I've Never Lit a Match

Layla and the boys spent most of July 4th on a plane to Wisconsin. After their set in Seattle, they camped out in the airport until their a.m. flight to Madison, where they stayed only long enough to play their show and then shuffle quickly onto the new tour bus that met them outside the venue.

Exiting the plane, Layla had turned on her cellphone to find a few sweet “thinking of you” sort of text messages from Jenna, who wished her a Happy Fourth and told her that she was missed at the neighborhood cookout back home. Layla’s favorite holiday just happened to fall on the one day of touring that wound up entirely lost to all-day travel plans; because of it, the fourth of July became the only day that whole summer that Layla felt just a little bit homesick.

Spending July 4th at the Garret House had been Layla’s favorite tradition since sixth grade. Layla’s mom and stepdad were there – like every year – along with three out of four of Layla’s brothers and most of the neighbors on their street. This year, even Jenna’s brother Peter and the band (which included Kris) were there grilling burgers and setting off fireworks, home for the rest of the summer.

Layla spent a lot of the time that she was in Madison thinking about what it would be like if she wasn’t away from home that day. She knew that she and Jenna would go swimming in the Garrets’ pool, just like they had done every summer for something like eight years. They would eat the flag cake that Layla’s mom makes every year, with strawberries for stripes and blueberries for stars on a white frosting background. She wondered whether or not Kris would still show up if she was there. Would he ignore her or would he get down to the reason why they had been having all those stupidly casual text conversations over the past couples of weeks?

Madison was the worst date of the tour for Layla – in an otherwise wonderful summer, it was the single off day – because a day full of plane rides and bus rides and well-intentioned text-message updates from Jenna left her with little distraction from thoughts of her ex-boyfriend at home doing all her favorite things with all her friends and family.

Out in the Midwest, Layla and the guys didn’t get a decent break from all the disorienting travel until the next morning, when they woke up in Chicago. Turns out, they were still able to belatedly celebrate the summer holiday. Layla still had Kris occasionally on her mind – ever since the first text message in Houston, he had been occurring to her more frequently than he had in months – but she bounced back from the off day just fine, sure that what she was away doing was a lot cooler than a cookout in her hometown.

“You want cheese on your burger?” Zack got Layla’s attention as she was about to walk past.

“Um, sure,” she answered, hands in her back pockets. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Nope, nope,” Zack declined, shaking his spatula. Per usual, he was shirtless and the afternoon heat shown itself in the shiny sweat on his chest and freckled face.

Sweet, easygoing Zack and famed-party-pooper-slash-tour-manager-extraordinaire Matt Flyzik were manning the grill together for a casual Fifth of July Shindig that had been a pleasant surprise to Layla. She should have known that the guys would never let a holiday practically designed for day-drinking go uncelebrated.

All three bands and their crew teams were chilling in the back lot outside the venue, their buses parked in a little semi-circle around the festivities. Set up on a table outside the All Time Low bus, there was a small radio playing Blink 182 and a few of the tour mates were playing one of those lawn games that everybody always brings to summer get-togethers. A while earlier, Jack and Alex had returned from the Walmart down the street with three bags of water balloons and an inflatable kiddie pool. They were now hard at work trying to inflate the thing, all the while talking about how cool it would be if they could fill it with beer instead of water.

“Don’t let them waste all the beer and pour it into that pool,” Zack told her and Layla said she’d do her best.

“Thank you,” Matt laughed, aware that this was actually a genuine possibility. He seemed vaguely amused at the idea; a soft chuckle on the surface covered up the majority of him that was apprehensive thinking about whatever stupid thing the boys would do next. He could completely envision Jack and Alex getting rowdy and dumping the entire cooler’s worth of beer cans into the kiddie pool, only to immediately afterwards begin to freak out upon the realization that none of it was drinkable anymore and that they had ruined the party.

“I’m on it!” Layla saluted, watching as Zack slicked back his damp hair with one hand and flipped a burger with the other.

Beside him, Matt looked detached and underwhelmed, which wasn’t necessarily much different than usual. Matt was the kind of guy who let his responsibilities silently annoy and exhaust him to the point where he just always sort of looked a little sleepy. Attempting to manage his friends’ tour affairs and herd them to and from various obligations left him frequently looking like a grumpy mother who had never wanted to have kids in the first place, guiltily trying to hide the fact that she found their childlike senses of humor seriously annoying rather than cute.

As she walked away, Layla patted Matt on the shoulder. “It’s okay,” she played at comforting him, teasing. “I won’t let them do it.”

Matt just chuckled, pulling a few cooked dogs off the grill and throwing them together onto a paper plate. He set them down on the condiments table that they had set up beside the grill, called out that the hot dogs were ready, and Layla walked off.

Following this exchange, she spent a majority of the afternoon with Rian as her partner in a water-balloon war, running around the pavement in denim shorts and a bikini top until it was time to get changed for that night’s show.

