Page 239 of Haunt Me

I lift a hand in the air, point a finger to the sky and look straight into the crowd, saying one last thing before Jude starts the first notes ofPierce Meon the bass:

“This is yours. You know who you are.”

Then I start the song. As I sing, the crowd beings a roar so loud it drowns out my voice. I know why they’re screaming, and I know why their screams are extra loud. It’s not because they love this song. It’s that behind me, a brand new music video is appearing on the huge screen.

Tonight, on the first Paris show, the music video ofPierce Meis making its worldwide debut. My singing is synchronized with the music video, which is muted. But the producers give me my cue so that I hit the notes in synchronicity with the actors. It’s a boy and a girl, roughly the age Eden and I were when we first met. And it’s set in our woods in Massachusetts.

They reenact some of the scenes that happened in real life, except slightly changed.

I couldn’t fix us back then. I couldn’t fix us now.

So I made a song and I fixed us in it.

In the music video forPierce Me, Eden and I are laughing in the places where we cried. There are orange leaves and sunlight beams streaming through the treetops and no one is having a panic attack. No one is bleeding from the knee. No one is running home to a man who is abusing her. It’s the most boring music video you have seen in your life.

Of course, it’s beautiful. The aesthetics of New England in the fall are on steroids.

But there is something else.

As the couple on the giant screen reclaims all the places Eden and I got lost in, the blissful image on the screen gets interrupted.

Footage of the girl sinking underwater starts flashing in-between.

Light interrupted by dark.

The crowd stops its excited screams. They continue to sing along with me, but it’s quieter, subdued. Their attention is completely arrested by the music video on the screen behind me. By the girl who is falling deeper and deeper into the dark water.

They are waiting to see if she will be saved.Whenshe will be saved.

But she won’t.

The girl and her boy keep laughing and chasing each other in the woods. She reads, her head on his lap, and he plays his guitar for her. And at the same time, in parallel scenes, the girl is sinking deeper and deeper.

The music video ends with me belting the very last note ofPierce Me. Then, there is complete silence.

The screen goes black.

I fight against the urge to lean my elbows on my knees and pant as if I’ve just ran a marathon. Singing this thing really took it out of me, but it was cathartic. Making this music video got some of the darkness out of me, and now I feel somehow lighter. Creating does that to me. Now I’m left empty, but calm. For a second.

And speaking of calm, the crowd is eerily quiet.

It’s been a few seconds since the video ended, and not a single person has cheered. I hope it’s not because they hated it. I think they are only now realizing what they just saw. It’s beginning to sinkin: the girl didn’t get saved. She drowned. They need a minute to digest it.

I don’t need anyone to understand the meaning behind it: I made if for me. Maybe they won’t get it at all.

Slowly, like a tidal wave, the crowd erupts in applause.

I give them a full minute, and they keep going, getting louder by the second. It seems like they could go on all night, but I have more stuff prepared for them, and zero time to spare.

“Hope you liked that,” I say into my mic, and they scream their heads off. I hear them over my earplugs, and I motion to my technician to turn the volume of my own voice up so that I can hear myself over the screams.

“While we are still onPierce Me, does anyone here know who wrote the music to the song we just sang?”

Of course, they start chanting James’ name.

Right on cue, my brother is lifted onto the stage from a secret panel below my feet. He ascends from the bowels of the platform’s underground area like a deus ex machina in reverse, looking completely tall and unfazed by the ear-splitting applause that greets him. It was him Skye was whispering about in my earpiece before.

When he told me ‘he’s here,’Skye had meant that my brother has arrived backstage. And now, he isherehere. On stage, with me.

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