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Vivian squinted. "That starts next week."

"Oh. My goodness." Rhonda laughed, and in the background Vivian could hear her chair making a squeaking noise like the woman had rocked backwards with true joy. "I forgot! I was wondering why I didn't see a second report from you yesterday."

"But we talked yesterday. You didn't ask me then."

"No, I know. I must've just forgot."

This would not fly. "Bullshit, " Vivian said.

"Busted." This was followed by more laughter, but of a much more natural tone for the woman.

"You never call on my days off."

"Yeee-up. Delia asked me to check in on you. How you doin'? I want the full report."

It didn't even occur to Vivian to lie. "Bad. I'm staying with my... she's like my mom. Um... I didn't get dressed for like two days. I went to work, last couple days, and did what I had to do, but I haven't been sleeping well. I haven't had much of an appetite. Got a show in two days, and my nerves are... bad."

"Mmm."

Then Vivian blinked, and her brain kicked back in. "She asked about me?"

"Vivian, do you want my advice?"

"Yes," she said, unflinchingly.

"You're an idiot."

"Yeah," she said, nodding. "Yeah."

"Said with love."

It was hard to muster a response at all, but, eventually, she said, "Thanks, Rhonda."

"You have a patient tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah."

"Alright," Rhonda said, and it sounded like she was smiling. "I'll talk to you then."

***

Gene, Taylor, and Beanie all arrived together, first. They were so excited that the meet and greet pleasantries with Vivian even seemed sincere. She was pretty sure this was their first major festival, and mostly just let them have their moment. She could tell that Taylor was itching to be back, and would not have been surprised if she was asked to step down at the last minute. Wonder of wonders, though, Taylor only had thanks and praise for her, for stepping in on such short notice, and for helping to keep everything together.

Behind her, Gene and Beanie were nodding their heads, but Vivian could tell that the sincerity wasn't unanimous.

There was a little tingle at the back of her scalp, a twinge of something, and Vivian turned just in time to see Lucia come strolling backstage with a big shit-eating grin. Her hair was bright pink, and all of them had more or less the same reaction.

"Whooooooa!"

Then, as they all crowded in, Vivian realized that it was magenta, not bright pink, and for the first time in a week it seemed like maybe not everything was awful.

"You like it?"

"It's perfect," Vivian said, breathlessly.

"Well I don't know about that," she said, rolling her eyes, "but I think it looks pretty fucking rad."

Taylor said, "Split the difference. Perfectly rad."

Vivian nodded, and stepped away to let the rest of them have their moment. She made her way to the side of the stage, and looked out. The crowd was huge.

"How you holdin' up?" Lucia said, as she appeared next to Vivian a few minutes later.

Vivian jumped, just a little, and nodded. "Not great, but, you know. Fine."

"Oh, hey..." Vivian's eyebrows rose as Lucia grabbed her arms and turned her. And then laughed. "That's not enough," she said, pointing at Vivian's face.

"What?"

"Remember Barstow?"

Vivian's eyes popped. "Oh shit. My makeup." It'd been so long since Vivian had played to a huge crowd like this that she'd forgotten Kevin's cardinal rule of visibility; play for the cheap seats. Loud in every way that matters.

"You want me to do it?"

She sighed and nodded. "Would you?"

A few minutes later, they were sitting on the tailgate of Helen's truck. Vivian was staring, one eyed, up at the clear, late afternoon sky while Lucia embellished the eye shadow on the other.

"Thanks for doing this. I don't trust my hands, at this point."

Lucia, carefully, asked, "Are you gonna be okay to play?"

"I'll be alright once we get out there. It's just... it's been a bad week."

"Anything you wanna talk about?"

Vivian shook her head, and said, "After."

"Stop moving!" Lucia said, both hands held out in front of her face. "Alright. We'll talk after. They might turn the lights out on us, but we'll talk."

"Yeah," Vivian said. "How did we get the last slot of the day?"

Lucia's smile flattened. "Once they found out you were playing with us, they changed our slot. The schedule out there says Graviton featuring, you know, you and me of Insanity Hall."

"Ahh shit." Last slot, second stage, first day was a pretty good spot to be. By comparison, at their peak, Insanity Hall had been a last slot, first stage, second day kind of band.

"Yeah. Not how I wanted that to happen. I think the others noticed, but at this point they're just happy to be here."

"They might be pissed about it later."

