The Haters (32 page)

So he told everyone's parents when Ash emailed him, and right away my parents flew down to New Orleans. Corey's parents drove. Ash's dad stayed in the Netherlands to watch Ash's half sister Jessica lose at tennis to a Polish woman in the second round of something called the Topshelf Open. Ash's mom stayed in New York for kind of no reason.

Ash burned out kind of quickly on yelling at Onnie and telling him he was a fucking pussy who'd do anything any rich fuck told him to, and she went over to a table and slumped into a chair and watched me get chewed out by my parents, who by then had figured out some of the things they wanted to say:

—I didn't know how much danger I had put myself in

—I didn't know how much danger I had put my friends in

—No, just listen

—There was no
way
I had any
idea

—I hadn't stopped to think about the terrible worry this had caused so many people, not just my parents, although, God, the last four-plus days had been a total hell

—Or the hundreds of hours the police had spent looking for me when God knows what else they could have been doing with that time

—Not to mention the
tens
of thousands of dollars this was probably going to cost

—The fallout from this, the damage you've done to your future, is just, we're speechless, Wesley

—Oh don't you say a
word
right now, don't say a
single word
, because this is just incredible, this irresponsibility,
incredible

—Zip it

—
Don't say a single goddamn thing
because neither one of us is anywhere
near
in the mood

—I don't even know who I'm talking to right now, Wes

—It is so unlike you to be this thoughtless and irresponsible that I feel like I'm not even talking to you

—It's so not you that we are
at a complete and total loss for words

I could've been a dick and pointed out that they clearly were not at any kind of loss for words. Or I could've gotten angry back at them and asked them what about that retreat they went on that they didn't tell me about. How what if I died that first night and they wouldn't even have known right away. Or I could've just reasoned with them. I could've said, you know what, guys, I've been so good for so long, you had to know something like this was coming. You can give me a freebie just this one time.

But I didn't do any of that. It was such an insane unfamiliar feeling being the object of their anger. I sort of just sat in it and let it wash over me. It was like being in a cold ocean. At first it's a shock to the system. But after a while you're used to it and you can just be in the cold water for a while.

Ash sat motionlessly, alone, watching me and my parents. And I was looking back at her from time to time, and there was this quiet little misery in her eyes, and I knew what it was from, and the only thing I wanted was for her not to have to feel it.

Meanwhile, outside, Corey was being yelled at so hard that he was just lying there straight-up pretending to be dead.

I sort of don't want to weigh you down with everything that happened after that. Because my parents were right about the fallout and the damage. There was a crazy amount of shit to deal with afterward, and it took forever. To the point where you had to ask yourself if it was even worth it.

First, there was the legal stuff. Ash got nailed by highway police radar drones in Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee for so many speeding violations in her mom's car that her license got suspended, and then the way bigger thing was, I got charged in Mississippi with a count of reckless endangerment for cutting the power to the Crossroad, plus a count of aggravated assault on Orryn Simmonds Sr., plus a few other random counts just to be a dick, and all the charges eventually got dropped but I still had to go down there a bunch of times and talk to lawyers and a judge, and my parents had to accompany me to every single thing, and it cost a crazy amount of money and time and just in general made me feel horrible, because it was my mess but other people had to help clean it up.

Plus the judge dropped the charges only on the condition that I do three hundred hours of community service back
in Pittsburgh, and so since then I've had to spend every Saturday working at the Food Bank with other court-ordered community-service kids whose shit tends to be just way more serious and fucked up than mine, and most of those kids are actually pretty okay to hang out with but one of them is a sociopath named Marcel who showed me a pigeon that he killed in the parking lot, and every time I have a shift with him I am legitimately afraid for my life.

Meanwhile, Ash's parents laid down the law and threatened to cut her off completely unless she moved in with her mom's parents back in rural France. So that's where she is now. Actually, her photos of it look kind of beautiful. But Ash says every day she contemplates becoming an arsonist. That's when I hear from her, which is less and less, because she's just not great about being in touch, online or otherwise. Which is not surprising. But it's still kind of tough.

Part of it might be that when she got her phone back, we all got to hear the recording of that first practice-room session we had, and it's definitely not that good. I mean, it's not horrible. But it's sloppy and sort of monotonous and just not the thing we thought it was. And so you can't blame her for wanting to get some distance from it.

Corey's parents went even more crazy than Ash's. They told Corey I wasn't allowed over at his house anymore, and he wasn't allowed to go over to mine. And they confiscated his drums and told Benson's music director that he wasn't allowed to do music this year, either. It wasn't just because of the tour. Corey said his dad sat him down and said, Corey, I'm going to
be very honest with you, because it's what you need to hear. I don't want you to pursue music for a living. Because it's just not a good life.

Corey fought back for a few days and then gave up. Because against his parents, there's only so much you can do. So now he's the kid at Benson High School who used to play drums until his parents took them away from him, and instead he's just a dude taking classes who doesn't have a thing and basically at all times is planning to fake his own death and escape to the Yukon or something.

