fic: Faster than you go when you're alone 2/3
(cont'd from part one)
When they get to Chicago late in the afternoon, Jon goes home. He has a few hours before soundcheck and no way can he stay on the bus: it’s been a fucking house of horrors in there since Richard called, with Ryan watching through slit eyes for any sign of life to leap on and tear apart and Brendon snarling back at him like a cornered cat, and Spencer just. Gone. Jon hasn’t seen him since last night, and he feels it in his jaw and across his shoulders, the anxiety of waiting for the next conversation where they’ll pretend like Jon isn’t a fucking idiot, and that everything is totally fine.
It’s a relief when Mike picks him up from the parking lot at the House of Blues, driving his shitty old Civic with a pile of unnamable machinery in the back seat. At home, Dad makes grilled cheese sandwiches and Bill comes up from the basement and they all sit around talking about Jon’s tour and the new fridge and how work is going. There are a few coded comments about Bill’s thesis and what Jon’s plans are come the fall. “It’s not too late to apply to school here,” Mom says. “University of Chicago has a waitlist.”
Jon doesn’t say anything about the contracts he signed, even though Mike makes eyebrows at him. Mike knows where the myspace page is, he probably saw the change in the sidebar. But Jon doesn’t want to get any crap about it and he doesn’t want to pull the papers out of his bag and go over them in his dad’s office and get lectured about how he doesn’t think about his future enough. He doesn’t think enough, period.
So he doesn’t argue when it gets implied that he’ll be home in August. Jon just eats his sandwich and wonders if it’ll make any difference when they see the show tonight.
When Mike drops him off again a few hours later, Jon gives him the handful of passes he pestered out of the promoter. Mike puts them in his breast pocket and says, “So where’s the afterparty going to be?”
And Jon laughs like it’s a joke but Mike just waits and so Jon says, “I don’t know. Come find me backstage.”
Mike smirks at him over the gearshift and says, “Can I tell them we’re with the band?”
--
Conrad and the guys from Academy are in town for the week and so they show up, and the whole crowd from high school, and Mike brings his girlfriend and Bill shows up with the folks in tow and Jon hides backstage beforehand trying not to freak out so much that his palms get sweaty. He hates playing with sweaty hands. He has corn starch in his duffel just in case, but still, he spends twenty minutes pressed against the wall in a dark, mirrored hallway trying to avoid his reflection and promising himself he’s not going to skip out under the EXIT sign no matter how much he wants to.
He loves them all, he does, and he’s so excited for them to be there but he is very well-acquainted with the role of replacement bassist: tertiary and shadowy. Especially in the face of Brendon’s showmanship and Ryan’s fucking rose vest and the eight hundred dancers on stage with them. Mitch eats fire - can’t they send him out, instead?
Jon is just not okay with having people there to see him. It’s alright if people look at him occasionally as they take in the show and revel in the theatrics and maybe glance over to stage left halfway through the set - that’s absolutely fine. But this isn’t the same. These are people who’ve come to see him. And it’s scary as hell.
When the call comes, he finds Ryan and Brendon and Spencer standing in a semicircle in the wings, waiting for Boink to give them the okay. They aren’t looking at each other. No one has anything to say.
But like every other night, they head onstage, and they play.
Brendon’s stage banter is off. Spencer misses a cue and recovers a bar later. Jon plows through the setlist without looking up from his fretboard once. He can hear that Ryan is doing the same thing.
They sound terrible. At least, comparatively. There have been good shows, way better shows. And this isn’t one of them.
The audience doesn’t seem to care. They want two encores. Jon feels so guilty when they come out for the second one - the non-obligatory one - that he actually makes eye contact with Spencer to get the beat drop for Build God dead on.
He regrets it as soon as it happens - a flash of blue eyes under sweaty bangs - but the song works better than the whole show up to that point. The crowd loses it.
They file offstage as the lights go down and standing in the wings they can feel the whole building shaking with the screaming.
And maybe it was because it ended so well, but no one backstage says a word about the show sucking. Not even Tom, usually reliable on that front, who stakes out a spot beside Jon on the couch and coaches him through two shotgunned pints of draft beer before his parents and brothers show up.
And thank god, because Jon needs the fortification. He has to tour them all around, of course. They peek out at the stage and Mike interrupts Boink’s guys as they’re packing up the cabling and the amps so he can strum a few chords on Jon’s Fender to the empty dance floor. Then Mom says, “You certainly seem to have a lot of fans,” as they’re standing there on the taped-up dirty stage at 12:15 a.m. and it may or may not be a compliment.
“They’re not mine,” Jon tells her, snapping his case shut again. “They’re here for the band.”
He shows them the buses and everyone exclaims over how tiny his bunk is and Mike makes a joke about Jon not using it for much anyway and Bill goes “Oh, snap” in a totally unironic way that means all the jokes from then on are at his expense. Jon soldiers on, introducing his family to everyone that they stumble across and Jon doesn’t forget anyone’s name and overall it’s okay. Everything is okay. Brendon is spectacularly polite and charming and Ryan’s gaze may be dark but he thanks Jon’s parents sincerely for coming and Spencer - well, Spencer has disappeared again and is nowhere to be found so yeah. It’s fine.
They make it back to the party, which is now spilling out of the green room and into the bar proper. They’ve lost Mike and his girlfriend somewhere along the way. Jon gets his dad a beer - or gets Tom to get his dad a beer, for appearances’ sake - and stands with his shoulders hunched, waiting for the man to weigh in. As he always does.
“This is a big operation, son,” his dad says, eventually. “Good to see you pulling your weight around here.”
Jon’s standard response to his dad’s pronouncements is a shrug and a nod, and that’s what the man gets this time, too. Jon knows it makes him look ungrateful, apathetic, childish. But arguing has never gotten him anywhere, and honesty isn’t really a thing in their family. Jon just says, “Thanks, dad. I’m glad you think so.”
And it’s as he’s saying this to his father - accepting whatever approval he can scrounge - that Spencer shows up.
Jon wishes to god that it didn’t make a difference to him where Spencer was, but the truth is that whenever Spencer is or isn’t someplace, Jon notices. And Spencer’s been gone so often lately that every time he appears it feels like an event. Out of the corner of his eye, Jon sees Ryan’s head swivel as Spencer makes his way across the room.
Spencer is freshly showered, changed into a boat-necked tee that clings tight and those goddamn jeans. He looks beautiful and clean. He looks tiny next to Brian, who is still wearing his bowler and his clown makeup from the show.
Brian, who puts his arm around Spencer’s shoulders and grins a greeting.
It’s pretty much instantaneous. The gesture was casual and affectionate, totally normal for Brian. But Spencer’s shoulders go up and the look on his face as he flinches away is so gut-level, so rattled, that it’s pretty obvious to anyone watching exactly what happened.
It’s perfectly obvious to Jon, anyway, who knows firsthand how Spencer likes to treat his conquests after the fact. Namely like they’re carrying the plague.
Jon’s mom is asking him a question about the rest of the tour, and Jon has to apologize. He says, “Sorry, I wasn’t-” and then, as his brain belatedly supplies the answer, he finishes: “No. No, not August. We’re going to Europe on the 17th. I’m not coming home until September. Maybe September.”
And as his mom makes a shocked little sound and his dad’s eyebrows go up, Jon says, “I have to go. I’ll be right back.”
And he leaves them there. He leaves everyone there.
--
Thank god it’s Chicago. Thank god he can catch a bus and know where it’s going and where to transfer and how to get to the north shore in forty-five minutes flat at this time of night. Thank god he knows where to hop off so that he can walk along the ragged crumbling concrete of the North Avenue Pier to find that perfect spot along its curve where across the bay you can see the whole city spread smudged in black and gold against a milky smog of pinkish sky.
Thank god he knows exactly where to go to feel sixteen and unsure of everything, everything, and have the black water chop under his dangling feet.
Thank god he has somewhere to hide, for once.
--
Tom texts him at three a.m. and says, if you aren’t going back you can crash at my place and as soon as Jon gets it he walks to the road and catches a bus back downtown, because the wind is picking up and if there is anyone who is decent in this world, it’s Tom.
Tom is waiting up in his kitchen when Jon raps on the door. He’s drinking coffee and there’s more in the pot. The lights down the hall are dim, there’s a blanket folded on the couch. Tom is such a fucking grandma. Jon pours himself a coffee without asking, then he sits down at Tom’s table and drinks the sludge black.
“Your folks are kind of pissed.” Tom rubs at his nose. Yawns.
“I went to get some air,” says Jon.
That statement makes Tom chortle, like he can just imagine giving everyone that excuse. “I told them you were probably out signing autographs.”
Jon puts an elbow on the table and his forehead in the crook of it. “You’re such a dick.”
Tom shrugs and swallows more coffee. He continues to watch Jon watch the tabletop.
Tom waits a good while before he asks. “So why’d you leave?”
