Track [27] “Mystery Achievement”/The Pretenders
The weeks between the Serj’s release from the hospital and the festival were tough. Fen told me countless times that he didn’t know how he’d survive reacclimating into his family without me, and I do think I helped—at least, as much as I could. He was on his own journey, and I supported him as best I knew how.
It felt a little like my aphasia, though. If you weren’t going through it, there wasn’t much you could do to help, unless you were a doctor. I remembered watching the helplessness on my dad’s face after the incident at the dam two years ago; back then, I knew Dad wanted to help me and was hurting, but I just couldn’t deal with him.
Now I was my dad, helpless to do much for Fen, and I saw him looking back at me like I’d looked at my father: appreciative of me, but he didn’t have the energy to tell me how to help him.
So when he needed to spend nights at the villa because his father was having a bad time with his cardiac rehabilitation program and Jasmine wanted Fen at home for the twins, I just nodded, even though it hollowed me out inside. Fen was being stretched thin, and we all wanted a piece of him.
Even the press.
Between Serj’s hospital release and the festival, they stuck around the lake, snapping photos of the lodge. Of Velvet. Of the Fintail every time Mad Dog rode into town. And of the Sarafians coming and going from their villa. I was used to this back in L.A. But Mad Dog had people who dealt with it—my dad, Kamal and his father, and lawyers if it went too far—and for the most part, it was pretty low-key. Mad Dog wasn’t out destroying hotel rooms and dominating the tabloid headlines, so there wasn’t much more than “producer caught dropping a box of doughnuts in Sherman Oaks.”
Fen wasn’t used to it, though, and it was making him cranky. Jasmine hired a security guard for the villa, which was an extra stress. In fact, all of this gathered into one big stress snowball for Eddie and Fen, who seemed to be slowly, slowly reverting to their old ways. Picking on each other. Little digs. Snide comments. Tiny treacheries.
I prayed they weren’t about me, but deep inside, I feared they were.
But the weight of an impending standoff lifted for a minute, and strangely enough, it lifted when Eddie and Velvet started hanging out together. I didn’t even know they had been friendly until the Fourth of July, when Mad Dog and Rosa invited the Sarafians over to the lodge for a cookout—it was so much food, Exie had to hire two people from town to help her set up grills outside. And when we were all watching fireworks by the dock, Eddie and Velvet were laughing their heads off, telling a story about something they did the night before.
Together. As in, Eddie and Velvet went out together.
“We’re just friends,” Velvet told me as I tried to calm down Frida, who hated fireworks with the trembling rage that only a small dog could muster.
“I honestly do not care,” I said. Much. I mean, it was a little weird to think of them together. But whatever. “More concerned about the sober issue for both of you. I saw Eddie drinking when his dad was in the hospital.”
“It’s a holiday weekend,” she told me. “Everyone’s drinking. But no one’s gone buck wild. And personally, I haven’t seen Erika Jones since that night at Betty’s, don’t worry.”
I was afraid this just made things more complicated than they needed to be. I even wondered if Eddie was in a mentally bad place this weekend. A couple hours ago, Jasmine had announced that even though Serj was resting back at the villa—holiday fireworks were too much for his heart—they’d come to a decision about the future of the festival.
And it wasn’t exactly great for Eddie.
“Starting next year, we’re going to scale back our hands-on production and coproduce the festival with Denis Oglethorpe,” Jasmine told us that night by Mad Dog’s pool. “He’s already running a fifty-person events operation out of Oakland, and they’re putting on two festivals in San Francisco without national equity.”
“This way, we avoid Live Nation and expand our brand,” Mad Dog said at her side. “We’ll be branded under S.L.O.: Sarafian, Larsen, and Oglethorpe Events.”
Eddie was furious. “Are you fucking joking me? Whose idea was this? Has Papa approved this?”
“Yes, he has. It was a group decision,” Jasmine said. “It will cut down on your father’s day-to-day stress. We won’t have to lay off too many people. Most will be taken under the Oglethorpe branch.”
“What about me?” Eddie said. “Where do I fit into the company?”
“Wonder if the new brand hires felons?” Fen murmured, scratching his chin dramatically.