As for me, I kind of dropped out of music at school, too. Because Benson got a sophomore transfer named Omar Brighton who happened to be the number two–ranked bassist at Bill Garabedian's Jazz Giants of Tomorrow Intensive Summer Workshops. He's a really good dude, but it's impossible for me to be in school jazz band with him. He's just too ferocious at jazz bass. He actually is a jazz giant of tomorrow. And I basically just feel like it's unfair for me to be taking half the songs when they could be going to someone who loves them and doesn't just like them. So after about a month, I dropped out as politely as I could. I didn't have a ton of time for it anyway, what with all the legal stuff and the trips back to Mississippi and the Food Bank hours with Marcel the pigeon murderer.

Basically, it all got pretty heavy and sad.

But it wasn't all sad. I did at least get back in touch with some people to apologize. And ShaeAnne and Charlize
and I have stayed in touch. ShaeAnne and I text each other little emoji nonsense stories every few days. And Charlize and I remind each other to stay healthy, go to checkups, and avoid broken highway glass. Her text personality is way more excitable than her in-person personality. On Sundays she sends me super Christian messages, and I send her super Buddhist ones, and then she says “WES U CRACK ME UP!!!!”

My parents and I went through a whole thing. But they calmed down after a month or two. They told me that they realized that the last five years or so, they had let themselves just kind of stop worrying about me, because I was such a good kid. But now that's all changed, and they'll never not worry about me again. And I know that sounds terrible, but it makes me happier than before.

We've at least gotten to the point where now it's kind of a family joke that I'm this depraved criminal mastermind. Every time I come home from anything, my dad asks if I've finally managed to put an end to that Batman character once and for all.

And I guess the best part of it is that they got me a dog in September for my birthday. It's a brilliant diabolical move, because now I can't leave Pittsburgh for basically as long as he's alive. He's this weird awesome poodle corgi mutt, and definitely not as big as Dad Junior but much smarter and more personable and not the kind of dog who will terrorize my mom. I named him Air Horse. Even Corey admits that's a great name for a dog.

And even though Corey has no drums and we aren't allowed to go to each other's houses, we've still been spending a bunch of time listening to tunes and messaging each other back and forth.

I've kind of listened to music differently since the tour. Everything I used to hate about a band, I don't hate anymore. It just feels like a way to know them a little better.

Recently, kind of all of a sudden, we started writing our own songs.

I do mine on bass and Corey does his on his dad's MIDI keyboard late at night. They're not very good but that's actually why they might be really good. We send each other skeleton tracks and add stuff and change stuff and I don't know. It's starting to sound interesting.

Obviously, making these tracks doesn't give you the same feeling as being onstage playing a show. But in some ways it's kind of better. If you work on a track long enough and get comfortable with leaving mistakes in there, it starts to have the same sound of playing live where you can hear that everyone is breathing the same air. Plus Corey is surprisingly sick on a keyboard. He rips in a completely unapologetic fashion. He has one eight-second riff on “Dogs Ate Cookie” that sounds like he has been training for decades in a remote mountaintop sanctuary just for this very moment.

At some point we're going to show these tracks to our parents, and maybe they'll let us hang out again, and maybe
Corey can get his drums back. But the tracks aren't ready yet.

What they need is Ash. And we've been sending files to her basically every single day.

But like I said, she's just pretty bad at keeping in touch. So every single day for weeks we've been hoping to get something back from her, and we never do.

At least not until last night. We got an email around 10
P.M.
Later we calculated that it was 4
A.M.
in France. There wasn't anything in the subject or body. But attached was one of our tracks with guitar added in. Plus she added a track of her own, just acoustic guitar and voice. It was this simple folky Hank Williams kind of song like nothing we had heard from her before.

In both of those tracks she sounds fucking great. Like she always does. And so it's hard not to be fired up right now. Maybe this is just the beginning. Maybe she's going to start sending us stuff every day, and maybe soon we'll put all these tracks up where you'll be able to hear them. And maybe one day she'll move back to the States and we can get serious about this shit.

But I don't know. I know I shouldn't get ahead of myself. There are plenty of reasons why it probably won't work out. It's hard not to be obsessed with what could happen, but I should really just have the attitude of, what already has happened, if that's all I get, that's enough and I'm grateful.

I mean, it's not. But I am.

I want to end this the way the tour ended.

My parents eventually said, well, say goodbye to your friend, because the police are saying it's time to go. So I walked over to where Ash was sitting.

She was still slumped over with an elbow on the table and one hand buried in her hair, and her eyes were still traveling back and forth between my parents and me.

The rain was finally starting to hammer down outside, and you could feel the shift in the air right away, from one kind of heavy to another.

She was actually smiling a little bit, and I realized I was smiling, too.

“Shredfest,” she said, and it took me until the flight home to remember what that meant.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

first acknowledgment:
the inadequacy of these acknowledgments

second acknowledgment:
my loyal, brilliant, and patient editor, Maggie, who got me into the YA game in the first place, and is also why Ash, Corey, and Wes escape jazz camp before page, I don't know, 250

third acknowledgment:
my equally loyal/brilliant/patient agent, Claudia, at WME, who is not just good at her job to the point of being some kind of warrior princess or something but also a superb read and drinking buddy; ditto Laura, Anna, and Sarah

fourth acknowledgment:
Susan, Leily, Michael, Chad, Jeff, and the rest of the heroically supportive Abrams team, who are responsible for this book's readability and visual and tactile beauty, and who frequently tolerate me being on the premises loudly writing emails without shoes or socks