It Was The Roar Of The Crowd That Gave Me Heartache To Sing

Angel and I walked onto the bus to see all of the girls already on it. Not just the girls assigned to this bus, but all of the girls. Even Audrey, who I figured would be with Bert. She must have seen the confusion in my eyes, because she gave me a weak smile before speaking.

“Bert was really upset and just wanted to be alone,” Audrey said.

“Max was the same way,” Tori said quietly. I looked around the room, and Reina’s eyes connected with mine. I raised my eyebrow at her (last night’s image was still burned in my brain), but she shook her head before looking down at the floor. Angel went and sat down on the floor next to Patti, and I slowly walked over to the couch. I sat on the arm of it and propped my back against the wall.

I looked around the room at all the girls. My girls. On the outside, they looked like your average person. They were happy, mostly hyper, friendly until you messed with them, and genuinely good people. Deep down though, I knew things still bothered them. We had been on this tour for less than a month, and I could already see the small cracks of strain. My girls are extraordinary, but they have their demons just like everyone else.

Angel, the best friend a person could ever ask for. She decided to give a few years of her life to her country, and she signed up for the Army when she just eighteen. We were still in our senior year then, but she went to train every other weekend. Then, right after graduation, she was gone. I didn’t see her for six years. We talked over the time span, but I never saw her. When she would come home on leave, we’d never be able to get our paths to cross. She finally came back, for good, in 2011. That had worried me, because her contract was up in December 2010, but she didn’t come back for about six months.

She refuses, even now, to tell me everything that had happened while she was a nurse for the Army overseas. A part of me was dying to know, but the other part decided that I didn’t need to know. She had come home just in time to save me, so I owed her. We left off to California together, to start over. I needed a change in scenery, and Angel said she needed to get away from everything. We packed up, said our goodbyes, and left.

Sam had been the next person I met. She had been twenty-two at the time, and I had been twenty-four. I had just started working as a psychiatrist in Huntington Beach, California. I was back in school to work on getting my PhD, and Sam had been one of my very first patients. As she started talking, I got completely absorbed in her story. Sam was a writer, so it was no wonder why her words captivated me so much. She lived in New York until she was sixteen, and then she had ran away with the love of her life, Victor. Together they moved to Huntington, and she began working as a waitress. She still wrote on the side, and she was a journalist by the time she was eighteen.

By that time, she had met and befriended Reina. She also married Victor when she was eighteen and became pregnant. Her and Victor bought a house, and he had a steady job working in construction. It sounded like the perfect life; a storybook romance. Then, at five months along, Sam lost the baby. It tore her up inside, and her and Victor slowly drifted apart. Before long they were divorced. She didn’t come to me until three years later. She had held it inside for as long as she could, and she finally decided that she needed help. I remembered crying later that night, thinking of how things in life never worked out right. Prostitutes got pregnant and carried babies to their full-term (I knew that from personal experience), but then Sam couldn’t? Sam, who would have made a wonderful mother? No, it definitely wasn’t right.

Reina had been right after Sam. Sam and Reina had already been friends, and Sam referred Reina to me. By that time, Sam and I were already friends outside of the office. Reina was a different kind of injustice than Sam. Something had been stolen from Sam, but Reina’s whole adolescence had been stolen from her. She was originally from Los Angeles, where she lived with her mother and little sister. Her home life was never any good, and she started doing drugs when she was only thirteen. She did it all, but her main addiction was heroine.

She moved around until she finally reached Huntington, where she met Sam. When they were both twenty-one, Sam had decided she had seen enough. Reina was her best friend, and she wanted to see her get better. Reina agreed to go into rehab, and she stayed there for a year. She was released when she was twenty-two, and that’s when she started seeing me. It was still within my first month of working there. During our first session, I leaned that she had started tattooing when she was seventeen. In her mind, she just said it was something to earn her some cash. I almost believed her, until I saw how her eyes lit up whenever she talked about it. At age twenty-three, she opened her own shop. She’s done most of my tattoos.

