Page 4 of Final Serenade

Levi: Who was number one before me?

Laughing, I tapped out a reply.

My alarm.

He responded with an eye-roll emoji.

Unable to go back to sleep, I dragged myself out of bed and resumed working on my summer write-up, but my head felt heavy and my tired brain was scrambled for words.

Levi called around noon when I was on my third cup of coffee.

“Did you see it?” he asked. The tone of his voice could be described as perpetual shock and was accompanied by the sounds of slurping and chewing.

“What are you talking about?” I opened my browser.

“TMZ just released an entire Frankie Blade gallery.”

“Any decent photos, at least?” I tried to mask the sudden wave of anxiety with a joke.

“Don’t worry. Your teenage crush has still got it,” Levi said, a pinch of amusement in his voice.

I pulled up the TMZ page and flipped through a gallery of freshly uploaded photos. There were clear professional shots of Frankie, taken somewhere in Malibu while he was dining. He looked good. There were no scars or any facial deformities, contrary to popular hearsay. I took a moment to study the shots. Frankie wasn’t alone. Dante and Johnny Z were with him in half of the photos.

“You think Carter’s out?” Levi pondered.

“Why would he be out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they wanted Quin on it. Probably would sell more tickets. The original line-up.”

“Nonsense,” I countered.

Right now, Frankie could probably sell out an arena on his own and people would pay crazy money to hear him sing a phone book backwards or an instructional manual from Ikea.

Besides, the only two band members that really mattered were Frankie and Dante. They brought the chemistry on stage. Carter and Johnny Z were merely a nice backdrop. Everyone knew that.

Levi didn’t pursue the subject further, because this wasn’t somethingRewiredwould post anyway. TMZ speculated. We created original content.

“Will you have anything ready for me today?” Levi inquired.

“In a couple of hours,” I lied. The article wasn’t anywhere near done. “I’ll upload it when I’m finished. Can you prep the draft?”

“I’m on it… Hey, check this out! They just updated their website.”

The iMessage window popped up on my computer’s screen with the incoming link from Levi.

I clicked on it and pulled up the band’s page, my heart beating a little faster. The signature red and orange flame logo on the homepage had been replaced by an all-black background with a burning butterfly. Nothing else. I stared at the artwork for a good minute, reveling in its intrigue and listening to Levi’s speculations about what Frankie had possibly been doing during his long sabbatical.

The imagery was dramatic…and sad. It made my chest twist a little when I tried to imagine what being dragged by a motorcycle across a quarter-mile-long spread of the freeway might feel like.

I remembered the day very clearly. It’d happened a few weeks before I started my internship at Jay Brodie PR. The news had broken early that morning, and I’d spent an entire day staring at my phone and waiting for updates on Frankie’s condition. My weak teenage heart barely held it together.

Levi’s voice was a muffled noise in my ear as he went on with his theories, slurping some more. He had this stupid habit of eating while talking or doing other things. He was a class-A workaholic. And the condition was contagious as hell.

“Hey, I really need to get this finished, okay?” I interrupted him.

My gaze swept over the digital clock on my laptop screen. I had four hours to put something coherent together. For a second, I thought of using my writer’s block as an excuse to bail on dinner at my mother’s, but my conscience told me to suck it up and go. I didn’t want to be another kid who was a letdown. Ashton was a huge disappointment and I felt obligated to try to change that, although my attempts to talk some sense into him hadn’t been successful. He was still undecided on everything. College, job, life. His music.

“Fine. Talk later, Cass,” Levi said and hung up.

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