Page 109 of Disharmony

“You don’t have to thank me.” She hugs me and envelopes me in her sweet smell of patchouli. I pat her back awkwardly. “This is what friends are for. I believe in you. You just need to believe in yourself too.”

If I perform, I won’t have Ripper, Zed, or Venom to support me. It’ll just be me and a group of girls who hate me. But, before I can get to the final show, I still have two weeks left, and I need to be ready to face the blonde volcano exploding my way.

thirty-nine

Venom

Ripper slams the door open like a hurricane ripping through the house.

I jump as the walls rattle from the force. “What is it?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he drives his fist straight through the timber wall. I’ve not seen him this mad in a long time.

“Shit, man…” I shake my head. “Zed is gonna kill you when he sees that.”

“It’s not like it’s his fucking house,” Ripper snarls. “I’ll tear this whole damn place apart piece by piece if I have to.”

I snap Ash’s notebook shut. Since she left it behind in Buggy, I’ve spent hours poring over her lyrics and compositions. She’s crazy talented, but most of her work is half-finished with lines missing. When I read her words, I can almost hear her beautiful voice and fill in the gaps myself to make her songs complete, like a puzzle. It makes me feel more connected to her. We’re so close… yet, so far away.

I’ve not been able to speak to her since Jacqueline has filled our time with coaching sessions. She pretends it’s for the campers’ benefit, but we all know the real reason she’s doing it. Her hold on us is slipping. She can feel it, and she wants it back.

“What’s happened?” I ask him, although I’m pretty sure of the answer.

I can’t deny my jealousy when I found out who he was meeting today.

“It’s her,” Ripper snarls. His eyes burn with ferocious fury. Without him having to say, I know he means Jacqueline Tate. “She’s messing with our other lives, and she doesn’t even know it.”

My lips press into a narrow line. I hate her almost as much as he does.

“What’s she done this time?” I ask, my shoulders tensing.

“She’s got Ash’s phone!” Ripper says, kicking the coat rack over. “We thought she was ignoring my texts, but Jacqueline took it away after the video leaked. She’s keeping her locked under fucking key.”

Now I’m the one who wants to punch a hole in the wall.

We figured Ash freaked out after spending the night with us, thinking it was too intense for her to handle. Not everyone can deal with hooking up with a rockstar, or three, especially when her life is as crazy and uncertain as ours. After she ignored Ripper’s messages, we believed we’d scared her off and blown our chances for good.

Ripper’s revelation changed everything.

“So, she hasn’t been ignoring us…” I murmur.

“No!” Ripper gets ready to hit the wall again, so I throw him drumsticks instead. When he’s in a frenzy like this, he does his best work. He grips the sticks hard enough to snap them in two. “Jacqueline’s interfering with her life, just like she did ours. I don’t know what Jacqueline’s said or done, but Ash could barely look at me. There’s more going on here. She isn’t herself… and fuck! There’s nothing we can do.”

I don’t mention how I slipped a gift under her cabin door. I noticed that she wears patches on her denim and saw one that was perfect for her. Delivering it by hand was a risk, but I had to reach out somehow. The girl is on my… on our… minds twenty-four seven. The urge to be around her is too strong to ignore, especially considering I’ve spent the last few weeks lost in her words and mind.

I’ve seen the deepest depths of her soul through her handwritten scrawls. They’ve revealed to me parts of herself she keeps hidden, parts she may not even know exist. Reading her lyrics tells me more about her than she ever could. She writes of feeling like an outcast without a place to belong, and there’s a heart-wrenching consuming pain nestled between her lines. I want to know more about the pain that seeps through her ink on the page. Some of her words are smudged with tear stains or ripped from where the nib has torn through the paper.

“Jacqueline can’t keep her phone hostage forever,” I reason with him. My biggest fear was that Ash abandoned us, but this news has given me hope. She might want to see us again. “There’s only two weeks left until camp end, then Jacqueline will have no choice but to return it.”

Ripper’s rapid breathing makes his chest heave up and down.

Our urge to be close to her is an addiction. After tasting her, breathing in her scent, kissing her soft lips, Ash captivated me. But reading her beautiful poetry, seeing the soft curves of her letter y’s, and the sharp angle of her w’s when she’s frustrated about what to write next… she hypnotized me under her spell.

“You want me to wait two weeks?” Ripper blasts.

Unlike him, I have patience. I can wait in the knowledge that Ash hasn’t ruled us out. Ripper is the opposite. He’s a raging storm. When he cares about someone, he cares hard. He gives his whole fucking heart, which is one of his best qualities, and his worst.

“It’s not long to wait,” I say cautiously. “We can’t step in now.”

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