Page 15 of #Moonstruck

Even after I pointed it out.

Our online flirtation continued until Wednesday evening finally rolled around and my brothers and I headed to Rodrigo’s. Despite Rule #1, I was strangely excited to see Diego. We unpacked our van, which was currently leaking coolant. Another expensive problem we couldn’t afford to fix. Our instruments were arranged in the back like pieces in aTetrisgame, but we’d been doing this so long it was easy to extract them in the right order.

We went inside Rodrigo’s and got set up. I plucked at my vintage Martin Dreadnought. I’d found it at a garage sale a couple of years ago and had seen that the woman selling it had no idea how much it was actually worth. She had put a five-dollar sticker on it. Part of me wanted to pay the money and run, but my conscience wouldn’t let me. When I told her she was really underselling, the woman said her husband had left her for her sister, and the judge had ordered her to sell their assets and split the proceeds. She apparently had a trust fund he couldn’t touch, thanks to an ironclad prenup, and she didn’t need this money. She was very happy to sell me the guitar for five bucks.

Sometimes I played my Dreadnought onstage; other times it was the Gibson Les Paul that had been passed down to me. Fitz had given it to me, but I suspected that my father had initially owned it (and most likely paid for it with my mom’s money), but I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to know.

I didn’t want him tainting my guitars, too.

He’d ruined so much of my world already. Like how I disliked performing in clubs. My childhood memories of my father centered around how he smelled after a show—stale cigarette smoke, cheap booze, and even cheaper perfume. Every club we ever played in specialized in that particular aroma combination.

I despised the smell of coffee. He’d drunk coffee around the clock, and every time he’d deigned to grace us with his presence, the coffeepot would be on day and night.

“Hey, Maze? Have you seen this?” There was a weird tone in Fitz’s voice.

“Seen what?” Knowing him, it was probably some clip of a bunch of guys burping and farting that he thought was hilarious. I put my ear closer to the guitar string as I slightly turned one of the top tuning pegs, finally satisfied with the sound.

“This.” He shoved his phone in front of my face. It was the YouTube video of me singing “One More Night.” He asked, “Did you know about this?”

That was a stupid question. “Yeah, I know about the video. I’m the one who filmed myself singing it.”

“I’m not talking about the video.” He scrolled down slightly, and the first thing I saw was the number of views.

Just a little over one million. “A million views?” I gasped, grabbing at his phone, wondering if I was hallucinating.

“Really? A million views?” Parker asked, coming to peer at the phone over my shoulder. “How much money is that?”

“I can’t math that high right now!” My brain was too excited to figure it out. It was probably only a few thousand dollars, but it was more than we’d ever earned from an upload before.

“That’s why Mom wanted you to go to college. So you could math,” Fitz teased me, apparently enjoying my mental freak-out.

“You mean likeyoudid?” I quickly retorted. “Before you dropped out your junior year to pursue your lifelong dream of paying back student loans?”

“How did we get so many views?” Cole asked, coming over to stand next to Parker.

“Keep scrolling down,” Fitz instructed.

The very first comment I saw was from Ryan De Luna, and he’d posted it twenty-four hours ago.

CHAPTER FIVE

So many thoughts happened all at once that it was hard to keep track. Beautiful? Who was beautiful? Me? The song? Did he recognize me from his concert? If so, was he being sarcastic? Or did he really like my cover of his greatest hit? If he liked it, was Ryan the one who actually commented on it? If not him, it had to be somebody who worked for him, as the post was from the official Ryan De Luna channel on YouTube. Had Diego shown it to him? Would the views keep going up?

What was happening?

There were more than a thousand replies to Ryan’s comment. I didn’t bother looking at them because I already knew what they would say. They’d be either some variation of how much that fan LLLOOOVVVEEEDDD Ryan or offering up creative new ways to get rid of me since I’d somehow managed to nab his attention.

“He’s also got this video on the landing page of his website,” Fitz added. “Didn’t you see this guy the other night? What exactly did you do?”

Now all my brothers had their arms folded and were glaring at me. “Oh please, like I’d hook up with this commercialized hack for some views. Give me a little credit. The only thing I did the other night was insult him. Repeatedly. To his face.”

None of them looked like they believed me.

“Come on, our fan is here,” Cole said. “We should get started.”

We often joked about our fan (singular). His name was Joe, and although my brothers had initially suspected him of harboring a crush on me, he just seemed to really like our music and showed up every week to hear us play. Because the rest of this crowd were people who just happened to stop in and get a drink, and girls who lusted after the male contingency of our band. Last and definitely least, you had the guys smart enough to have figured out that hot chicks showed up to hear Yesterday play, and they came to hit on the women.

So yeah, we didn’t make much money from playing music. If any of us had been able to quit doing it, we would have. But the love of music, of performing—it’s like an infection that seeps deep into your soul, becoming a part of you. Even if I decided to walk away—no more band, no more uploads, no more performances—I would still play. Still write. It couldn’t be stopped; it was too much a part of me. Same for my brothers.

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