs and said a silent prayer in my head—one for forgiveness, because I felt like I was letting my friend down, but also that she would be all right.  “Okay.”

Sounding like a barking auctioneer, Peter said, “Problem solved,” as if it really
was
—but he and I both knew we were living a lie.  Of the two of us, though, I think I was the only one whose conscience nagged her—until I myself indulged enough to drown out the voices of guilt and betrayal.

Chapter Thirteen

HAVE YOU EVER spent Thanksgiving on the road?  No, I don’t mean visiting family members.  I mean spending it alone somewhere you’ve never been before, away from all the people you love.

Actually, worse than that.  Around all the people who have been driving you nuts and pissing you off.

We all chatted with our families, but Peter explained to them and us how we’d barely get home, have a couple of days to spend, and then have to be right back at it.  Our last show that week was Tuesday night and our next show was Saturday night.  We could have gone home, and—had I been older and knew then what I knew now—I would have insisted.  But I didn’t know enough to be able to argue.

We’d played somewhere in Idaho and our next stop was Northern California, so that Wednesday, we drove to a halfway point and Peter informed us we’d be spending Thanksgiving there.  He’d already called around and found a restaurant that would be willing to cater to us, and he took all our stipends (including, I guessed, the amount reserved for himself and Andrew, and also what he gave Bad Dog and TT) and paid the restaurant well.  One thing I will say—it was magical.  After eating nothing but fast food burgers and tacos for the last two and a half months, a truly home-cooked meal was amazing.  And they’d thought of everything—we had turkey with gravy, stuffing, buttery mashed potatoes, cranberries, sweet potatoes, glazed ham, rolls, corn, green bean casserole, and a huge salad.  Oh, and then for dessert, not that any of us had room, we had pumpkin pie with whipped cream, red velvet cake, or chocolate cream pie—or all three if we so desired.

I felt like a stuffed turkey by the time we were done.

They also sent each of us back to our hotel with a Styrofoam container of leftovers, Chinet paper plates, and plastic utensils so we could microwave dinner later in our hotel rooms.

Peter wasn’t done surprising us, though, and it was that brief shining day that I thought maybe he did have a heart.  Maybe he did have a soul.  But one day trying to keep your moneymakers happy to avoid mutiny does not make you human.

He stopped at a Walmart and bought a Monopoly game, a few decks of cards and dominos, and even an Xbox and a few games to go with it so we could play games that afternoon.  But I just wanted to nap.

I didn’t see through his ruse at the time.  I didn’t realize it was just a way to lull us into feeling like we were with our music family so we wouldn’t cry fowl.  It was completely out of character for Peter to be kind and considerate like that, and it’s the only time I remember him being that way.  Something I know now in retrospect is that Peter always had an angle.  He always had a reason for doing something and, if I have ever known anyone in my life who is a sociopath, it would be Peter.  He didn’t care about anything or anyone else other than himself.  Anything and everything he did was to benefit number one.  He was good at pretending to care or faking emotion, but it is clear to me now that he never had any concern about any of us.  He was really good at putting up smokescreens to hide that lack of caring and inability to empathize.  On Thanksgiving of that year, the smokescreen was dinner and games.  And we enjoyed ourselves so much, in spite of the fact that we couldn’t really recharge and reconnect with our real family members, that we didn’t see what he was really doing.

That was Peter in a nutshell.  He was always one step ahead of us.

So, that afternoon, I slept.  It felt good, and I hadn’t realized how sleep deprived I’d been until I rested my head on the pillow and slept for over six hours straight.  I woke up close to ten o’clock that night.  Most everyone was still in Peter and Andrew’s room playing games, only by the time I got there, they were playing charades.  Drunken charades.

The problem was, thanks to my freewheeling existence as a kid, I didn’t know—had never known—how to play charades.  So my already plastered friends gave me the best instructions they could, and I muddled through, but it was a laugh riot—mainly because they were so trashed that their guesses at my gestures were comical.  Of course, trying to charade
eternity
when trying to communicate the movie
From Here to Eternity
wouldn’t have been easy for people at the top of their game, much less people who couldn’t spell their own name due to their lack of sobriety.

We had fun and I got drunk too as the night wore on.

That night, Kelly and I shared a room and we walked back to it together with the intent of heating up our leftovers before going to sleep.  I let Kelly nuke hers first and I sat on the bed.  I’d chatted with mom and dad before my nap earlier today but my mind wandered back to the other person who occupied my mind on occasion.  CJ.  I wondered what he was doing tonight—if he was hanging with his band or if they were home for a few days.  I wondered if he ever thought of me.  I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and found his name in my text messages.  I pondered what I wanted to say for a few seconds before I started typing my message out with my thumbs.  I didn’t want to set myself up for disappointment, so I thought it best to ask a neutral question. 
What are you thankful for today?

Nothing.

Hmm.  Well, maybe he was busy…or asleep. 

So I threw the phone on the bed and pulled my food out of the little fridge and microwaved it once Kelly’s was done.  She sat at the little table and turned the TV on.  She said she missed her family but then didn’t seem to want to talk much about it, so I nodded in agreement and pulled my food out of the microwave.

I missed mine too, but I wouldn’t have missed this experience for all the world.  Even when shit was bad, I was living my dream.

She had some dumb movie on the boob tube, so I got up and fetched my phone off the bed.  I planned to check in on Facebook or Twitter to see if anyone who’d been to a recent concert had posted anything, but I had a notification on the front of my screen—a text from CJ. 
I’m thankful for a lot of things.  What about you?

I smiled when I saw it.  I sat down and scooped up a bite of the reheated mashed potatoes.  What did I want to say in reply? 
I can’t think of anything I’m not thankful for.
  I pressed
send
and then sent a follow up. 
Life is good!

