Fly Until You Crash

Slivers of yellow light flickered across grungy metal walls, accompanied by violet revolutions and heart-jolting hip hop rhythms. The whole scene nauseated Logan as he slumped in the back of the warehouse against a posh leather couch. He should’ve been feeling proud, accomplished, maybe even famous, but he didn’t. He just felt like the proverbial tree falling in a forest. He had fallen, but no one was there to hear him.

An outer-body experience, that’s what Logan was witnessing. Distanced from himself, he felt like the person he was just wasn’t up to Hollywood’s standards.

In all honesty, Logan had never really been into the boy band idea. It was the fresh green dollar signs that pulsed in the back of his head that convinced him to go along with it. Did you know that Justin Timberlake made forty million dollars last year? That was enough to persuade anyone to sell their soul to the machine.

If Logan squinted slightly, he could just make out James dancing wildly with a stunning blonde that could’ve easily passed as a model. His thoughts wandered back to six months ago, when they first went to that audition.

Every since Logan had known him, James had dreamed of becoming famous. Over the years, he’d bounced back and forth between movie star and musician, even fancied the idea of being on a reality show a few times. James wanted the girls to scream his name and throw themselves all over him, as if he didn’t get enough attention from the opposite sex back in Minnesota. He longed to see his name flashing in neon lights, even though Logan had never really seen anyone’s name in “shining lights.” He highly doubted the existence of these lights.

If he ever saw his name in lights, Logan had a feeling that it would blind him.

This was James’s dream, not Logan’s.

Logan would’ve rather been back home in his bedroom, figuring out logarithms while his mother and father watched television in the next room. Despite the bass thumping around him, Logan could almost hear the light hum of Law and Order through his thin navy walls. He could feel the soft hug of his blue gingham comforter against his shoulders. Unlike the others, Logan actually enjoyed the cold weather, the rush of chill morning air that would hit his cheeks when he left the house for school. The weather was too perfect in L.A.

For an instant, Logan envied James’s ability to push all of that away, to forget where he came from. Voluntary amnesia. Sure, James’s dad wasn’t exactly “father of the year,” Logan had noticed the indigo-violet blend of bruises that blemished James’s arms several times, but that didn’t mean he should block out everything about their home.

James never let it show. Smooth confidence seemed to ooze from his every pore. He had that careless attitude that just made girls want to be able to claim him for their own. Logan had bared witness to his charm on many double dates. While James practically eased one girl out of her panties, Logan was stuck awkwardly blabbering with the friend, who secretly also wanted James.

Logan had never asked a girl out in his life. He had tried, once, but the words just seemed to get caught under his tongue. Hindered by humiliation, Logan refused to go through that experience again, so he was perpetually single.

All the girls in the crowd screamed James’s name or held up signs for Kendall and Carlos to see, but no one screamed for Logan. He was just a nobody; he didn’t belong in a boy band. Not once had he seen some glittery poster board with “Logan, marry me!” plastered across the front. Logan was too awkward to be a popstar.

Sometimes he caught this glimpse of intuition and knew that the only reason he stuck around was because he would be alone in Minnesota.

To anyone who didn’t know them, James was the shallow manwhore and Logan was the awkward geek. But they were both so much more than those labels.

In an attempt to market the quartet, Hollywood had slapped four huge labels on them. Kendall was the down-to-earth leader, Carlos the reckless prankster, James was the pretty, and Logan was the brains.

The only thing was…Logan didn’t want to be the brainiac. Brains didn’t really get you noticed.

And Kendall wasn’t always “the leader.” As Logan watched him chatting with his girlfriend Jo, he remembered all of the times when Kendall hadn’t been so sure of himself. Like when they were freshmen, Logan had to beg Kendall to try out for the hockey team because Kendall was convinced that he wasn’t good enough.

There were times when James felt insecure. He had admitted that his first real girlfriend had broken his heart when she cheated on him. Logan couldn’t help but think that even heartbreakers got their heart broken sometimes. Maybe it was poetic justice.

Although Carlos liked to put himself in dangerous situations, he had a heart of gold. He was the most loyal and supportive person that Logan knew, but none of the people in this abandoned warehouse would ever know him well enough to come to that realization.

Logan didn’t always have the answer, sometimes Kendall had to sort his thoughts out for him. And he was more than just brains, he could also make a mean English muffin pizza, but none of their fans would ever know that. Being able to fire off random facts didn’t necessarily make you intelligent. Logan was clueless when it came to living. He knew there was a thin line between living and existing, but he didn’t know how to cross that line.

Logan had always thought he wanted to become a doctor, but he was beginning to question everything. Maybe he really didn’t want to save people, maybe that was just the pressure from his parents justifying itself. He was certain that he didn’t want to be a popstar, but he couldn’t come up with any alternatives. Maybe his destiny was to become a culinary expert. Logan never really felt more existential than when he was standing in front of the microwave, watching the faint green numbers count down.

This introspective thinking wasn’t really Logan’s thing, so he decided to let the obnoxious beats numb his brain.

They had just played Times Square, and instead of feeling pumped up about himself, Logan just felt drained. Even though he didn’t want to, he knew in his heart that he would keep going along with this band thing. He’d never really been one to wander off the beaten track. He was just a train that chugged along the tracks without a complaint, and he hated it.

Secretly, he was praying for a crash, praying to be derailed in some way.