Dissonance - Chapter 47

My night with Sydney had been mind-blowing. It had also been funny, awkward, confusing, and a whole host of other adjectives, but they all came together into something I’d never forget. We’d fumbled a lot, but in the end, we both just wanted to make the other happy. I think maybe that was why we were both so happy when I finally left, it wasn’t just that the physical act had been enjoyable, which it had been, but one thing was for sure, our relationship had gotten a lot closer. I didn’t actually leave the next morning like Sydney suggested, however. Even though I was technically an adult, Mrs. Phillips still worried about me and I had school the next day, but it was pretty late when I got home. After, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, until I finally had to get in my car to drive away.

Kat was already in bed when I got home, but I think Mrs. Phillips might have realized something was different as I quickly snuck up to my room. I don’t know why I was embarrassed, since she was neither my parent nor my guardian, but I felt weird about her knowing.

My relationship with Sydney had definitely moved to another level, though. Just seeing her face as I walked up the steps to school to find her waiting for me, put a smile on my face. Sure, it was about the physical stuff, and it would be a lie to say I hadn’t thought about that part of it a lot since the previous night, but it was more. I felt my heart skip a little bit when I saw her, my stomach knotting up. The smile on her face told me she felt the same way.

“Hey,” I said, as she put her arms around my waist and tip-toed up to give me a quick peck, which was about as far as either of us was comfortable going, PDA-wise.

“Hey, yourself,” she said.

“How are you?” I asked.

We’d talked a lot afterward, before I left, but this was all new to me, so I was a little uneasy about how things went, the next day.

“I’m great. I’ve missed you,” she said.

“It hasn’t even been twelve hours since you saw me,” I said, laughing.

“I know. An eternity.”

“Goof,” I said, swiping at her nose.

“You like it,” she said, taking my hand as we walked into the school.

“Yeah, I do.”

Of course, it couldn’t all be hearts and rainbows. At conditioning class, David found me before I got into the weight room.

“Hey, just a heads up, Harry’s been making some noise. He’s telling people they’re going to jump you soon.”

“Jesus, can’t he just get a fucking hobby.”

“I don’t know. I thought he’d cooled down after that thing with y’all in the hallway, until just before we went on break. Everyone was talking about how you got the principal to back down and bring the newspaper guys back, and I guess he didn’t like you being the center of attention, because from what I hear, he’s been bitching about you non-stop ever since.
You’ve been busy with your music thing, so I don’t think you noticed, but he’s been talking.”

“Well, he’s welcome to try,” I said, trying to walk around him.

David grabbed my arm and stopped me, “Charlie, man, you need to stop and think. Your whole ‘make the bullies back down’ thing is great and all, but they aren’t here right now. It’s just you and me, and you have to use your head. You told me you thought he was one of the people that jumped you last year, during the playoffs, right? Do you know how lucky you were they didn’t break your hand? You’re just about to become some big, famous musician, you can’t just charge forward like you’ve got nothing to lose, because you do.”

David and I normally only talked during practice or conditioning, and I hadn’t realized he’d been paying that much attention. He was a good guy and I did consider us friends, or at least friendly. I was usually too focused on my own stuff and honestly didn’t think about him much when we weren’t actively hanging out, so I was surprised he’d noticed both how my music career was going, remembered what I’d said about the attack last year, and was watching out for me. Honestly, it kind of pointed out how I’d been a little bit of a shitty friend this year, since I honestly knew very little about what was going on in his life.

“That’s a good point.”

“I know you’ve got a lot going on, but you’ve got to think things through more. You can’t just try and muscle your way through this stuff. Yeah, Harry is a coward and will never take you head-on, but you’ve also clowned him in front of his friends. For guys like him, who peak in high school, all they have is their reps. You have to know he has to find some way to get some face back, and he can only beat up so many freshmen. He needs to knock you down. Also, as much as you think he is, Harry isn’t a complete idiot. It’s not a secret that the admin here hates you and you’ve had trouble with the cops. Everyone saw how much trouble Aaron put you through last year with that restraining order thing. Harry might not have that kind of pull, but he’s smart enough to know if he can make a situation look right, he can get people to believe you’re the problem. And Packer’s just waiting for an excuse to expel you.”

Once again, someone was telling me I needed to stop rushing into situations and think them through.

“You’re right. I’ll try to be careful. Thanks for having my back.”

“Sure. Let’s go lift.”

I spent the rest of the day looking over my shoulder before I realized that wasn’t going to work any more than just pretending that Harry couldn’t do anything to hurt me would. Spending all of my time scared of my shadow would be a win for Harry just as much as him hurting me would.

By the end of the school day, I finally gave it up and decided I’d just be careful about where I was alone. Harry wasn’t going to jump me in school where there were witnesses, and he’d already had a lot of chances to get to me in the parking lot and hadn’t. I’d have to pay more attention going to my car, but maybe he’d learned some kind of lesson when that didn’t work for Aaron.

What I’d have to do is avoid situations like the time they got to me when I was walking by myself from the ball field in the dark. As long as I kept someone with me, I should be okay in those situations though. I just needed to be smart about it.

As I headed towards band practice, I knew what I really wanted to do was see Sydney again. I knew her parents would be home today and there was no way we’d be able to arrange a repeat of the night before, but I still wanted to see her. Even just thinking about her face made me smile, although that would be a problem at practice. I’d been distracted in a lot of my classes thinking about her, and band practice was probably going to go about the same way.

Or at least I thought it was until I saw a car I didn’t recognize out front. It was a rental, which was unusual in Wellsville, since it would have had to have been rented in Asheville and driven here. The answer came pretty quickly as Warren walked out of the garage as I made my way up the driveway, casting one last look at the rental over my shoulder.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said, meeting me and shaking my hand.

