Who We Are

In the couple of months following our separation, we tried to go back to the way things were before we got together. Ronnie went back to his friends and his music and his brother and I spent my time at school with Dean. I tried to keep an eye on the singer the best I could, but he didn’t stick around for long. He disappeared more and more every week, until finally none of the band bothered showing up at all.

I watched Ronnie spiral like I knew he would, but no one else quite saw his actions in the way that I did. They saw a boy desperate to make his band into something, I saw a boy who was becoming a musician in all the wrong ways. The boys from Escape the Fate disappeared from the city near the end of the year and were gone without much explanation. The only inkling that he’d even been here at all was his brother, who kept his head down and walked through school like he was just trying to get out.

The summer came and went quickly. It was a series of days spent taking care of my sisters. It was cooking and movies and shutting ourselves up in the house. My father worked so much that it felt like we didn’t see him for days or weeks at a time and when he came home he went right to bed with only a few words.

The only thing that happened over the summer was Nate. He came to my house near the middle of August and stood on my doorstep like it was sacred ground and he was unholy. I stood in the doorway and listened to him claim that he’d spent weeks working up the courage to come over. I knew that Ronnie’s absence gave him strength - and I could see the ideas in his eyes.

Some part of him believed that we would be together now that Ronnie was gone. He’d given me time to move past the disheveled singer and had shown up with some sort of thought that Ronnie had been the only thing keeping us apart. Nathaniel didn’t understand, that despite everything, there was nothing else I wanted besides Ronnie. I never let myself admit it until that moment on my doorstep, but I was still holding out for the boy, crossing my fingers that he would make it out and get the opportunity to leave everyone behind.

I didn’t resent him for disappearing from the school and the city. I reveled in his success. Nate didn’t understand. To him, to almost everyone, Ronnie was gone and never coming back. He had gone without an explanation and we were over. There were no ties that would bring him back to me.

Nathaniel went back to campus early. He never asked me out, but the question had been implied and I turned him away for the same reason I had before. This time hurt him more than the last and I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him again. I started my junior year and Gwendolyn stepped up to take my place in the sophomore class. The three free months had erased Ronnie from everyones’ minds and in that, I was grateful that they seemed to forget about me too.

It wasn’t until the following year the thought of Ronnie came back to the students. His poster showed up without warning on our bulletin board, posted next to the list of graduating seniors, and boasted that Escape the Fate had won a radio contest in September and was now touring with huge bands across the country. Instead of his name being advertised as one of the kids who’d finished his education, his photo blared success, and suddenly everyone wanted a piece.

The school erupted in memories of him. Everyone who’d once sat in the same room felt like they were entitled to his success. He wasn’t infamous in our halls anymore, he was famous. He wasn’t the boy from the wrong side of town that got in too many fights and whose mother didn’t love him, he was our first success story. He was suddenly something more than anyone had noticed in him before. His voice got him out and it was going to bring him back to Las Vegas with a record deal.

Escape the Fate’s EP spread through the high school like contraband, outshining all the graduation news and teenage rituals. It felt like everyone was talking about their show. It was the first hometown gig in a year and it was met with different reactions than the ones in the past. Everyone wanted to go and the show had already been switched to a larger venue to accommodate them.

I didn’t see Vanna much that year. But when news of Escape the Fate being signed to Epitaph broke and their show was announced, she said Ronnie’s name like she’d conquered him. She thought of the band as something she’d been privy to before everyone else. And when her eye met mine in the hall for the first time, she looked at me like the two of us made up a secret club. We were the girls who had sex with Ronnie Radke. The ones who got to him first.

I didn’t buy a ticket to their show because I didn’t want to see him. I saw his image at school everyday and still recognized this version of him and I thought that maybe, if he was the same, it’d turn out that I would still feel the same about him. I was scared that I would go and look at him, and feel all the things he used to bring up in me. And I didn’t want to feel anything towards him, because I knew that he couldn’t stay, and that he didn’t want to.

The songs on the EP were ones that he’d played for me before. They were songs that he’d sung his heart out on merely a year before and his heart and talent had made him something. I heard pieces of us in his songs and I tried not to picture the girls who felt like he was singing right to them at every show. I didn’t want to see their reactions to his words. I was trying to forget my own.

Their show was scheduled two weeks before graduation and I could barely stand to be at school. The halls were filled with people in their t’shirt and his face was everywhere.

The first time I saw him outside of images, I’d stayed home from school for the first time that year. After getting my sisters on the bus and making Gwen promise not to tell our father that I skipped, I climbed back into bed. I didn’t wake up until one, and even then I wished I would’ve just slept the day away.

I walked down to the kitchen and my eyes landed on a van through the window. It was black, nondescript, but I knew instantly that it meant he was next door. I lingered in the kitchen, my eyes craning to see his house, unable to stop myself from wanting to see him, despite what I’d been feeling about his show.

