We All Fall Down

It took Jack a full good five minutes to get over his shock.

All I could do was smile hopelessly at him, thinking of what an idiot he was. But then again, it made sense as to why he was so surprised.

“Who are you and what have you done with Mia Hawthorne?” he asked, raising his eyebrows as he looked me up and down.

I rolled my eyes. “It’s called liquid eyeliner and mousse. I suggest you get some for your hair,” I said as I fluffed his messy blonde/black hair.

He laughed.

We were at a club called Le Deux, our meeting place when him and the rest of All Time Low had arrived back in LA. The rest of the guys were getting their stuff back home, but Jack had made sure that he called me up to meet somewhere.

He also said the rest of them were going to join us afterwards.

All including a certain someone I didn’t really want to see at all.

I sighed, taking a sip of the dry martini I had ordered, looking all around the club. Everyone was so dressed up, partying with their friends and drinking all around. For a club, this was a pretty high class kind of place. I could imagine all the heiresses and celebrities making their way to Le Deux on a Monday night.

God. Who goes clubbing on a Monday night?

Jack was still staring me over when I said, “So how was the rest of the tour?”

“Great. But we had a little bit of a dilemma when it came to sales.”

I raised an eyebrow.

He smirked. “We were missing our merch girl. The little preteens went crazy when they couldn’t get an All Time Low shirt. It got so bad that we had to recruit some random girl that we found sitting on the curb outside of the place. She was willing to do it as long as she got a cut of sales. It was pretty tragic.”

I started laughing really hard.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I fluffed Jack’s hair a little more. “I didn’t know I was so important to the band.”

He rolled his eyes and said, “Wait until Matt gets his hands on you. He’s gonna murder you.”

I laughed harder, thinking about the boys’ crazy ass manager. He wasn’t going to be happy with me, bailing on them without a word. But it wasn’t that big of a deal. I was just a lowly merch girl that could be easily replaced.

I sighed, taking another drink of my martini.

“So you want to explain to me why the sudden make-over? Not that I mind, but I did like the old Mia too.”

I smiled, setting down my glass. “I just thought why not dress up today? Like my fashion major ego was telling me, ‘The world is your fashion show. Dress up for it’. And I guess I just got a little into it and went overboard with the cosmetics. Is it too much?” I began touching my face, worried that it was.

Jack chuckled, taking my hand away from my face and settling it in his.

“Nope,” he said, popping his ‘p’. “It’s just right. For a fashion major, that is.”

Laughing, I said, “I guess I just got sick of all the polos and flip-flops. It wasn‘t something that Coco Chanel would be too proud of.”

“Who?” he asked.

I just shook my head at him. “Nothing,” I said with a smile.

Moments passed by and the atmosphere between Jack and I suddenly got serious. He gave me this look that I couldn’t really read and in a way, it freaked me out. Slowly, he said, “So how’re you going to act when Alex gets here? Are you gonna go on ignoring him?”

I gave him a look before saying, “No. I guess I’ll just have to act civilized with him.”

“And as far as going being friends?”

I sighed. “Isn’t gonna be that easy…but I’ll have to pretend like nothing happened.”

Jack nodded.

And then, quietly he said, “What exactly did happen?”

I sighed again. Time for a story.

“Well, I accidentally walked in on him and one of his fan girls…and saw something I definitely never wanted to see in a million years.” To put it short.

Jack suck in his breath and let out a long and winded whistle. I stared at him funny. Was that really necessary?

“So?” he asked.

I raised an eyebrow.

He chuckled and said, “Well, it’s not like you weren’t aware of Alex’s…ways. So why are you so surprised now?”

“Well, Jack,” I said with a bit of venom in my voice, not because of what he had said but because it was exactly what I had been thinking earlier, “maybe it’s because I’ve never been actually witnessed to it. And it’s not something that I had wanted to see.”

And then I stopped.

“Whoa,” I said. Jack cocked an eyebrow up, cocking his head to the side and giving me a weird look.

“When did you get so mature?” I asked him.

He had a confused expression on his face, and before I knew it, Jack was laughing his head off. He was pounding his fist onto the table, clutching his side while he buried his head into his arm, laughing even harder. It almost looked like he was having a seizure.

After a while, I started to get bored, watching him through his little thing, and started looking around the club.

That’s when my eyes came across the front entrance, locking with the one person I didn’t want to see at the moment. His expression quickly changed from how it originally was and instantly turned to one of anxiousness.

I turned away from Alex, looking back at Jack who had finally calmed down his fit of giggles. He wiped away at his eyes.

“Me? Mature? Good one, Mia.”

My eyes settled on his calming face as he went on. “Besides, I think things are getting interesting. I can’t wait to see what happens next.” Suddenly, he clapped his hands together, rubbing them and sitting forward. Boy, did he look excited.

I rolled my eyes at him as three other boys approached us.

“Dammit, Mia! What is this?” cried Rian. He started laughing, holding out his arms for me to hug him. I got up, throwing my own arms around his shoulders, laughing along with him. Zack came around, getting in on the hug, also.

“Mia,” said Zack, “what’s up with the dressing up? You’re only here to see your boys. Is it really necessary?”

I frowned.

“What? Am I not allowed to dress up like this or something?”

Off to the side, I glanced to see Alex standing there, staring at me with a weird expression on his face. It was unreadable and hard.

And seeing him was enough to make me want to get out of there.

“Hey guys,” I said, slowly grabbing my clutch off of the table that Jack and I had been sitting at. “I better get going. I need to get up early in the morning tomorrow--”

“What for?” asked Jack, whining a bit. He was tugging on my arm, trying to get me to sit back down on the seats.

I laughed nervously, yanking my arm back.

“To work on that project I have for school. So I’ll see you guys later.”

And before they could say anything else, I quickly walked past a vomiting Lindsay Lohan and made my way out of Le Deux, out onto the outside sidewalk.

I sighed, breathing in the polluted LA air.

Enough of Alex Gaskarth. I needed to get out of it, become my own person. Build up my own life, a life that didn’t surround around him.

I needed my own life.

As I walked down the sidewalk, passing by young people lining up to get into Le Deux, I spotted an older woman that was huddled, taking a long drag on a cigarette.

I stared at her for a long time before I finally said, “Mrs. McNeir?”

The now twenty-six year old science teacher from Dulaney High School looked up from the ground, staring back at me, her eyes horrifyingly wide, letting the cigarette she had stuck between her fingers slip through.

“Mia?” she asked in a incredulous voice.

Finally snapping out of it, I was able to say, “What’re you doing in LA? I mean--how are you? How have you been?”

The surprised look instantly melted away as she said in her kind, caring voice, the one that I remembered clearly, “I’m good. Good, actually. What’re you doing here?”

I took a step closer to her and said, “Well, I live here. I actually moved out to LA after I graduated from Towson. I go to school here.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling now. We were now entering conversation mode. “Which school is that?”

“Um, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merch.”

I could see her eyebrows raising high until they hid behind her fringe.

Typical.

I cleared my throat and said, “But you haven’t told me what you’re doing here in LA.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but instead of hearing her feminine voice, out came the voice of Jack Barakat.

“There she is! Okay now, Alex, you and Mia are gonna have a civilized and grown up conversation.”

I could see Mrs. McNeir’s expression quickly receding back into it’s former self, when I had first spoken to her, except she seemed even more horrified than when she had seen me.

I turned back to look at Alex, the person she seemed to be most horrified at looking.

And his expression mirrored hers.

“Suzie?!” he cried.

And that’s when it all hit me.

It was her.