I manage two painful, probably incoherent paragraphs before he pulls his headphones down around his neck and says, “You ever been to a concert?”
I shake my head.
“We’re going to see these guys in a couple weeks.” Dorian holds his headphones out to me. I look at him skeptically. “C’mon, they’re good!” He yanks up the leg of his joggers—the same black with ROYALS HOCKEY written down the leg in purple the rest of us are wearing—and twists to show me the black tattoo on his calf. A bomb with a flower in place of the wick. “They got a song called ‘Flowerbomb,’ so.”
He settles back in his seat while I put the headphones over my ears. When he hits play on his phone, I swear my eardrums rupture. There is a man. Literally screaming at me. I pull the headphones away from my ears and glare at Dorian until he grins and apologizes. Barbie huffs a laugh.
“You listen to this shit, too, Barbie?” I ask him once the music is turned down enough that my ears aren’t bleeding from it.
“Excuse you?” Dorian scoffs. “Shit?”
Barbie shrugs. He’s got his hat pulled down over his eyes, voice sleepy. “Hard to avoid it with Dori and Cauler around. It grows on you.”
“‘It grows on you,’” Dorian mocks him. “As if you didn’t fanboy when you realized it was Ahren screaming in the background of ‘Beltsville.’”
“I prefer my pop punk and banda, thank you.”
Dorian plays a bunch of songs by the same band, translating the screaming and growling into spoken words for me. It’s a lot more meaningful than I expected. More hopeful than the screaming makes it out to be. It’s downright relatable. I can see the appeal. The delivery might take some getting used to, but I mean. People who look like they listen to this kind of music are my type, all those piercings and tattoos, so I might as well give it a chance.
“The screamer, Joel? He writes the lyrics,” Dorian explains. “He’s got depression and anxiety, so he puts all that into his music.”
My stomach flips. No wonder it felt so meaningful. I clear my throat and take off Dorian’s headphones.
“So you wanna go see ’em with us?”
“Who’s all going?” I ask, voice a little rough.
“Me, Barbie, Cauler, Zero, Kovy.” He counts them off on his fingers. “Your sister and her girlfriend might be coming, too, but I guess that depends on how much work Jade gets done on some project she’s got.”
“Okay,” I say, and immediately regret it. Hanging out with Dorian and Barbie is one thing; Barbie’s always in our room anyway, so that’s basically like hanging out already. But Cauler? At a concert? As soon as I agree to it, I know I’m gonna back out at the last second. Tell them I don’t feel good or I got a big assignment or something.
“Nice!” Dorian says. “I’ll send you some of their songs so you can get to know them better. More fun when you can sing along.”
I get a message full of video links from him later that night, lying in a hotel bed wide awake while Colie snores across the room. I put earbuds in and turn the music up just enough to drown him out. Each song hits closer and closer to home, like I could’ve written these lyrics myself.
I take a cold shower to wake myself up in the morning, but my eyes still hurt and nothing I do gets rid of that grimy, sleepless feeling around them.
“You look rough, bro,” Dorian tells me when we meet the team downstairs for breakfast.
I shrug, pouring myself a cup of complimentary coffee. Ever since Delilah started bringing me iced coffees every math class, I’ve started relying on it to function. At least I’ve developed a taste for it, because I desperately need it now.
“Colie’s snoring,” I say, even though it had a lot more to do with the music. Dorian grimaces. The upperclassmen warned us about it. Kovy survives rooming with him at the hockey house because he’d probably sleep through the apocalypse and make it all the way to his first class before realizing something was wrong.
I’m used to running on little sleep, but this is extreme.
I take out my phone on the bus to the rival campus. Nova posted a picture of herself barefaced, red around the eyes, acne scars visible, an angry-looking pimple in the crease of her nose, messy hair cut to her chin, next to a picture of her all made-up and flawless with her waist-length extensions in. She captioned it nothing is real, and she’s got thousands of people commenting, thanking her for the transparency and saying she’s equally beautiful in both.