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They’ve showed up for me.
The tension in my chest lets up a bit, and I can breathe. I nod to Jude, my bassist, who is shooting worried glances at me, and he smiles widely. The crowd goes bananas. They adore him. He has almost as much following as I do online, according to Skye, and at leasthedeserves it. He is a genius musician and gorgeous to boot.
What everyone sees in me is a mystery.
Theo—Teddy—flashes me one of his rare smiles, and I smile back at him from across the stage as I sing, suddenly glad that I decided to include his song in tonight’s set.
The song I wrote for him, is not a festive song, or even a happy one, but it’s important to me and to a lot of people. Sadness doesn’t take a day off just because it’s the holidays; on the contrary, more people are depressed and suicidal at this time of the year.
So, three songs later, it’s time for what I privately call ‘Teddy’s song’ in my head. The rest of the world knows it as the three times platinum hitFireworks.
I write all of my songs myself, music and lyrics, with two notable exceptions: The one exception is that she who will not be named wrote a lot of my first songs with me back when we were in high school. And the other exception is my little brother, the one the papers call ‘a modern Beethoven’. James Pan, the musical prodigy. James Pan, the ass. James Pan, my brother.
He lets me use his compositions as melodies for my songs. Music just falls out of the guy’s brain as he walks to the grocery store. I just pick up some of the scraps.
ButFireworksis my own creation, start to finish.
My chest tightens a bit as soon as the opening notes hit and the crowd begins shrieking–next toHeartbreaker, this song is what many people are all here for. But I look at my friends, Spencer and Teddy, as I take a deep breath, and their steady gazes ground me. They both have important, valuable lives, much more so than mine, and they’ve left them to come and be here for me.
Teddy is in Harvard, and Spencer just won an Oscar as the male lead in his latest movie, as well as a nomination as a director for a different one that he created with Teddy and my brother. They both have families, girlfriends. Yet here they are, for me. I have to do them proud, even if I let down everybody else.
I close my eyes and start.
The pain was just too much
The voices in your head
You couldn’t take no more
And there was just this ledge
And you thought:
There will be so many fireworks
When you fall
Fireworks just for you.
And you’ll wear the brightest one
Round your head.
I steal a glance towards Teddy. He’s focusing his whole attention on me, which is rare for him. He’s usually lost inside his own mind, distracted, listless. But he’s listening to me right now, watching me, his face blank and inscrutable as usual. He knows I wrote the song for him. He knows it’s about the day he got high and tried to jump from his hotel window, fifty stories over the ground. I was there, I pulled him back to safety.
That was back in May and I’ve been calling him nearly every day since then: he never answers his phone. But now, he’s here, and he’s listening to me. His face is blank, his sculpted cheeks not twitching even once as I sing
I wouldn’t get over losing you
how did you think that leaving me behind
was ever going to be ok?’
But then the flying lights of the arena catch him on the chin and I think I see something glistening there. A tear?
Those who see the fireworks
The fireworks round your head
