“Oh my God, my openers are here!” Reagan Moore exclaimed into her mic right as we took in the sight of the Las Vegas arena. In the midst of rows of folding chairs that made up the floor seats stood her enormous stage emerging from the concrete floor.
Her stage definitely proved we were all about to embark on a world tour with how massive it was. It took up the whole width of the arena, extending three-fourths of the way up to the ceiling and at least a quarter of the length of the floor. Plus, behind Reagan Moore and her band was a giant LCD screen for computerized digital effects and to show the close-up of her face while she performed.
This was the kind of stage every aspiring musician dreamed of performing on.
She looked so little in comparison to it, and when she found us soaking in the stage for the first time, she carefully hopped off, which had to have been more than a six-foot drop, but she did it without a grunt. Reagan Moore’s head of wavy light blond hair bounced gracefully as she speed-walked over to us. Man, those magazine covers and billboards didn’t do her beauty justice. That glowing smile of hers pinned me to the floor, and I wasn’t sure if I was experiencing being starstruck or realizing that Reagan Moore had one of the most beautiful smiles I’d ever seen. Her face was free from makeup, her stud nose ring was in the same spot as my hooped one, and she wore a plain black V-neck and aqua track shorts, so the beauty was nothing but pure.
She first pulled our manager, Corbin, in for a hug, and then as she hugged Miles, her dark blue eyes met mine. That was when my armpits started sweating. Her facial features were so delicate, and her eyes were so soft that I don’t think she had the ability to ever hurt anyone. I’d met her once about a year ago at a label party Gramps’s business partner hosted at his house, and I didn’t remember sweating. Even though back then we only exchanged pleasantries, somehow, I made it through that first conversation without armpit sweat.
After greeting Miles and Corbin, she opened her arms for me and took me in as if I was a longtime friend. “It’s nice to see you again, Blair. How are you doing?”
When she broke the hug, her stare held sympathy, and I almost missed it because I was too busy smelling her designer perfume. She smelled as beautiful as she looked.
“Pretty good,” I responded, which was half true. At this particular moment, knowing that in four hours, the place would be packed with roughly thirteen thousand people and Miles and I would perform our first ever show in a sold-out arena, life was pretty good. Gramps would have wanted me to focus on this, not the crap outside, so I would push away my grief for him.
Her hand landed on my shoulder. “I’m glad. And I just want to say that I’m so sorry to hear about your grandpa’s passing. I was fortunate enough to have met him a couple of times, and he was always so kind and funny.”
“Thank you. Yeah, he was a pretty amazing guy.”
“I’m glad you’re doing okay, though. I’m so excited to have you guys come on tour with me. I think you both are absolutely brilliant.”
“And we feel the same way about you,” Miles said. “We can’t wait until we get on that stage.”
“Well, I’m done sound checking, so she’s all yours now. Oh, and after your sound check, we’re having a feast. Come hungry. There will be champagne.”
“You don’t need to ask us twice,” I said.
“I’m gonna go shower up, but I’ll see you two in an hour!”
* * *
Reagan Moore wasn’t lying when she said they were having a feast. It made sense because she had to feed her opener, her band, her dancers, and all of her crew. And that meant about fifty people. Yes, fifty people, which made sense when I saw the fleet of buses that came with her. Reagan Moore came with a stage that took up practically half an arena floor, eight sleeper buses, four tractor trailers, and a whole army.
Four long tables of every single kind of food I could imagine stretched across the entire wall. Sandwiches, fruit, vegetables, salads, and cases upon cases of water. Her manager, Finn, informed everyone to grab a flute of champagne for a toast. Her army separated into cliques, her dancers in full concert makeup and coifed hair circled around each other with small plates of food since they were about to endure an hour and a half of dancing. The stage crew in their black T-shirts loaded up on sandwiches after all the hauling and setting up they already did for the day.
As Miles, Corbin, and I fixed our plates, my eyes fixed on Reagan Moore as she entered the room and eyed all the food in front of her. I couldn’t control myself from scanning her head to toe. Her blond hair with loose, natural waves cascaded down to breasts that were slightly revealed by the dip in her long-sleeved, sparkly black bodysuit that ended right at her bikini line. And if that revealing black bodysuit wasn’t enough to kick-start impure thoughts, she wore black knee-high boots to highlight the toned legs her bodysuit accentuated. The blue in her eyes popped even more from the dark dusting of her eye makeup. My lips parted as her beauty swept me up in a hazy cloud, and once I realized my mouth was open, I closed it and swallowed.
