She’d adopted the tone of a social worker, an impartial third party, and I wanted to smack her for it. For all of it. Instead, I just exploded. “Then what the fuck are you doing here? What good are you then? Who are you to me? Without her, who are you? You’re nothing! A nobody!”

Kim stumbled back, but when she looked up, instead of looking angry, she looked at me full of tenderness. It made me want to throttle her even more. “Adam—” she began.

“Get the hell out of here,” I growled. “I don’t want to see you again!”

The thing with Kim was, you didn’t have to tell her twice. She left without another word.

That night, instead of sleeping, instead of reading, I paced my room for four hours. As I walked back and forth, pushing permanent indentations into the tread of my parents’ cheap shag carpeting, I felt something febrile growing inside of me. It felt alive and inevitable, the way a puke with a nasty hangover sometimes is. I felt it itching its way through my body, begging for release, until it finally came tearing out of me with such force that first I punched my wall, and then, when that didn’t hurt enough, my window. The shards of glass sliced into my knuckles with a satisfying ache followed by the cold blast of a February night. The shock seemed to wake something slumbering deep within me.

Because that was the night I picked up my guitar for the first time in a year.

And that was the night I started writing songs again.

Within two weeks, I’d written more than ten new songs. Within a month, Shooting Star was back together and playing them. Within two months, we’d signed with a major label. Within four months, we were recording Collateral Damage, comprised of fifteen of the songs I’d written from the chasm of my childhood bedroom. Within a year, Collateral Damage was on the Billboard charts and Shooting Star was on the cover of national magazines.

It’s occurred to me since that I owe Kim either an apology or a thank-you. Maybe both. But by the time I came to this realization, it seemed like things were too far gone to do anything about it. And, the truth is, I still don’t know what I’d say to her.

SIX

I’ll be your mess, you be mine

That was the deal that we had signed

I bought a hazmat suit to clean up your waste

Gas masks, gloves, to keep us safe

But now I’m alone in an empty room

Staring down immaculate doom

“MESSY”

COLLATERAL DAMAGE , TRACK 2

When I get onto the street, my hands are quaking and my insides feel like they’re staging a coup. I reach for my pills, but the bottle is empty. Fuck! Aldous must’ve fed me the last one in the cab. Do I have more at the hotel? I’ve got to get some before tomorrow’s flight. I grab for my phone and remember that I left it back at the hotel in some boneheaded attempt to disconnect.

People are swarming around and their gazes are lingering a little too long on me. I can’t deal with being recognized right now. I can’t deal with anything. I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this.

I just want out. Out of my existence. I find myself wishing that a lot lately. Not be dead. Or kill myself. Or any of that kind of stupid shit. It’s more that I can’t help thinking that if I’d never been born in the first place, I wouldn’t be facing those sixty-seven nights, I wouldn’t be right here, right now, having just endured that conversation with her. It’s your own fault for coming tonight, I tell myself. You should’ve left well enough alone.

I light a cigarette and hope that will steady me enough to walk back to the hotel where I’ll call Aldous and get everything straightened out and maybe even sleep a few hours and get this disastrous day behind me once and for all.

“You should quit.”

Her voice jars me. But it also somehow calms me. I look up. There’s Mia, face flushed, but also, oddly, smiling. She’s breathing hard, like she’s been running. Maybe she gets chased by fans, too. I imagine that old couple in the tux and pearls tottering after her.

I don’t even have time to feel embarrassed because Mia is here again, standing in front of me like when we still shared the same space and time and bumping into each other, though always a happy coincidence, was nothing unusual, not the slightest bit extraordinary. For a second I think of that line in Casablanca when Bogart says: Of all the gin joints in the world, she has to walk into mine. But then I remind myself that I walked into her gin joint.

Mia covers the final few feet between us slowly, like I’m a cagey cat that needs to be brought in. She eyes the cigarette in my hand. “Since when do you smoke?” she asks. And it’s like the years between us are gone, and Mia has forgotten that she no longer has the right to get on my case.

Even if in this instance it’s deserved. Once upon a time, I’d been adamantly straightedge where nicotine was concerned. “I know. It’s a cliché,” I admit.

She eyes me, the cigarette. “Can I have one?”

“You?” When Mia was like six or something, she’d read some kid’s book about a girl who got her dad to quit smoking and then she’d decided to lobby her mom, an on-again-off-again-smoker, to quit. It had taken Mia months to prevail upon Kat, but prevail she did. By the time I met them, Kat didn’t smoke at all. Mia’s dad, Denny, puffed on a pipe, but that seemed mostly for show. “You smoke now?” I ask her.

“No,” Mia replies. “But I just had a really intense experience and I’m told cigarettes calm your nerves.”

The intensity of a concert—it sometimes left me pent up and edgy. “I feel that way after shows sometimes,” I say, nodding.

I shake out a cigarette for her; her hand is still trembling, so I keep missing the tip of the cigarette with my lighter. For a second I imagine grabbing her wrist to hold her steady. But I don’t. I just chase the cigarette until the flame flashes across her eyes and lights the tip. She inhales and exhales, coughs a little. “I’m not talking about the concert, Adam,” she says before taking another labored drag. “I’m talking about you.”

Little pinpricks fire-cracker up and down my body. Just calm down, I tell myself. You just make her nervous, showing up all out of the blue like that. Still, I’m flattered that I matter—even if it’s just enough to scare her.

We smoke in silence for a while. And then I hear something gurgle. Mia shakes her head in dismay and looks down at her stomach. “Remember how I used to get before concerts?”

Back in the day, Mia would get too nervous to eat before shows, so afterward she was usually ravenous. Back then, we’d go eat Mexican food at our favorite joint or hit a diner out on the highway for French fries with gravy and pie—Mia’s dream meal. “How long since your last meal ?” I ask.

Mia peers at me again and stubs out her half-smoked cigarette. She shakes her head. “Zankel Hall? I haven’t eaten for days. My stomach was rumbling all through the performance. I was sure even people in the balcony seats could hear it.”

“Nope. Just the cello.”

“That’s a relief. I think.”

We stand there in silence for a second. Her stomach gurgles again. “Fries and pie still the optimal meal?” I ask. I picture her in a booth back in our place in Oregon, waving her fork around, as she critiqued her own performance.