Page 22 of Ring My Bell

“There’s no polite way to broach this,” I started, but Paige waved me off with their fork.

“Nah, it’s cool. Raymond and I hooked up back when I was first trying to get started. Well, me and the band. Then he fucked us over, yada yada yada. The others were absorbed into some other bands, and it went all right. We’re still friends and all but.” They shrugged. “I’m kind of a hard sell apparently.” Baring their teeth, they added, “I don’t play nice.”

“Trixie and the Martians,” I said thoughtfully, trying to remember ever hearing about them. “You all had stage names like Kitty and Bear-Bear, right? Wore a lot of rainbow stuff?”

Paige nodded. “We hated it so much. Raymond met Theresa, who played bass, at some industry shindig. He decided to jump on the queer punk pop trend starting to be a thing out west.” Another bite of food, another shrug. “Anyway, you know the drill. Led us on, fucked us over, dropped us like hot potatoes after stealing from us. Took our masters and screwed us out of a ton of money. None of us had the dough to hire a good lawyer and fight him back, so…” Paige shrugged. “Here I am. Eating gravlax in suburban Missouri. Livin’ the dream, frankly.”

Taking a bite of my eggs, I thought of Iggy back in our room. He’d been sprawled all soft and warm on the sheets, and I wished we had more time to spend just the two of us, before we had to be on for this plan to work.

Calling it a plan was really being generous. Maybe it was more of a notion.

An idea.

A desperate wish.

Paige booped my nose with their teaspoon. “Dude. It’s gonna be fine. Stop stressing about it.”

Speaking of stress… The mere mention of the word made me think of Raymond’s messages on Iggy’s posts. “Are you on social media?” I asked. So long as Iggy wasn’t with me, I could ask Paige and maybe Gerald if they’d had any weird messages lately, anything they thought might be Raymond stalking them, trying to stop us from going forward.

“Whoa, hello conversational whiplash. And yeah, I’m super online. Wanna friend me? I’m on most of the platforms and some of the dating apps but, sorry man, you’re pretty much taken, and that is not my bag.”

Chapter Nine

IGGY

The website wasn’t my best work, but it definitely didn’t suck. I had enough left in my account to cover the first three months of hosting. Hopefully by then, Mathis will have some gigs under his belt, and it’ll be his problem, I thought. Glancing up, I saw him eyeing me, trying to see what I was doing on my phone. “Sorry, just checking social media.”

“Hm.”

I tabbed over to one of the platforms I used regularly and showed him the screen. “See? I’ve got a lot of interest in the special surprise performance.”

Mathis’s jaw twitched as he gritted his teeth. “Anything from Raymond?”

I shook my head, scrolling down to the original post I made what felt like ages ago but had only been a week before. “Not officially, but a few randos with pretty new accounts, like made in the past few days, are posting shit about Iggy who and, er, calling me some pretty specific names.”

“How specific?” he demanded, fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “Read it to me.”

“Easy there,” I muttered. “I appreciate the chivalry but it’s NBD, you know? Twerps on social media, thinking they’re the shit for making fun of a Z-lister.”

“But you think it’s Raymond.” He flipped the indicator on, changing lanes.

“Where are we going?”

“I need to pee.”

“We just stopped like five miles ago.”

“Thirty, but the bladder wants what it wants.”

I made a very Marge Simpson noise at him, but kept scrolling. When he went to the bathroom, I thought, I’d give the site a final look-see and set it up to go live in a few hours.

When we were in the mountains and he definitely couldn’t stop and check his notifications if they went off because o-m-g he was going to get so many likes on his social media.

I mean, to be fair, even one like would be a lot. He had exactly three tweets, the most recent of which was four years old and just one word: Fuck.

Some rando had responded with a proposition, but apparently no answer from Mathis. Unless he took it to DMs… “Hey, so, you ever hook up with people you meet online?”

“What?” He jerked the wheel, startled, before taking the exit ramp towards a cluster of gas stations and fast food places.

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