Before her set, she salvaged her wet hair by French braiding it and slipped into a black sundress. Like every other night, she played five songs: three originals and two covers. The cover she opened with tended to change each night – tonight she decided to go with that new song they were playing on the radio called I Kissed a Girl – but the closing song had remained The Girl’s a Straight Up Hustler ever since it went so well the first night back in Philadelphia. She had been right to assume that an All Time Low cover would get the attention of a crowd of people waiting for All Time Low to come on stage.

Layla remembered when she first agreed to come out for the summer, how she had never really been sure what exactly was going to come out of it; but the sets she played each night went well. There were always a handful of people tuned in and receptive, at least somewhat. Apparently some of the people at a few shows had been particularly invested, since there were now two or three YouTube videos of her performing that were circulating the internet. They each had a decent amount of views, some even with a few positive notes left in the comment sections.

Additionally, Alex and Layla had taken her original demo a few weeks ago and uploaded it as an EP on a Bandcamp account that they had set up for her. Between the flyers that they made available at shows and their efforts at mentioning Layla’s music in tweets posted both to the official All Time Low twitter account as well as each of the guys’ individual accounts, the link to Layla’s Bandcamp had spread around enough for her to gain a few hundred views and for 47 people to purchase her five-dollar EP.

They were legitimately getting her name out there and, watching it all happen, Layla realized that this was exactly what she had always wanted to do. It was the ultimate grassroots campaign and she was thrilled to have this sort of down-to-earth networking become fundamental to the start of her “career.” The best example of it all were the personalized and friendly conversations that she had each night in the back of the venues with people who had enjoyed her set enough to come over and meet her. Everything about Layla’s operation was so ground-level that it seemed almost as if gaining a new fan required as much effort and investment as getting to know a new friend.

“Alright, thank you all so much,” Layla ended her set that night. “My name is Layla. I’ve got an EP available on Bandcamp if you liked anything you heard tonight. You can stop by the All Time Low merch table in a few minutes and get a poster with the download link and I’ll also be hanging out there for a while too so you can say hi. Thanks. Goodnight!”

On the fifth of July, 2008, Layla walked off the stage satisfied. Over the weeks, she had become so excited about and sure of her new path that the only appropriate word for her feelings seemed to be: content. Plus, that night, she was also looking forward to Alex’s promise that after the show they were going watch fireworks on Lake Michigan.

Just as she had been doing each night between her solo set and her later set with the band, Layla left the stage and went right over to the back of the venue and hung by the merch table with Vinny. Each night, there were always at least two or three people who came over to say hello, usually it was a small handful of show-goers. They grabbed posters, told her they enjoyed her songs, made conversation… Sometimes, they even asked for a picture or for her to sign something. Those requests always blew Layla away.

“So, Alex Gaskarth just brought you out on tour? Like, just because?” One of the girls who came over to see her that night seemed awestruck, which, all accounts considered, was a pretty normal reaction to the badly-written fanfiction that Layla’s life had so hilariously become.

“Well, we’re friends,” Layla gave a safe answer to this skinny girl in the purple All Time Low tee. “And I guess he just thought of it as helping out a friend.”

“That’s so fucking amazing,” was the girl’s response. “Will you sign this?” she asked, holding out one of Layla’s posters. Essentially, they were just cheap flyers: 8x11 sheets of pink paper printed with her name and all the proper advertisement information, encouraging people to go download her EP. She didn’t yet have the budget to print ones with actual pictures on them.

“No problem,” Layla answered, leaning over to scribble her signature.

“I’m gonna buy your demo,” the girl told her as she walked off.

“Thank you!” Layla couldn’t help her too-big smile.

The small crowd that had come to talk to her had all come and gone now that the first real opener had started. Layla picked up her water bottle and, as she started to walk away from the table, Vinny looked at her and said, “Well, aren’t you becoming a rock star on us?”

He said it like he was teasing her, but the kind of way you tease someone that you’re proud of.

Layla smiled sweetly back, waving her water bottle-free hand as she walked towards the backstage door.

“Great job, great job,” Alex greeted her when she walked into the band dressing room backstage.

“Thanks,” Layla said, falling into the plush sofa beside a sleeping Zack.

“So you kissed a girl?” Alex asked, teasing her choice of song cover.

“Yup,” Layla answered nonchalantly, stretching out with her head on Zack’s fast asleep chest.

“Really…?”Alex quickly turned, raising a bushy, curious eyebrow.

“No,” Layla laughed at him. “Not really.”

“Oh. Well.” Alex took a seat in a fold-out chair. “You keep me posted on that.”

Layla laughed again and Alex smiled at her.

Around an hour later, they were walking on stage, opening the All Time Low set with Poppin’ Champagne, and – true to Alex’s word – after the show everybody went continued the days Fifth of July Celebrations with fireworks on Lake Michigan. Layla sat on the sand beside Alex, resting her bodyweight against him with her toes in the sand. Layla was absolutely content, yesterday’s thoughts of Kris completely replaced in her head.

She had no idea that, soon, Kris would be showing up to crash her new life.