Having known this question was coming, these are the points Jon considers before answering: First, Tom’s weakness for gossip. Second, Tom’s relationships with the rest of the band. Third, Tom’s relationship with Pete. Fourth, Tom’s motivation to keep his mouth shut: i.e., the time Tom stole his manager’s Vespa and accidentally trashed it and Jon didn’t tell; i.e., the time Tom got really wasted and puked all over his parents’ bedroom and Jon cleaned it up before they came home. Fifth, Tom’s reaction when Jon came out to him in the bathroom at a friend’s junior prom houseparty. Sixth, Tom’s reaction when Jon told him that he was going to ask a guy from work out. Seventh, Tom’s reaction when Jon told him that the guy from work had sucked him off in the supply closet after closing shift.
Mostly, though, Jon just considers Tom’s constant, wordless, bone-deep loyalty.
Jon lifts his head off the table. Rubs his thumb deep into his eye socket like he could maybe get at the headache in there. Eyes squeezed shut, he sighs and says, “I’m in love with Spencer.”
Tom looks down at the coffee in his mug. “I wish I’d timed that better. I could’ve done a spit take.”
Jon snorts. But when he glances sideways, Tom’s expression isn’t particularly jovial. In fact, he looks more like Jon just told him his second-best amp got stolen at their last show. Sympathetic. Ready to beat someone up, in the unlikely event that it’s necessary. But mostly it’s just shrug-your-shoulders, what-you-gonna-do-about-it, these-things-happen. Tom gnaws his lip, considering the facts, and says: “So I guess Spencer isn’t aware of that fact.”
Jon just shakes his head. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“So you’re not gonna tell him, either,” the way Tom says it, it sounds like a stupid decision.
“He’s not interested,” Jon still does not want to talk about it, but somehow the words just leak out of him.
“He told you that?”
“No. He just. It’s become apparent.” Jon grates it out.
Tom looks unconvinced.
“And it’s not the same,” Jon continues, looking up at Tom, suddenly clear on something. “He’s not the same since the spring tour. You wouldn’t even - he’s just been acting totally differently than how he used to be.”
“So?” says Tom, like Spencer’s different is still everyone else’s really truly excellent.
“So he’s being an asshole,” Jon snaps, so fast it seems like the anger was there waiting in his lungs all along. And suddenly he can’t stop himself from going on. He lists Spencer’s infractions: “He’s messing around with half the guys on the tour and making shit really awkward because of it, and he’s drinking and he’s disappearing all the time and whatever, maybe it’s none of my business but even if I didn’t care and things were totally normal I’d still be pissed because he’s being a shitty bandmate.”
Tom takes a swallow of his coffee. He eyes Jon for a while, like he’s not exactly sure what to say. Or maybe he’s entirely sure, but he knows that it would be entirely unappreciated. So instead, after forever, he says, “You want a croissant?”
Jon huffs out a breath and nods. He finishes off his mug and passes it between his hands, feeling stupid and sullen.
Tom turns on the toaster oven and pulls jam out of the fridge. He leans his hips on the counter and crosses his arms and says, “You know, whatever’s going on. It’s not fair to be pissed at him if you’re not going to tell him.”
Jon doesn’t answer. He has held off on being angry for so long that it feels too good to let go. It sure as hell feels better than being sad. Or hurt. Or humiliated.
The timer dings and wordlessly Tom pulls out Jon’s croissant and butters it and spoons some jam on it and put it on a tea saucer beside Jon’s mug. “I’ll drive you back to the bus in the morning,” Tom says. “Wake me up when you’re ready.”
And he drops his palm on top of Jon’s head, gentle, as he heads down the hall to his bedroom.
Jon stays at the kitchen table, eating his warm pastry under the hood light from the stove and feeling, if not right, then at least self-righteous.
--
It’s not weird at all on the bus when Jon climbs on in the morning. Ryan and Spencer are still asleep, Brendon says. He’s in his pajamas, eating a miniature box of Frosted Flakes and soy milk and watching Avril Lavigne on MTV. The driver is fiddling around on his radio, and pretty soon the convoy starts rolling out.
Jon sits on the couch and stares out the window as they merge onto the Kennedy Expressway. Just a hundred miles north to Milwaukee, that’s all. Same lake, even. Same black waves at night.
Still, Jon feels sick for leaving. Even though there’s nowhere to stay, nothing to do here, he hates leaving.
Ryan comes out after a while, looking pale and disgruntled in last night’s pants. But he raises his eyebrows at Jon, mild and curious. “Where’d you go last night? You didn’t answer your phone.”
Jon shrugs, apologetic. “I ended up crashing at Tom’s,” he says.
Brendon says, “You missed a good party.”
And Ryan snorts, more bitter than mirthful.
“What?” Brendon tilts his head back to examine Ryan’s face, “It was fine.”
Ryan shakes his head. “Yeah, you didn’t have to spend half the night convincing Amanda Palmer that beating up Spencer is a) unnecessary and b) totally an unfair fight.”
“What?” says Jon. “Why?”
“She was pissed about something with Brian. I don’t know. It was unclear.” Ryan shrugs and rummages through Brendon’s stash for another box of cereal.
“Hey,” Brendon protests, half-heartedly.
Ryan doesn’t have a very good poker face, Jon decides as he watches him shovel cereal into his mouth. But then, Spencer’s sex life isn’t exactly standard breakfast conversation for them, so maybe ignoring the issue is the better choice anyway. Because what are they going to do about it, really? He’s an adult. He’s making his own decisions. Jon tells himself that, and wishes that he could believe it.
--
They pull into Summerfest in Milwaukee and the entire place is a gongshow. The back gate is a mess of clueless, radioless staffers consulting lists on clipboards and Boink hasn’t even unloaded a single guitar before he’s arguing with some backstage autocrat about the rider and the fact that the tour’s guy isn’t allowed to touch the festival’s lightboard. It’s eleven a.m. when they pull in and by eleven-thirty they’ve decided to just nix the set pieces and the lights and hope to god their sound is at least half-decent given that their soundcheck is cancelled because the doors are about to open and god forbid the audience see something they haven’t paid through the nose for.
Jon is not interested in helping Boink or Spencer yell at anyone, so he just hides backstage in the hospitality tent eating hotdogs off the grill and making small talk with the people milling around back there. Mostly it’s other musicians and their friends and kids and family and roadies and in a lot of ways it feels like he’s wandered into someone’s backyard barbecue. It’s actually kind of nice.
He’s standing around with a beer - it’s almost noon, right? - and his third hotdog listening to Carrie Underwood’s tour drummer tell war stories from his days working for Santana. The guy’s young enough that those days were probably one week last summer doing emergency backup on the southwestern festival circuit, but he tells a good story, so Jon tries to look impressed.
Brendon comes to join them, looking morose with a can of Red Bull and a handful of broccoli. The drummer, whose name is Nolan, gives Brendon a quick twice-over, which is enough to answer Jon’s pressing question about Nolan’s preference in makeout partners - evidently guys are okay, but only ones with pretty faces - which suits Jon just fine because Nolan is tall and slim and has hawkish hazel eyes and immaculate bedhead and makes Jon feel like a squat little troll anyway. So Brendon can have him.
But Brendon’s not interested in flirting, even in his usual happy, oblivious way. He just chews his vegetables while Jon introduces Nolan, and then pronounces to Jon, like the guy isn’t even standing there, “So it’s possible that this show could be terrible. Ryan says it’s ninety-three percent guaranteed to be terrible.”
“Oh,” says Jon, already knowing that he doesn’t want to know why.
“Yeah,” says Brendon. He gives a long glance back at the stage, half-visible through the opaque scrim hanging from the trusses. The first band is about to start their set. The amphitheater beyond is littered with people.
Nolan smacks Brendon on the shoulder, and gestures towards the girls staffing the kegs beside the grill: “C’mon, have a couple beers and it won’t be half as bad. When are you guys on, anyway?”
“Nine or so,” Jon says, trying not to sound too much like the smug headliner he is.
“Oh yeah?” says Nolan, doing a crap job of not sounding more interested, all of a sudden. “Plenty of time to get what, half a keg in? C’mon, boys.”
But Brendon, evidently feeling the pressure, turns his most Mormon gaze on the guy and says, “No, thanks” in a soft voice.
Jon wants to wince, he hasn’t seen Brendon shut anyone down that hard, ever.
Nolan blinks for a blank second and then shrugs and says, “Well, good luck anyway,” and heads over to the girls on his own. Probably they’ll care about his Santana days even more than Jon did. That fauxhawk breeds interest better than any comedic anecdote.
Jon watches him go, and takes the piece of broccoli that Brendon offers.
“So incidentally, we are so fucked,” says Ryan, appearing between them.
“Are we?” asks Jon, hoping maybe he can persuade Ryan otherwise. “Really?”
“I need a fucking beer,” says Ryan, making no move towards the keg girls, just kind of glaring at them.