“Welcome to the future, Eddie,” Jasmine said, ignoring Fen’s remark. “This is how we grow. Would you like to really learn this time? Start at minimum wage, bottom of the ladder, and work your way up.”
Eddie was seething. But he held his tongue, maybe for the sake of keeping his family united during his father’s recovery, who knows. I wanted to think he was learning and growing.
But later in the night, when he was watching the fireworks, and Velvet was insisting that he’d only had a few celebratory holiday beers, I worried about the darkness behind his eyes.
Maybe I was just projecting something that wasn’t there.
Maybe.
Dad and I finally made time to take our yearly sequoia tunnel tree photo. Good thing we got it when we did, too. If we’d waited a couple of days, we would’ve had to share our annual shot with strangers.
Because the week of the festival, Condor Lake swelled with people.
Thousands upon thousands.
They descended like a plague of locusts, clogging up every street and parking space. The Strip? Forget about it. Bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way to the festival grounds. Which meant all the shops along the Strip were jam-packed.
Most definitely Victory Vinyl. It was one of their busiest times of the year. Fen had to work most of it, so I rode into the festival with Starla, Velvet—and Eddie, of all people.
Nothing like VIP backstage passes.
I just hadn’t imagined experiencing them like this.
Starla and I spent most of the first day of the festival together. It was as hot and sweaty as I remembered. Nothing but bodies and booths, an enteral quest for overpriced bottled water, and a longing to chill at those Avalon tents, even though I knew the secret behind them now.
My heart hurt a little thinking about it because I wished I could go back to that day with Fen, riding out into the woods to see his tree. Back when we were in our own little bubble.
The second night of the festival, Fen was able to get away from the record store. Dad ended up driving us to the amphitheater in one of Mad Dog’s SUVs with Velvet and Eddie, and there was concern in my father’s eyes as he watched us in the rearview mirror. He was seeing something I wasn’t, and that made me anxious. Was it Velvet? Was she high? Eddie was a little twitchy, and he kept licking his lips, saying he needed water. But it was hot outside, and maybe I was looking for trouble that wasn’t there.
Velvet had promised me several times that she’d been sober around Eddie. Swore. She sounded genuine.
So I tried to put it out of my mind, because even though Fen was tired from working all day, he was trying to get a second wind, holding my hand, and I was grateful to spend time with him. If he didn’t notice anything wrong, then maybe it really was okay.
All in my mind.
After donning lanyards that pretty much identified us as festival demigods—I would definitely be saving this memento—we entered the amphitheater through the band door around back. I enjoyed it for a while, walking through a dark underground tunnel past dressing rooms and some of the roadies who were friendly to Fen and Eddie. Velvet somehow knew one of the band’s managers. One big happy music family, the Sarafians and the Larsens.
And me, the only odd person out.
But I forgot all about that when we stood in the wings, looking out at a crowd of thousands. I was excited all over again. It was music, the thing I loved. A band I loved, and on a warm summer night, all these people made a pilgrimage all the way out to Nowhere to experience this. For them, the fairy tale of Condor Lake was real. You could watch a dozen live clips on YouTube alone in your bedroom anytime you wanted. And that was all good—truly. But you’d never feel what everyone here was feeling right now.
The connection.
The energy.
The joy of being human together.
The roar of the crowd transcended anything that could only be seen on a tiny laptop or heard through a pair of earbuds. Because it wasn’t just the band that mattered. It was all the people out there who were listening. Without them, it was just band practice.
Together, it was a shared experience. A give and take.
A conversation.
For someone like me, a conversation was everything. I’d lost all hope of even being able to talk at one point. But I knew I could understand words. I could hear music—this right here. I could always have this. And that brought me more peace when I was in therapy than anything the doctors told me. If I still had music, I had joy, connection, and a conversation.
What magic!
I watched the crowd and the band, and I watched Fen, too. I saw the awe in face, and I was pretty sure he was feeling something close to what I felt. Maybe he was finally appreciating what his father had built, even if he could never bond with the man himself. Maybe there was some peace to be found in the thing Serj created. This festival was more than “scamming” people for luxury tents or trying to pack bodies in front of stages. It wouldn’t have lasted this long if that’s all it was.
There was some good here.
