Chaos

“That is what you’re wearing?”

I snatch up the boots and do a showman’s twirl before plopping down on the edge of my bed. “I look hot, don’t I?”

Kale’s face contorts like the time I convinced him a Sour Patch Kid was just a Swedish Fish coated in sugar. “You’re my sister.”

“But I’m hot,” I counter with a confident smirk, and Kale huffs out a breath as I finish tying my boots.

“You’re lucky Mason isn’t home. He’d never let you leave the house.”

Freaking Mason. I roll my eyes.

I’ve been back home for only a few months—since December, when I decided that getting a bachelor’s degree in music theory wasn’t worth an extra year of nothing but general education requirements—but I’m already ready to do a kamikaze leap out of the nest again. Having a hyperactive roommate was nothing compared to my overprotective parents and even more overprotective older brothers. Pair that with Kale, who always knows what I’m thinking even when I’d rather keep it to myself, and I’m pretty sure I need to figure out what the hell I’m doing with my life or accept that eventually the white coats will need to drive out to retrieve me.

“Well, Mason isn’t home. And neither is Mom or Dad. So are you going to tell me how I look or not?” I stand back up and prop my hands on my hips, wishing my brother and I still stood eye to eye. A growth spurt in high school gained him a few inches over me, and now he’s almost as tall as the rest of our brothers, even if he is a whole lot lankier. At five foot eight, I have to tilt my chin to glare at him.

Sounding thoroughly unhappy about it, Kale says, “You look amazing.”

A smile cracks across my face a moment before I grab my guitar case from where it’s propped against the wall. As I walk through the house, Kale trails after me.

“What’s the point in dressing up for him?” he asks with the echo of our footsteps following us down the hall.

“Who says it’s for him?”

“Kit,” Kale complains, and I stop walking. At the top of the stairs, I turn and face him.

“Kale, you know this is what I want to do with my life. I’ve wanted to be in a big-name band since middle school. And Shawn is an amazing guitarist. And so is Joel. And Adam is an amazing singer, and Mike is an amazing drummer . . . This is my chance to be amazing. Can’t you just be supportive?”

My twin braces his hands on my shoulders, and I have to wonder if it’s to comfort me or because he’s considering pushing me down the stairs. “You know I support you,” he says. “Just . . . ” He twists his lip between his teeth, chewing it cherry red before releasing it. “Do you have to be amazing with him? He’s an asshole.”

It’s not like I can’t understand why Kale is worried. He knew how much I liked Shawn before that party, and that night, he squeezed every last detail out of me. He knew I gave Shawn my virginity, so he knew why I cried myself to sleep for the next few weeks when Shawn never called.

“Maybe he’s a different person now,” I reason, but Kale’s dark eyes remain skeptical as ever.

“Maybe he’s not.”

“Even if he isn’t, I’m a different person now. I’m not the same nerd I was in high school.”

I start down the stairs, but Kale stays on my heels, yapping at me like a nippy dog. “You’re wearing the same boots.”

“These boots are killer,” I say—which should be obvious, but apparently needs to be said.

“Just do me a favor?”

At the front door, I turn around and begin backing onto the porch. “What favor?”

“If he hurts you again, use those boots to get revenge where it counts.”

I laugh and take a big step forward to squeeze my brother in a hug. “Promise. Love you, Kale. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

With a big sigh, he hugs me back. And then he lets me go.

It takes me an hour to drive to Mayfield. An hour of drumming my fingers against my Jeep’s steering wheel and blasting the music so loud that I can’t hear myself think. My GPS interrupts the eardrum massacre to give me directions to a club called Mayhem, and I park in the side parking lot of a massive square of a building.

With my Jeep in a spot and my ignition turned off, I drum on my steering wheel a few more times before smacking the heel of my palm against my glove compartment. It pops open, a hairbrush spills out, and I use it to tame my wind-tangled locks.

Earlier this week, the name of Shawn’s band—The Last Ones to Know—popped up on one of my favorite bands’ websites. I blinked once, twice, and then pushed my nose toward the screen to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

They were looking for a new rhythm guitarist. After doing a little digging, I found out that their old one, Cody, got kicked out of the band. The website didn’t say why, and I didn’t care. There was an opening, and everything in me told me to send an email to the email address listed at the bottom of the online flyer.

I typed the email in a daze—as if my guitar-loving fingers wanted to be in the band even more than my spaced-out brain did. I wrote that I had been in a band in college but that we broke up to go our separate ways, I sent a YouTube link to one of our songs, I asked for an audition, and I signed my name.

Less than half an hour later, I received a reply overflowing with exclamation points and an audition time, and I wasn’t sure if I should smile or cry. It was a chance to make all my dreams come true. But in order to do that, I’d have to face the dream that had already been crushed.