Page 27 of Reverb

Aside from my writing about the band, I did research. I’d promised them that I’d find out who their rich, anonymous tour backer was, and through the magic of persistence, nosiness, and a journalism degree, I found William Hale. He was a young multimillionaire who had made part of his fortune with a hip company that made turntables, a fact that immediately endeared him to me. Dad would love this guy. Hale had sold that company and now worked for a venture capital firm in New York. He also, apparently, had financed this tour.

I needed to verify a few things when we got to New York before I told the band what I’d found, but I was pretty sure Hale was our man. Why was he so interested in the Road Kings? That, I didn’t know yet. I couldn’t find a connection, and I didn’t think any of the band members had met him. If I had any luck, I’d eventually land an interview with Hale and ask him myself.

With that task tucked away, I returned to the mystery of Stone Zeeland. Something about what he’d told me niggled at the back of my mind—about his first band, about going to L.A. and coming home in failure. There was nothing on the internet about Stone’s first band, no abandoned social media pages or old show listings. But I only had Stone’s name to search with, because I didn’t know the name of the band.

There was that itch again, in the back of my mind. As the bus traveled to New York, I let my thoughts focus on it. Axel and Brit were playing their game, Neal was reading, and Denver was asleep in his bunk, the most exhausted of any of us. Stone was slouched at the back of the bus, wearing headphones and scrolling on his phone. I stared at him long enough that he must have sensed something, because he looked up, his brown eyes meeting mine.

Why was he such a mystery? Why did I have so many questions about Stone Zeeland? Why couldn’t I let them go? Why was he so determined not to answer them, to shut me out?

Why couldn’t I stop staring at him?

I was used to him now—his size, his intimidating bulk, his mostly black wardrobe, his bearded scowl. I didn’t know when it had stopped intimidating me, but it had. I’d slept in the same room with him for weeks, and despite our prickly conversations and frequent mutual annoyance, I could admit that he had actually been a gentleman. He might have blunt opinions about my personal life, but he’d never laid a hand on me, never gotten too close, never pushed the boundaries he could easily have pushed as a famous rock star. He’d never made me uncomfortable, even for a minute.

Of course, that was probably because he wasn’t attracted to me, and a nerdy girl like me wasn’t his type. The flutters I’d gotten in his presence were an inconvenience on my part, signifying nothing. And yet as I took in the familiar lines of his face, his hard jaw beneath the trimmed beard, the well-shaped lips pressed together in bemused annoyance, the deep chocolate of his eyes as he kept our gazes locked, I felt a little crazy. I had the urge to cross over to him and straddle his lap. I’d feel those hard thighs beneath mine through the denim of his jeans, and I’d put my hands on those big, warm shoulders. Maybe if I shook him, he’d talk to me. Maybe if I kissed him, he’d do something else.

I blinked, and for a second Stone’s expression softened, his pupils going dark. He knew what I was thinking.

He knew exactly what I was thinking.

I jerked my gaze away from him and back to my screen. What the hell was I doing? I couldn’t look at him again. I picked up my earbuds and jammed them in my ears, the universal signal for leave me alone. I clicked through the windows I had open on my laptop browser, hoping to look busy. The page I’d called up with the lyrics to “Fuck You California” appeared, and as I looked at the words in front of my eyes, the answer came to me, just like that.

We’d have gardens on Mars, you swore,

But we were just kids, going to war.

Following my hunch, I opened a new tab and typed in a search: gardens on mars. I got pages of results about the possibilities and methods of growing plants on a hypothetical Mars base, as well as the novel The Martian. I changed my search to gardens on mars band. The first result was an old online music mag piece about a gig at a tiny club in L.A. by a band called Gardens on Mars. The year was the same year that Stone would have been seventeen.

Stone had written the name of his first band into the song, made it part of the lyric.

I risked a glance at him. He was looking back down at his phone, reading something there, his headphones on. The moment between us had passed. He’d forgotten about me.

I turned back to my screen. For a second, I hesitated. Stone hadn’t offered this information; he hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Still, if he’d put the band in the lyrics to one of the Road Kings’ most famous songs, wasn’t that fair game? Anyone could do the same search I had done. There was nothing wrong with reading public information.

I clicked into one search result, and then another. And I went down the rabbit hole.

* * *

“Holy shit,” the man on the other end of the phone said into my ear. “This is a blast from the past.”

“I’m glad you decided to talk to me,” I said. I was in a small lounge on the eighth floor of our hotel in New York. The Road Kings were doing their second sound check at Madison Square Garden, and I could have done this interview in the room I shared with Stone, but I wanted complete privacy, as if he could somehow know about this conversation if I did it there.

Darren Pinsent—married father of two in Seattle, long-ago bassist in Gardens on Mars—laughed. “Stone isn’t telling you all the details, huh? Something tells me he hasn’t changed much.”

“He’s a man of few words,” I said.

“Yeah. Did he give you Kenzo’s number, too?”

Kenzo Fujimoto had been the drummer all those years ago. I decided not to correct Darren’s assumption that I’d gotten his number from Stone. “Kenzo lives in Australia now,” I said.

“Oh, right—I think I heard that. It’s been so long. And, you know, we don’t keep in touch. I guess we’ve lost track of each other.”

“It happens.” I wondered why Darren hadn’t asked about Chase Mackay, Gardens’ lead singer. I’d found almost nothing about him online, and no Facebook account, which was how I’d tracked Darren down. “I’m following the Road Kings on tour and writing about them for Soundcheck. I’d love some of your insight into Stone and your experience with him in L.A.”

“Our experience in L.A.? That’s easy,” Darren said. He seemed like a sociable guy, pleasant and gregarious. He’d said yes immediately when I’d messaged him on Facebook and asked for an interview. He’d said that no one had ever asked him before. “We went to high school together, Stone and me—at least, we did whenever he went to class. We got a band together with the other guys. We thought we were the shit. We thought we were Guns N’ Roses. We got in the used car that Chase’s dad gave him for his sixteenth birthday and drove to L.A. We were gonna be huge.” He laughed.

“I guess it didn’t turn out that way,” I said.

Darren’s laugh trailed off. “Look,” he said, more seriously. “The way things turned out—I don’t know. We would never have made it big, even if it didn’t end like that. All of us sucked, except for Stone. The thing you need to know about Stone, as a player, is that at sixteen he was better than most people would ever be. He practiced for hours a day. He had a shit family life—his dad left when he was a baby, and his stepfathers used to hit him. So we—”

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