It’s somewhere around eight p.m. and I think we’re planning to head over to the Court to drink with Ween and watch their surprise set. They never do get to play Ag Field Day, so since they’re in town they decide to hop onto Red Five’s bill tonight. Red Five doesn’t care because the place will sell out on word of mouth in under an hour, and they’re all but guaranteed a CMJ showcase now. This is what I’m babbling on about and how we should maybe work up the nerve to ask Ween for a contact at CMJ when Travis stops me.
“I need to tell you something, all right?” he says, and he looks sick, really sick. So sick I’m worried he is literally sick, or about to be sick right in the van.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says. “No, actually, forget that. I’m not fine. Not really.”
“What’s wrong?” I’m terrified to ask.
He takes a deep breath and looks away, out the window. Then he turns to me, takes both my hands in his own.
“I’m leaving Stars on the Floor,” he says. “I quit.”
Chapter Sixteen
When I was fifteen and my mother came into my bedroom to tell me my dad died, I stared at her for a long time and said nothing. She’d been crying, I could tell. Her hair was a mess, mascara was all over her face, her nose and mouth were swollen. I realized that she needed me, so I put my arms around her and told her I was so sorry. I promised her we’d be okay. She agreed and she asked, how could I be so calm? I couldn’t explain it then, but I just didn’t have it in me to cry. I had nothing, not a thing left inside of me, because as soon as I heard the word “dead” come out of her mouth, this space opened up in my heart and consumed everything that was ever there.
I don’t tell this to many people, but before Dad left us, he was my hero. My everything. He was the coolest, funnest, sweetest guy in the world. When he was on tour I used to mark the days on a calendar until he would come back. I wrote him letters every day. He drank too much, but he used to carry me on his shoulders in the park and he loved to watch cartoons and make me and Mom pancakes on the weekends when he was home. I loved to watch him with his guitar in the basement, so lost in the sound of it that he didn’t even know I was there, hiding behind the corner, wishing one day I could be just like him. I was so proud of him back then.
For a long time, all through high school, I kept telling myself that one day Dad was going to come back. There was no way such a bright, shining star could just go dark like that without a trace. He must be lost in the sky somewhere, I used to tell myself. I kept looking for him. I kept waiting, but he never came back. It stayed real. And then I got angry.
But at least I’m not waiting anymore.
I’d tell you what happens right after Travis quits the band, but I don’t exactly know. All I remember is the world opening and swallowing me whole, crushing my bones in its unforgiving jaws, spitting out the shards, coughing what’s left of me up on the pavement to be scattered through Highland Park by stray dogs.
I know that to a lot of people, a band breaking up really doesn’t sound like a major life crisis at all. A band is for fun, right? It’s a hobby. But it should be pretty obvious by now, I hope, that it’s not like that for me. For me, being in a band is a way of life. It’s the only thing I want to do with my life. The only thing I have ever wanted to do, and Stars on the Floor is the first band I could ever believe in. And when Travis quits, he kills it, and there’s a part of me that just feels dead, too.
After Travis leaves that night, I lie in bed, stare up into the empty space above me where for weeks now I have imagined Travis making that intensely euphoric face as he’s inside of me and I want to claw the air at the memory.