Chapter 1 - Rayna
Chapter 1 – Rayna
“Are you there, Chester? It’s me, Rayna,” I let out a wry chuckle as I lean back against the rough, red brick wall, blowing out a lungful of smoke. “It’s been nearly twelve months since you’ve been gone now, and the pain in my chest is starting to be a little less every day.” I suck deeply on my cigarette, squinting my eyes against the low afternoon sun as it bounced off the silver paintwork of the car which slowly drove into the carpark. “Adam is convinced this is gonna work, but the other guys still aren’t totally on board.” Another plume of white smoke is snatched from my lips, and I pull on the strings of the hoodie I was bundled up in, trying to keep the bitterly cold breeze from getting in. “I mean, I get it…if anyone else had tried to fill your place in the band, I’d have fucked them up.” I chuckle again before dropping my head back against the wall with a groan. “I wish you were still here. I wish I wasn’t being put in this position. I wish…”
“Ray?” Adam steps through the fire exit and looks round, the breeze catching the ends of his long brown hair and lifting it off his shoulders for a moment.
“I’m here.” I blink back my tears, surreptitiously wiping the treacherous one which escapes down my cheek, taking one last desperate drag on my cigarette before stubbing it on the floor and pushing up onto my feet. Adam’s shoulders visibly relax as his hazel eyes find me, softening as he takes in my tense posture and the way I nervously chew on my bottom lip.
“You ready?” he asks, holding out an inviting arm. I slip past him back into the warm rehearsal studio, the sound of the rest of the band getting warmed up washing over me.
“As I’ll ever be,” I shrug.
“The guys from the record label are here, but just ignore them,” he says as we make our way down the gold record laden walls. “You got this, okay?” He stops me, resting his hand on my shoulder and stooping down a little so he is at eye level with me. “Chaz would have been behind this one hundred percent, okay?”
I nod. “Okay.”
“Are you there, Chester? It’s me, Rayna. It’s been a fucking crazy two years.” I shake my head, cringing when I feel the extravagant hairstyle the hair and make-up girls had spent the last hour working on wobble. “I can’t believe we’re here, at the fucking Grammy’s! You’d have loved it here, it’s as insane as you always imagined. Ads, Dax and Red are running around like little fan girls collecting autographs from half pickled rock stars.” I grin. “Adam is even wearing the outfit he promised you he’d wear if the band ever got nominated.” He looked ridiculous in the huge sequined ballgown, but my brother and he had always said if they ever got the opportunity to go the Grammy’s – or any other big music awards ceremony – that they would both wear ballgowns as per Kurt Cobain on Headbangers Ball. My grin slowly fades from my reflection in the mirror. “I wish you were here to experience this. It should be you up there tonight, singing with your friends.” A knock on the dressing room door makes me jump.
“Ten minutes, Ms Allard.” A slightly harried looking stagehand pops her head round the door. “Can I get anything else for you?”
“No. Thank you!” I give her a tight smile, just wanting to be left alone again. The door snicks closed, and I breathe out a relieved sigh, only to groan when the door flies open again, the rowdy noise of the other three band members assaulting my ears. Guess I’ll finish talking to you later, I think, casting my eyes briefly up towards the sky. When I look back down, I catch Adam giving me that same pity-filled look he gives me when he thinks I’m not looking. Like I’m some delicate little flower which might wither away and die if its not looked after just right.
The door opens again, this time letting in our manager, who hadn’t deviated from her standard black pants suit even though tonight would have been the perfect excuse to buck the trend. Her cell phone is pressed to her ear as per usual, her coral pink lips pressed into a flat line as she listens to whoever is on the other end of the line. Her forest green eyes flick up and down me as she mhmms and I see’s, and I smile as she nods her approval of my outfit.
“Okay,” she snaps her phone shut, making the boys jump to attention. “Rayna.”
“Selina,” I jump in cutting her off and smirk, making the corner of her mouth quirk up fractionally. It’s been the ambition of all of us in the band to get her to crack a full smile, but it’s still not happened in the last two years that she had been assigned to keep us in line.
“Boys,” she turns her attention to them, shaking her head as she takes in Adam’s outfit. “This is the biggest night of your career, so far. Please don’t fuck it up.”
“Is that our pep talk?” Red asks incredulously at her retreating figure, the door clicking closed behind her. He twirls his drumsticks around his fingers, grinning as Dax tries to grab one and misses. “She really needs to work on her people-ing skills.”
“Not a word, dipshit.” Dax growls as he misses another stick and I can’t help but giggle, earning myself a glare. Adam easily plucks one of the twirling sticks of hickory out from between Red’s fingers and taps him on the top of his ginger mohawk.
“Listen up, fucknuts, this is the biggest fucking night of our lives,” he grins widely. “We’re doing this for Chaz.”
The rest of us raise our voices in a loud cheer. “For Chester!”