“Ha,” says Jon, voice a little weak.
“I have more Red Bull on the bus,” Brendon offers.
“Fucking jesus christ,” says Ryan, turning away to face the stage again like the keg girls have deeply offended him by not coming over to ply him with plastic cups and cheap, warm beer. Then he announces: “Spencer told the dancers that they were off for the night.”
“What? Why?” Brendon’s head snaps over.
“I don’t know,” Ryan rolls his eyes. His voice is flat and acidic: “Maybe because the show is already falling apart so he thought that we may as well just get rid of the last vestiges of any class or originality we ever had.”
“Is that how he put it?” Jon kind of doubts it.
“No. He said that they were inappropriate for the crowd and that we should just play a straight set like everyone else at this shitshow of mediocrity.”
Jon suspects that this statement is also embellished.
“But we’re the headliners,” says Brendon. “I mean, not to sound - you know, or whatever - but we’re kind of supposed to do the lights and the guitar solos and all that.”
“Not according to Spencer Smith,” Ryan’s smile is pointed sharp with sarcasm. “According to him, we should just keep our heads down and hope no one throws garbage at our boring-ass pop rock selves.”
Jon has never heard Ryan say anything, anything, bitchy about Spencer behind his back before. And Ryan says a lot of bitchy stuff. It’s weird, honestly. Like hearing his mom complaining about how his dad gives head. Jon’s not prepared for it. He doesn’t want to hear it.
But at the same time, he sees why Ryan’s pissed. They need the dancers - it’s part of their thing, and Jon’s not exactly ready to perform without a much better-looking person in a tutu standing beside him to absorb some of the crowd’s attention. “So where are they?” he asks. “Let’s tell them they’re still on.”
“Boink says they’re not backstage. He’s got Mitch looking around. But if they’re out in the crowd then-” Ryan shrugs. He looks hot and tired and frustrated.
Jon glances out past the stage again. The amphitheater is filling up fast. There are thousands of people out there, and then there’s the smaller stages and the beer tents and the food kiosks and the merch booths beyond. “No way would they go out there,” he says. “They must be around the buses or something.”
Ryan shakes his head, “Or they just left. Maybe they went to see a movie.”
“All of them? Sara and Ann and everyone?” Brendon puts in dubiously, “As if they’re hanging out together.”
“Yeah,” Ryan agrees, voice tight: “They’re probably as sick of each other as we are.”
This is the moment Spencer chooses to show up. He doesn’t look apologetic. He doesn’t even look conciliatory. He looks totally stone-faced, and he definitely heard Ryan’s last snitty comment. “So you guys are all pissed, then?” he asks, like he caught them smoking up behind the bus without inviting him.
“Yeah,” Jon says, surprised to hear himself speak. “Seems that way.”
Spencer doesn’t turn to acknowledge him, he’s just looking at Ryan. He ticks items off on his fingers: “We don’t have our own lights. We don’t have the set. The smoke machine won’t do shit outside. Having dancers is just going to make us look like half-assed rappers.”
“So we should get rid of the costumes, too, then?” Brendon asks, and it’s not exactly an honest question. He sounds just as brittle as Spencer. “If we’re getting rid of everything else?”
“I don’t care,” says Spencer. “Wear whatever you want. There are three hundred other bands here - these people aren’t here to look at us.”
“It’s part of our act,” Ryan jabs in. “It’s all part of the fucking act that we’ve been doing every night for the last month.”
“Yeah, well these aren’t our regular fans,” Spencer says. He raises a scathing eyebrow, “No one here cares about your artistic vision, Ryan.”
“You still shouldn’t have made that decision by yourself. It wasn’t your call.” Jon, again, is totally surprised to hear himself speak up. But Ryan is evidently choking on Spencer’s comment and Jon feels like it’s his duty to make some kind of adult, professional point, here.
Spencer snaps his head to look at Jon. He doesn’t look like he considers Jon to be adult or professional at all. “None of you were standing around trying to get us a soundcheck or figure out the lighting specs,” he says. “You all fucked off, and to be honest I thought they could use a break.”
“Oh, man,” Brendon rolls his eyes. Maybe at Spencer, maybe at all of them.
“You still could have checked with the rest of us,” Jon maintains, trying to stand his ground despite how shaky everything’s suddenly gotten. He’s shoved his hands in his armpits to stop them from shaking. He fucking hates conflict, he can’t handle it. He knows he’s right but he knows that in a second Spencer’s going to say something that will just eviscerate his argument and leave him speechless and stupid.
Jon knows this, and so he strikes, pre-emptive, with a bitter little voice: “Maybe you have your own priorities now or whatever, but it would’ve taken two seconds to text Ryan.”
Spencer’s glare is so icy Jon can feel it in the drop of his stomach. Spencer says, all calm, “My own priorities? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jon shakes his head, lowers his eyes. “I don’t know. Forget it.”
Spencer stares at him, waiting him out.
In his peripheral vision, Jon can see Ryan shake his head. “Jesus, Spencer. You know what he means.”
“Spell it out for me,” Spencer says, low.
There is a silence. Suddenly Jon realizes that the band onstage is halfway through their set, and all the conversations around them are being shouted and he’s standing in the middle of the hospitality tent having a totally public argument with his band and it just makes him want to crawl into a hole somewhere, curl up into something tiny and invisible.
No one’s saying anything. Spencer’s still staring at him. Jon doesn’t feel any less angry for all his mortification. In fact, Spencer’s expression - flat and dismissive and iced over - makes him even more furious.
Jon shrugs, and says, smooth like maybe he actually thought this out and isn’t just saying the most spiteful thing that comes to mind: “I just meant that maybe you should spend less time thinking about who you’re going to fuck next and more time thinking about what’s best for the band.”
Spencer’s eyes are on the ground, his face drawn tight and blank. He nods his head once as Jon finishes - at best for the band - and then he pauses like he might say something, and then his head tilts at a funny angle, and he walks away.
He goes. No word of contradiction. He slips past Brendon without brushing him, and makes his way through the noisy, increasingly drunken crowd that’s stood oblivious witness to this whole idiotic showdown.
It’s not the reaction Jon envisioned. If he’d planned that far - maybe as he was falling asleep on Tom’s couch, with an eloquent, sympathetic appeal on Jon’s part and a crush of shame and regret and confessed love on Spencer’s - this was not it.
Jon doesn’t even want to look at Ryan or Brendon. “Fuck,” he mutters, glaring at the ground.
They don’t say anything. When Jon finally looks up, the two of them are exchanging a loaded glance. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Jon says.
“Probably not like that,” Ryan mutters.
“It’s not even true,” Brendon points out. “I mean, not really.”
Jon doesn’t argue. There are things that he knows are true, and those are the things he should’ve said.
But he didn’t say any of them. He doesn’t have the courage to say any of them.
--
It’s Spencer who rounds up Sara and Ann, at least, if not the others. Who knows where the hell the rest of them went. But the girls are there in their ragged skirts at 8:45 when everyone gathers to wait in the shadows behind the scrims and the sub-woofers.
And they play the show without the lights or the soundcheck and the crowd is so, so drunk and so rowdy it’s impossible to tell if half of them even notice the dancers or if they’re all just there to start a mosh pit in the middle of the first song they recognize from the radio.
It’s now an irrelevant argument whether the dancers are necessary. Equally defunct: whether the show is terrible. Who in the crowd will notice one way or another if Jon skips a bar here or there or Brendon drifts off-key? Spencer just bangs away in the back, regardless of whether anyone’s keeping up or not.
The audience is uniformly wasted. They roar their approval between songs as the standard bank of headlights flashes slow oranges and hot pinks entirely off-beat and the smoke machine putts away in the background.
The show sucks. No one cares.
At the end of the night, as Jon steps down into the trampled grass backstage, he looks around and notes that the people back here aren’t any better-behaved than the paying ones up front. Whatever kind of professionalism keeps vocalists in their bunks early in the evening and roadies sober for load-out and musicians aware of where their gear is getting stacked has apparently evaporated in the too-bright stadium lighting.
Above the white glare of the floodlights, the sky is a deep, aquarium blue. The air is full of smoke and hazy with the din of the dissipating crowd, and the shouted conversations of the closer one. There is canned music playing over the speakers - something pop-rocky from the mid-90s. There are waves of exhausted-looking festival staff passing over the grounds picking up trampled cups and hosing away messes and clearing out drunks.
Jon pauses, not sure what to do with himself. He can’t see Spencer: he was the first one offstage and now he’s already evaporated into the crowd. Brendon is over scanning the decimated food table with the dancers and Ryan’s been corralled into a conversation with one of the mid-afternoon acts even though he looks irate and twitchy. As Jon stands there, trying to decide if he’s even capable of a conversation, someone comes by and presses a sweating green bottle of beer into his palm.
