Page 26 of Reverb

“My parents are both high school music teachers,” I said. For once, I wanted to talk about something pleasant, just like he was asking me to. I didn’t want to dig anymore. “Not at the same high school, though. They met at a teachers’ conference. I’m their only child. They’ve been married for thirty years.”

Stone leaned back in his seat, and I saw his shoulders visibly relax. He was listening. He didn’t interrupt.

“I guess the most interesting thing about my family is that my aunt was a TV actress,” I continued. “She starred in a show a few decades ago called Avery’s Place.”

“I’ve seen it,” Stone said, surprising me. “I should have connected the names. That’s your aunt?”

I nodded. “She married my dad’s brother. She doesn’t act anymore. My two cousins, Olivia and Gwen, married rich guys who are kind of terrifying, but it seems to be working out. That’s the exciting side of the family. Then there’s my side, plain old Peter and Maggie. Two music nerds who got married and had a music-nerd daughter. I was raised listening to the bands of the sixties and seventies. My dad’s record collection fills the entire attic of our house, and the basement is full of stereo equipment. My mom gets excited by choir every year, and I still live at home. Pretty sad, right?”

“No.” Stone sounded…fascinated, maybe? “It isn’t sad at all.”

“They would have preferred if I became a teacher, but they’re supportive of my choice of career,” I said. “Not that I would have picked anything else. I love music, but I can’t play, and my singing voice is a crime. I have no patience for teaching. Writing is what I do.” I felt myself smiling. “My dad would lose his mind if he saw your music library, by the way.”

“So share it with him,” Stone said.

“Oh, he doesn’t have the app. Dad believes fervently in the gospel of vinyl.”

“He’s not wrong.” Stone pulled his phone out of his pocket. “There’s no way you listened to the whole library, Maplethorpe.”

“Do you have any idea how much time I’ve spent driving?” I pulled my own phone out and opened the music app. “I could have listened to every song in existence by now.”

“No more driving,” Stone said, scrolling through his music. “You’re on the bus, as of now.”

I stared at him in shock. “I’m supposed to get a week of access.” Denver and Neal had agreed to give me a week on the bus in exchange for my work uncovering their backer, but no one had talked to me about it since. They’d probably forgotten. Musicians were like that.

“Not a week,” Stone said. “For the rest of the tour. And you get on the plane home with us, too.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.” His tone was final.

I had so many questions. Why? Why now? Was it something I did? If so, what? What would the other members of the band say about this? Had he talked to them already?

Stone’s dark brown gaze rose to meet mine, as if he was reading my mind. “Don’t ask questions or I’ll change my mind,” he said in his familiar growl. “Now let’s talk music.”

TEN

THEN

Sienna

When I thought back on it later, everything at the end of the tour seemed to happen fast. Then again, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was only the terrible finale, at the end of everything, that made it seem that way.

We were on the East Coast now, doing a series of dates that would end in New York City, then we’d fly back to Portland for the final show. I’d finally ditched my rental car and was riding the bus with the band, and this time they didn’t put on a fake show for me.

On the bus, the Road Kings did what, apparently, they’d been doing all along: ate, slept, watched TV, listened to music, played video games (this was Axel and Brit), read books. Sometimes they talked, usually about the previous show or plans for the next one. Sometimes they ribbed each other, made each other laugh, or bickered like an old married couple that happened to consist of four guys.

Stone talked the least. He was caustic to all of them, but most of his criticism was directed at Neal. For some reason he was harder on the band’s bass player than on anyone else. He was almost harder on Neal than he was on me.

Every day I set up my laptop at the bus’s table, connected to the wifi, and got more work done than I’d achieved the entire tour. I wrote articles for Soundcheck. The band had played an off-the-schedule free show in Detroit on a whim, and news of it had gone viral. As a result, my articles were getting more traffic than they’d ever had—each one higher than the last, since no other writer had access to the tour. Soundcheck had finally remembered I was alive, and they were happy with what I was turning in. They wanted more, as much as I could write, to feed the machine. So I wrote.

The Road Kings had been moved from their smaller venue in New York to Madison Square Garden, which they’d never played before. They were to do four shows there for the first time in their career, and the extra tickets were on their way to selling out. In other words, after all these years, it looked like the band was about to get big for the first time.

Then their longtime agent died suddenly back home, and they were left wondering how their future career would be handled. I watched them work through these ups and downs from my place behind my laptop, quietly observing.

This setup wasn’t the same as the interview I’d done with Travis White, but in some ways, it was better. The Road Kings had decided that I was all right to have around, and they let me observe how they truly were when they were alone instead of psyched up and rehearsed for an interview.

Axel and Brit were in love with each other—I could see that now—and hadn’t told the rest of the band. Denver missed his girlfriend, Callie, and was counting the minutes until she flew to meet him in New York. Raine had just flown home—I thought maybe she and Neal had had a fight—and Neal was unusually subdued, as if he was worried. I observed everything and wrote notes. I would have felt invisible except that I frequently looked up from my laptop to find Stone’s gaze on me, his expression unreadable.

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