Chapter 7: The Bill

August 2002, Costa Mesa, California

By the beginning of August all four of them had jobs.

They didn't decide it. They didn't sit down at the coffee table, nobody took out a sheet of paper, there was no fourth column that somebody finally wrote down. It happened in a week, separately, and by the time they noticed, it had already happened, the way you wake up one morning and find you've caught a cold.

Vex started at the record store, the one where they'd greeted him by name in the spring. One afternoon, while Vex was digging through the used bins, the owner asked if he knew how to work a register. Vex said yes. It wasn't true. The next day he stood behind the counter from ten to seven, rang up the first customer's record three times, and the owner watched from the back and said nothing, and let him in again the next day. The store was cool, and music played all day, only never what Vex would have picked, and by the third day he understood that a record store is the place where a person listens to the least music.

Nova at a one-hour photo lab on Harbor. All day other people's pictures came out of the machine in glossy, warm, chemical-smelling stacks: vacations, birthdays, a christening, a dog that looked into the camera the exact same way in every single frame. Nova slid them into envelopes and didn't look at them, because she'd been told not to, and looked at every one of them anyway, because it was the only thing in the day that interested her. Once, in a stack from a backyard party, at the edge of the crowd, there was Roxy with a cup in her hand. Nova took the print out, looked at it, put it back. She didn't mention it to anyone.

Roxy stayed where she'd been washing dishes, only further forward. The owner said she was good with drunks, which was true, and so he put her behind the bar, six nights out of seven, five in the afternoon to closing. Behind the bar Roxy was what she was behind the drums: fast, exact, and she served everyone who asked properly and no one who didn't. In two weeks she threw out two people. One of them by herself.

Cayde at a music store on Newport. The British accent got him the job, not the résumé. The accent sold strings, picks, cables, and once a used amp to a fifty-year-old man who'd come in to ask where the post office was and walked out an hour later with an amplifier. Cayde told that one in the evening and they laughed, and it was the first evening in the living room that anyone had talked about something other than the band.

Rehearsal slid to eight at night, and by eight everyone was tired. Not the way you're tired after a show, there's something good in that. The way you're tired after a day. It was a different tiredness, slower, and it didn't lift with the first song. Roxy drummed on the table with a stick while she waited for the others, and when Cayde fell through the door at half past eight and said sorry, nobody answered, because everyone had fallen through the door the same way.

The first week they still got through all seven songs. The second week, at the fifth, Nova said that's enough, she had an early start. Nobody argued. It was the first rehearsal they'd stopped in the middle instead of at the end, and afterward all four of them acted as if it hadn't been that way.

The weeknight shows fell away. Nobody canceled them; they just stopped taking them, because you can't leave for Long Beach at six if you're behind a counter until seven. Friday and Saturday were left. For a while that was two a week, then there was a week with one, and there was a week they canceled the Saturday too, because Roxy got a shift and there was no one to cover it. One Friday night they played Santa Ana for thirty people, played it well, and on the way home Cayde said that was good, and it was true, and it still sounded like an excuse.

Nobody said it. The column in Nova's notebook just got shorter.

The merch box stood in the middle of the living room where Cayde had set it down in July. It wasn't full anymore, two shirts had sold in Santa Ana, and five CDs, but it was still half full. Nobody stepped over it anymore. They walked around it, as you would a piece of furniture that has always been there.

Eli came on Thursday, like always.

The first week he sat on the stairs for an hour, because nobody was home until seven, and the key was with Vex, and Vex was behind the register with a customer who couldn't decide which Descendents record to buy. Eli sat on the stairs with his bag in his lap and watched the cat from across the street, which watched him back. When they got home, Eli said nothing, only stood up, brushed off his jeans, and went in with them. Nova looked back at him from the doorway, and Eli shrugged.

The second week he had a key.

Nova gave it to him, one morning, at the lab, across the counter, between the envelopes, as if she were handing over a developed roll of film. Eli came in, Nova took the key out of the drawer, set it on the counter, Eli picked it up and said thanks. Nova said: Thursday, not the stairs. That was all. They didn't discuss it with the others. That evening Vex noticed there was one key fewer on his ring, because it was his spare that Nova had given away, and he didn't ask where it had gone. He assumed he'd lost it.

The third week, by the time they got home, Eli and Nova were already at the coffee table.

The notebook open. In front of Eli a sheet in his own small, straight handwriting, a list of places and dates, and the next two weeks were already decided. Where, when, for how much, if at all. One place crossed out, because the owner hadn't paid last year and wouldn't this year. Another written in, because Eli knew a girl there who did the booking. A third they argued about, quietly, and Nova won, because Nova knew how many shirts had sold there last time: none.

Vex watched them from the doorway. His key was still in his hand.

Nova didn't even look up, only said Saturday, Santa Ana, nine, and that they weren't going back to the place at the end of Harbor.

"Okay," Vex said.

Nobody had asked him. Not because they'd wanted to go around him; Nova and Eli had simply gotten home first, and by then it was done. Vex stood in the doorway and felt relieved that this wasn't his table now. And that bothered him. Both at once: that he didn't have to decide, and that they didn't ask anymore.

