together what she was freaked out about. Trolls were easy to deal with. It wouldn’t take but a minute to call and tell her how to handle it.
I hit call, and her voice poured through. “There are a bunch of people suddenly commenting all over your reviews, all disagreeing with you and calling the fans idiots. I didn’t notice right away because—”
“It doesn’t matter, Ash. Give me a minute to log in.”
I had to go back out to the rehearsal room to grab my laptop bag. Shane had settled back behind his drum and was tapping out a beat while Noah noodled around. I waved at Shane. He responded with the most famous drum beat from “In the Air Tonight.”
I laughed with my fist over my mouth. He settled into another rhythm, and it took me until I got back to the kitchen and Micah kicked in with the rhythm guitar for me to recognize their song “Close Enough.”
I remembered his words the night before.
“I can’t get close enough to you.”
My thighs turned to liquid at the memory. I wanted to think he’d played that on purpose, just for me, and I preened a little. Over the speaker, Ash asked, “What the hell is that? Where are you?”
The closed door provided no respite from Shane’s relentless drumming.
“Um.” I’d forgotten about Ash. I would have loved to confess it all, but besides her inability to keep a secret, she’d want to know everything, and that could take a while. It was too much to explain, and she’d be mad I’d kept the secret. I’d deal with it later.
“I’m at a bar.” My nose scrunched up as I processed that terrible excuse.
“At noon?”
“Co-workers took me out for lunch.”
“Why are you calling me then?”
“Uh.” Fuck. I couldn’t think of anything.
“Is that band covering Theater of the Absurd?”
“I hadn’t noticed.” I opened the hotspot on my phone. “Hold on. I’m almost online.”
Ash kept talking. “The usernames are all one word, like Unforgiven and Puppets.”
“Aren’t those from Metallica songs?”
Had we done something to piss off Metallica fans? With everyone so bored, waiting for anything to do, a fan war would be like throwing a spark into dry kindling. I didn’t have time for it. A few trolls, we could handle. An assault? I already dreaded the expended energy putting out the fires.
But I couldn’t understand why they’d want to attack us. “Do you know if Metallica fans are prone to start feuds?”
“No idea. They hit about ten of your blog posts, but most of the comments are on your review of the new album.”
“Did they go to the forum?”
“Not yet.”
Not yet, but if this was the start of a board war, they would.
“I’ve got the blog up now.” I scrolled through hundreds of comments, kind of laughing at how lame they were.
There’s no way you listened to this album. Did the band pay you to write this?
This is a shit album. You’re a shit reviewer.
I scanned the rest without reading. “When did this start?”
“The earliest one I found was from around seven-thirty. The last one came about an hour later. They’re all roughly a minute apart. What’s weird is they’re grouped. Like they hit one blog post, then moved on to the next.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I was missing the band’s rehearsal for this stupidity. The comments weren’t going to hurt anything. Most of them were on old blog posts which had been buried by time. If anyone was reading my archived reviews, they must be bored. Or vengeful.
“I think we should just leave them and pretend we never saw them. That will piss off whoever it is.” I disconnected my hotspot.
She snorted. “Won’t they just come back and do more?”
My turn to laugh. “What’s the worst they can do? Drive traffic to the blog? Make me an extra twenty-five cents this month?”
“You’re always so levelheaded, Layla. I should have known you wouldn’t panic.”
The music in the other room came to an abrupt halt, and I felt a stab of disappointment and regret for choosing to take care of business rather than enjoy the last few minutes of my fly-on-the-wall experience.
“Thanks for helping out, Ash.”
“No problem. Traffic’s down anyway. People are getting restless though. It will be good when the guys are on the road and we can get back to discussions about setlists and sharing vids.”
“For sure.”
The door cracked open, and I closed the lid on my laptop before anyone could catch a glimpse of my dirty little secret.