Chapter Sixty-Five

Taylor Hanson

When we walked out on stage, the crowd was surprisingly...quiet. Well, no, to call them quiet wouldn’t be right because they weren’t quiet. They were just....I don’t know. Not as loud as most crowds. There was no screaming or shouting or crying or, as far as I could see, passing out. Just polite clapping and a few cheers.

I felt suddenly exposed for some reason. Why was the crowd so unenthusiastic? A few thoughts passed through my mind, but I quickly pushed them away, telling myself that I was being paranoid.

I walked dutifully behind my keyboards and began to play the opening to “Gimme Some Lovin’” as well as I could with the bandages on my arm restraining me slightly from playing it the same way I had played it before.

We began singing and finally, the audience began to get up and clap along with the beat. I could only blindly thank Parker and his friends for that.

At the end of each song, the audience clapped politely and not without some amount of enthusiasm but not enough to make it seem as if we were playing for people who had heard our music before. It was almost nice, being able to play and being able to hear ourselves play and know that everyone in the audience could hear us play, but it was disturbing at the same time. It only reinforced what Zac had said backstage. Something had changed in us and the audience could sense it.

It wasn’t until we were in the middle of the song “Weird” that I saw them. Their blueness stood out to me because there was only one other pair of them in the crowd and he was sitting too many rows back for me to see. Seeing them, and then realizing it was her, actually surprised me enough for me to pause in my playing for a few moments. Only when I noticed that Isaac was giving me a funny look did I find my place and go back to what I had been doing. I made a show of rubbing my arm slightly to try and get him to think that that had been the problem.

Throughout the rest of the concert, my eyes never left her. The way she was smiling with a pride that you can only find in mothers and fathers as she clapped along with the beat and watched us up on stage with the wonderment of a child in a toy store. I noticed that she was wearing a t-shirt with us on the front, what must’ve been the shirt she had been originally wearing draped over her arm.

I wanted to be mad. I really did. I wanted to want to beat her to a pulp or be so mad that I didn’t care that she was there and be able to know that she would disappear from my mind the next morning after she had disappeared from my memory and somewhere into the void of sleep.

But somehow I wasn’t. I wasn’t mad. I was happy. I felt like a kid whose parents had told him that they wouldn’t be able to make it to their school play but end up making it anyway, to his surprise. She looked so proud.

Then came the time for us to take a bow, a whole concert and a short encore that the audience hadn’t seemed to want anyway later. Isaac and Zac left the stage ahead of me, but I lingered, watching the audience leave as the lights came on, no one aware that I was still on stage.

She walked up to the stage from the front row. I met her there.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said, the confusion evident in my voice.

A man with longish brown hair and glasses walked up behind her. At first I thought he was someone official from the park come to take her away but then he put his arm around her. More to remind her that he was there than to display affection.

“Taylor, this is my husband, Reese Lawrence,” she said, nodding her head toward him.

“I know,” I said, extending my right hand.

“Reese, this is Taylor,” she said.

“So this is Taylor,” he said, taking my hand in his and shaking it firmly. “It’s an honor to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”

Annie and I smiled at the same time. Seeing her smile, I suddenly knew what I wanted.

“Look,” I said, taking my backstage pass, hidden under my shirt, from around my neck. I took Annie’s hand and pressed the little laminated piece of paper with my name and the logo on it into her hand. “Meet me backstage.”

“We-,” she began but I got up and walked away before she could finish her sentence. I didn’t want to let her allow me time to change my mind. It was the first time in weeks that everything was crystal clear and I didn’t want to know what I wanted because now I knew (got that?).

I walked backstage to where people were wandering around aimlessly. Some were surprised by my late arrival but that didn’t stop them from shaking my hand or patting me on the back. One woman even attempted to ruffle my hair but quickly recoiled after feeling how oily it was with sweat. Some people just called out things like “Good job!” from afar.

I barely heard or felt any of it. Right then I had one thing on my mind.

"You get what you want and you never want it again." --Hole
Index
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Six