"I'll deal with that later, if I have to. Don't worry about it for now." She narrowed her eyes, and switched to the liner pen. "You really gonna be okay?"

"I got this," Vivian said.

Lucia sat back, admiring her work, and smirked. "Yeah, you do."

***

Given the manifold circumstances, Vivian convinced them at the last minute to start with Roadtrim Part 2. The Dead Pirates were a pretty close parallel to Graviton's style, so it wasn't a big ask, and the way the instrumental built and built as it ripped along gave them the chance to dial it all the way in. Tighter than a gnat's ass, Kevin would have said. Vivian was kicking herself for not having suggested it before, but if they were gonna pull a rabbit out of the hat, Bumbershoot was the place to do it.

They came out hot, sounding as good as they had ever sounded with Vivian out in front, and the crowd was incredible. Daylight was still clinging when they started, if only just barely, but it was gone by the third song. The crowd was dense, fired up, feeding back into her, and Vivian gave them everything. She channeled all the frustration, funneled all the anxiety, and turned it into something. It wasn't fixing any of her problems, but it was the best damn therapy she'd ever had.

Her gray leather jacket was hot, and the lights were hot, and Vivian was sweating about as much as she had ever sweat in her life, but she had so much to work out that she barely noticed. The compromise to adding Roadtrim at the last minute was that they played a much heavier mix of their own original songs, which Vivian was all too happy to agree to. In return for her enthusiasm, which seemed to surprise them, Gene and Beanie were showing up in full force. She still didn't think they liked her as much as she wanted them to, but if they were gonna pull it together, Bumbershoot was the place to do it.

Vivian knew, about ten songs in, that she was gonna blow out her vocal chords by the end of the night, but there was no stopping what was happening.

"Alright," Lucia said, panting heavily after a thunderous rendition of Aim For The Head. This wasn't a planned moment of crowd interaction, so Vivian stepped away from the mic and just threw in a few heavy chords here and there. "Yeah! Seein' a lot of Insanity Hall signs out there. Gotta tell you guys, it's good to be back. Glad you could all come out and see us tonight, and super glad to be sharing the stage with Vivian again. It's been a rough few years since we were here last. What was it? 2016?"

Vivian nodded, a big emphatic nod, and punctuated that with a root fifth. The next song, Teenager, was all root fifths, and she was ready for it.

"Yeaaaah. Graviton doesn't make it up to Seattle all that often. What do you guys think, though? Should we start making the trip a little more often?"

The crowd went loud. Lucia was beaming. This was her in her element.

"Glad you guys are enjoying the show. Now normally, we've got a slightly different lineup, but our awesome singer and bassist is doing the whole mom thing for a minute, but, I dunno. Seein' all you beautiful inmates out there, I'm almost wondering if this isn't an opportunity. I'mma let ya'll in on a little secret. You see, not many people know this, but that woman over there?"

Vivian felt a cold prickle on her skin, and she gave Lucia a wide-eyed look. Shook her head.

Whatever she'd been about to say, which was probably about giving Vivian all the credit for Insanity Hall again, she didn't say. Instead, Lucia licked her lips once, and said, "She's my friend, and I'm glad she could make it here tonight. Now, we're the last band up tonight. Do you think they'll get mad at us if we throw in an extra song? Run five minutes late?"

The crowd was hyped, but Vivian saw a few of the crew in the periphery giving each other frustrated looks.

"Yeah. Yeah. I think we should do something a little special since there's so many inmates here tonight. Whadday say, Viv? You and me."

Vivian looked at Gene and Beanie, who were shrugging.

"We'll do Kevin's song, but we'll do it like the demo."

"Oh fuck," Vivian said, out loud, before she caught herself. After a second, she nodded, and turned and headed off stage.

"What are you lookin for," one of the crew said, his hand over his mic.

"We need two acoustics," Vivian said. "And a stool, maybe?"

It took an extra minute to borrow some guitars from the local band that had played before them, find a stool and get settled. Away from the mic, Vivian and Lucia quickly divided up the parts, and then the two of them settled in to play Empty Bottles and Bad Luck in the original flavor. On Methbender, and at every show Insanity Hall played thereafter, it had been an angry, unapologetic observation on the highs and lows of addiction, but the original demo Kevin had played for them was a somber, reflective piece. It was easier to pick out the sarcasm when it came to the highs, and the painful truth of the lows.

