December 31
I jogged downstairs to the hotel lobby to find that nightmares do come true: Isaac and Michael were leaning against the wall by the stairwell, talking. As I approached, they cracked up about something or other, Michael’s nose crinkling up at the bridge, Isaac’s unconcerned laugh bouncing off the metallic lobby’s slopes and edges. I immediately assumed that they were comparing notes on the way I kissed and that my defects were hilarious, but I would never find out, because everybody is too polite to tell someone they’re a bad kisser.
This had to happen at some point, I figured. For two weeks, they’d managed not to talk. I was lucky I’d made it this long.
Michael and I had talked the first day of tour. The talk had consisted of two parts: 1) an elaborate eight-minute apology he’d clearly scripted and figured out how to perform, which probably would have made your average audience-goer shed a tear but which left me weirdly indifferent, and 2), the realization that I had nothing to say to him, because time was the rope that hung into the pit of heartbreak and I’d finally climbed over its lip. I had no desire to look back over the edge. Some things are made to end. Storms, and winters, and hurts.
This was our last stop, the New Year’s Eve show in London. Tomorrow, Aural Fixation was headed to Germany, and the Sharps were flying back to the States on a horrifically early flight. I was almost looking forward to it. At least it wouldn’t have the distinct scent of urine that had permeated the back of the bus over the past few days.
Our voices were all but shot. We performed only twenty-five minutes a night, but constantly being around each other, we were talking our vocal cords into disrepair. Something about traveling, too—the bus’s recycled air, maybe, or inhaling the grime of cities after the Kensington fresh air—had us all drinking hot water with lemon out of thermoses and mumbling about “saving voice,” like complete caricatures of ourselves. Trav had taken to carrying around a whiteboard that read “Vocal Rest: Do Not Talk to Me,” which resulted in everyone asking him increasingly insulting questions, trying to get him to crack.
“Hey, blue jay,” Isaac said as I passed him and Michael. I’d been determinedly staring at my feet but couldn’t stop myself from looking up at the sound of his voice. He looked like a hug feels, soft black jeans cuffed and dark sweater pushed to his elbows.
“Hey,” I said, pausing midstep. With Michael’s eyes fixed on me, I felt an urge to prove something, to show him how I’d moved on, to show him that this new relationship was important, too—that my entire life could still be full of important things without him. A lot of pressure for a three-second interaction.
I took a long breath and let it go. Isaac was smiling, and I smiled back. I was happy. That mattered by itself.
I walked forward, past the long stretch of welcome desk that gleamed bright purple in the light of dangling bulbs. I passed ten-foot-high panels of surrealist wall art, all incomprehensible jumbles of facial features and landscapes where seas dribbled into skies. I skirted the deep rock pool sunk into the lobby floor, which was guarded by a shin-high glass perimeter. I was convinced that this hotel’s designer had been given the directions, “Imagine an acid trip that looks like it’s worth eighty million dollars.”
The rest of the Sharps were seated in a far corner of the lobby, where a trio of weirdly shaped sofas faced a wall-mounted TV. Jon Cox, Mama, and Erik were riveted on an American football game. Somebody in white hurtled into somebody in black. The ball popped free from his arms, and Mama let out a small, anguished wail, capsizing backward into the sofa. How had they even found a channel that played football on this side of the Atlantic?
“Hey,” I said, sitting beside Nihal, who was on his phone for once. Mostly, he didn’t approve of phones in public. “What are you doing?” I said, reaching over to flick at his screen.
He dodged, frowning at me. “Oh, just avoiding harassment, as always.”
I grinned. “Ready for the concert?”
“I suppose you could convince me to sing tonight.” He issued a belabored sigh.
“Just . . .” I waved a hand. “Just do your texting, millennial.”
He obliged, looking back at his phone with a half-smile. It warmed me. The first few days of tour had consisted of superficial conversation and avoiding each other’s eyes. On day four—night four, really, past midnight in Berlin—we’d given in and talked, leaning against the balcony rail outside his and Marcus’s hotel room as compact cars trailed by far below. I’d unleashed an elaborate babble of apology, round two. Nihal had told me that after everything Dr. Caskey had said in the greenroom, he could understand why I’d been desperate to hide. A week out from the talk, we were beginning to find our old dynamic again.
“I see you and Isaac have detached yourselves from each other for once,” he drawled.
“We’re not that bad.”
“You’re pretty bad.”
I sighed. To their credit, the Sharps were less insufferable about me and Isaac than they could have been. The worst thing had been when Trav very seriously sat us down and gave us a talking-to about how this could not be allowed to affect our professionalism. I’d nearly cried from trying not to laugh.
I sank into the sofa, staring up at the hotel ceiling, glad to be in a stationary location. Touring exhausted me more than I could have imagined, the cycle of boarding the bus, driving all day, checking into a new city, performing, and crashing. Wake up, rinse, repeat. It was exhilarating but intimidating, every city too huge for us to absorb much of anything before we were accelerating out of it. The entire experience was already blurring over in hindsight, becoming an indistinct black-and-white reel of dark bus seats and spotlights.
“Sharps!” called one of the Aural Fixation guys as they crowded out of the hotel restaurant. “Game time.”
We filed up the steps toward the stage. With the hand that wasn’t holding a mic, I patted Marcus on the back—one night, the performance space had overwhelmed him so much, he’d had breathing problems and nearly blacked out halfway through a song.
We came out, blinking, into the lights, which dangled from the frame of metal scaffolding like grapes on a web of vines. The stage was smaller than most we’d performed on—unsurprisingly, New Year’s Eve meant more people interested in staggering drunk through the streets than attending a singing concert—but the roar of the crowd inundated us. A semicircle of eight stools waited ahead.
We’d stripped away most of our choreography. As the opener, we needed to warm the crowd up but couldn’t risk seeming like the main event. So wardrobe had us in simple matching outfits, dark jeans and heather-gray shirts, and we performed the front half of our set seated. The four songs from our competition set, plus the two we’d performed at Daylight Dance, occupied all the time they’d asked us to fill.
We took our seats, lifted eight mics, and sang. It was all muscle memory by now: the reassurance of the set going off like clockwork, and the trust hanging heavy between the eight of us.
Near the end of the set, as we were on our feet near the edge of the stage, I found myself looking around at the guys instead of playing the crowd. This was the last of the lasts I had to count: the last time I’d be performing with them.
Our voices wound around each other, chased each other up scales and down riffs in parallel. I remembered watching them perform last year: From the audience, their performances had seemed synchronized into a single machine. Here, singing among them, it was impossible not to focus instead on the harmony and the dissonance, the ways we converged and the ways we clashed, the tension and the resolution. The machine had cracked open to reveal not a collection of cogs but a multiplicity of colored threads, alive and humming. I was going to carry these colors with me a long time.