Frankie was right, and I’m fucking nervous as hell. All the pacing and knuckle-cracking in the world isn’t going to fix it, or make it any better, or erase the fact that I feel like if I fuck this up I’m sunk forever.

I did show up sober. With a girlfriend, no less, one who’s already gotten on Darcy’s good side, which can be tricky, and who’s hit it off with Marisol. More than anything, it might be Frankie’s presence — a straight-laced girl who doesn’t take any shit — that’s helped me the most with the band.

Make it up to her tonight, I think, and smile quietly to myself.

“Got her,” says a voice behind me, low and American.

“I’m not a stray cat you had to trap,” Darcy’s voice says, and I can hear the eye roll in it.

“I’ll stop saying that when I stop having to go into the women’s bathroom to get you before every show,” Trent says.

“It’s my pre-show ritual,” she says, wrinkling her nose at him as they come stand next to me, waiting just behind a curtain.

The stage is tiny, and there’s about six feet square of space to stand back here, so we’re all a bit closer than custom would ordinarily dictate. With nearly anyone else it would feel strange, but with them it just reminds me of months spent together on the tour bus, and before that a van, sharing single hotel rooms to save money.

You get a strange kind of intimacy with a band. Your lives intertwine in ways you wouldn’t expect. You know one another’s shoe sizes and bathroom habits, you know who snores and who needs what sort of pillow, so standing close isn’t bothersome.

Feels a bit like coming home, in a way.

“Sort of like your pre-show ritual is pacing back and forth until you drive someone crazy,” Darcy teases.

They both glance at me, and the pointless talk of pre-show rituals dies on their lips, so I point at myself.

“Heroin,” I say, meaning that was my pre-show ritual. “Very relaxing, at least.”

Darcy just snorts, but Trent’s shoulders relax a little. I think that neither of them is exactly sure how to deal with me yet, whether they can bring up the past or joke about it or whether the mere mention of illicit substances will send me spiraling back down.

“True,” Darcy mutters, glancing at Trent quickly. “I did nearly kill Gavin a couple times on tour when it turned out that the non-junkie version of that guy was an uptight dictator.”

I raise one eyebrow.

“Gavvy was?”

“He got better again,” Trent says. “But there were a few times Darcy almost got into it with him.”

“Me?” Darcy laughs. “What about the time you kept fucking up the chord change on—”

A curtain moves, someone thumping along the other side, and then Gavin finally pops through to all three of us staring at him.

“What? It’s tricky,” he says. “You lot fucking ready or what?”

“Can’t we have some sort of team cheer before we charge back out there?” I ask.

“Goooooo wildcats!” Darcy says, very perkily.

We all look at each other for a moment.

“Tell me about these wildcats,” Trent says, a hint of a smile on his face.

“Are we about to play children’s football, or are we some sort of dance squad...?” Gavin asks.

“Does our routine have a lot of jazz hands?” I ask, wiggling my fingers in the air.

“You guys are assholes,” Darcy says, flipping us all off, even though she’s grinning. “I try to build morale fucking once, do one nice thing, and you shit all over it.”

“Rowr,” I say, and she waves her middle finger directly in my face.

“All right, fucking seriously, though,” Gavin says.

The lights over the audience go down, plunging the whole tiny theater into near-darkness, and the cheering starts. Suddenly, I’m lightheaded, dizzy, and I exhale all at once. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath, because I feel like my veins have turned into a thousand live wires, all carrying ten thousand volts of electricity.

This is it. It’s happening, not in some mad dream, but actually here.

“Oi, Liam,” Gavin says, his voice hushed, his hand on my shoulder. “Breathe, mate, it’s not that bad.”

I crack my knuckles one more time, flexing my fingers.

“Let’s get on with it, shall we?” I say.

In the dim light, the three of them are all smiling. It’s the first time in ages that we’re together like this, and I feel like I’m at the base of a mountain, looking upward to the sun cresting over the peak.

Like some great fucking things are going to happen.

“Go get ‘em, wildcat,” Darcy says as she punches my shoulder, and we walk out onto the tiny, dark stage.

The second we step on the crowd starts screaming, the sound like a wall that hits me out of nowhere. It’s like being punched in the gut, if one could be punched with nostalgia.

I sit behind the drums. It’s not the first time I’m glad that I’m at the back of the stage, seated, the least visible, but it’s the most intense because the screaming hasn’t stopped yet. If I listen closely enough, I can hear someone shouting my name at intervals, just one bloke who sounds like he’s way in the back.

But he knows my name. He knows what I look like well enough that he can see it’s me back here, not someone else filling in from another band or whatnot.

I grab my drumsticks, square my shoulders. The knot in my gut clenches and unclenches as I try to think of how Periwinkle Smile begins, and I can’t.

Oh God, I can’t. It’s been too long since I’ve played, since I’ve been on stage. Even though we practiced this a dozen times in the last week my mind’s gone perfectly blank, my palms sweating.

I don’t know how to do this sober, I think.

I’ve not been on a stage sober in...

...Since...

Jesus, I can’t even fucking remember.

What if it was the heroin that made me good at this?

What if the heroin remembered the songs, the drum fills, the right tempo, when to hit the cymbals and when to hit the bass drum?

What if I was just along for the ride?

They’ve all got their instruments on. Darcy tosses her hair, getting it out from under the bass strap. Trent’s left hand makes chords on the neck of his guitar, and up front, Gavin’s just breathing, head down.

For a long moment, we’re just there. The screaming wanes and then intensifies, ebbing and flowing. Then it’s been too long, but I’m still frozen, the sticks feeling strange and alien in my hands. I can’t even think of which drum is which, and Darcy looks back at me, over her shoulder.

“Dude,” she hisses.

I open my mouth to whisper back it’s been too long, I forgot everything, I’m sorry Jesus Christ I’m fucking sorry, but then I look past her to the side of the stage, where two women with curly hair are both standing and grinning, whispering to each other excitedly.

Frankie sees me watching her and laughs. She waves at me like she’s having the time of her life, and then all in a rush, the music comes flooding back and almost instantly, I snap the fuck out of it.

“Right,” I call to Darcy, who looks faintly amused.

I grab the sticks harder. Suddenly they feel like a part of me again, so I raise them over my head, count off: one, two, three, four.

And we play.