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He glanced to his left and nodded to a musician playing bass. He spoke the man’s name. He allowed the crowd to cheer, then looked to the right and gestured to the musician on the keyboard and followed the same routine.
It wasn’t that he disliked these musicians. They were terrific people, but they were stand-ins, fillers, placeholders. Years ago, before the accident, when he’d complete the same movements, it was to acknowledge his best friend, Trey Grant, and his little sister, Leighton Paige.
Listening to the crowd, then acknowledging the stand-in musicians, was a bitter pill. It made him feel closer to Trey and Leighton while reminding him that he’d never share the stage with the pair again. It triggered the memories of the last words passed between them.
Harsh words he could never take back.
Caught in a cyclone of nostalgia spiked with crushing despair, he listened as the crowd chanted the name of the band he’d started with Trey and Leighton back when they were teenagers.
It was so easy then, snacking on junk food, jamming in a garage, and shooting videos of their backyard performances. They’d uploaded the clips onto social media for kicks. Sure, they’d dreamed of playing in major venues across the world one day. They were small-town teenagers with stars in their eyes. But they’d never expected to become household names in the blink of an eye.
“Heartthrob Warfare, Heartthrob Warfare!”
He remembered the day Leighton had blurted out the two words. At the time, they would have died laughing if someone had told them those words would grace the lips of millions of fans and be chanted in near-deafening waves of palpable sound.
It had been a rainy summer day in the Colorado foothills. After hours of fruitlessly trying to perfect a song, Trey had abandoned his bass and Leighton had left the keyboard. The two decided to take a break and play Scrabble on an old milk crate in the center of the garage. They often shifted gears when they struggled to come up with lyrics or something wasn’t jiving with a melody. Some days, a word on the board would spark creativity. Leighton would call it out, and they’d play around with it, riffing and improvising, using the word to jumpstart their creativity.
But he never joined them around the game board.
Scrabble wasn’t his thing. Reading and writing—any academics, for that matter—had never come easily.
They still didn’t.
Leighton had gotten the brains when it came to school. Still, he had his own process when it came to music—a process that incorporated sound, movement, and another quality he still couldn’t quite describe. With the murmur of Trey and Leighton’s voices and the tap of the Scrabble tiles hitting the game board in the background, he sat on a stack of milk crates and strummed his guitar, experimenting with words and melodies. He couldn’t see the notes. He felt them. He understood them, which was quite extraordinary since he’d never taken a music lesson.
His childhood had been too volatile.
He and Leighton had lost their parents when he was eleven and she was just shy of her tenth birthday. Their paternal grandmother had taken them in, but she soon fell ill. She was their only living relative, and by the time he was twelve, he and his sister found themselves in the foster care system.
Not many folks wanted to take on the combo of a moody preteen boy and a sharp-tongued spitfire of a girl.
Luckily, they only needed one couple to want them.
And one couple had.
The summer before his freshman year of high school, he and Leighton moved in with two eccentric sculptors, Tomás Medina and Bess Fletcher. With their wild manes of hair and hippie lifestyle, their new foster parents weren’t like anyone they’d met. There weren’t any rules in the Medina-Fletcher household like they’d experienced in other foster placements. They had free rein of the multi-acre property nestled near Evergreen, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was the kind of wonderland that could spark even the surliest of teen’s creativity.
The house was like a museum of oddities. Tomàs and Bess were collectors of the strange and the beautifully unusual. While their place was jam-packed with the tools of their trade, clay, plaster, chunks of wood, and hunks of metal, it also contained treasures and trinkets from their travels.
With their foster parents’ easygoing vibe, he and his sister settled in and spent hours ignoring the dust bunnies and exploring every nook and cranny. They’d started in the attic, rifling through trunks, and they’d hit the jackpot. They uncovered a trove ofRolling Stonemagazines from the sixties, seventies, and eighties and stumbled upon an old record player and a stack of dust-covered records.
They pored over the images. Between soaking in pictures of the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, U2, REM, and the Police, they played the old albums and screwed around, singing into paintbrushes.
But the exploration didn’t stop in the attic.
Their foster family encouraged them to tinker with whatever items they found in the house and on the property. That’s when he and Leighton made a life-changing discovery in the dusty detached garage. Horns, a clunky tuba, a guitar, a trio of keyboards, and an upright piano sat linked together between spider webs.
The minute they’d entered the space and spied the guitar, a topsy-turvy tingle had passed through him.
It was as if he’d found his calling hidden beneath a layer of dust.
And he wasn’t wrong. Discovering the cache of instruments had changed his life.
With tiny particles dancing in the rays of light pouring in through a pair of windows on the west side of the structure, nothing less than a miracle had taken place within the cluttered space. For a kid who hated school and wasn’t keen on sports, it was as if he’d struck gold.
Like a pair of musical savants, he and Leighton learned they could play just about any song by ear on just about any instrument.
It was uncanny.