“Jon Walker,” Mitch says. “I’m making it my personal mission to get you trashed tonight.”
He’s not kidding: Mitch actually stands there and make sure Jon swills the bottle fast so that he can hand him another one. It’s not the cheap draft shit provided by the festival, but a truckload of actual-fact bottled imports. Pilfered, Jon would guess, from the back of a tent somewhere.
Jon is obliging, relieved to not have to choose what to do with himself, though he can’t help snorting when a third bottle makes it into his second hand with a confidential eyebrow quirk and a sly smile.
Mitch is a good guy, Jon knows. He’s funny and people like him and he never complains about dumb shit. He learned to eat fire when his hippie parents brought him to Burning Man as a teenager. He has a master’s degree in something liberal artsy and he’s at least thirty and not much taller than Jon but with an acrobat’s body and he has really, really blue eyes and short blonde hair that sticks up in the back. “Hey,” Jon says as he finishes the second bottle and starts the third, “I finished that book you lent me.”
Mitch grins. “So you liked it?”
Jon is honest: “It was depressing as hell.”
“Yeah,” Mitch nods, “Social conservatism is like that. All good gays must come to an end and all that.”
Jon laughs. He doesn’t want to talk about it much, just in case it turns out he missed the entire point of the novel or something and comes off looking like an idiot. Also, that word said out loud - gay - still makes him fumbly and uncomfortable. And also, he has a weird suspicion that Mitch is hitting on him.
Mitch is pretty astute, though, and graciously changes the subject as Jon puts a hand to the back of his sweaty neck. “So what happened tonight?” he asks. “You guys seemed off.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jon says, and grimaces. This topic isn’t much better, but the beer is working on his tongue and his brain and it all doesn’t seem so bad right now. “It’s just stupid stuff. You know, totally high school. We’ll get over it.”
“Ah, high school. You guys are barely out of it, aren’t you?” Mitch is baiting him, a glint in his eye.
“A couple of years,” Jon admits, slightly shame-faced about it. God, he hates being younger than everyone. Everyone except Ryan and Spencer and Brendon, anyway. Old enough to know how young they all are. Smart enough to know how stupid. And so on.
Mitch doesn’t seem to hold it against him. “Touring is hard on everyone,” he shrugs. “You’ll figure it out. It’s impressive you guys have gotten this far without any major blowouts.”
“I don’t know how you missed them,” Jon knows he’s being a downer, tries to shake it off. He takes a swig from his beer, empties it, and finds another cold bottle in his hand. “God,” he says. “You really are going to get me drunk.”
Mitch raises his eyebrows, all innocence. “It’s part of my strategy.”
Jon says, “What strategy?”
And Mitch says, “To convince you to let me kiss you.”
“Ha,” Jon squeaks. He darts his gaze away and then back to Mitch’s face: amused and confident and totally focused. “That’s some pickup line.”
“I do my best work on the fly,” Mitch confesses. And then he leans forward and kisses Jon.
Jon has never kissed a guy in public before. And this is really, really public. His spine stiffens and he’s aware that he’s not really performing his best because he’s burning with a full-body blush of terror and embarrassment and he’s wondering who is watching and where his band is - where Spencer is - and whether there are any social conservatives hanging around ready to form a lynch mob for a couple of uppity homos touching body parts in public. It turns out that Mitch tastes like the Heineken he’s been plying Jon with. It turns out that Mitch’s tongue knows what it’s doing. Jon is petrified.
Mitch notices. He breaks off, his smile a little more hesitant as he meets Jon’s eyes. “Maybe another beer?” he suggests, self-deprecating like he’d be pretty understanding if Jon said no. To the beer or the kiss.
“No,” Jon shakes his head. He’s resisting the urge to look around, guilty as a criminal. He’s trying so hard to process this. He looks at Mitch’s face and thinks his name - Mitch, fire-eater Mitch - and wonders where the fuck this came from. Why he didn’t see it coming. “No, I don’t need another beer,” Jon says.
He leans over and kisses Mitch back.
They leave the empty beer bottles on the grass where they were standing, almost a dozen between them. Mitch’s tongue in Jon’s mouth convinces him that they need to go somewhere else. Somewhere darker and louder.
Despite his protests, Mitch passes Jon another armful of bottles to take with them, saying, “This is definitely the only decent beer you will see all night, we can’t just abandon it.”
They make it maybe twenty feet away. Part of Jon’s mind nags him to shuffle along further, find somewhere where no one will see them, but heading to the buses is kind of a charged statement and it turns out that the area under the stage on the other side of the loading ramp is almost private. Besides a handful of mid-career groupies smoking up and whatever can be seen through the security fence from the amphitheatre, it’s kind of nice.
Mitch grins at him as he cracks another bottle and takes a swig. “You’re not very good at being out, are you?” he asks, the question seeming way too personal but also kind of pragmatic, now that they’ve put their mouths on each other in front of everyone. Everyone which maybe includes Spencer, Jon can’t help thinking.
Jon shakes his head, shrugs, examines the next bottle Mitch hands him. He tries to imagine Spencer’s reaction to seeing Jon making out with some other dude and fails. “Not really,” he says. “I mean, I never deny it.”
Mitch gives a little laugh, like Jon just said something terrible and sad. “So how many people have you actually come out to, then? Or do you just make everyone guess? And for future reference: you are very lucky that I am an excellent guesser.”
“I guess I am lucky,” says Jon. And he should maybe be ashamed of this, but instead of letting Mitch grill him more on his lack of out-and-proud lifestyle choices, and instead of letting himself dwell on whether or not he wants Spencer Smith to be jealous, he steps forward and presses his body against Mitch’s and lets the conversation continue in silence.
He runs his hands up Mitch’s ribcage and shudders when Mitch’s fingers dip under the damp hem of his shirt to rub the base of his spine and then trail around over his hipbones. Mitch’s skin smells like sunlight and sweat and his mouth is just slightly chilled and they are both a little clumsy, now, a little fumbling.
Maybe Jon lets it go too far.
Maybe the kissing gets a little urgent. Maybe Jon’s decision-making skills go out the window because he is a little drunker than he thought and Mitch smiles at him in this blithe, dreamy way whenever they break apart and look at each other in the blue half-light. Mitch murmurs things in Jon’s ear that make Jon feel like a prize long desired. He is wanted. He is admired. He is hard in his pants and he suspects that Mitch will go down on him if he asks.
Mitch goes down on him before Jon asks.
Mitch is on his knees in the dead grass and sawdust. Jon has his back pressed up against a girder, head bowed to avoid the plywood decking above. Mitch’s fingers are working at Jon’s belt buckle, backwards, and Jon is panting through his mouth, which is suddenly dry.
“Is this going to make things weird?” Jon blurts, the words out of his mouth before he even thinks them.
Mitch looks up. He’s made it past the buckle, he’s got three enterprising fingers looped in Jon’s waistband. “Weird?” he repeats. “Would what get weird?”
Jon’s got an image in his head: Spencer flinching away from Brian’s affectionate arm at the afterparty in Chicago. “Like, between us,” he struggles with the words, which are uncooperative and make him sound like a scared virgin and also an asshole. “What would it mean?”
Mitch grins, like he suddenly understands what Jon’s getting at, and he finds it amusing. “It would mean I gave you a blowjob once. How weird does that sound to you?”
Jon blinks. There’s another image in his head: Andy the keyboardist plucking Spencer’s suspender like a harp string and murmuring something that makes Spencer smile back slow and wicked.
It sounds pretty fucking weird to Jon.
“I can’t,” he says. “I just.”
Mitch looks surprised. He doesn’t rise from his knees. “Hey, look,” he says, in a tone that is gentle and calming but also guaranteed to change Jon’s mind if he lets it go on.
“I don’t want to pretend this is something it’s not,” Jon tells him, absolutely sure.
“I’m not-” Mitch starts, his smile starting to look more bewildered.
“Yeah, but I am,” Jon cuts him off, knowing that he’s being too blunt, that this guy doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment. But Jon can’t let himself waver. He buckles up his belt. “I’m really sorry,” he says, and means it.
Mitch rolls back to the balls of his feet, pushes himself up fluidly. “Alright,” he says, watching Jon’s hands. “I don’t really…”
Jon takes a breath and gives him a smile that stutters like a scratched record.
Mitch nods. “Yeah, okay. You’re sure.” He glances towards the rest of the backstage area, barely visible between the stage’s struts, and then bends forward and gives Jon a soft kiss that lasts too long to be called quick. When he pulls back he looks like he maybe wants to give Jon some advice. But he just says, “No hard feelings, hey?”
Then he goes.
Jon stays under the stage for a while longer. He twists open another beer. Then he changes his mind and watches the liquid pour out onto the ground from the upended bottle.
He has another image in his mind: Spencer three miles down the West Side Highway, sweaty and disheveled and panting. Spencer grinning under the yellow sodium lights, washed out and dark-eyed, the river and the city glinting behind him.
