Something to Remember

JOHN:

“Hey John, you coming or what?” I heard Jared call from outside the bathroom door. After every show, we all take showers and then go meet our fans outside.

I hadn’t seen Sarah since we played “Misery” and she cried. Where she went I had no idea, but it was fine with me if it meant she wasn’t going to confront me. What was I supposed to say if that happened? I’m sorry? No, I think we were too far gone for that.

“Yeah alright, alright. Give me two minutes,” I yelled back. As I wiped the steam off the mirror, I noticed there were bags under my eyes. I was looking pretty pale, too. Great.

Honestly, I really couldn’t tell you why seeing Sarah stressed me out so much. I mean, everyone goes through bad breakups, and it wasn’t like I still had feelings for her or anything. After all, it had been over a year already and I was the one who broke it off to begin with. That would just be ridiculous.

No, I was going to stop thinking about her. She probably left during the show and there was nothing left to worry about. I just needed to calm down so I could get dressed and then go visit with the people out front. All I needed to do was breathe.

In. Out.

In. Out.

I held on to the sides of the sink and looked in the mirror.

This is your life John, I thought. You had to make sacrifices to get here. You did what you had to do, there’s nothing wrong with that.

For some reason, that kept becoming harder and harder to believe.

*************

After I finished up in the bathroom and greeted with some fans, I was feeling a whole lot better. There had been no sign of Sarah outside the venue and I was pretty confident that she had decided to leave before doing whatever she had planned. My night was back on track.

“You guys up for some midnight pizza?” I asked Pat, Jared, Garrett, Ken, and Matt, who all agreed enthusiastically.

We found an old pizza shop down the street and spent an hour stuffing ourselves with as much pizza as we could handle, along with some more beer to wash it down. All of us were still riding the high from such an amazing show and I was fairly certain that the alcohol wasn’t about to cure us.

When we finally decided to head back to the bus and get some sleep, it was about one in the morning.

As we walked, Garrett told us some story about an old lady who almost ran him off the road and I had the sneaking suspicion that we were all finding it funnier than it actually was. My jaw was aching and I had one hand grasping my stomach, but I was happy. Eventually, we managed to contain ourselves.

“Hey, I forgot some stuff back in the theatre so I’m just gonna quick run in there and get it,” Ken said when we got closer. Our bus was parked on a backstreet behind the venue so our little group split up. Pat and Garret went with Kenny while Matt, Jared, and I set off down the alley.

When we were about twenty feet away from the tour bus, I heard Jared mumble something.

“What’d you say?” I asked while looking over at him.

“Looks like a fan decided to stick around…” he said, squinting at someone in front of us.

I looked up and sure enough, there was someone leaning against our bus. It was too dark to really make out what the person looked like but I internally groaned.

This always happened. Now we were going to have to spend the next half hour trying to get rid of whoever it was.

As we got closer, I could tell that it was a girl. She had her hood up and her head down so I still couldn’t see her face, but I was getting a funny feeling in my stomach. We were about ten feet away when she finally looked up at us. I felt my heart jump to my throat.

Sarah showed her teeth in something that resembled a smile and pushed off the bus to walk to me. She kept the hood of her black sweatshirt up so her long brown hair spilled out the side. Her cutoff shorts had threads hanging against her thighs. Her converse crunched gravel with every step.

“Hello, John,” she said when she was right in front of me.