Less than two weeks after meeting Reina, I met Aiden. I didn’t get out of my office until very late, and Angel was working a late shift at a hospital. We were currently living in a one bedroom apartment (we bought bunk beds), and so far we had managed to pay all of our bills. I had sat down in a restaurant that I passed every day but had yet to try out. I sat kind of in the middle, because I felt like people-watching. I loved watching how people interacted with each other. I had been sipping on my coke and waiting for my food when something crashed into my table. I watched as different colored liquids spilled over my table, and a little splashed onto my pants and shirt. I scooted away from the spill and looked up. A tired looking girl had her mouth hanging open, and I heard the small bell over the door ring as someone walked out. The girl looked up at me, and I remembered thinking that I had never seen someone with eyes like hers. They weren’t exactly blue; they had an almost purple look to them. She had apologized over and over, said something about someone running into her, and then she had apologized some more. I had told her not to worry about it, and then she had looked me right in the eye. We stared at each other for a moment and then she said, “Have you ever had one of those days when you don’t even know why you get up in the morning?” I had thought it over and then slowly nodded my head before replying, “That’s when I find someone to talk to.”

The small restaurant closed an hour later, and the girl (who had by then told me her name was Aiden) led me to a small apartment above the restaurant. I was almost surprised that she trusted a stranger this much, but then I decided that I probably looked as dangerous as a box of kittens. Aiden then sat down on the couch, slipped off her shoes, and propped her feet up on a table. I had sat beside her, waiting. Then she began talking, and I had to resist the urge to lean over and hug the little girl I could see from her past. Aiden never had a good home life, and money had been scarce. She had learned at a young age to live sometimes without lights, or running water, and most of the time, food. She knew what it was like to struggle. She was kicked out of her house at the age of sixteen, and she was homeless for a little while. She eventually got a job at a restaurant, the one under us, and her and the owner had made a deal. In exchange for staying upstairs for free, she agreed to work overtime with no extra pay. She says that’s how she gained her love of cooking, which explains why she owns her own restaurant now.

Audrey I met through Aiden, and only three days after I met Aiden. Aiden had invited me over to her house on a Friday night (Angel was working yet another night shift), and I agreed. Upon entering her apartment, I saw Audrey. Aiden was nowhere in sight, just Audrey. The girl with bright red hair and even brighter green eyes didn’t look a day over eighteen, but she was actually twenty-one. She told me Aiden had ran to the store, and that I could do ahead and sit down. I hesitantly sat down, and she had turned to introduce herself. I told her my name, and then she asked what kind of accent I had. I told her where I was from, and then I asked what kind of accent she had, since it didn’t sound like the usual California one. She had smiled at me and said she was originally from Lutherville, Maryland.

By the time Aiden got back, I had learned just about everything there was to know about Audrey Elizabeth Barakat. She hated her parents and her parents hated her. She didn’t seem bothered by the fact, and it made me wonder about her home life. Then she started telling me about her brother, Jack. It was very easy to tell that she loved her brother and missed him. He was in a band named All Time Low, and it was one of the bands that didn’t make the new cut. So, him and his band left for Europe. Audrey, however, had been in Huntington for a little over two years. She had went on tour with All Time Low, and then she had just decided to stay in California. She told me that she had always wanted to be a writer, and she had done most of her writing in the restaurant beneath us. She met Aiden while working, and the two had instantly hit it off. She told me she had a feeling that the book she was currently writing on would be the one to make it big. She was right. We had continued talking for the rest of the night, Aiden joined in after she got home, and the three of us would get together once a week to just hang out and talk after that.

Anna had been next. I moved to California in June of 2011, and I had met Anna on July third of the same year. Angel and I hadn’t been talking much lately, because we were both always so busy. I still talked to the four amazing girls I had met; girls I could relate to. Something had still been wrong though. My job here in California was better than my one back in Alabama, but something still felt off. School was draining me, but I refused to quit. Everything was just to…indescribable. So on the night of July third, I found myself in a bar. It was a place I had vowed to never return to less that two months ago, and I was already back. The bartender had been a girl a few years younger than me, and she had given me a small smile as she gave me my shot. She then walked off to her other customers, and I had laid my chin down on the worn wood while I stared at the shot glass’s contents. The amber liquid seemed to call to me, but I couldn’t touch my lips to the rim. I hadn’t even realized the bartender was standing in front of me until she spoke. She had asked me if I was okay, and I had told her no. She told me she was getting off for the night and asked if I wanted to talk about it. I thought it over and nodded my head. So she walked around to my side of the bar, and I told her my whole story, beginning to end. She had listened carefully, and then she asked if she could confide in me as well. I told her it would only be fair, and she gave me another of her small smiles before talking.