(part three)
When they get to Chicago late in the afternoon, Jon goes home. He has a few hours before soundcheck and no way can he stay on the bus: it’s been a fucking house of horrors in there since Richard called, with Ryan watching through slit eyes for any sign of life to leap on and tear apart and Brendon snarling back at him like a cornered cat, and Spencer just. Gone. Jon hasn’t seen him since last night, and he feels it in his jaw and across his shoulders, the anxiety of waiting for the next conversation where they’ll pretend like Jon isn’t a fucking idiot, and that everything is totally fine.
It’s a relief when Mike picks him up from the parking lot at the House of Blues, driving his shitty old Civic with a pile of unnamable machinery in the back seat. At home, Dad makes grilled cheese sandwiches and Bill comes up from the basement and they all sit around talking about Jon’s tour and the new fridge and how work is going. There are a few coded comments about Bill’s thesis and what Jon’s plans are come the fall. “It’s not too late to apply to school here,” Mom says. “University of Chicago has a waitlist.”
Jon doesn’t say anything about the contracts he signed, even though Mike makes eyebrows at him. Mike knows where the myspace page is, he probably saw the change in the sidebar. But Jon doesn’t want to get any crap about it and he doesn’t want to pull the papers out of his bag and go over them in his dad’s office and get lectured about how he doesn’t think about his future enough. He doesn’t think enough, period.
So he doesn’t argue when it gets implied that he’ll be home in August. Jon just eats his sandwich and wonders if it’ll make any difference when they see the show tonight.
When Mike drops him off again a few hours later, Jon gives him the handful of passes he pestered out of the promoter. Mike puts them in his breast pocket and says, “So where’s the afterparty going to be?”
And Jon laughs like it’s a joke but Mike just waits and so Jon says, “I don’t know. Come find me backstage.”
Mike smirks at him over the gearshift and says, “Can I tell them we’re with the band?”
--
Conrad and the guys from Academy are in town for the week and so they show up, and the whole crowd from high school, and Mike brings his girlfriend and Bill shows up with the folks in tow and Jon hides backstage beforehand trying not to freak out so much that his palms get sweaty. He hates playing with sweaty hands. He has corn starch in his duffel just in case, but still, he spends twenty minutes pressed against the wall in a dark, mirrored hallway trying to avoid his reflection and promising himself he’s not going to skip out under the EXIT sign no matter how much he wants to.
He loves them all, he does, and he’s so excited for them to be there but he is very well-acquainted with the role of replacement bassist: tertiary and shadowy. Especially in the face of Brendon’s showmanship and Ryan’s fucking rose vest and the eight hundred dancers on stage with them. Mitch eats fire - can’t they send him out, instead?
Jon is just not okay with having people there to see him. It’s alright if people look at him occasionally as they take in the show and revel in the theatrics and maybe glance over to stage left halfway through the set - that’s absolutely fine. But this isn’t the same. These are people who’ve come to see him. And it’s scary as hell.
When the call comes, he finds Ryan and Brendon and Spencer standing in a semicircle in the wings, waiting for Boink to give them the okay. They aren’t looking at each other. No one has anything to say.
But like every other night, they head onstage, and they play.
Brendon’s stage banter is off. Spencer misses a cue and recovers a bar later. Jon plows through the setlist without looking up from his fretboard once. He can hear that Ryan is doing the same thing.
They sound terrible. At least, comparatively. There have been good shows, way better shows. And this isn’t one of them.
The audience doesn’t seem to care. They want two encores. Jon feels so guilty when they come out for the second one - the non-obligatory one - that he actually makes eye contact with Spencer to get the beat drop for Build God dead on.
He regrets it as soon as it happens - a flash of blue eyes under sweaty bangs - but the song works better than the whole show up to that point. The crowd loses it.
They file offstage as the lights go down and standing in the wings they can feel the whole building shaking with the screaming.
And maybe it was because it ended so well, but no one backstage says a word about the show sucking. Not even Tom, usually reliable on that front, who stakes out a spot beside Jon on the couch and coaches him through two shotgunned pints of draft beer before his parents and brothers show up.
And thank god, because Jon needs the fortification. He has to tour them all around, of course. They peek out at the stage and Mike interrupts Boink’s guys as they’re packing up the cabling and the amps so he can strum a few chords on Jon’s Fender to the empty dance floor. Then Mom says, “You certainly seem to have a lot of fans,” as they’re standing there on the taped-up dirty stage at 12:15 a.m. and it may or may not be a compliment.
“They’re not mine,” Jon tells her, snapping his case shut again. “They’re here for the band.”
He shows them the buses and everyone exclaims over how tiny his bunk is and Mike makes a joke about Jon not using it for much anyway and Bill goes “Oh, snap” in a totally unironic way that means all the jokes from then on are at his expense. Jon soldiers on, introducing his family to everyone that they stumble across and Jon doesn’t forget anyone’s name and overall it’s okay. Everything is okay. Brendon is spectacularly polite and charming and Ryan’s gaze may be dark but he thanks Jon’s parents sincerely for coming and Spencer - well, Spencer has disappeared again and is nowhere to be found so yeah. It’s fine.
They make it back to the party, which is now spilling out of the green room and into the bar proper. They’ve lost Mike and his girlfriend somewhere along the way. Jon gets his dad a beer - or gets Tom to get his dad a beer, for appearances’ sake - and stands with his shoulders hunched, waiting for the man to weigh in. As he always does.
“This is a big operation, son,” his dad says, eventually. “Good to see you pulling your weight around here.”
Jon’s standard response to his dad’s pronouncements is a shrug and a nod, and that’s what the man gets this time, too. Jon knows it makes him look ungrateful, apathetic, childish. But arguing has never gotten him anywhere, and honesty isn’t really a thing in their family. Jon just says, “Thanks, dad. I’m glad you think so.”
And it’s as he’s saying this to his father - accepting whatever approval he can scrounge - that Spencer shows up.
Jon wishes to god that it didn’t make a difference to him where Spencer was, but the truth is that whenever Spencer is or isn’t someplace, Jon notices. And Spencer’s been gone so often lately that every time he appears it feels like an event. Out of the corner of his eye, Jon sees Ryan’s head swivel as Spencer makes his way across the room.
Spencer is freshly showered, changed into a boat-necked tee that clings tight and those goddamn jeans. He looks beautiful and clean. He looks tiny next to Brian, who is still wearing his bowler and his clown makeup from the show.
Brian, who puts his arm around Spencer’s shoulders and grins a greeting.
It’s pretty much instantaneous. The gesture was casual and affectionate, totally normal for Brian. But Spencer’s shoulders go up and the look on his face as he flinches away is so gut-level, so rattled, that it’s pretty obvious to anyone watching exactly what happened.
It’s perfectly obvious to Jon, anyway, who knows firsthand how Spencer likes to treat his conquests after the fact. Namely like they’re carrying the plague.
Jon’s mom is asking him a question about the rest of the tour, and Jon has to apologize. He says, “Sorry, I wasn’t-” and then, as his brain belatedly supplies the answer, he finishes: “No. No, not August. We’re going to Europe on the 17th. I’m not coming home until September. Maybe September.”
And as his mom makes a shocked little sound and his dad’s eyebrows go up, Jon says, “I have to go. I’ll be right back.”
And he leaves them there. He leaves everyone there.
--
Thank god it’s Chicago. Thank god he can catch a bus and know where it’s going and where to transfer and how to get to the north shore in forty-five minutes flat at this time of night. Thank god he knows where to hop off so that he can walk along the ragged crumbling concrete of the North Avenue Pier to find that perfect spot along its curve where across the bay you can see the whole city spread smudged in black and gold against a milky smog of pinkish sky.
Thank god he knows exactly where to go to feel sixteen and unsure of everything, everything, and have the black water chop under his dangling feet.
Thank god he has somewhere to hide, for once.
--
Tom texts him at three a.m. and says, if you aren’t going back you can crash at my place and as soon as Jon gets it he walks to the road and catches a bus back downtown, because the wind is picking up and if there is anyone who is decent in this world, it’s Tom.
Tom is waiting up in his kitchen when Jon raps on the door. He’s drinking coffee and there’s more in the pot. The lights down the hall are dim, there’s a blanket folded on the couch. Tom is such a fucking grandma. Jon pours himself a coffee without asking, then he sits down at Tom’s table and drinks the sludge black.
“Your folks are kind of pissed.” Tom rubs at his nose. Yawns.
“I went to get some air,” says Jon.
That statement makes Tom chortle, like he can just imagine giving everyone that excuse. “I told them you were probably out signing autographs.”
Jon puts an elbow on the table and his forehead in the crook of it. “You’re such a dick.”
Tom shrugs and swallows more coffee. He continues to watch Jon watch the tabletop.
Tom waits a good while before he asks. “So why’d you leave?”