Velvet was waving Fen over to introduce him to someone semi-famous, a little farther backstage. I squinted into the dark and let him go. I was too enthralled with watching the show and the crowd. Toward the end of the song, someone stepped behind me, and I felt a chin rest on my shoulder.
My head told me it should be Fen, but my instincts said nope. Fen didn’t smell like beer.
I flinched and looked out of the corner of my eye at the cheek next to mine.
Eddie.
Before I could jerk away, he folded his arms around mine, trapping me, and pressed the length of his body against my back. It was ridiculously intimate. Not a hug between friends.
Eddie had never once made me afraid of him. Ever. I wasn’t sure if he’d been drinking enough to be drunk, or what was happening. I just knew it didn’t feel right. I panicked a little and pushed him off, and when I looked at his face, he was laughing.
A joke? It didn’t feel funny to me.
As the song ended, he leaned down and put his mouth against my ear and said loud enough for me to hear over the crowd, “We can hit it on the side, like you and Fen did when we were together. Fen’s just using you to get at me, anyway. Let’s have some fun.”
Then he backed away.
Mother trucker.
I was all kinds of panicked now. But Eddie just walked away as if it wasn’t any big deal. Was he threatening me? Or joking? Maybe he was high—I honestly couldn’t tell.
My eyes searched for Fen’s and found them full of fury. He’d seen. He was marching toward Eddie, and it looked like he might dismember him.
They were too far away from me backstage, and it was too loud. I couldn’t hear them. I could just see the sharp lines on Fen’s furious face, and the way he pointed his finger at Eddie.
The way Eddie strolled toward him, unbothered—or pretending to be, at least.
When they met in the middle, Fen pushed Eddie.
Pushed… violently shoved.
I tried to shout, to make them stop, but my word-pixie woke, scrambling things up, and the words I could speak were lost under the thunder of the concert.
Suddenly, the brothers lunged toward each other in a flash of bodies.
Someone’s fist came out. Eddie’s, I think. Fen’s head rocked backward. Then he was stumbling, and stagehands were rushing toward the boys, breaking them up, blocking my sight.
Everything inside me retracted in pain. This was exactly what I didn’t want. This.
This nightmare.
Of which I had a leading role. Ruiner.
I watched in horror as security held the boys apart until they’d cooled down. Fen was wild-haired, still furious. Eddie was laughing. Both of them had hurt each other—mentally and physically. Utter disaster.
Was this how things were going to be now, with Eddie back? The two brothers were going to be at each other’s throats again, and I was the wedge in the middle. I wasn’t sure why that was so shocking. Did I truly believe I could float like a bee from one brother to another without any fallout?
Why are love triangles in movies always so fun and frivolous? They aren’t in real life. They’re tragic and horrible, and if I could have gone back in time and erased everything that happened that night at the dam, I would have saved myself two years of misery.
I damaged my brain. I cost Mad Dog thousands of dollars in medical bills—because God knows my father’s crappy insurance didn’t cover it. On top of that, Dad worried himself sick over me, and I lost friendships and got so far behind in school.
But it wasn’t just the people in my world. It was the Sarafians. I spent how long chasing Eddie? Even after he rejected me that night at the dam, I was still starry-eyed over him while I was in speech therapy—while Fen was having a low-key breakdown over the dam incident.
If I contributed to driving a wedge between the two of them, even a little? Just thinking about it made my stomach sick.
If I could have gone back in time and just seen Fen instead of Eddie that night—really seen Fen for who he was—then everything might be different right now. Maybe he wouldn’t have spent years being haunted. Maybe he’d be in a music program at school. Getting accolades for his piano playing. Never kicked out of his house.
Who knows, maybe even Serj might have stayed out of the hospital.
Three people can never make it work. Look at what happened with Mad Dog, my father, and my mother. I didn’t want that to happen now. But there was another way that didn’t involve two boys I cared about being hurt.
I couldn’t change the past, but I could change the future.
A triangle can’t exist without the third side.
Dad always said that if I needed a ride, he’d be there, no questions asked. That was the policy. I hesitated, making sure in my head this was the right thing. But as the music continued to play behind me, the band unfazed by the fighting in the wings, I felt it deep in my chest.
I knew this was the right thing, and if I waited too long, I’d talk myself out of it.
So I texted him: I need you to come get me. I want to go home to LA. I want to leave service.