He obliged, looking back at his phone with a half-smile. It warmed me. The first few days of tour had consisted of superficial conversation and avoiding each other’s eyes. On day four—night four, really, past midnight in Berlin—we’d given in and talked, leaning against the balcony rail outside his and Marcus’s hotel room as compact cars trailed by far below. I’d unleashed an elaborate babble of apology, round two. Nihal had told me that after everything Dr. Caskey had said in the greenroom, he could understand why I’d been desperate to hide. A week out from the talk, we were beginning to find our old dynamic again.
“I see you and Isaac have detached yourselves from each other for once,” he drawled.
“We’re not that bad.”
“You’re pretty bad.”
I sighed. To their credit, the Sharps were less insufferable about me and Isaac than they could have been. The worst thing had been when Trav very seriously sat us down and gave us a talking-to about how this could not be allowed to affect our professionalism. I’d nearly cried from trying not to laugh.
I sank into the sofa, staring up at the hotel ceiling, glad to be in a stationary location. Touring exhausted me more than I could have imagined, the cycle of boarding the bus, driving all day, checking into a new city, performing, and crashing. Wake up, rinse, repeat. It was exhilarating but intimidating, every city too huge for us to absorb much of anything before we were accelerating out of it. The entire experience was already blurring over in hindsight, becoming an indistinct black-and-white reel of dark bus seats and spotlights.
“Sharps!” called one of the Aural Fixation guys as they crowded out of the hotel restaurant. “Game time.”
We filed up the steps toward the stage. With the hand that wasn’t holding a mic, I patted Marcus on the back—one night, the performance space had overwhelmed him so much, he’d had breathing problems and nearly blacked out halfway through a song.
We came out, blinking, into the lights, which dangled from the frame of metal scaffolding like grapes on a web of vines. The stage was smaller than most we’d performed on—unsurprisingly, New Year’s Eve meant more people interested in staggering drunk through the streets than attending a singing concert—but the roar of the crowd inundated us. A semicircle of eight stools waited ahead.
We’d stripped away most of our choreography. As the opener, we needed to warm the crowd up but couldn’t risk seeming like the main event. So wardrobe had us in simple matching outfits, dark jeans and heather-gray shirts, and we performed the front half of our set seated. The four songs from our competition set, plus the two we’d performed at Daylight Dance, occupied all the time they’d asked us to fill.
We took our seats, lifted eight mics, and sang. It was all muscle memory by now: the reassurance of the set going off like clockwork, and the trust hanging heavy between the eight of us.
Near the end of the set, as we were on our feet near the edge of the stage, I found myself looking around at the guys instead of playing the crowd. This was the last of the lasts I had to count: the last time I’d be performing with them.
Our voices wound around each other, chased each other up scales and down riffs in parallel. I remembered watching them perform last year: From the audience, their performances had seemed synchronized into a single machine. Here, singing among them, it was impossible not to focus instead on the harmony and the dissonance, the ways we converged and the ways we clashed, the tension and the resolution. The machine had cracked open to reveal not a collection of cogs but a multiplicity of colored threads, alive and humming. I was going to carry these colors with me a long time.
January 1
Isaac was quiet in sleep, and still. For a moment I looked at him, his planes and valleys equalized, everything about his face flattened and hazed by the half-light of the opening morning. The glow snuck in through the airplane window.
“Hey,” I whispered, brushing the back of his hand.
Jon Cox had been assigned the boarding pass reading 27A, but when we’d filed down the aisle a few hours ago, he’d stood aside, waving me in beside Isaac. “All yours,” he mumbled, and sat in the seat I’d been assigned, in front of us, where Isaac put his knees up on the back of his chair for three hours just to piss him off. True gratitude.
Now the guys, like everyone else on the plane, were unconscious. We’d reached the fatigue section of the flight; we’d all given up on the ambitions we’d had sitting down. I had abandoned my plan to marathon three movies in a row after finishing the first, which was discouragingly terrible. Nihal’s sketchbook, meant to document the trip from top to bottom, was slipped into a seat back as he slept silently against the porthole window behind us.
Isaac stirred next to me. He pawed at one eye to wake up, a little clumsy. When he saw me he smiled. “What’s up?”
“I think we should talk before we get to the airport.” After we touched down in Newark, the eight of us would split, half to connecting flights, half done with the journey. For me, it was another six-hour leg to San Francisco.
“Yeah,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Okay.”
The drone of the plane engines hummed along. I took a deep breath. “So, I guess . . . do you want to keep this going when I’m home?”
He thought about it, and kept thinking. My thoughts began to fray, excitement into anxiety, hope into dejection. This was it. The moment he told me he didn’t care, or not in the right way, or not enough. Here, again, another moment of letting go.
“How are you feeling about it?” he asked. “Do you want to stay together?”
Obviously, I thought. This is a terrible sign, I thought.
“I mean,” I said, “I want to try.”
But then relief eased his expression. “All right.” He leaned forward, resting the side of his head on Jon Cox’s seat. He studied me. “Then let’s try.”
I let out a slow breath. My hand loosened on my wrist, which I had been squeezing, afraid. But it was all right. I wouldn’t have to look back on this as a hinging moment that swung the track from hope to hurt, yes to no. At least for now, we were still on the rails together.
“But you have to be honest,” I whispered, after a moment.
“About what?”
“Everything. I’m serious, everything.” I swallowed. “Don’t keep something from me because you think I can’t handle it. If something happens, or if you’re not feeling it anymore. If—if there’s someone else. Just tell me.”
Comprehension started to settle into his face. “Jordan.”
“Because I can get hurt. That’s fine. But I don’t want to feel stupid again. Ever.”
He reached for my hand and squeezed.
“Can you do that?” I said hoarsely. “All honesty, full disclosure?”
“Can you?” he said.
It took me aback for a moment. Then I tightened my hand on his. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna try. I’m gonna always try.”