Having known this question was coming, these are the points Jon considers before answering: First, Tom’s weakness for gossip. Second, Tom’s relationships with the rest of the band. Third, Tom’s relationship with Pete. Fourth, Tom’s motivation to keep his mouth shut: i.e., the time Tom stole his manager’s Vespa and accidentally trashed it and Jon didn’t tell; i.e., the time Tom got really wasted and puked all over his parents’ bedroom and Jon cleaned it up before they came home. Fifth, Tom’s reaction when Jon came out to him in the bathroom at a friend’s junior prom houseparty. Sixth, Tom’s reaction when Jon told him that he was going to ask a guy from work out. Seventh, Tom’s reaction when Jon told him that the guy from work had sucked him off in the supply closet after closing shift.
Mostly, though, Jon just considers Tom’s constant, wordless, bone-deep loyalty.
Jon lifts his head off the table. Rubs his thumb deep into his eye socket like he could maybe get at the headache in there. Eyes squeezed shut, he sighs and says, “I’m in love with Spencer.”
Tom looks down at the coffee in his mug. “I wish I’d timed that better. I could’ve done a spit take.”
Jon snorts. But when he glances sideways, Tom’s expression isn’t particularly jovial. In fact, he looks more like Jon just told him his second-best amp got stolen at their last show. Sympathetic. Ready to beat someone up, in the unlikely event that it’s necessary. But mostly it’s just shrug-your-shoulders, what-you-gonna-do-about-it, these-things-happen. Tom gnaws his lip, considering the facts, and says: “So I guess Spencer isn’t aware of that fact.”
Jon just shakes his head. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“So you’re not gonna tell him, either,” the way Tom says it, it sounds like a stupid decision.
“He’s not interested,” Jon still does not want to talk about it, but somehow the words just leak out of him.
“He told you that?”
“No. He just. It’s become apparent.” Jon grates it out.
Tom looks unconvinced.
“And it’s not the same,” Jon continues, looking up at Tom, suddenly clear on something. “He’s not the same since the spring tour. You wouldn’t even - he’s just been acting totally differently than how he used to be.”
“So?” says Tom, like Spencer’s different is still everyone else’s really truly excellent.
“So he’s being an asshole,” Jon snaps, so fast it seems like the anger was there waiting in his lungs all along. And suddenly he can’t stop himself from going on. He lists Spencer’s infractions: “He’s messing around with half the guys on the tour and making shit really awkward because of it, and he’s drinking and he’s disappearing all the time and whatever, maybe it’s none of my business but even if I didn’t care and things were totally normal I’d still be pissed because he’s being a shitty bandmate.”
Tom takes a swallow of his coffee. He eyes Jon for a while, like he’s not exactly sure what to say. Or maybe he’s entirely sure, but he knows that it would be entirely unappreciated. So instead, after forever, he says, “You want a croissant?”
Jon huffs out a breath and nods. He finishes off his mug and passes it between his hands, feeling stupid and sullen.
Tom turns on the toaster oven and pulls jam out of the fridge. He leans his hips on the counter and crosses his arms and says, “You know, whatever’s going on. It’s not fair to be pissed at him if you’re not going to tell him.”
Jon doesn’t answer. He has held off on being angry for so long that it feels too good to let go. It sure as hell feels better than being sad. Or hurt. Or humiliated.
The timer dings and wordlessly Tom pulls out Jon’s croissant and butters it and spoons some jam on it and put it on a tea saucer beside Jon’s mug. “I’ll drive you back to the bus in the morning,” Tom says. “Wake me up when you’re ready.”
And he drops his palm on top of Jon’s head, gentle, as he heads down the hall to his bedroom.
Jon stays at the kitchen table, eating his warm pastry under the hood light from the stove and feeling, if not right, then at least self-righteous.
--
It’s not weird at all on the bus when Jon climbs on in the morning. Ryan and Spencer are still asleep, Brendon says. He’s in his pajamas, eating a miniature box of Frosted Flakes and soy milk and watching Avril Lavigne on MTV. The driver is fiddling around on his radio, and pretty soon the convoy starts rolling out.
Jon sits on the couch and stares out the window as they merge onto the Kennedy Expressway. Just a hundred miles north to Milwaukee, that’s all. Same lake, even. Same black waves at night.
Still, Jon feels sick for leaving. Even though there’s nowhere to stay, nothing to do here, he hates leaving.
Ryan comes out after a while, looking pale and disgruntled in last night’s pants. But he raises his eyebrows at Jon, mild and curious. “Where’d you go last night? You didn’t answer your phone.”
Jon shrugs, apologetic. “I ended up crashing at Tom’s,” he says.
Brendon says, “You missed a good party.”
And Ryan snorts, more bitter than mirthful.
“What?” Brendon tilts his head back to examine Ryan’s face, “It was fine.”
Ryan shakes his head. “Yeah, you didn’t have to spend half the night convincing Amanda Palmer that beating up Spencer is a) unnecessary and b) totally an unfair fight.”
“What?” says Jon. “Why?”
“She was pissed about something with Brian. I don’t know. It was unclear.” Ryan shrugs and rummages through Brendon’s stash for another box of cereal.
“Hey,” Brendon protests, half-heartedly.
Ryan doesn’t have a very good poker face, Jon decides as he watches him shovel cereal into his mouth. But then, Spencer’s sex life isn’t exactly standard breakfast conversation for them, so maybe ignoring the issue is the better choice anyway. Because what are they going to do about it, really? He’s an adult. He’s making his own decisions. Jon tells himself that, and wishes that he could believe it.
--
They pull into Summerfest in Milwaukee and the entire place is a gongshow. The back gate is a mess of clueless, radioless staffers consulting lists on clipboards and Boink hasn’t even unloaded a single guitar before he’s arguing with some backstage autocrat about the rider and the fact that the tour’s guy isn’t allowed to touch the festival’s lightboard. It’s eleven a.m. when they pull in and by eleven-thirty they’ve decided to just nix the set pieces and the lights and hope to god their sound is at least half-decent given that their soundcheck is cancelled because the doors are about to open and god forbid the audience see something they haven’t paid through the nose for.
Jon is not interested in helping Boink or Spencer yell at anyone, so he just hides backstage in the hospitality tent eating hotdogs off the grill and making small talk with the people milling around back there. Mostly it’s other musicians and their friends and kids and family and roadies and in a lot of ways it feels like he’s wandered into someone’s backyard barbecue. It’s actually kind of nice.
He’s standing around with a beer - it’s almost noon, right? - and his third hotdog listening to Carrie Underwood’s tour drummer tell war stories from his days working for Santana. The guy’s young enough that those days were probably one week last summer doing emergency backup on the southwestern festival circuit, but he tells a good story, so Jon tries to look impressed.
Brendon comes to join them, looking morose with a can of Red Bull and a handful of broccoli. The drummer, whose name is Nolan, gives Brendon a quick twice-over, which is enough to answer Jon’s pressing question about Nolan’s preference in makeout partners - evidently guys are okay, but only ones with pretty faces - which suits Jon just fine because Nolan is tall and slim and has hawkish hazel eyes and immaculate bedhead and makes Jon feel like a squat little troll anyway. So Brendon can have him.
But Brendon’s not interested in flirting, even in his usual happy, oblivious way. He just chews his vegetables while Jon introduces Nolan, and then pronounces to Jon, like the guy isn’t even standing there, “So it’s possible that this show could be terrible. Ryan says it’s ninety-three percent guaranteed to be terrible.”
“Oh,” says Jon, already knowing that he doesn’t want to know why.
“Yeah,” says Brendon. He gives a long glance back at the stage, half-visible through the opaque scrim hanging from the trusses. The first band is about to start their set. The amphitheater beyond is littered with people.
Nolan smacks Brendon on the shoulder, and gestures towards the girls staffing the kegs beside the grill: “C’mon, have a couple beers and it won’t be half as bad. When are you guys on, anyway?”
“Nine or so,” Jon says, trying not to sound too much like the smug headliner he is.
“Oh yeah?” says Nolan, doing a crap job of not sounding more interested, all of a sudden. “Plenty of time to get what, half a keg in? C’mon, boys.”
But Brendon, evidently feeling the pressure, turns his most Mormon gaze on the guy and says, “No, thanks” in a soft voice.
Jon wants to wince, he hasn’t seen Brendon shut anyone down that hard, ever.
Nolan blinks for a blank second and then shrugs and says, “Well, good luck anyway,” and heads over to the girls on his own. Probably they’ll care about his Santana days even more than Jon did. That fauxhawk breeds interest better than any comedic anecdote.
Jon watches him go, and takes the piece of broccoli that Brendon offers.
“So incidentally, we are so fucked,” says Ryan, appearing between them.
“Are we?” asks Jon, hoping maybe he can persuade Ryan otherwise. “Really?”
“I need a fucking beer,” says Ryan, making no move towards the keg girls, just kind of glaring at them.