“Are you there, Chester? It’s me, Rayna.” I yawn widely, stretching my arms up above my head and my legs straight out, all my toes stretched out too. “So, last night was fucking amazing. That performance was the best we’ve ever fucking sounded, and the way they managed to use AI to reproduce your image…” I swallow around the ball of emotion which suddenly blocks my throat. It had been surreal to look round and see my brother’s image projected up on the huge screen behind me, his mouth moving to the words he’d written and recorded only days before his death. “I wish we’d had the chance to really perform together like that on stage.” Tears slowly roll down my cheeks, pooling annoyingly in my ears. I shake my head from side to side, trying to use my pillow to mop them up. “I miss you so much…”
“Hey, Ray,” Adam knocks on the connecting door between our hotel rooms.
“Yeah?” I call.
“Are you decent?” he asks. Ever since he just barged in and found me fresh out of the shower, he claims he’s been scarred for life. I don’t give a shit, but it is nice to finally be offered some semblance of privacy. The door flings open and Dax and Red just pile through, making me roll my eyes. Well, some semblance anyway.
“Ray is never decent,” Red grins, dropping down onto my bed next to me, making my body roll slightly towards the dip in the mattress his body makes.
“Asshole,” I push at his well-defined arm, jostling him and making the hardware in his face and ears jingle. “What happened to sleeping ’til dinner then filling our faces with junk food?”
“I take it you haven’t read your emails yet?” Dax calls through the open door from the bathroom, the sound of his piss hitting the toilet water making me wrinkle my nose. Honestly, being around these three men all the freaking time should have made me more immune to their disgusting manners, but they were still vile.
“No. I’ve just woken up,” I reply, stretching over Red to retrieve my phone from the nightstand where I’d left it charging when I’d stumbled into the hotel in the early hours of the morning after attending a killer after party.
“Damn, dude,” Red snorts in laughter from under my outstretched arm. “Did you stick your finger in a socket or something?”
I run my hand over my hair, feeling just how much of a birds nest it felt, the tons of hairspray used to keep it in check yesterday leaving it feeling brittle and disgusting today. I flick Red on the nose, trying to tame my hair a little with the black hair band I usually wore round my wrist before grabbing my phone, leaning my bony elbow on his chest in the process – on purpose, of course – making him squeal like a little girl, rubbing the spot like I’d pierced his skin or something. You wouldn’t imagine he would be such a pussy about pain with the number of piercings and tattoos he has, but Red has the lowest pain threshold of anyone I’ve ever met. I laugh as I settle back down, slowly blocking out the sounds of my bandmates loving banter as I read the email from our record label.
“They want to send us on tour?” I look up at Adam, who grins maniacally, nodding his head.
“A world fucking tour!” I scan the list of potential dates and venues. He was right, they were proposing a yearlong extension to our upcoming tour, taking us outside the USA. There was also a list of added dates to our original schedule. “The band has blown the fuck up since our performance last night. You should see how many hits we’ve had on YouTube and our socials, too. This is it, man. This is fucking it!”
I feel dazed.
Just four short years ago, I was one of the stars of Blue Ridge Dancing Studio, a dumb reality TV series following a competitive dance troupe. I had been brought in as a fresh faced ten-year-old who was well known on the dance circuit for never leaving without gold. My bedroom was a shrine to dance comps, with shelves groaning under the weight of the ridiculously huge trophies and you could barely see the cute rosebud wallpaper underneath all the colourful rosettes. With my sunshine gold hair and large bright blue eyes, I was a hit with the watching public and was always heavily featured in every episode. I was home schooled, my life revolving around dance training for six or seven hours a day, then rehearsing and competing every weekend. But the best thirty minutes of my day were always the thirty minutes I was in the car with my big brother, Chester.
I was the dancer in the family, but he was the rock star.
There was ten years between us, but it didn’t matter. He was my best friend. He would always take me to and from my dance classes, telling my eager ears the stories about his day, and his friends, to a background of the songs they had written and recorded on shitty equipment floating around his beat-up old car out of the equally shitty speakers.
But then he got diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my whole world imploded.
I quit the show and quit dancing, so I could spend all my time with him, which meant I started hanging around with his band all the time. Adam, I knew quite well already – they had been friends since first grade – but Dax and Red were somewhat of an acquired taste.
When Chaz died, I was lost. I didn’t have my brother. I didn’t have my best friend. I didn’t have dance. I was floating on a lonely ocean until Adam came to see me and put forward the idea of me stepping into Chaz’ role as lead singer of Age of Decay. Dax and Red took some persuading, and the record label they were signed to, took even more persuading, but from there it just kinda took off. We’d been steadily growing in popularity over the last couple of years, but it wasn’t until we recorded a song, the song, Chester’s last song, that we hit the big time. It was his song, and his vocals, that had won us our Grammy, and from the looks of it, renewed the label’s confidence in us.
A hand slides into mine, squeezing my fingers gently and dragging me back into the room, and I look into Adam’s joyful expression. “This is it, Rayna. This is what Chaz wanted for us.”
I lean forward, and he copies the movement, resting our foreheads against each other. “For Chester,” I whisper with a smile.