Her mother had been one of those types of women who never said anything against their husband. So she went along with everything he did, even if he constantly criticized her daughter. Anna was the youngest child and only daughter; she also seemed to be the biggest disappointment. Her father loved her older brother, which meant her mother did too. Her brother loved reminding her that their parents loved him more than her, and Anna spent most of her nights crying herself to sleep. She told me the only time she felt happy was when she was with her grandparents. They loved her for her, and they treated her like a daughter. Then, during her senior year, Anna’s grandfather passed away. She was never quite the same afterwards, and she left the day after she graduated. She said she came to straight to California, and that she had been working as a bartender ever since. Then she told me that her dream had always been to be a model. I found a small audition a few days later and talked her into going. She worked her way up from there, and now she’s one of the best.

Patti’s had been the most interesting meeting. Angel and I were both finally off from work, and we decided to drive up to Los Angeles for a weekend. We had been saving up some money for tickets, and we finally had enough. Angel and I were both fans of Lyric Vicious, a female cage fighter. We had been dying to see her fight in real life and not just on a TV screen, and it was finally time. We were in the third row, and we screamed and cheered until our voices went hoarse. Weirdly enough, we ran into her at a McDonalds after the fight. Angel and I had almost not walked over to her, but then she caught us staring and motioned us over. She signed some autographs and asked if we wanted to join her. We both sat down immediately, which had caused her to laugh. We had started talking, and before long we were all cracking up. Patti (as she told us to call her) then invited us to her hotel room, since Angel and I hadn’t gotten one yet, and we agreed. We stayed up for a few more hours, just talking. We eventually went to sleep, but I woke up earlier than usual. I had found Patti sitting outside on the balcony with dried tears on her face. I had asked her what was wrong, and then she had started wiping at her cheeks. I had already seen the tear tracks by then, and I had eased myself into the chair across from her. She told me she didn’t want to bother me with her problems, and I had laughed and said it was in the job description. Then I had gotten serious and told her that I really didn’t mind. I could tell something was bothering her, and I wanted to help. It had nothing to do with me being a fan of hers; it had been the look in her bright blue eyes.

She was originally from New Jersey. Her father, the only person she had, started beating her when she was only seven. She stayed in and out of hospitals until she was sixteen, which is when she decided she’d had enough and ran away. She didn’t have any money or a car, so she hitchhiked her way across the US. She said she wanted to get as far away from Jersey as she could, and she wound up in California. She searched for a job and finally found one at a fish pier. After being there for a couple of months, she met James. At the time she was still sixteen, and he was twenty-three. Despite her past, she had trusted him. He gave her a place to stay until she could afford her own, he helped her get her GED since she dropped out of school, he made sure she had something to eat, and he just made sure she was safe. He was like the brother she had always dreamed of. He later enrolled her into a self-defense class, and from there she learned martial arts, kickboxing, jujitsu, and ti kwan do. Her love of fighting grew into a career, and she said that she was really happy now. But she said her past caught up with her at the weirdest times. We had talked until the sun came up, and then we had continued talking over breakfast. By the end of the day, she agreed to come back to Huntington with us.

Lindsay was still a mystery. I had tripped over my feet as I ran into Reina’s shop, and I had a piece of paper clutched in my hand. It had been three months now since I moved to California. Most of the girls I had met had met each other by now, and everyone got along. In other words, we were all inseperable. School was slightly more tolerable, and I was loving my job more with every person I helped. I had found Reina tattooing some guy, and I smiled down at her. She had already done my back and right rib piece, and now I had an idea for my left rib piece. I had told her my idea, and she had asked me if her apprentice could do it. I told her it was fine with me, and she had called Lindsay over. I had a knack for getting people to tell me everything about them, but Lindsay was the exception. I loved talking to her, and we talked about anything and everything as she worked on my tattoo. She never revealed anything personal though. It confused me, because I was used to people being open with me. She told me that she was originally from Canada, and I told her that I had always wanted to go to Canada. Other than that though, she didn’t tell me much.

