Page 8 of Never Been Shipped

Chapter

Five

Even without rehearsals,the month between that meeting and the start of the cruise flew by. John practiced every day, holing himself up in his room and running through every song in ElectricOh!’s limited catalog, even ones he knew there was no chance they’d bother to play. It was as much an exercise in remembering as it was an exercise in learning anew, and he was surprised at howgoodit started to feel, playing all these old songs he hadn’t let himself think about in so long.

Now, the day before the ship was going to set sail, all he had to do was finish packing. He had three guitars—two acoustic and one electric—and an undoubtedly overkill supply of accessories and extras, from his pedal board to tuners to patch cords to strings. He’d focused so much on the music side of things, he’d barely started packing anything else.

“Easy.” One of his housemates, Asa, had wandered into John’s room to help, although so far he’d been less than helpful. He was standing in front of John’s closet now, pretending to surveythe outfit choices even though John had always used the closet more for instrument storage than anything else. It was a disaster at the moment, picked through and piled up and all disorganized compared to how he usually kept it. “For the first day, you’re going to want to wear something black. For the second day, I’m thinking…hmm, maybe black? Then the third day, well, everyone knows it’s good luck to wear black. Now the fourth day is the big show, right? You’re going to want to make a statement, so…”

Asa turned, his eyebrows raised expectantly. John huffed out a laugh, unable to resist playing along. “Black again?”

Asa ran his hand through his hair, like he was really considering that one. He cycled through hair colors and styles more than anyone else John knew, and right now it was a faded pink he was debating whether to re-dye or grow out. “Could work. Do you have an LBD in here?”

All John’s clothes were in his dresser, so he opened the second drawer, sifting through the folded-up T-shirts. “I do wear other colors, you know.”

Asa gave a pointed look at the open drawer, which, okay, happened to contain almost entirely black shirts. John came across one that was dark gray, and would’ve held it up as proof except even he knew that was a stretch.

Hadn’t Micah made a similar comment? Something about the white shirt he’d worn to the meeting, almost like he’d betrayed something, changed in some fundamental way. He’d never gotten around to asking her three things that had changed inherlife. He had just been debating the wisdom of asking her if she was planning to be in town long, entertaining the brief,clearly delusional idea of asking her if she’d want to come to his house for dinner, when she’d reached down to put her shoes back on and ordered a rideshare to come pick her up.

“What’s the story behind the name?” Asa asked. “ElectricOh! Is that a reference to something?”

John grunted as he took the entire bottom drawer out of the dresser, putting it on his bed so he could go through it without having to keep bending over. “That’s not in the Wikipedia?”

“I searched you up one time, back when you first moved in,” Asa said. “I didn’t read all of it.”

It was one of the things that John had appreciated most about his housemates, actually. They were all easy to live with—Kiki, who always had ten thousand opinions about whatever show the house had chosen to watch as a group; Elliot, who was a big music fan (they were definitely the one most likely to have listened to ElectricOh! in its prime); and then Asa and his now-fiancée, Lauren. Everybody cared about each other but also minded their own business, seeming to navigate boundaries that hadn’t even been spoken aloud, like the way John never really wanted to talk about his past in a band. But now he’d spent the last month playing all those old songs, was about to spend five days stuck on a boat with people he used to spend every waking minute with, and was probably going to have to answer a thousand questions more invasive thanWhat’s the story behind the name?

“We went to a concert together in high school,” John said. “Me and Micah and Frankie, our bassist. And the lead singer was kinda over-the-top showboating—you could just tell he was feeling himself. I think he must’ve been at least a little blitzed.He had this billowy white shirt unbuttoned down to his belly button, and he kept gyrating against the mic stand.”

“Sounds like quite the show,” Asa said. “Who was the band?”

“You know, I don’t even remember. They opened for someone else we were there to see. I bet Frankie still has their concert ticket somewhere. They’re good at that kind of thing.”

“So this isn’t a story about how you stole that guy’s band name because you were so impressed by his gyrations?”

“Ha,” John said. “No. He kept shouting, ‘You’re electric, Ohio! You’re electric!’ We thought that was hilarious, so we said it formonthsafterward. Then somehow that led to us calling ourselves Electric Ohio!, which sounded too much like a utility company, and then that became ElectricOh!, and yeah. That’s the name that stuck.”

“With an exclamation point.”

“What can I say, it was the time. We were also trying to adequately convey the unhinged excitement of that guy yelling at the crowd in his pirate shirt. If we had known what a bitch it was going to be, always having the next word autocorrect to a capital letter, we might’ve made different choices.”

There were a lot of different choices they might’ve made in retrospect. But it was hard to go down that road, because everything affects everything else. It was easy for John to wish they’d never allowed Ryder in the band in the first place, but he could also admit that the band would’ve never been what it was without him. He might be a dick, but he was a good guitarist and had written some really solid lead lines. And then maybe they would’ve signed a different type of record deal, if they’d been at all savvy about the way the business worked, wouldn’t havegiven up so much control and locked themselves into a contract that was so easy to get perverted later into something none of them had wanted. Or at least hadsaidthey didn’t want—John still wasn’t sure how Micah actually felt about all that.

“And you really haven’t played with any of these people since the band broke up,” Asa said.

John laughed without any real humor. “I’ve barelyseenany of these people since then. Frankie and Steve and I text every once in a while. Happy birthday, here’s a funny meme, what do you think of the new album by this band we used to tour with, that kind of thing. As for Ryder…let’s just say there’s no love lost there. Besides, he’s busy with his new band—he’s the only one of us who’s really had a consistent career in the music industry after ElectricOh!, although Frankie still does some session work and Micah had her own thing for a bit.”

“Is that—” Asa started to say, then held up, like he was carefully considering how to phrase whatever he was going to say next. John knew the question he wanted to ask and decided to take pity on him. It was what everyone wanted to know. And for all Asa’s sometimes playful and flippant attitude, it was a testament to his thoughtfulness as a friend that he’d shown restraint in ever bringing it up before John had opened the subject himself.

“Micah wanted to go solo,” he said. “And the way the contract was structured, she really didn’t need us—she could fulfill the third album we were signed for on her own. So that’s basically what broke the band up.”

John wondered if it was obvious just how much heavy lifting the wordbasicallywas doing there. Because the truth was, there had been a lot of reasons why the band was doomed.

Creative differences—Ryder had always wanted them to getmoreradio play,morechart domination, but then had somehow seemed to turn on everyone the more popular they got, saying they were betraying their artistic principles. He’d hated that they’d done theNightshiftersepisode, although John had always suspected that was because they’d performed the one song that Ryder didn’t help write. The song that had come together in the middle of the night, when John and Micah had both been unable to sleep and had found each other on the back porch of the rental they’d all been staying in while recording the first album. The song that had gone on to be ElectricOh!’s most successful by far, in part because of theNightshiftersconnection, in part because…well, they’d put everything into that song. At least, John knew he had.

And then there were the personal differences. John didn’t know exactly when Micah and Ryder started dating—they’d kept their relationship a secret from the public for its entire duration, or at least as much a secret as possible. There had always been whispers, rumors, blurry candid photos that were posted to the internet and debated on various forums. But they’d also kept it a secret from thebandfor at least the very start, which still had the power to piss John off. And then Micah and Ryder dated—occasionally breaking up, then getting back together, then repeating the cycle again—for the next two years. Through the tail end of promoting the first album, and then into the second album and that disastrous European tour.

“We were all really young,” he said now to Asa. He didn’t know why, as much baggage ashemight carry around about the way things had ended, he didn’t want Asa to think less of Micah for it. “It was a lot of pressure.”

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