Page 174 of Pierce Me

I am going to cause it, if everything goes well.

“I can’t hear you, Athens!”

They roar my name. I tap my ear, pretending I still can’t hear. They love it. They feed off my every move, screaming even more.

This crowd is something else. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this is something I’ve rarely seen in two years of concerts, which in musician years is about a thousand years. But these people… I definitely did not expect them to be singing every word toThis Is Waralong with me, or to be so loud and pumped with energy. A faceless sea sways in front of me, lit up with a million phone lights. They’ve stopped dancing now, but I can see everyone pulsing with energy to start moving again. I don’t intend to keep them waiting for long.

“I said, are you with me?”

The phones come down and everyone concentrates on screaming their lungs off. I feel a huge smile split my face and I can’t help it: I forget all about Issy Woo. The sun is taking its time setting behind the highest seats and there’s a splash of orange light across the darkening horizon. The stars are already blinking behind the tiny, fluffy clouds—it’s going to be a beautiful Greek night. The kind I’m addicted to now.

“Right!” I start running to the back of my arrow-shaped stage, as my musicians and band start appearing out of the smoke. Huge roars and applause welcome them one by one.

The minute Jude appears, the crowds go nuts. But for once, he doesn’t even acknowledge them. He is anxiously searching for my eyes, and I nod briefly at him. He motions for me to come over. It’s not in the choreography, but I jog to him with long strides, my heart pounding.

“They haven’t found her yet,” he murmurs, hand over his face mic.

“What?” My knees go weak and his arm shoots out to grab my elbow.

“They will,” he says, gripping me tight. His fingers are crushing bones, but it’s good. The pain is good. It grounds me, keeps me from falling apart. “They will.” His eyes burn into mine.

Is it too late to start believing?

Is it too late to start hoping?

“Yeah,” I tell him, “they will.”

Miki is looking over at us, a panicked look on his face, and in a split second, I realize why: the transition to the next song has already started and I am standing next to Jude, which is approximately a million miles away from my mark. I start running so that I will get back in position in time, and the crowd gasps in anticipation. I don’t make it for two seconds, so I do the only thing I can: I start dancing on the way.

The crowd bursts in delighted laughter and applause. The phones come out again, as they usually do whenever something unexpected happens. If this is unexpected to this crowd, they have no idea what’s coming.

Here we go.

…

We’ve been singing for an hour and sweat is pouring down my back and forehead freely. We are steadily making our way through the set list as the sky gets heavy with night. As I sing, the world outside the stadium slowly ceases to exist, until the only thing that’s left is what the spotlights touch. The stage, me, the musicians and the crowd. There’s nothing else outside of these purple, pink and white lights.

I singHis HandsomenessandChemistryseated on the piano, which is one of my favorite ways to sing. Just the piano, me, and Miki with his drums. We sing the two rock ballads like that, just us two, and it hits me like a punch in the throat all over again how much pain these two songs carry.

Judging by the number of voices that sing along to every word, some of them hoarse with tears, the feelings resonate with a lot of people. That’s what I do. I sing my pain, I sing their pain.

It’s been this way since the beginning.

We are all here because of that pain.

But tonight, I listen to my songs with a different set of ears. With her ears.

And the pain almost doubles me over, stealing my breath.

After the piano set is done, I sing my most famous summer song,Invincible Summer. Most people don’t realize it because the lyrics are kind of cute, but it actually is about a man drowning. As he slowly fades away beneath the surface, he imagines his love jumping in to save him and bring him safely back to shore. In the bridge, we find out that he’s actually died and it was all a last-minute hallucination. Almost no one has ever gotten that about the song, and I’m not about to explain it and ruin everyone’s day. And possibly life.

But I remember the feverish night I wrote it.

I had woken up sweating from nightmares, dreaming that Eden had come back to tell me it had all been a colossal joke. And I had found myself wishing I had been dead instead of waking up to the reality of her still being gone.

I wrote the song in a frenzy, within a few hours.

I told my mom who was slowly going crazy worrying over me—I think I hadn’t eaten in a few days by then, and had dropped ten pounds in two weeks—that it had made me feel better to put it all in a song.

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