Page 25 of Never Lasting (Never Blue)

the emperor never had clothes

can’t stop the madness

drifting past sadness

falling into lonely

sinking below slowly

slept but still tired

fighting the muck and get mired

I sang my song of kids who grew up with everything but were still empty and searching. Kids who went to their prom and got so loaded, they drove down the wrong side of the highway and smashed into a minivan, killing themselves and a mother coming home from her nursing shift. Ben had almost died with them, but I’d stopped him from getting in that car. I should’ve stopped them all, but I had been just a kid myself.

There was no pause between the story of one of my deepest traumas and the next song, a cover of The Killers. I sang because I needed to. I played my guitar like an extension of myself. I wrote music to soothe my soul. Music didn’t bring me joy; it was my reason to breathe.

Ben sat at a table in the front, surrounded by a group of friends from back home. Normally, he’d be holding court, regaling them with his antics and charming the shit out of anyone within earshot, but he never did that when I was on stage. His attention was rapt, and our old friends didn’t dare make a peep within earshot of him. Dude was easygoing as they came, but not when it came to my music. He was intensely supportive in every way.

I was launching into my last song when movement at the door caught my eye. Stripes. Her eyes flicked up from the bouncer checking her ID, locking on mine. My mouth curved into a smile as it wrapped around Eddie Vedder’s lyrics about finding a better man.

Singing to Tali for the first time was going to be one of my favorite memories. And she stayed there, just inside the entrance, even as Tino and Nina tried to push her closer. Our eyes never parted. The entire song was hers.

“Thank you. We’re Never Again, and you’ve been a fucking ridiculous audience tonight.”

I had to go backstage for a few minutes to put my shit away, and when I came back out, there was no Tali.

I grabbed an empty chair and pushed it up to my table full of friends. “Did you see Tali?” I asked Ben.

He shrugged, and Claudia smacked his arm. “Was that the girl you were talking to?”

Ben scowled at her. “Yeah. She was here for a split second, but they decided to go somewhere else.”

My eyes darted to Claudia, my ex as of a month ago. I’d called her and broke up with her the same day I hung out with Tali in her dorm room. There was no screaming or hurt feelings. She’d been ready to move on too. It hadn’t been a big, dramatic scene. We grew up together, and over the summer we got the itch to try each other on for size. We had fun, but from the beginning, it was obvious to us both that’s all it was going to be.

I could’ve rushed to Tali’s dorm and spilled the news, but she’d been clear it wasn’t my relationship status holding her back. I gave her room, thinking I’d see her at Tino’s or out somewhere else—that we’d get to know each other naturally and see what came of it.

But she’d disappeared, just like tonight. I’d been beginning to think she’d never existed, except Ben would casually mention something from the class they were both in, and I’d become obsessed with her all over again.

“Is she the girl you dumped me for?” Claudia asked, grinning wickedly.

Ben said yes at the same time I said no. He chuckled. “Dude, she so is,” he said.

I grabbed his beer, holding it to my lips. “She so isn’t.” Then I chugged the three-quarters of the bottle that was left, wiping my mouth with my sleeve and slamming it on the table.

“She was pretty,” Claudia offered.

“She is. But she’s not mine,” I said.

Ben took a pill from his pocket and popped it in his mouth, swallowing it dry. My eyebrows pulled together as I watched him. “What was that?”

He shrugged again, smiling crookedly. “Just a little something to smooth the path. Not a big deal.”

I held my hand out. “The big deal is you’re not sharing.”

He laughed and slapped a little white pill into my palm. I swallowed it with a swig of Claudia’s beer.

“You’re a bad influence, Ben!” Claudia giggled.

He gasped innocently. “Who do you think gave me my first Oxy?”

It’d been me, although I was pretty sure it was one of my mom’s Percocets the day after my Bar Mitzvah. My dad had spent three hours lecturing me on how I’d screwed up the ceremony, not getting my Hebrew right, thus humiliating him in front of our entire family and his colleagues who’d trekked out to Northern Virginia from D.C. to see his loser of a son.

I hadn’t made a habit of taking pills. Although I’d never admit it to Ben, it scared me how good they felt. Tonight was the first time I’d taken one in at least a year. Normally, I stuck to weed and the occasional hit of E when I wanted to feel like a nineties’ raver.

But my sorrows were drowning me a little, and I just wanted to feel good when I went under.

We hung out at the bar, drinking and talking about shit back home. Dopamine flooded my brain, and in that moment, not a thing was wrong. It didn’t matter Tali had left, or my band played shitty gig after shitty gig, or my friends had died. The little white pill told me lies, but I was more than willing to believe them.

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