Page 24 of Your Chorus
We don’t stop playing as we wait for his distant reply.
“I’ve got nothing to play!”
“Voyons!” JP calls between breaths. “Find something!”
A few seconds later, Cole appears with a pepper grinder.
Our eyes meet over the top of my violin, and his mouth twitches into that spasm of a smirk. He keeps staring at me as he starts to gravely shake the pepper in time with the beat.
I can’t help it. I start to laugh, my chin shaking against the wooden rest and making it impossible to play properly. Cole does his best to keep messing with me, but I can see the fight to smile playing out on his face as he keeps shaking that damn pepper grinder up and down.
We get to the outro, and everyone drops off to let Ace and JP harmonize on the final lyrics. There’s a second of silence after they’re done with their falsetto wailing before the five of us burst out laughing and the rest of the bus breaks into loud applause.
“Encore, encore!” the band’s stage manager shouts as somebody else wolf whistles.
I can’t stop staring at Cole. He crosses his arms over his chest, tattooed biceps straining the sleeves of his black t-shirt. We haven’t played together like this in so long. I forgot how good it feels, howright.
“When is this damn tire getting changed, anyway?” Ace demands.
“Oh,” answers one of the guitar techs, shouting back at us from the front of the bus, “they’re almost finished. We didn’t want to interrupt you guys.”
Sure enough, I glance out the window and see a pair of guys in overalls packing away the last of their gear. We’re back in our seats and rolling away a few minutes later, with Rose still grumbling about the snowstorm of ’96.
“Jesus,” Sanjay mutters, as he twists in his seat to look at the road behind us. “Almost three hours behind schedule, and you can still see the Mont-Royal cross.”
I look back too. Mont-Royal, the forest-covered mountain that rises up in the middle of the city, looms behind the jagged ridges of the skyscrapers. Even from this far away, you can still make out the pinprick of the metal cross that sits on its summit. It’s some hundred feet high, but from this distance, it looks like a little toy sword that’s been rammed into the rock.
My eyes meet Cole’s again, but this time all the easiness is gone. This time the past is wedged between us once more.