We started having lunch together, usually at the restaurant where Aiden worked, and continued to talk. Lindsay was wickedly smart, and she could talk about anything. I could easily tell a few things about her though. She was a very humble person, and she was extremely caring. I knew that she would do anything for someone that she considered a friend. She was so easy to talk to, but I still wondered why she the only one who wouldn’t reveal anything personal. Strangers in grocery stores had vented to me (without knowing my profession), but not Lindsay. In the end, I just decided that she was a private person. I told her continuously if she ever wanted to talk that I would be there for her, and she always nodded her head in an understanding way.

Tori was Lindsay’s best friend, but I didn’t meet her through Lindsay. Back home, I had only drunk coffee during our winter months. Over in California (the part I was in anyway) didn’t have really cold months, so I had to drink coffee whether it was hot outside or not. I didn’t mind too much though, as long as the coffee shop was well air conditioned. It was in one small coffee shop that I had met Tori. I was there on my lunch break, sipping at my coffee and going through a file. I had looked up, my neck had felt stiff, and looked around. The small shop had been completely crowded, and there was one person looking around for somewhere to sit. Her eyes caught mine, and I looked at the empty seat in front of me. She had smiled and then walked over. Her green eyes looked tired, and she was wearing a pair of nurse scrubs. She had noticed me taking in her tired expression and smiled again. “Have you ever had one of those weeks where everything just seems to happen at once?” That had been her first sentence to me, and I had replied to her question the same as I had Aiden’s: “That’s when I find someone to talk to.” After the first fifteen minutes of talking, I realized that Tori was superwoman. She basically worked three jobs, and she had been called in to all of them in the past couple of days. She was a sound engineer, first and foremost. She was also a part-time model, and she had been asked to do a quick shoot that lasted two days. Finally, the hospital she volunteered at had called her and almost begged her to come in and help since they were so short-staffed. So, Tori had sucked it up and done it all.

After listening to her talk, I wanted to know more about her past. I loved hearing about where people came from; what made them who they are. Tori told me that she was born in Italy, and she lived there until she was six. Then her parents moved off to England. They stayed there for only two years, and then moved to the States. Here, Tori had met her current best friend while she was vacationing with some family, and they stayed in contact over the years. Her parents decided to move back to England when she was eighteen, but Tori stayed behind and moved in with her best friend. She then explained that her and her mother never got along. She said there had always been issues between them, but she loved her father. Tori was the definition of a daddy’s girl, and I could easily tell that it killed her to be away from him. Then she started talking about her best friend, who she lived with in a small apartment. When she said Lindsay, I thought of the girl who had done my tattoos and could keep a conversation going constantly. Tori and I both laughed when we realized that we both knew the same Lindsay, and Lindsay freaked out when we both showed up at Reina’s shop to surprise her.

Raven was the last person I met in California, but she was the second person I’d met out of all the girls. The first time I saw Raven, she was sitting against a stone wall with her knees pulled up to her chest. Her dark brown hair had hidden her face, and instead of jumping when I spoke, she seemed to curl into herself. She had slowly looked up, and the nothingness in her light brown eyes had caused my throat to close. I had seen a variety of hopeless looks in the two months I had been working at the homeless shelter (I was twenty and in my second year of college), but this was something different. Raven looked like she was already dead. It took two weeks for Raven to open up to me, and I had sat beside her and listened. Her parents wanted her to be something that she wasn’t, so they constantly argued. Right after she graduated, her parents kicked her out. She didn’t have any money or anyone else to take her in, so she started hitchhiking. She worked odd jobs and mostly stayed at hotels, and she had made her way down to Alabama when she had originally lived in Hillsboro, Illinois.

Less than a week after that, I asked Raven to come stay with me. I was still living at home at the time, because it made things easier while I was in college. Raven had been reluctant, but I finally talked her into it. My aunt had instantly fallen in love with her, along with the rest of my family. She was made an honorary member of the family after just three days. I used to joke and say they liked her more than me. Raven stayed with us for a year, and then she decided it was time to be on her own. I didn’t see again until I made it to California, three years later. We literally ran into each other one the street, and picked up right where we had left off. All of the girls welcomed her into our new family, and in the summer of 2012 we all moved in together. We’ve all been inseperable ever since.

As for me, well…

“I’m going to die of boredom if we don’t do something, and soon,” Audrey said.

That’s a story for another time.