Possibly, Cassidy wasn’t the first person on the island to try to pull strings. The crew member acted as though Cassidy asked her to point out the bathroom. “Why?”
“That’s none of your business.” Cassidy tried to keep her features impassive. She was no match for the short brunette that held all the power and seemed to know it.
“If it’s none of my business, then it’s not my business to go get him for you,” she replied before turning around and moving a barrier to head into the off-limits backstage area.
Cassidy huffed. She stepped up to a muscular guy with a big belly behind the barrier and repeated her demand to him. He barely looked up from his clipboard.
“Are you with the talent?” he asked.
“Yes.”
This crewmember looked up then. “Where’s your pass?”
“I lost it.”
“Well, you’ll have to find it. I can’t have just anyone coming back here.”
“Just anyone?” Cassidy repeated. “I’m not just anyone. Do you have any idea who I am?”
The humble woman inside of Cassidy cringed at the words she swore she would never say again after she turned 20, but that woman could never have anticipated things as they were now. Cassidy needed to get off this island and was going to do whatever it took.
She ripped her sunglasses off her face and stared the crewmember dead in the eyes. Everyone always told her that she had her father’s eyes and her mother’s nose. The nose was courtesy of the same plastic surgeon as her mother, but the eyes were all genetics.
“I need to speak with the talent coordinator. But if you give me your name then I can tell Scot Burns that you were the one who kept me from doing my job just because I didn’t have my pass on me.”
The crewmember eyed her as the younger one had. His features remained impassive beneath his salt and pepper stubble, but he reached down and moved the barrier out of the way.
“Jimbo was on the loading dock last time I saw him. If he’s not there, check the dressing rooms,” he said.
Cassidy stepped through the gap in the barrier and put her sunglasses back on. She gave a curt thanks and walked on like she belonged backstage. Part of her felt like she did, since she’d spent much of her childhood in off limits areas like these, with crewmembers pushing ATA cases and musicians strumming unplugged electric guitars atop milkcrates full of cables.
A security guard with a yellow vest and a black t-shirt stretched tight over his belly locked eyes on Cassidy, and although she tried to continue past him with the same confident strut she’d entered backstage with, he immediately approached her and cut her off.
“Can I see your pass?”
Before Cassidy could answer, a nasally squeal cut in. “Oh my gosh! Cassidy, is that you?”
Cassidy turned to her right and saw a woman that wasn’t much older than Cassidy herself wearing a red tank top and purple leather pants. For a moment, Cassidy had no idea who this woman was and thought that maybe it was just a fan, but the woman’s lips spread into a gap-toothed grin she recognized as the frontwoman for a band called Puerto Freakin’ that Cassidy discovered in their infancy and convinced her father to put on his label.
“Ama! Oh my gosh, I’m so glad I found you!”
The two women embraced. Cassidy felt genuinely glad to see another familiar face and hugged Ama a little tighter than she meant to.
“Do you know this person?” the security guard asked.
“Yeah, yeah, she’s with me, she’s good,” Ama said. “How have you been, girl?”
Cassidy watched the guard walk away from the corner of her eye. “Good, good, you know, just enjoying the festival and everything, but something has come up and I actually need to leave.”
“Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that,” Ama said, pushing out her lower lip and giving an exaggerated frown. “Is everything okay?”
“Eh, not really. My dad is like, really sick, and my phone isn’t working so I’ve had a hard time figuring out what to do, and I really just need to, like, catch a flight back to the states as soon as I can.”
“Oh wow!” Ama put her hand on Cassidy’s arm and squeezed gently. “I definitely want to help you and you can totally fly out with us. If your dad is sick then you should totally get home.”
A cool relief washed over Cassidy and she felt lighter on her toes. “Thank you, thank you so much, Ama.”
“Yeah, of course! Hey, let’s get out of the way of all this though,” she said, using the hand on Cassidy’s arm to pull her out of the path of a tall trunk getting pushed by two crewmembers. “Why don’t you come back and hang out with us until the show? Ooh! Do you want to watch from the stage?”
