“Hold on to my hand,” Landon shouts over the music as he holds his hand out to me. But I hesitate, looking around at the people tripping out of their minds, high on music. “Nova.” His voice brings me back to him. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
I place my fingers in his and he pulls on my arm, steering me in front of him, so he can walk behind me with his hands protectively on my hips. The band that’s playing is usually a rough, edgy band, but their playing one of their softer, sultrier songs.
We’re in a dome building, but as I stand in the crowd, listening to their lyrics and watching them pour their hearts out onstage, I can’t help but wish that we were outside, underneath the sparkling stars, because it would add to the magical feeling building in me.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Landon whispers in my ear, his breath damp against my skin.
I nod, then realizing I’ve shut my eyes, I open them. “I am,” I say, tilting my head back so I can look in his eyes. “Are you?”
He nods with a hint of a smile on his lips. “I am. You’re like the only person I do have fun around while I’m sober.” He says it as a joke, but the haunting hollowness in his eyes makes me wonder if he’s lying.
I turn around and loop my arms around his neck. “Why? What’s so special about me?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” he says with his hand against the small of my back and his forehead wrinkled.
It makes me feel small and ugly and unimportant to him. I let out a breath, moving my arms away, because I’m about to cry. But he presses me closer, shaking his head.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that, Nova,” he insists. “In fact, that came out very wrong.”
I force down the strangling lump in my throat. “Then what did you mean?”
Looking down at me, he strokes my cheekbone with his fingers. “I’m not sure.” He stares into my eyes, like he’s trying to read his own thoughts through his reflection in my pupils. Then he grabs my arm, twirls me around, and tugs me back against him, wrapping his arms around my waist. “Let’s just enjoy ourselves.”
“Okay…” My voice gets lost in the music as he kisses my neck, sucking on the skin, even biting at it. “I love you Nova… I always will… no matter what.”
I blink from the thought as a stray elbow rams me in the side. I’m being smashed into as people demand more room, flailing their arms and bobbing their heads. And everywhere I look I see Landon’s honey-brown eyes and inky-black hair, only sometimes the hair shifts to short and brown and suddenly Quinton is everywhere, a sea of replicates that need to be helped. And then I see the one image I loathe more than anything.
The rope is slightly frayed, like it was about to break, and all I could think as I fell to the floor was: Why couldn’t it just break?
“God damn it.” I clutch at my head and my knees buckle as I collapse to the ground, knowing that there’s a good chance that I’m going to get trampled, especially if I’m near the mosh pit.
But I don’t care. I’m too lost in Landon. He would always say that, that he’d love me no matter what. At the time, I thought it was just something he said, but now I wonder if he was always saying it because he wanted me to know he loved me, even if he took his own life. The thought of this brings me no sense of relief, because that would mean that pretty much the entire time we dated, he was thinking about leaving me. Then he did, and now he’s gone, and I’m left sitting in the dirt at a concert that I really don’t want to be at. My hands are getting stomped on and I’m getting kicked, but I can’t get up. I’m starting to have a panic attack, which has happened a few times. My therapist always told me to breathe through it and that it would pass, but how the hell can I when my lungs are shriveling up and oxygen is getting restricted?
“Nova, what the fuck?” A voice rises over the shouting and music. A hand grabs my shoulder and someone lifts me from the ground.
It’s not the voice I want to hear, neither Landon’s nor Quinton’s. Instead, Tristan stands in front of me, holding my arm, and he looks pissed off for some reason.
“What are you doing?” He grips my elbow and hauls me to the right, thrusting his hand out in front of him to create a narrow walking path for us. “You can’t just sit down in the middle of this shit.”
I trip over my own feet as I aimlessly let him lead me through the people. Ultimately we break free from the chaos and step out into the mellower tent area. My head empties a little, but not a lot. In fact, the noise and loudness that’s diminished around me is replaced by noise and loudness screaming inside my head. You didn’t find him… didn’t help him. “Why did you say that to him?” I wiggle my arm out of Tristan’s grasp as we reach our tents. “That thing about being the driver?”
“Because…” He drags his hands through his hair, smoothing it out of his eyes, and he leaves his hand on the top of his head, his elbow bent out to the side. “Look, I f**ked up, okay? I shouldn’t have said it. It doesn’t bring anyone back.” He turns around, clutching the back of his neck, and hikes over to the tent.
I know very little about Tristan, other than he’s my age, he does drugs, but he’s actually really smart. Even though he failed most of his classes, he always did well on tests, but he just never turned in his homework. I don’t know what his likes and dislikes are, or what he does besides smoke a lot of weed and drink. I’ve never met his parents. I don’t know if he has any sisters or brothers. But he’s always seemed like a nice guy, and so it doesn’t make sense to me that he would intentionally say something to Quinton that would hurt him.