He came walking out following a man that I’d never seen before. He looked the same. Same jeans, same shirt, same style of jacket. His hair was sharper than before, but he looked the same. He walked out with his arm around Riley. The younger boy was carrying a bag on his back and their father came barreling out of the house, screaming at them.

It was something I’d seen countless times. Something that they’d had to deal with countless times. But this time, the man who led them out, the man in the black leather jacket who looked like he owned the world, turned around and wrapped his arm around Ronnie, shielding him from the can that Russell tossed out after them. The man led them both to the van.

Ronnie loaded his brother into the backseat and slid the door shut. I was wrong about him looking the same, there were subtle differences in the way he held himself. He looked back at his father and it wasn’t an angry expression like he’d worn in the past, it was subtle, and resigned. He ran his eyes over the house and the man yelling drunkenly from the doorway. Ronnie had always been secure in his belief about where his music would take him, but the reality of it created a change in him. His movements and expressions personified ease and it was something that I didn’t recognize from before.

While he’d always been confident in his ability, this new version of reality made that confidence tangible. It wasn’t just cockiness and wishful thinking anymore. His new life brought out all the natural qualities that had been stunted in him. He was a leader, and it wasn’t him against the world anymore, it was him on top of the world.

I heard later on that Ronnie got his brother out of their father’s house for good. Riley didn’t return to school with the rest of us. People talked about their father as though he wasn’t good enough for his sons, and I never saw either Radke back at that house again.

Escape the Fate played their hometown show to a record number of people and those people talked about them for a few days after before it finally died down. The posters disappeared from the bulletin boards and graduation was at the forefront, and everyone moved on and into their summers.

I had one more year of high school left, but I spent the summer preparing to graduate a semester early. I’d been granted early admission to UCLA and kept it a secret for months before finally revealing the news to my father. I was going to be the first one to leave our house, and leave my father and sisters behind, and there was a certain amount of guilt that came with it, but being with Ronnie had taught me something. Watching him fight to make something of himself made me feel like I owed it to me to give leaving a chance.

If I had learned anything from him, it was that there was so much out there to be discovered and so many more versions of this life to live.

I kept tabs on ETF the best I could. I watched them tour the country and return home to start work on their second album. I had to seek out their news and it didn’t come in the form of conversations in the hallway anymore, but from what I heard they were doing well for themselves. They were poised to be something. The more that time separated present from when I knew them, the less I knew about them.

I was in Los Angeles when I heard the news. It had been months since I’d even thought their names.

Ronnie was arrested on a Tuesday. It ran on every channel because of the past that he had accumulated. He was wanted and arrested, and had been evading the police for awhile. I read the headlines compulsively, learning everything I could about what he’d been doing with his time. I missed class and spent hours trying to reacquaint myself with this version of him. I spent hours trying to believe what I was reading.

It was drugs, and I knew it even before the reports said it.

I learned that it was more than drugs that sent Ronnie to jail, but I knew that his addictions impacted every decision. I was shocked and sickened to learn that he’d lost his band, and I couldn’t picture his best friends continuing without him.

But the world had changed a lot, and so had they. Ronnie grew up into the person that everyone expected him to be. As a child, all he’d wanted was to make it out and become something. He wanted to use his talents to live a different life than they projected for him.

The news made me scared and I kept picturing him as the seventeen year old boy who’d told me he loved me and sang me songs that made me realize he was a dreamer. When I thought of Ronnie going to jail, I thought of the child who’d put everything he had into hoping. I pictured the boy who sang his heart out for the world’s approval.

But he became exactly what everyone expected him to and no wishful thinking could change that. He lost his band, and his friends, and his freedom. He followed his father and left his brother alone.

The world talked of him again. My hometown spat words that made me them hypocrites. He wasn’t the golden boy that his success had made him. He was a child again. The child who bore the weight of his parents, and everyone acted as though they’d never seen greatness in him.

I read that he was sentenced to three years in Nevada State. And when they took him, I no longer thought of him as the same boy I knew. I had never thought of him as the trouble maker everyone else saw. All I ever saw in him was desire and determination. But when he went to jail, there was no sign of the boy who'd sang me songs in his bedroom. I let him go, finally, because I’d always held out that he would make it and watching him crash and burn was too much to bear.

Drugs killed the boy I knew.

Drugs killed his dreams.

I once believed that Ronnie had the power to do everything he set out to do. He once told me that we were judged by the lives that our parents created for us before we were born. And he was right. The way we’re viewed is skewed by the lifestyle we’re brought into and the people who are supposed to love us, but I always believed that Ronnie could change the way people saw him. I always believed that he would do more than his father.

But he ended up locked in the same place that he’d desperately tried to escape.

I wasn’t waiting for him any longer. Because there was no coming home. He couldn’t get any farther from the place he was supposed to be, and he couldn’t be any farther from the boy I thought he was.

"Oh, the webs I weave,
I am caught in this game.
My passions dead
The life I've lead,
has drowned me in vain."