“Ha,” says Jon, voice a little weak.
“I have more Red Bull on the bus,” Brendon offers.
“Fucking jesus christ,” says Ryan, turning away to face the stage again like the keg girls have deeply offended him by not coming over to ply him with plastic cups and cheap, warm beer. Then he announces: “Spencer told the dancers that they were off for the night.”
“What? Why?” Brendon’s head snaps over.
“I don’t know,” Ryan rolls his eyes. His voice is flat and acidic: “Maybe because the show is already falling apart so he thought that we may as well just get rid of the last vestiges of any class or originality we ever had.”
“Is that how he put it?” Jon kind of doubts it.
“No. He said that they were inappropriate for the crowd and that we should just play a straight set like everyone else at this shitshow of mediocrity.”
Jon suspects that this statement is also embellished.
“But we’re the headliners,” says Brendon. “I mean, not to sound - you know, or whatever - but we’re kind of supposed to do the lights and the guitar solos and all that.”
“Not according to Spencer Smith,” Ryan’s smile is pointed sharp with sarcasm. “According to him, we should just keep our heads down and hope no one throws garbage at our boring-ass pop rock selves.”
Jon has never heard Ryan say anything, anything, bitchy about Spencer behind his back before. And Ryan says a lot of bitchy stuff. It’s weird, honestly. Like hearing his mom complaining about how his dad gives head. Jon’s not prepared for it. He doesn’t want to hear it.
But at the same time, he sees why Ryan’s pissed. They need the dancers - it’s part of their thing, and Jon’s not exactly ready to perform without a much better-looking person in a tutu standing beside him to absorb some of the crowd’s attention. “So where are they?” he asks. “Let’s tell them they’re still on.”
“Boink says they’re not backstage. He’s got Mitch looking around. But if they’re out in the crowd then-” Ryan shrugs. He looks hot and tired and frustrated.
Jon glances out past the stage again. The amphitheater is filling up fast. There are thousands of people out there, and then there’s the smaller stages and the beer tents and the food kiosks and the merch booths beyond. “No way would they go out there,” he says. “They must be around the buses or something.”
Ryan shakes his head, “Or they just left. Maybe they went to see a movie.”
“All of them? Sara and Ann and everyone?” Brendon puts in dubiously, “As if they’re hanging out together.”
“Yeah,” Ryan agrees, voice tight: “They’re probably as sick of each other as we are.”
This is the moment Spencer chooses to show up. He doesn’t look apologetic. He doesn’t even look conciliatory. He looks totally stone-faced, and he definitely heard Ryan’s last snitty comment. “So you guys are all pissed, then?” he asks, like he caught them smoking up behind the bus without inviting him.
“Yeah,” Jon says, surprised to hear himself speak. “Seems that way.”
Spencer doesn’t turn to acknowledge him, he’s just looking at Ryan. He ticks items off on his fingers: “We don’t have our own lights. We don’t have the set. The smoke machine won’t do shit outside. Having dancers is just going to make us look like half-assed rappers.”
“So we should get rid of the costumes, too, then?” Brendon asks, and it’s not exactly an honest question. He sounds just as brittle as Spencer. “If we’re getting rid of everything else?”
“I don’t care,” says Spencer. “Wear whatever you want. There are three hundred other bands here - these people aren’t here to look at us.”
“It’s part of our act,” Ryan jabs in. “It’s all part of the fucking act that we’ve been doing every night for the last month.”
“Yeah, well these aren’t our regular fans,” Spencer says. He raises a scathing eyebrow, “No one here cares about your artistic vision, Ryan.”
“You still shouldn’t have made that decision by yourself. It wasn’t your call.” Jon, again, is totally surprised to hear himself speak up. But Ryan is evidently choking on Spencer’s comment and Jon feels like it’s his duty to make some kind of adult, professional point, here.
Spencer snaps his head to look at Jon. He doesn’t look like he considers Jon to be adult or professional at all. “None of you were standing around trying to get us a soundcheck or figure out the lighting specs,” he says. “You all fucked off, and to be honest I thought they could use a break.”
“Oh, man,” Brendon rolls his eyes. Maybe at Spencer, maybe at all of them.
“You still could have checked with the rest of us,” Jon maintains, trying to stand his ground despite how shaky everything’s suddenly gotten. He’s shoved his hands in his armpits to stop them from shaking. He fucking hates conflict, he can’t handle it. He knows he’s right but he knows that in a second Spencer’s going to say something that will just eviscerate his argument and leave him speechless and stupid.
Jon knows this, and so he strikes, pre-emptive, with a bitter little voice: “Maybe you have your own priorities now or whatever, but it would’ve taken two seconds to text Ryan.”
Spencer’s glare is so icy Jon can feel it in the drop of his stomach. Spencer says, all calm, “My own priorities? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jon shakes his head, lowers his eyes. “I don’t know. Forget it.”
Spencer stares at him, waiting him out.
In his peripheral vision, Jon can see Ryan shake his head. “Jesus, Spencer. You know what he means.”
“Spell it out for me,” Spencer says, low.
There is a silence. Suddenly Jon realizes that the band onstage is halfway through their set, and all the conversations around them are being shouted and he’s standing in the middle of the hospitality tent having a totally public argument with his band and it just makes him want to crawl into a hole somewhere, curl up into something tiny and invisible.
No one’s saying anything. Spencer’s still staring at him. Jon doesn’t feel any less angry for all his mortification. In fact, Spencer’s expression - flat and dismissive and iced over - makes him even more furious.
Jon shrugs, and says, smooth like maybe he actually thought this out and isn’t just saying the most spiteful thing that comes to mind: “I just meant that maybe you should spend less time thinking about who you’re going to fuck next and more time thinking about what’s best for the band.”
Spencer’s eyes are on the ground, his face drawn tight and blank. He nods his head once as Jon finishes - at best for the band - and then he pauses like he might say something, and then his head tilts at a funny angle, and he walks away.
He goes. No word of contradiction. He slips past Brendon without brushing him, and makes his way through the noisy, increasingly drunken crowd that’s stood oblivious witness to this whole idiotic showdown.
It’s not the reaction Jon envisioned. If he’d planned that far - maybe as he was falling asleep on Tom’s couch, with an eloquent, sympathetic appeal on Jon’s part and a crush of shame and regret and confessed love on Spencer’s - this was not it.
Jon doesn’t even want to look at Ryan or Brendon. “Fuck,” he mutters, glaring at the ground.
They don’t say anything. When Jon finally looks up, the two of them are exchanging a loaded glance. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Jon says.
“Probably not like that,” Ryan mutters.
“It’s not even true,” Brendon points out. “I mean, not really.”
Jon doesn’t argue. There are things that he knows are true, and those are the things he should’ve said.
But he didn’t say any of them. He doesn’t have the courage to say any of them.
--
It’s Spencer who rounds up Sara and Ann, at least, if not the others. Who knows where the hell the rest of them went. But the girls are there in their ragged skirts at 8:45 when everyone gathers to wait in the shadows behind the scrims and the sub-woofers.
And they play the show without the lights or the soundcheck and the crowd is so, so drunk and so rowdy it’s impossible to tell if half of them even notice the dancers or if they’re all just there to start a mosh pit in the middle of the first song they recognize from the radio.
It’s now an irrelevant argument whether the dancers are necessary. Equally defunct: whether the show is terrible. Who in the crowd will notice one way or another if Jon skips a bar here or there or Brendon drifts off-key? Spencer just bangs away in the back, regardless of whether anyone’s keeping up or not.
The audience is uniformly wasted. They roar their approval between songs as the standard bank of headlights flashes slow oranges and hot pinks entirely off-beat and the smoke machine putts away in the background.
The show sucks. No one cares.
At the end of the night, as Jon steps down into the trampled grass backstage, he looks around and notes that the people back here aren’t any better-behaved than the paying ones up front. Whatever kind of professionalism keeps vocalists in their bunks early in the evening and roadies sober for load-out and musicians aware of where their gear is getting stacked has apparently evaporated in the too-bright stadium lighting.
Above the white glare of the floodlights, the sky is a deep, aquarium blue. The air is full of smoke and hazy with the din of the dissipating crowd, and the shouted conversations of the closer one. There is canned music playing over the speakers - something pop-rocky from the mid-90s. There are waves of exhausted-looking festival staff passing over the grounds picking up trampled cups and hosing away messes and clearing out drunks.
Jon pauses, not sure what to do with himself. He can’t see Spencer: he was the first one offstage and now he’s already evaporated into the crowd. Brendon is over scanning the decimated food table with the dancers and Ryan’s been corralled into a conversation with one of the mid-afternoon acts even though he looks irate and twitchy. As Jon stands there, trying to decide if he’s even capable of a conversation, someone comes by and presses a sweating green bottle of beer into his palm.
“Jon Walker,” Mitch says. “I’m making it my personal mission to get you trashed tonight.”
