Page 8 of On the Beat

He’s even selfless enough to drop everything to drive me to the airport at the last minute. I couldn’t ask for a better roommate and friend.

But as reliable, dependable, and as selfless as Kaiden is, and as much as I want to say that we were ever more than friends, it never happened. He may be dependable and reliable with his friends, but I’ve seen how his relationships ended. In the past four years, they’ve all spun out in flames, and I’m not interested in being another casualty of his hectic schedule, commitment issues, and overbearing family.

“We’re here,” Kaiden says, startling me out of my thoughts as I look at the signs. We’re at the international departures leg of LAX. “Want help getting your stuff out of the car?”

I shake my head. Deep down, I’m still a New Yorker: independent, tough as nails, and unshakable. I have a feeling I’ll need those qualities for this assignment. “I got it.”

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Have a safe flight. Call me when you land.”

“I will. Thanks for everything,bro.”

“You’re welcome.”

After I pull my beat-up suitcase out of the back seat, I shut the door and take a deep breath. Walking through the airport’s sliding doors, I don’t look back.

Chapter 5: Ryder Black

Maybe I’ve lost my mind, but at least I did it in paradise.

I take in the blue skies and white sand beaches through the rolled-down windows of the car. I thought I knew sweltering heat from growing up in the South, then moving to L.A., but here, the heat is sweltering already. Though it should be suffocating, it feels liberating instead.

Paulo Magnayon, my college roommate and the owner of the beachfront bungalow I’ll be staying at, insisted on coming to the airport himself to pick me up. With only a duffel bag and my guitar, I booked—well, Mia had booked—this trip at the last minute, catching the last flight out. After a gruelling twenty-three-hour plane ride from Los Angeles to El Nido, made more bearable by the fact that I was on a private plane, I made it here.

Staying in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, surrounded by people I don’t know and people who don’t know or care who I am. I’ve been to the Philippines once before, a hurried tour date in Manila for two nights before flying out to Japan. This is far different. It’s freeing, edenic if only because of the anonymity, and the scenery only makes it better. Maybe I can take up surfing or wakeboarding. Nobody knows me, and I’m not the most hated pop star or most believed music artist. I’m just Ryder Black, a small-town boy from Kentucky, on vacation. I can easily pass as any other tourist.

“So, Ryder,” Paulo says, only a faint accent betraying that Tagalog is his first language. Paulo and I have a friendship stretching back a decade. He was a pre-med student, and I veered into the other end of majors starting withM: music. After school ended, he came home to help care for his sick grandmother, but we’ve been in touch fairly often. “What made you decide to slum it with me andfinallycome to El Nido? Just looking for a break? Are we about to party for three months straight, like we never did in university?”

“First of all, all the frat parties at UCLA were trash, and we didn’t know anyone who was well-connected enough to get us into a Hollywood party,” I say, laughing. How nice it would be to have those same problems now that we did when we were nineteen. How well we knew each other, then.

Now, Paulo knows me… and he doesn’t. He knows I went to UCLA with big dreams, but after we graduated, we diverged paths. I think most people assumed I’d be playing cover bands until I got discouraged and headed back to Kentucky, but Paulo’s always had a pragmatic yet hopeful outlook on life. He knows me—the Ryder I want to get back, the person who played music out of sheer joy and love for the art. He knows who I was. He doesn’t know who I am. Then again, when I showed up at the airport in sunglasses and a ball cap, no one knew who I was either, and I was grateful for it.

“And second… yeah, I’m just trying to get away from work and all the paparazzi. I’ve heard the beaches here are great, and I didn’t want to go anywhere that was too crowded.”

“Yeah, well, El Nido is definitely the best place for that if you want to avoid crowds,” says Paulo. He rubs the nape of his neck, where the edges of his close-cropped hair fade.

Then Paulo flicks the blinker and makes an aggressive left turn that leaves me reeling. He narrowly misses a motorcyclist, two pedestrians, and a cyclist, but seemed utterly unfazed by the vehicular maneuver. Having been driven everywhere for the past few years, I feel like a granny-type driver in comparison, one who goes twenty miles in school zones and two miles over speed bumps. Plus, the horrible lines of traffic didn’t help any latent need for speed I might have had. I’m used to bad traffic, having lived in L.A. for so long now, but I didn’t expect to nearly die in a car accident before my first twenty-four hours in El Nido were up.

“So, what happens this time of year?” I ask.

“It’s storm season,” he replies. “Monsoons, tropical storms, that kind of thing. We should be safe, though. I don’t think there have been any storms forecasted.”

No wonder Mia Rose was able to book such a cheap plane ticket, not to mention the amount of hotel, Airbnb, and vacation rental vacancies in El Nido. I chew on my lip, annoyed at the anxiety that spikes in me from the phrasestorm season.I grew up with tornado warnings. Dry storms that rip through the Midwest and tear roofs off of buildings, demolish schools, and star in old movies with Judy Garland. I got used to one type of storm, but i never quite recovered from myfearof them. I’m not sure that hurricanes or monsoons would be any better. “Great.”

“You’re not worried, are you?” he says, eyeing me under his Ray-Ban sunglasses. “If you’re feeling unsafe, I guess I could take you back to the airport. But it’d be a shame not to catch up after all this time, man.”

“No, no,” I say, squaring my shoulders. I can’t just run from one problem to another.But isn’t that what you’re trying to do? “I’m excited for us to finally get to hang out.”

I don’t know whose voice was talking: my sister or my conscience. I try to shut out the last words that Poppy flung at me when we talked on that fateful night.

You’ll never amount to anything with that attitude.

All you do is run away from your problems. You make messes but never bother to clean them up.

Maybe that’s why I went to Skye’s house. To prove a point. To prove to her that I was more than someone who runs away from their problems—that I can solve them.

That I can provide more than trouble.

Or maybe I wanted to convince myself.

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