It was only seconds before he responded this time. 
Indeed it is.  You home for Christmas?

Shit.  I think so, but maybe I need to make sure.  We have a week and a half off…  You?

Yeah.  A few days.  Maybe we could hang.

That would be cool.
  Was he serious?  Was I wearing down his resolve?  I knew I shouldn’t get my hopes up because CJ had led me along this far without anything happening—but, in all fairness, he had that stupid ass age hang up.  Part of me wanted to tell him I’d fucked a guy who was probably twice my age—and then thought better of it.  I didn’t think he’d appreciate that knowledge and definitely not the details.  But I
had
already decided that if he chose to be stupid and make me wait, I wasn’t going to be a pristine car never driven off the lot just because he wanted to wait until I’d reached a magical number.  Nope.  I was going to have a few miles on me before that, and he was just going to have to deal with it.

Text me or call me when you know for sure.

Will do.
  There was nothing left to say, really…and yet there were thousands of words unspoken.  Now I understood why CJ wrote lyrics.  I’d heard his musical words, read them, felt them and realized that it was maybe easier for him to communicate through them.  I could see how it might be less stressful to put everything into lyrics, because there was less chance of rejection and, if you were misunderstood, you could tell someone, “It’s just a song.”  Whether or not CJ did that, he was a hell of a songwriter and, even if we never would hook up, I’d consider him a friend.

Yeah…I guess I was thankful for
him
.

* * *

Saturday night, we were back to performing—and Liz and Barbie were back together.  Dear God in heaven, I couldn’t keep up with them anymore than I could the stupid headlines in the tabloids, and if these two bandmates of mine were any reflection of other celebrities, it was no wonder some stars seemed to be on again, off again—because they fucking
were
.

Before the show, they were giggling and grabbing at each other, laughing and playing, and I refrained from rolling my eyes.  They were worse than the girls who had gone to my high school and just as tiresome.

They were getting pretty serious before we headed back to our room after the show and even Kelly looked at me and whispered, “God, get a room!”

When we finally arrived, things felt awkward, because Vicki was already sharing a room with the two of them.  As we began unpacking the van, Barbie said, “Hey, would you mind bugging out of the room for a while?”  She glanced at Liz before looking back to Vicki.  “Unless you want to join us…
Sticky
.”  She laughed then, a sound I think Barbie felt showed how much she loved life, but I’d always found it derisive and mocking.  She had other giggles that sounded more genuine, but her hearty, raucous laugh was fucking fake.

And Vicki wasn’t up for it anyway.

I caught Andrew looking on, none too happy either but he didn’t dare get involved.

So Vicki, Kelly, and I shared a room.  We smoked a little weed, watched a crime investigation show that seemed more interesting than most, and passed out sometime before two that morning.

It wasn’t surprising that Vicki wasn’t in our room when morning arrived.

Two days later, we had our first scheduled radio interview, and Peter also announced that our second video would be out a week later.  They’d filmed us singing our song “Walls Closing In” in various venues and had finally spliced together what they felt would be a great cut.  Then, in a few months, they planned to release a third single and would do a lyric video.  I was excited about the video releases, but I was even more excited about our radio interview, because I’d never done anything like it before.

And, goddammit, leave it to my friends to fuck a good thing up.  Barbie and Liz were bickering that whole morning, and they couldn’t blame their other three bandmates.  We’d been giving them plenty of room to do whatever it was they had to do, probably because we didn’t want to get any on us when they exploded once more.  With Barbie, it was just a matter of time.  She was selfish and narcissistic, not to mention unrealistic, and I couldn’t imagine her ever having a successful relationship with anyone, let alone Liz, a young girl who was beginning to seem possessive and maybe even obsessive.

I’d wanted to stay out of it, but the two of them were nonstop fighting in the van on the way to the radio station.  I finally said, “Would you two shut the fuck up already?  We don’t want to hear it.”

Barbie glared at me and spat, “
You
shut the fuck up, Kyle.  This is none of your business.”

“Yeah, actually, it is.  You’re so damned loud, you’ve made it
all
our business.  So help me, God, if you fuck up this radio interview, there will be hell to pay.”

“Oh, yeah?”  Barbie said the words, but I could tell she was only half confident.  She knew that she’d not only have to answer to me but Liz and the other girls as well—not to mention Peter, even though he had no hold or sway over her at all.  She looked at Liz and nearly shrieked, “Fine, bitch.  I like boys better anyway!”  She turned and faced the window, crossing her arms over her chest.  Liz too looked the other way.

She’d been hurt again.  I felt bad for her, but it was obvious to me and probably everyone else there that Barbie was
not
a person who cared about the feelings she trampled while in a relationship.  I could even see that when I saw how Andrew looked at her.  It might have been a fling to Barbie (as I suspect most of her “relationships” were), but the people she had intimate relations with had somehow believed what they’d had with her was more.

Vicki…man, she must have been high.  She leaned forward so that her chin was resting on the back of their seat, her face in between their shoulders, and she said, “So…you two lesbians or what?”

Liz turned and gave her a look that could only be interpreted as cool refusal to answer.  Barbie, though, whipped her head around, her blonde hair flying out from behind her, and said, “Hell, no.  We’re just experimenting.  That’s what girls our age do, right?”  Liz’s face gave her away.  That statement too was a knife in her belly.  I knew then all I needed to know about Liz’s sexual orientation—not that it mattered in the least.  Barbie might have been experimenting, but Liz was in love…and Barbie was fucking breaking her heart.  I could see it in Liz’s eyes, and it made me want to wrap an arm around her and tell her to let it out, to cry until she felt better.

But I knew stoic Liz would never, ever do that—not in a million years.

Holy shit.  This was going to be a hell of an interview.