He’s not kidding: Mitch actually stands there and make sure Jon swills the bottle fast so that he can hand him another one. It’s not the cheap draft shit provided by the festival, but a truckload of actual-fact bottled imports. Pilfered, Jon would guess, from the back of a tent somewhere.
Jon is obliging, relieved to not have to choose what to do with himself, though he can’t help snorting when a third bottle makes it into his second hand with a confidential eyebrow quirk and a sly smile.
Mitch is a good guy, Jon knows. He’s funny and people like him and he never complains about dumb shit. He learned to eat fire when his hippie parents brought him to Burning Man as a teenager. He has a master’s degree in something liberal artsy and he’s at least thirty and not much taller than Jon but with an acrobat’s body and he has really, really blue eyes and short blonde hair that sticks up in the back. “Hey,” Jon says as he finishes the second bottle and starts the third, “I finished that book you lent me.”
Mitch grins. “So you liked it?”
Jon is honest: “It was depressing as hell.”
“Yeah,” Mitch nods, “Social conservatism is like that. All good gays must come to an end and all that.”
Jon laughs. He doesn’t want to talk about it much, just in case it turns out he missed the entire point of the novel or something and comes off looking like an idiot. Also, that word said out loud - gay - still makes him fumbly and uncomfortable. And also, he has a weird suspicion that Mitch is hitting on him.
Mitch is pretty astute, though, and graciously changes the subject as Jon puts a hand to the back of his sweaty neck. “So what happened tonight?” he asks. “You guys seemed off.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jon says, and grimaces. This topic isn’t much better, but the beer is working on his tongue and his brain and it all doesn’t seem so bad right now. “It’s just stupid stuff. You know, totally high school. We’ll get over it.”
“Ah, high school. You guys are barely out of it, aren’t you?” Mitch is baiting him, a glint in his eye.
“A couple of years,” Jon admits, slightly shame-faced about it. God, he hates being younger than everyone. Everyone except Ryan and Spencer and Brendon, anyway. Old enough to know how young they all are. Smart enough to know how stupid. And so on.
Mitch doesn’t seem to hold it against him. “Touring is hard on everyone,” he shrugs. “You’ll figure it out. It’s impressive you guys have gotten this far without any major blowouts.”
“I don’t know how you missed them,” Jon knows he’s being a downer, tries to shake it off. He takes a swig from his beer, empties it, and finds another cold bottle in his hand. “God,” he says. “You really are going to get me drunk.”
Mitch raises his eyebrows, all innocence. “It’s part of my strategy.”
Jon says, “What strategy?”
And Mitch says, “To convince you to let me kiss you.”
“Ha,” Jon squeaks. He darts his gaze away and then back to Mitch’s face: amused and confident and totally focused. “That’s some pickup line.”
“I do my best work on the fly,” Mitch confesses. And then he leans forward and kisses Jon.
Jon has never kissed a guy in public before. And this is really, really public. His spine stiffens and he’s aware that he’s not really performing his best because he’s burning with a full-body blush of terror and embarrassment and he’s wondering who is watching and where his band is - where Spencer is - and whether there are any social conservatives hanging around ready to form a lynch mob for a couple of uppity homos touching body parts in public. It turns out that Mitch tastes like the Heineken he’s been plying Jon with. It turns out that Mitch’s tongue knows what it’s doing. Jon is petrified.
Mitch notices. He breaks off, his smile a little more hesitant as he meets Jon’s eyes. “Maybe another beer?” he suggests, self-deprecating like he’d be pretty understanding if Jon said no. To the beer or the kiss.
“No,” Jon shakes his head. He’s resisting the urge to look around, guilty as a criminal. He’s trying so hard to process this. He looks at Mitch’s face and thinks his name - Mitch, fire-eater Mitch - and wonders where the fuck this came from. Why he didn’t see it coming. “No, I don’t need another beer,” Jon says.
He leans over and kisses Mitch back.
They leave the empty beer bottles on the grass where they were standing, almost a dozen between them. Mitch’s tongue in Jon’s mouth convinces him that they need to go somewhere else. Somewhere darker and louder.
Despite his protests, Mitch passes Jon another armful of bottles to take with them, saying, “This is definitely the only decent beer you will see all night, we can’t just abandon it.”
They make it maybe twenty feet away. Part of Jon’s mind nags him to shuffle along further, find somewhere where no one will see them, but heading to the buses is kind of a charged statement and it turns out that the area under the stage on the other side of the loading ramp is almost private. Besides a handful of mid-career groupies smoking up and whatever can be seen through the security fence from the amphitheatre, it’s kind of nice.
Mitch grins at him as he cracks another bottle and takes a swig. “You’re not very good at being out, are you?” he asks, the question seeming way too personal but also kind of pragmatic, now that they’ve put their mouths on each other in front of everyone. Everyone which maybe includes Spencer, Jon can’t help thinking.
Jon shakes his head, shrugs, examines the next bottle Mitch hands him. He tries to imagine Spencer’s reaction to seeing Jon making out with some other dude and fails. “Not really,” he says. “I mean, I never deny it.”
Mitch gives a little laugh, like Jon just said something terrible and sad. “So how many people have you actually come out to, then? Or do you just make everyone guess? And for future reference: you are very lucky that I am an excellent guesser.”
“I guess I am lucky,” says Jon. And he should maybe be ashamed of this, but instead of letting Mitch grill him more on his lack of out-and-proud lifestyle choices, and instead of letting himself dwell on whether or not he wants Spencer Smith to be jealous, he steps forward and presses his body against Mitch’s and lets the conversation continue in silence.
He runs his hands up Mitch’s ribcage and shudders when Mitch’s fingers dip under the damp hem of his shirt to rub the base of his spine and then trail around over his hipbones. Mitch’s skin smells like sunlight and sweat and his mouth is just slightly chilled and they are both a little clumsy, now, a little fumbling.
Maybe Jon lets it go too far.
Maybe the kissing gets a little urgent. Maybe Jon’s decision-making skills go out the window because he is a little drunker than he thought and Mitch smiles at him in this blithe, dreamy way whenever they break apart and look at each other in the blue half-light. Mitch murmurs things in Jon’s ear that make Jon feel like a prize long desired. He is wanted. He is admired. He is hard in his pants and he suspects that Mitch will go down on him if he asks.
Mitch goes down on him before Jon asks.
Mitch is on his knees in the dead grass and sawdust. Jon has his back pressed up against a girder, head bowed to avoid the plywood decking above. Mitch’s fingers are working at Jon’s belt buckle, backwards, and Jon is panting through his mouth, which is suddenly dry.
“Is this going to make things weird?” Jon blurts, the words out of his mouth before he even thinks them.
Mitch looks up. He’s made it past the buckle, he’s got three enterprising fingers looped in Jon’s waistband. “Weird?” he repeats. “Would what get weird?”
Jon’s got an image in his head: Spencer flinching away from Brian’s affectionate arm at the afterparty in Chicago. “Like, between us,” he struggles with the words, which are uncooperative and make him sound like a scared virgin and also an asshole. “What would it mean?”
Mitch grins, like he suddenly understands what Jon’s getting at, and he finds it amusing. “It would mean I gave you a blowjob once. How weird does that sound to you?”
Jon blinks. There’s another image in his head: Andy the keyboardist plucking Spencer’s suspender like a harp string and murmuring something that makes Spencer smile back slow and wicked.
It sounds pretty fucking weird to Jon.
“I can’t,” he says. “I just.”
Mitch looks surprised. He doesn’t rise from his knees. “Hey, look,” he says, in a tone that is gentle and calming but also guaranteed to change Jon’s mind if he lets it go on.
“I don’t want to pretend this is something it’s not,” Jon tells him, absolutely sure.
“I’m not-” Mitch starts, his smile starting to look more bewildered.
“Yeah, but I am,” Jon cuts him off, knowing that he’s being too blunt, that this guy doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment. But Jon can’t let himself waver. He buckles up his belt. “I’m really sorry,” he says, and means it.
Mitch rolls back to the balls of his feet, pushes himself up fluidly. “Alright,” he says, watching Jon’s hands. “I don’t really…”
Jon takes a breath and gives him a smile that stutters like a scratched record.
Mitch nods. “Yeah, okay. You’re sure.” He glances towards the rest of the backstage area, barely visible between the stage’s struts, and then bends forward and gives Jon a soft kiss that lasts too long to be called quick. When he pulls back he looks like he maybe wants to give Jon some advice. But he just says, “No hard feelings, hey?”
Then he goes.
Jon stays under the stage for a while longer. He twists open another beer. Then he changes his mind and watches the liquid pour out onto the ground from the upended bottle.
He has another image in his mind: Spencer three miles down the West Side Highway, sweaty and disheveled and panting. Spencer grinning under the yellow sodium lights, washed out and dark-eyed, the river and the city glinting behind him.
(part three)