“Hey. This is a surprise. What are you doing in Wellsville?”

“Just checking in on my guys …”

“Hey!” Lyla called from the mouth of the garage.

“… and girl,” he added. “You guys absolutely killed it this weekend. We started getting in some of the preliminary sales numbers for last week, and besides all the CDs you sold at your shows, your streaming numbers seriously peaked. Not as much as when you got those shout-outs, and good job on that, by the way, but still, noticeable. You keep this up, and we’ll start having to figure out how to get short hops up to New York, Chicago, or out to the coast so you can get some real exposure.”

“There’s no way we’ll get enough of a bump to pay for that kind of trip, is there?” I asked.

“Maybe for something like this last week, where you have a longer break. Christmas is pushing it, but we might arrange for something this summer. If it was just the show money, no, it wouldn’t be profitable, but every time you guys do a show, you get a bump in your streaming and album sales, and some of that streaming doesn’t fall off. We always expect some falloff after an event-driven bump in numbers, but yours haven’t reset to where they were before the bump. After the few bumps you managed from those shout-outs, and the festival, your baseline number remained ten or fifteen percent higher than before. Since that’s cumulative, the more exposure we can get you, creating more of those bumps, the higher we can push your baseline numbers. That’s where the real money is. Selling albums is great, and can make a lot of money, but unless you’re putting out an album every six months, the momentum doesn’t hold. You’ll have more time in between album releases than you will have the golden zone around album releases, so being able to keep your numbers in those ranges is key.”

“At some point that will top off, right? I mean, we can’t keep going up ten percent after every big show. It’s just because no one knows us.”

“At some point, but that point is a lot higher than you think. If you manage to get there and hold, trust me, you’ll be loved by everyone at the label.”

“Ohh,” I said. “Are you going to stay for the practice?”

“Yep, then I have to rush back to take a late flight up to New York.”

“Man, that’s a tight schedule. We appreciate the visit, but as long as you keep getting us shows like this last week, we’re happy. You don’t have to push yourself to just come watch us practice.”

“It’s not that bad. Besides, I have some good news for all of you, and I wanted to deliver it in person. Let’s go in, I want to tell all of you together,” he said, putting out an arm like he was inviting me up to the garage.

That was one of the things I liked about Warren. Although technically he only represented me, of everyone involved in this process, only he and Rowan had treated all of us as equals. Kent had a bad habit of treating the rest of the band as plus ones, and addressed everything to me. I guess it made sense. Kent only really talked to me and looked at numbers, and hadn’t actually traveled to any of our shows like Warren did, or interacted with us as a group.

“I’m excited to see you guys play, but first, I’ve got some news for all of you.”

“More shows?” Marco asked.

“Yes, in fact, or at least one show. I have you guys booked as the second band for the Times Square New Year’s Eve Extravaganza.”

Lyla actually gasped. We’d thought the Spring Break Festival and the Nashville Food & Wine thing were huge, but both were basically bar gigs compared to the New Year’s Eve show. It was the New Year’s Eve event, with a stage set up in Times Square surrounded by thousands of people and televised by multiple major networks. Of course, if we were the second act of the night, we probably wouldn’t make it on the network broadcasts, which other than a few check-ins with reporters, only really tuned in for the last hour.

Still, our name would be on the listing and we’d be seen by the most people we’d ever performed for by a huge margin. This was a gigantic gig for us, and surprising. Every band I’d ever heard perform that show had been a name I knew, and we were very far from that.

“How?” I asked, still too stunned to be excited by it.

“I know the booker. He lives in Maryland, and I dragged him with me to the show you did there last week. His in-laws were in town, so he was dying for an excuse to get out of the house.”

“Is that why you booked us for that show? Why didn’t you say something?” Lyla asked.

“Your first shows in Virginia were good enough to get booked, so extra prep wouldn’t have helped you, but knowing someone like that was out in the audience might have caused you to second guess yourself. You wouldn’t believe the number of bands I’ve seen play clean sets only to choke when something was on the line. I’ve generally found it best, if the group is ready, to let them do the set without knowing. It always produces a better result.”

“I guess we can’t complain, since we got the gig,” Seth said.

“No kidding,” I said. “This is huge for us. So, when you said you needed to figure out how to get us on short hops to New York, you were hinting at this, weren’t you.”

“Kind of, although I also meant we need to get you more traditional gigs as well. This is huge, it’s true, but this isn’t the same as a show of your own. For those who make it big, they need both a lot of smaller shows where they’re the focus and these larger shows where they get exposure, even if they aren’t the focus.”

“Well, I still think it rocks,” Lyla said.

She wasn’t wrong. It was going to be huge for us. We spent the rest of the practice talking about what kind of lineup we wanted to do, figuring out how much time we needed, and what would work well. We basically had three weeks before the show to practice for it, including shows at the Blue Ridge to work out the kinks. I’d be out of school a week before that, but not every performance called for the same set list, and we all agreed we’d rather spend a little extra time practicing than travel for this or that small gig.

Warren also said gigs on either side of Christmas usually weren’t good, not like Thanksgiving. People were out and about after Thanksgiving, shopping and doing whatnot, but after Christmas, they tended to stay home more, so the size of the audiences wouldn’t be as good anyway. I did give up my chance to play a lot of gigs over winter break, because I’d be back in school the next week, but this was a big enough chance to make it worth it. If things went perfectly, it could be a huge break for us.

We’d fly up the day before, so we’d have some time to rest, and would go on stage around nine. This was a make-or-break moment, a lot like just before the summer when I got the shot at the record contract. If we did this right, it would shoot us up to the next level. We’d be playing bigger crowds, selling more albums, and be closer to solidifying our career.

To say I was excited would be an understatement!