Page 128 of Goodbye Note

Arik got up to make the video call. “See? I’m alive. Don’t just believe stuff you read on the internet… Yes, I know you can’t tell Gran that because she’s ninety-four… What?”

There was a long pause and more yelling. I cocked my head in a silent question.

Arik’s gaze flickered to me, but he gave a subtle shake of his head. “Yes, it’s a tattoo. It’s small. It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s on your hand!” I heard and cringed.

Half an hour had passed before Arik slumped into the seat next to me again. The other guys had gone to bed or at least to their bunks while Kiernan was in the back room dealing with the publicity shit.

“Well, I’m fucked.”

“What happened?”

“They, in no uncertain terms, told me to come home right now, like I’m not twenty-fucking-one years old. They want me back in school in the fall. They threatened to sell all the shit I left in their house. All my instruments. They told me they won’t help me pay for an apartment unless I’m in school, so I’ll have nowhere for my stuff when I do go back there if they haven’t already sold it. So I have to figure out the logistics of all that.”

“Can you cover rent?”

He closed one eye. “Maybe. Not like we get paid in a timely manner, though, and I don’t know where we are at with merch. It’s been good, but we have to wait for the credit card payouts on that shit, too.”

I slipped my arm around him, and he pressed his face into my shoulder, knees pulled into his chest. “Do you want me to pay your rent? Or for, like, a storage unit?”

“My place is sublet for the summer, and if we go on tour, I’ll find somewhere else for the semester, but all my stuff is at my parents’ house.”

“So maybe a storage unit.”

“You can’t do that.”

I put my hand on the side of his neck, gently stroking my thumb over his skin. “Yes, I can. I told you, we are pretty flush. We have the band money and my mom’s estate. We get all her royalties and shit.”

“I can’t take that from you.”

“Yes, you can.” I pressed my lips to his forehead. “And you’ll be fine. You have a massive tour lined up. You know what else you could do?”

“What?” He picked his head up.

“Do a limited drop of those ghost shirts. You could do a bunch of funny shit on them. Lindsay would help. She might not even take a cut.”

“I can’t not pay her.”

I shrugged. “Fine, give her a percent. She’ll push them, and you can throw them up online, too. Start your own label, and then you don’t have to give the label a cut since it’s not band merch.”

I exhaled. “What if that draws more attention to the rumors about us?”

“I modeled for you. Say wearing them was a stunt to get buzz going. We’ll have our photog shoot some pictures.”

A spark of hope made it to his eyes, and that was enough.

“Let’s find a tattoo shop to get our galaxies at the next stop.”

I found a picture of the butterfly galaxy on his journal the next morning.

give me butterflies like galaxies.

a shape i’d never hoped to feel.

thought YOU were andromeda at night.

i wrote you into stars

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