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And why shouldn’t it be? Everything is different now.
And Johnny Baskets is about to be fucking huge.
Alana
Iexpectedthiscityto be cold–despite the proximity to the equator and what Mr. and Mrs. Smith led me to believe, I was told that I needed to make sure to bundle up at night because of the altitude. I only brought a coatigan to put over my short-sleeved crop top and, as soon as we step outside onto the tunnel that leads from the plane into the airport, I realize that this might not have been the wisest choice.
The wind is biting, even through the walls of the tunnel.
The airport is surprisingly big, but there are a lot of people here, so it makes the space look smaller than it was. Trine is waiting for us at the end of the tunnel, near immigration. Misha–that’s the boyfriend she decided to come down here with–stands next to her, his hair a little longer than I’ve ever seen it, a five o’clock shadow on his face.
“Rough flight, huh?” Misha says.
Trine elbow checks him, which makes the rest of the girls smile. I probably would too, if I didn’t feel like this headache was going to end me. It’s gotten worse since we’ve been off the plane. The sea of people is hard to tune out. They’re mostly speaking Spanish, and I can hear little bits and pieces of conversations that I mostly understand.
“Where’s Devon?” Bryony asks.
“He’s waiting for us outside,” Trine replies. “We have a driver picking us up, taking us to a hotel, and that’s where we’re meeting Javi and his band before we go on tour. They want to do a few introductions, and we only have tonight, so…”
“The guy I hired is waiting there too,” Misha says. “And I would like to be there as soon as possible.”
“No one is going to possess us in an airport,” I say. “They don’t have to, it’s already hell.”
I should’ve probably kept my mouth shut, but I’m surprised when Trine laughs. “Come on,” she says, letting go of Misha and walking over to me. “Let’s get you out of here as soon as humanly possible. I thought you didn’t mind crowds.”
“I don’t,” I say as she wraps her arm around my bicep. “I hate airports.”
“Fair enough,” Trine says. “Misha will get your bags and I’ll distract you, how does that sound?”
Misha opens his mouth to protest, but the look Trine flashes him quiets him, and he grabs my stuff without hesitation. His gaze scans the rest of the girls and there’s a brief moment where they decide that he should, in fact, be carrying most things, since we’re all going to have to lug around our instruments.
Fuck. I don’t want to wait for the luggage.
“Can you believe Devon pulled this off?” Trine says, pulling me away from the commotion. I have no idea how she knows where she’s going, but she does. “I mean, when he said, I have a cousin who knows Javi, I was like, okay, calm down? But yeah. Turns out you don’t need any skills to be a manager. You just need to know people.”
I smile. “Yeah, I wouldn’t say that too loudly around Devon,” I say. “You might hurt his feelings if you imply he doesn’t have any talent.”
She shakes her head, blonde curls framing her face as she looks at me seriously. “No, you don’t understand,” she says. “I think it’s incredibly aspirational. Like fuck yeah. If I had a cousin who knew the manager for Fleetwood Mac or something, we’d have gotten a lot further already.”
“We’re only here because you came down from Boston to rehearse with us, and then you decided to finance half of this,” I say. “You made this happen. It wasn’t just Devon.”
“You made this happen, too, Al,” she says. “Though I would’ve been happy to pay for all of it.”
“My dad was fine with giving me the money,” I reply. “He said he would’ve preferred if I used it to go to grad school, but I told him there’s no grad school for punk.”
She raises her eyebrows. “You know, there probably is.”
We laugh at that, but I can’t shake the feeling that Trine looks concerned. We haven’t seen each other much since she moved at the beginning of the year, though she went down to Orlando to rehearse before the tour started, and it was wonderful to see her.
Trine is whip smart, hilarious, and she always makes the rest of us feel less on edge. Doesn’t hurt that she’s not bad at her instrument.
But I’m concerned.
She’s lost weight, there are dark bags under her eyes, and her normally perfectly curled balayage looks a little messier than usual. I know it’s been a hell of a few years for her and I can’t exactly call her out on looking like shit. But I worry about her. We all do.
Picking up our luggage is surprisingly simple. We pay a few people to take it for us and, once we check that all our instruments have arrived unscathed, we make our way outside.
I guess there was a lot of noise inside. I hardly noticed that it had started to rain. It’s so dark it’s hard to see a few feet ahead of us. There are a few people holding signs, but it’s hard to read anything from behind the glass of the airport.