Vivian was much better suited to imitate Kevin Van Nuys' deeper voice than she was Taylor's, but it was a much harder song to sing. Her throat kept trying to tighten and close, and her eyes were watery the whole time. It was a horrible song, especially in hindsight, and the crowd was about as dead silent as eight thousand people can be.

By the middle of the second verse, Vivian was outright crying, but she'd picked up steam. It was a song worth crying to. In the back of her head, some thoughts that had been gathering for a while started to coalesce into shape, and she felt a whole lot more purposeful. It was good to get it out. She really did miss Kevin.

It was the kind of song that made so much more sense, seven years later.

It was also a song she didn't know perfectly, so she'd had to play the whole thing while staring down at the fretboard. When she finally hit the last chord and looked up, the reaction was instantaneous, but Vivian barely heard them. Lucia had been crying too, and she came over to hug Vivian.

"I'm gonna miss this," Vivian said, nearly yelling despite being right next to Lucia.

"Me too," Lucia yelled back.

It was almost strange how much of a hugger Lucia was now, but Vivian pushed that thought to the side as soon as it came up. Two stage hands came rushing out from either side to give each of them back their guitars, and Vivian went right back to hammering on those root fifths. Her attempts to move things along did not sway the crowd, who were still going loud and strong.

Eventually, though, the response died down, and Graviton got back to doing what Graviton did best: stoner rock. They played eight more songs, about forty minutes worth, and were only a few minutes behind schedule when Vivian's heart and stomach started going absolutely nuts.

"Thank you, Bumbershoot!" Lucia said, as they finished a damn fine version of Three Legged Cat. "We've got one more for you tonight. You think you motherfuckers got that in ya?"

The crowd had thinned a little after Julia, but those that were left were that much louder to make up for it. Vivian went right for the riff as soon as the response softened, but that just riled them right back up again. She grinned across the stage as she played the riff alone, for seven bars, while Lucia was encouraging the crowd to get louder and louder, and periodically pointing at her magenta hair.

On the eighth bar, and after one final gesture toward the sound guy to fucking crank it, Lucia joined in on the riff. Vivian stepped up to the microphone, cocked one eyebrow, and sang,

"It's astounding."

There were a lot of songs, Vivian thought, that would have benefitted from Graviton's very specific kind of heaviness. Over the previous three months, she had tried to sell them on a lot of really out there ideas, and had very little to show for her efforts except for some strained relations and limited patience; Vivian's idea of how to do a cover was a lot more experimental than Graviton's. Of those suggestions, the most bizarre had been covering Time Warp, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was the least straightforward, the most obscure, and by far the gayest, but the stars had aligned for her final show, and so, vocal chords nearly blown out and the sun setting on her time with the band, Vivian threw herself into a searing take on the cult classic.

Lucia was as into it as was humanly possible. She couldn't sing the high part of the titular harmony, so Vivian took the high while Lucia came in to do the melody line. She hit the most perfectly timed divebomb Vivian had ever heard during the drum solo. The whole band was in lock step every time the beat dropped. Lucia was doing her best to get Gene into the performance part, trying to play off of him, but he never ventured far enough forward to make it into Vivian's peripheral vision.

It didn't matter. They were playing it, and it sounded exactly as awesome as she'd known it would. She was vindicated, and nevermind that her throat was killing her. She swore she felt something give in the last chorus, and the volume was so loud, the draw on the amps so huge, that the massive flood lamps all around the field flickered at the end. It was perfect.

Vivian had never gotten a reaction like she got right then, but it almost didn't matter. At best, it was bittersweet. It was over, and over much too soon. Vivian gave the crowd a few quick waves, and then wandered off to find something to drink.

***

"Heeeeeey," Vivian said, eyes reluctantly focusing on the blob of bright pink hair that came around the back of the tour bus she was squatting behind. "Have a drink with me!"

"Oh shit," Lucia said, as she came closer. "Your voice sounds bad."

"Wrecked," Vivian croaked, with a wide smile. "Have a drink!" She held up the second of her three bottles of Black Label Jack Daniels. Lucia recoiled, holding up a hand, but Vivian was unphased. Mostly because she hadn't really noticed. "Ahhh, it's all over."

"Hey," Lucia said, sitting down next to her on the curb. "You okay?"

Vivian smiled, and shook her head. Somewhere in her whiskey-addled brain, she knew that her makeup had probably run something terrible in all her crying, but it didn't matter. "Drink with me."