And then without warning, she turned around and met my gaze, and that was when I realized Miles and Corbin weren’t beside me anymore.
“You skipped out on the salad?” she asked and looked up at me with a teasing grin. I stood there, heat attacking my cheeks, forgetting what I even put on my plate despite the fact I was just at the food table thirty seconds before. “What?”
She pointed to my plate, free from any sort of vegetable but loaded up with tiny sandwiches, fruit salad, and a nice handful of potato chips. “No salad. I caught you.”
“Oh, yeah, I kinda hate vegetables.”
“Seriously?” She acted as if I told her I hated ice cream, which was way more shocking than someone hating vegetables.
“I mean, carrots are cool.”
“Carrots are cool? I didn’t know a vegetable could be cool.”
Who said vegetables were cool? God, how she repeated my lame comment made it seem as if she really thought I was lame. And I didn’t blame her. But the grin still firmly intact made me wonder if she found my dumb carrot comment endearing.
“Yeah…I didn’t know that either until I said it,” I said shamefully.
She laughed. “Wanna go join Miles and Corbin at the crew table?”
We ate with a handful of guys from the crew, all built as if they could do some heavy lifting. I caught Miles eyeing one of the guys who had to be around our age: styled brown hair, a scruffy five o’clock shadow, with long, thick eyelashes and gray eyes. I knew exactly where his mind was.
“Down, boy,” I whispered to Miles.
He snapped his attention to me. “What?”
“I see you drooling.”
He wiped his mouth as his cheeks turned pink. “I’m not drooling.”
But he was. He went back to eating his salad, but I still caught him ogling. When I moved to LA, Miles Estes was the first friend I made. We had first period history together, and I’d smelled the remnants of stale weed emanating from him, which I didn’t expect coming from this skinny kid with a kind, fresh face, rocking black skinny jeans and a gray sweater over a white collared shirt. He looked too straight edge. I asked him if he had some, and he told me to meet him under the football bleachers during lunch. That was how our friendship started. But then once we were comfortable enough to ask about each other’s dating life, I found out Miles was bi at the same time he found out I was a lesbian, and both of our eyes lit up as if we had just found our person. At fourteen, we didn’t know a lot of people who were out, so knowing that we were queer really solidified our friendship.
His eyes lit up with the bearded crew guy the same way they lit up when he found a gay friend.
“Okay, maybe a little,” Miles admitted when he took a sip of water. “He has really nice eyelashes.”
After we all ate, Reagan grabbed her champagne flute and stood on her chair. “Hey, guys! I’d like to make a toast,” she said over the chatter.
But my gaze went straight to those sexy legs and black knee-high boots. She circled her attention around the room. “So, tonight is the big night,” she said, and everyone in the room “wooed” and clapped. “Ten months of planning this tour and working tirelessly to perfect every note, every dance move, every light, the stage, and it’s finally here, and I couldn’t be more grateful to have all of you by my side. This tour wouldn’t be possible without you. This show is sold out, over thirteen thousand people are going to be in that arena tonight. Take in all the sights and sounds. Live in the moment because we’re so lucky that this is what we do for a living. We’ll look back on these days when we’re older and wish we could relive all of this. We’ll remember the friendships we made on this tour, the smiles on the fans, the energy running through us. Don’t take this for granted. Enjoy every second of it. And to my wonderful opener.”
She turned to us with a full smile, and her stare caused my stomach to do backflips again, something I’d never felt until Reagan Moore stood in front of me with that glowing smile; piercing, dark-blue eyes; and those damn boots practically waving hello. It was so hard to look at her eyes instead of her long, built legs that begged for my attention. “I’ve been a fan of you guys for quite some time, and I knew once I heard your EPs that I wanted you guys to open for me someday. So badly. The fans are going to love you just as much as I do, I know it. You never forget your first arena show, so enjoy it. It’s one for the record books.” She raised her glass. “And, everyone, today is Blair Bennett’s birthday, so that means we have to sing and embarrass her.”