He sat down on the couch. Not at the table, on the couch. Next to Roxy, who was spinning a stick and watching the TV with the sound off. Cayde went to the fridge, took out a beer, and drank it leaning on the fridge door, like someone who didn't want to come further in.

Nova turned a page in the notebook, Eli nodded at something, and that was the whole of it. There was no handshake, like in June. There didn't need to be.

Later, after Eli had left, Roxy asked Nova how long it had been going like this.

"Three weeks," Nova said.

"And is it good?"

Nova thought about it.

"Faster."

Roxy nodded, as if that had been an answer.

On the first, Nova paid the rent.

There was no envelope. Vex's mom didn't come by, Roxy didn't call her father, there was no money on Cayde's side of the table in the morning that nobody asked about. There were four paychecks, in four work envelopes, that each of them set on the table as they came home, Friday night, almost at the same time, and Nova counted it, and took it to the landlord the next morning, who took it, and said: well.

For the first time since February it was on time.

Nova wrote it in the notebook. Seven-sixty, the date, and nothing underneath, because nothing needed to go underneath. No minus, no question mark, no "from whom." One line, closed.

Vex read the number. He read it and waited to feel something. Something good, he thought, that's what he should feel, this was the whole point of all of it. He felt nothing. Only that it was the first of the month, and tomorrow was ten to seven behind the counter, and the register tape needed changing, because it had run out yesterday.

"This is good, right?" Roxy asked.

Not sarcastic. She was really asking.

"Yeah," Cayde said, and went out to the kitchen, and didn't come back for a long time.

Nova closed the notebook and set it on the merch box. Then she took it off again and put it on the table instead.

The next Thursday Eli set an envelope on the table.

It wasn't money. It was thicker than that, and it didn't bend the same way, and Eli didn't set it down as you set down money, but as you deal cards.

"Read this before you say anything."

There were a hundred tickets in it. Printed, numbered, perforated along the edge, with the name of a club they all knew, because they'd all been there as the crowd, in the back, and none of them had ever stood on its stage. Saturday night, three weeks away. And the name of the headliner, which Roxy said out loud, and then closed her mouth, and didn't say again.

Eli waited for the stack to go around. Vex took two out and laid them side by side, as if to compare them. Cayde studied the serial number. Roxy the back, where it said in small print that the ticket was non-refundable.

"The place doesn't pay," Eli said. "The other way around. A hundred tickets, six dollars each. You sell them. From what sells, the club takes its cut, the rest is yours. What doesn't sell, you pay for. If nobody comes, six hundred dollars."

Silence.

He said it as he'd said the flyer math in March. Calm, with numbers, no pressure, like someone who knows the numbers are loud enough on their own. The same voice. Only now he wasn't counting how many people would come, but how many wouldn't.

"It's a dirty system," he added. "I know. I saw it from the inside before I knew you. The club risks nothing, the band risks everything, and the band is grateful to be playing. Whoever sells the hundred gets two hundred next month, and is grateful for that. That's how it goes."

"And whoever doesn't sell them?" Vex asked.

"Pays, and doesn't get asked back."

Nova wasn't looking at the tickets. At Eli.

"And?"

"And do it."

Nova said nothing. Vex turned the two tickets over. Roxy studied the name of the club, and nothing showed on her face, which with her meant a great deal was showing. Cayde put his hand on the box, the merch box, as if he meant to lean on it, then took it off, because he remembered what was in it.

"Without this you won't even get as far as Chain Reaction," Eli said. "Nobody books a band there that hasn't proven it brings people. And this place is proof. If the hundred sell, everyone who matters will know. I don't like it. You don't have to like it either."

"Have you ever sold a hundred?" Roxy asked.

Eli turned to her.

"I used to sell them. From the other side."

It was the first time Eli hadn't recommended the honest way. Vex couldn't have put it like that; he only felt that something was different from before, that until now Eli had always said what was right, and now he was saying what worked. Nova, on the other hand, understood exactly, and held Eli's eyes for a long time, as she had in June, before the handshake. Only now she didn't hold out her hand.

Eli held it. This time too.

"Think it over," he said. "Not today. You've got three weeks."

He stood, put his bag on his shoulder, and left. He locked the door behind him with the key, from the outside, and the sound of the lock was the same as when they locked it.

The tickets stayed on the coffee table.

One corner of the stack hung a little past the edge of the table, and the fan lifted the top one with every pass, a millimeter, back and forth.

Above them on the wall, the envelope from February with the hundred dollars, next to the copy of the demo, on double-sided tape, slightly crooked. Nobody had touched it since, and by now not because they didn't want to, but because they'd forgotten it was there. Now it was there again. Four inches apart: what they'd been given once, and what they would have to pay now. A hundred and six hundred. Vex took in the two of them and thought that the envelope hadn't changed either, only he had.

Roxy picked up one of the tickets, checked the back once more, as if something different might be written there by now, put it back.

Cayde went out in front of the house and just stood there.

Nova opened the notebook, turned to the last written page, under the line for the rent, and wrote a new line. A number, and nothing underneath.

Six hundred.

She looked at it for a while. Then closed it.

Neither yes nor no.