Lucia brushed the proffered bottle away, and winced. "You ran off so quick. I've been looking for you. Have you been back here the whole time?"

"No, I... wandered for a bit. I wasn't ready. Drink with me."

"You know I don't drink," Lucia said, patiently.

Vivian held the bottle to her, narrowed her eyes (as much as she could), and said, "You owe me."

At this, finally, and with some reluctance, Lucia took the bottle.

"There you go," Vivian laughed. She could feel her emotions veering wildly, but it didn't matter. None of it mattered anymore. "Delia's gone."

"Wait, what?"

Vivian reached over, and tapped the bottom of the bottle. "Driiiiink."

Lucia gave her a sidelong look as she raised the bottle to her lips, and gulped.

"I think they're mad at me."

"Who's this now?"

"Gene and Beanie," Vivian said, giving her a flat stare. "Obviously. I wanted to... Why did you do that?"

Lucia gave an exasperated whimper, and turned. "Do what?"

"Bring me in! God! I didn't mesh with them at all, and you haaad to know I wouldn't."

Lucia lifted the bottle to her lips again, and held it there for several seconds while she gulped. Then she gasped, and said, "You know... It was selfish. I've felt, for so long, like I owed you something. Never really knew how to make things up to you, but... I kept trying. Tried to get back with you, which was a terrible idea. Tried to turn people on to your music. Tried to get people to go to your shows. Tried to tell the whole world how much I love your songwriting."

"I wanted you to love me," Vivian said, sadly.

"I know," Lucia said.

Vivian sniffed, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "It's okay. Now I have Delia to break my heart."

"Yeah, what do you mean she left? She's gone?"

"I don't understand," Vivian said, staring bleakly at the asphalt in front of her. "We were happy, and then... marriage, and then baby, and then sex in a car, and then... we were fighting, like, kind of a lot, and... and I don't know what happened. It happened so fast."

Lucia asked, voice trembling, "Is it my fault?"

Vivian shook her head emphatically. "No no no no no. No. A little." Then she snickered and took a swig from her own bottle. "No, I think I jusss... I wanted to be in a band, and it was hard being in this band. It was hard. Hard." For emphasis, she slapped her hand down on the concrete between them. "I didn't... I missed you, and I missed playing with you, but also, being around you is harrrrd. You're diff'rent. I'm differnt. I've been... thinking about you... and Kevin... and the accident... and I've been having a hard time keeping it together. I haven't been very nice."

Vivian rolled back onto her elbows, in the soft grass behind her, and it seemed like maybe sitting upright again was probably not going to happen. Her second bottle of whiskey was finally starting to take the edge off of the pain in her throat, but it was having some extremely obvious side effects.

"I wanna be in a band again."

"Did you say baby, like a minute ago?"

Vivian groaned, and took another awkward swig from her bottle. "So ss-sstupid."

"Babies are stupid?"

"I got scared," Vivian said, heedless of Lucia's cluelessness. "I got scared, and nervous, and Darren? I mean, I'm the much cooler twin. Fuck that guy."

"Yeah, fuck Darren," Lucia said, hoisting her bottle.

"No, fuck you," Vivian slurred. "Darren... made a baby, and that baby likes your baby, and... and..." Vivian flinched as a hair fell in front of her eye, and tried to focus. "What was I saying?"

"Darren is a good guy?"

"Kinda," she said, unwillingly.

"You used to reeeeally hate him," Lucia said, nudging her with an elbow. "Like, it was caustic."

"Yeah, well... he's my twin. When I look at him, I see myself. Better version." Then she sighed, and added, "It was never about him. It was me. I don't..."

"You're drunk."

"No, you're drunk," Vivian exclaimed, and she cheered when Lucia smirked and raised the bottle to her lips again. "I don't know what I did wrong."

"With Darren?"

Vivian scoffed, and pushed Lucia harder than she meant to. "With Delia. God, she's... awesome, an-and oh my god the sex. That woman."

"To Delia," Lucia said, saluting with her upraised bottle.

"Love of my life," Vivian said, as she took another long, long swig. "I tried. I was trying."

"Viv, no one who's ever met you would accuse you of not trying."

"Wasn't enough. Wasn't enough for her. Sh'ssss too good for me."

"This is it," Lucia said, under her breath, as she stared down at the bottle. "This is your moment, Alvarez."