Her manager, Finn, came to the table with a giant chocolate cake, the number two and four candles already lit, and in white icing, it said “Happy birthday, Blair.” She was definitely right. I was embarrassed that all those people looked at me and sang “Happy Birthday,” but it was a good embarrassment. I only expected some beers with Miles and Corbin on the bus ride to Vegas, which had happened, and then my birthday would go completely unnoticed in the shadow of the excitement of the first show of the tour and the fact that this was my first birthday with Gramps gone and no family around me.
But the gesture was really sweet, given the fact Reagan Moore and I hadn’t exchanged more than ten sentences up until that point.
An hour and a half later, Miles and I consumed our preshow shots of Patrón and Southern Comfort. We stood in the darkness of the side stage, calming our pounding hearts with deep breaths. Miles drummed on his black skinny jeans as I plucked each string of my Fender to make sure they were perfectly in tune, then wiped my clammy hands on my faux leather pants. Miles and I practiced at least four hours a day, and being confined to a bus while traveling all over the country, I was eager to go out and take the stage, strum my first chord, use my looping station, and play all the other seven instruments I brought to wow the fans. As much as I was excited and bursting at the seams to get out there to play, I also felt so hollow knowing that Gramps wasn’t alive to witness this. When I told him that Reagan Moore wanted us to open for her, his smile took up his whole face, and his dark brown eyes sparkled in the fluorescent hospital lights. The first round of chemotherapy drugs ran through the tubes into his body, and it was only a matter of time before he started to feel the awful side effects of it, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. He reached for my hand, clasped it tightly, and said, “I haven’t been prouder of you than I am right now. My little Piglet is going to be a rock star.” And his voice repeated that same comment from wherever he was in the universe, bringing tears to my eyes that I forced back down in my throat because I couldn’t afford to have mascara run down my face.
This performance was for Gramps, the man who raised me, the man who always encouraged my love of music, the man who taught me everything about life, and the strong, intelligent, caring person I hoped to one day be.
This is for you, Gramps.
The lights of the arena hid us in darkness until my Fender ignited the lights for our opening song. It was our job to warm up the crowd for Reagan Moore. In three years, our band made three EPs and we were currently working on our first full-length album. Our song “Tomorrow”—a song about procrastinating and drinking on the beach instead of dealing with the real world—never failed as the opener. And it didn’t fail that night in Las Vegas either. Just a few measures in with the wailing of my Fender, the lights burst on and revealed the thirteen thousand people exploding into a cheer I knew I’d never forget. I remembered Reagan’s pep talk and took in the sight of the faces in front of me and the bodies extending to the far back of the arena, phones in the air, glow sticks bouncing around in the low and high levels; all of it only encouraged me to run up and down the stage to hype up the crowd, encouraged the adrenaline to pump faster, and my fingers to push harder on the strings for extra oomph.
By the end of the seven-song list, I found myself hammering away at the Fender on top of one of those five-foot speakers on the end of the stage, teasing the crowd on the floor and the lower level as I improvised some riff, feeding off their energy and loudness that pierced my in-ear monitors. The crowd on the floor shifted over to me, their hands in the air, sweat sticking to their foreheads a tad less than mine, and their cheers begging for more. As the last chord rang out, I thought, damn, this is fucking amazing. Now this is a high.
That night in Las Vegas, I realized that my love for music and performing might be the cure I needed to sew my life back together. The energy the crowd gave off was addictive. It was even more addictive when they sang the words to our songs right back at us. As an opener, I kind of assumed many people out there in the audience used my stage time as a buffer between bathroom and beer breaks and the main show. And sure, plenty of people did that. Seats were still empty around the arena that slowly filled up the further into our set list we got. But with about three-fourths of the seats already filled with fervent fans, the sounds of them singing to us was a magical cocktail of all the right emotions for me to feel hopeful about the next year on tour. As much as it hurt to know that Gramps was gone, and he wasn’t here to witness the biggest show we had to date, I knew that he would kick my ass if I didn’t take every detail in or fully bask in the glory that was performing in front of people.
And that was what made me smile when I fell asleep in my bunk that first night. This tour? I knew it would save me and put me back on track for this little thing called life.