He ducks in the tent and zips up the door. Seconds later, smoke seeps out of the screens on the side. I trudge over to the cooler, open the lid, and take out a beer. I pluck the fragments of ice off the glass, wipe the condensation on the side of my shorts, then sit down on the cooler and drink the beer while I survey the crowd from a safe distance. Delilah and Dylan’s tent occasionally shakes, and I’m pretty sure they’re hav**g s*x inside it.
How did I get here? To this place? This moment? This life?
I sit on the cooler for a while, drinking the beer, watching the stage, listening to the rhythm and the musical poetry flowing from the stage. The more alcohol that enters my system, the more calm I feel. The sky dims, and Delilah and Dylan come out and wander off somewhere while Tristan stays in the tent. I’m guzzling beer when Quinton emerges from the crowd. He’s got a cigarette in his hand, his brown hair is wet, along with the top of his shirt, and it looks like he’s been crying.
I lower the bottle from my lips and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Why is your shirt wet?”
He points over his shoulder without making eye contact with me. “Some a**hole dumped a bucket of water on me when I walked by.”
“Are you okay?” I ask, not really referring to the water.
He shrugs, reaching behind his head, and tugging off his shirt. “It’s just a little water.” He tosses the shirt toward the tent and then motions for me to stand up.
I obey, getting to my feet as I take in the lines of muscles carving his chest and stomach, along with the coarse-looking scar running vertically down the middle, right over his heart. He opens the lid to the cooler and grabs a beer, the muscles of his arms flexing with his movements, and the names tattooed on his arm ripple. Ryder and Lexi. There’s also the phrase no one below the names. Who are Ryder and Lexi? Why do they mean so much to him that he’d permanently tattoo a reminder of them of them on his body? And who’s no one?
When he stands up straight with a beer in his hand, he notices my gaze. I start to ask him what they mean, but he covers the tattoos with his hand, and the harsh look in his eyes makes me snap my mouth shut. He unscrews the cap off the beer, and then he lets his head fall back as he nearly guzzles half of it in one large gulp. Lowering the bottle from his mouth, he licks the remaining alcohol off his lips.
“Where’s Tristan?” he asks, staring at the stage.
“In the tent.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know. Smoking weed, I think.”
He twists his head in my direction with his eyebrow crooked. “How would you know that?”
I shrug. “I smelled and saw the smoke coming from the tent.”
He pops the end of his cigarette into his mouth and gradually inhales. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He holds the breath in for longer than seems necessary, and his lips part as a stream of smoke rises out of his mouth and surrounds his face.
I’m confused because it smells like weed, but he’s smoking a cigarette. His eyes look glassy, though, and his pupils are immense. He continues to drag on the cigarette, looking more and more out of it with each breath. Finally he grabs one of the fold-up chairs in front of the tent and sits on it. I’m trying to figure out what the hell to do or say to him when Tristan exits the tent, his shirt still off and his blond hair disheveled.
I stand there awkwardly as the two of them pretend that the other one isn’t there. Tristan goes over to the cooler and takes out a beer, and then he stares at the ground in front of his feet while he rotates the bottle around in his hand.
“Sorry, man,” he mutters, freeing a breath from his chest. “I really didn’t mean it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Quinton replies without looking at him. “I deserved it—deserve more.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I don’t think it was your fault.”
“But it was.”
“No, it wasn’t. Shit just happens and I was just being a douche bag because… of stuff.”
“Because I deserved it.”
Tristan drags a chair next to Quinton’s and sits down. “How about we agree to disagree?” He tilts the top of his beer bottle in Quinton’s direction.
Quinton sighs and taps his bottle against Tristan’s. “You should really start acting more like your parents toward me. And my father.”
“My parents are f**king idiots,” he says. “And your dad’s always been a dick, even before.”
Quinton doesn’t respond, and silence sets in as he hands Tristan his cigarette. I stand just behind them, gripping my beer bottle, wondering if I should leave because they seem to be having a little bonding moment. I feel awkward, because I have no idea what’s going on and the moment seems so personal.
“Nova, are you alive back there?” Tristan asks without looking at me.
“Yeah,” I reply and then finish off the rest of my beer before tossing it in the trash bag just outside the tent.
“Do you want to sit down?” Tristan glances over his shoulder at me. It’s getting dark and his blue eyes look like sapphires. “Or do you prefer sitting in the dirt in the middle of the crowd?” The corners of his mouth tug upward, and it’s like nothing even happened, as if there had been no fight between the two of them.