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Chapter Eleven


We had a flight early the next morning and Lou was banging on our hotel room door at five reminding us that we were leaving in thirty minutes. "Are you okay?" I asked Nick as we packed, but he didn't answer. I sighed. "Nick, I understand why you're mad at me, I --"

"I'm not mad at you," he snapped. "I'm mad at me."

"Why are you mad at you?" I asked.

Nick scowled.

"Nick, c'mon, you can talk to me," I said. "You know you can talk to me, don't you?"

"I used to think so," he answered hotly, "But right now I'm not so sure."

"What?" I asked, "How can you not be sure of that?"

Nick's eyes were sad, "Brian, you don't even know anything okay? So just forget it. Just forget about all of it, all right?" He threw his backpack on his shoulders.

"Nick, what's the matter?"

"I said forget it." He glanced at the clock, "And besides, we're late. Let's go before the fat bastard comes screaming at us again." He shoved his way out the door and into the hallway, dragging his rolling suitcase behind him.

I shouldered my dufflebag as well and followed him into the hallway. "You didn't tell the fellas, did you?" I asked.

Nick shook his head.

"Then what?" I asked. Behind me, I heard doors opening. Kevin, Howie, and AJ's voices all echoed off the walls of the hallway, coming closer towards Nick and I where we stood by the elevator doors with our bags.

"Nothing," he answered.

We were whisked away to LAX and boarded a flight to North Carolina. Nick was supposed to sit between me and Lou, but he switched seats with Howie to sit between AJ and Kevin across the plane. I stared at the back of his head for a bit trying to figure out what I'd done to upset him, but I was tired again (Again? Still.) and I soon fell asleep.

In North Carolina, we were waiting for Lou and Johnny to check us into the hotel in Charlotte, gathered in the lobby, tired and quiet. Johnny came over to us with the room keys and started handing them out to us. I blinked in confusion at the number on my key, and the different number on Nick's.

I nudged Nick, "Wait, who are you rooming with?"

He looked. "Uh... AJ," Nick replied.

"What about me?" I looked around, confused.

"Looks like I'm in the single," Howie answered, triumphantly.

I looked at Kevin in confusion, but he looked just as confused as I felt. Nick and I had been in the same room for over a year, every time we stayed at hotels. We were Frick and Frack, that's just how it worked, that's how I had begun to believe it would always work. "What's going on with the rooms, Johnny?" I asked.

"Don't shoot the messanger, I didn't reassign you," he answered flatly.

We all glanced toward Lou, who was finishing up the paperwork across the lobby. After he'd signed the last of the pages, he waddled his way over to us, hauling his bags. "Okay, let's head up. We only have a couple minutes before we need to get to the rehearsal..."

"What's with the room assignments?" Kevin asked Lou, but he huffed away without answering, boarding the elevator. We followed and on the way up to our floor, Kevin reasked his question. "Lou, it looks like our keys got mixed up, AJ and Nick are together and I'm with Brian and --"

"I know," Lou replied.

Kevin glanced at me, licking his lips in frustration, then turned back to Lou, "Why?" he asked.

"After last night, I need to keep an eye on these two," Lou responded, twisting his thumb at Nick and AJ.

Nick looked at the floor and Kevin nodded, accepting Lou's reply this time. It made me wonder what Kevin knew.

Lou looked up at the blinking numbers over the elevator door and nobody asked any further questions. The door dinged open and he shoved his way out first. "Remember we gotta be leaving in fifteen minutes and no later, so don't get comfortable." Lou opened his hotel room door and disappeared inside.

"Don't be such a sore loser of the single," Howie said, grinning as he frolicked forward to his private room.

Kevin scowled and led the way to our door. I watched sadly as Nick hustled in behind AJ to their room, right next door to Lou's. I wondered what had brought this on, what they'd been up to last night in Los Angeles that had caused Lou to reorganize us and keep a closer eye on Nick and AJ than he needed to keep on me and Nick. As Frick and Frack, after all, we were supposed to be the trouble making team, not Nick and AJ. They were just Bone and Frack. That's not even a thing.

In our room, Kevin went straight for the bed closest to the window as though he was worried about having to argue about who got which. Clearly he'd forgotten I was used to rooming with Nick, who always had to pick first because he had this weird thing about sides of the hotel, where if he felt like we were on the left of the door he slept closer to the window and on the right then he slept closer to the wall (I have no idea, don't ask me, it was just something he did and he did it consistently, so I always just let him pick first because it just really never made sense at all to me). Kevin stood there and stared at me as I put my duffle bag down on the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed and sighed, staring at my feet.

"So what happened last night?" I asked.

"They got into a lot of trouble last night," Kevin said, his voice low, hesitant.

I stared at him, waiting for him to continue.

He rubbed his forehead, looking down, eyes closed, frustrated. "They had a ton of champagne... they kept knicking them off tables and whatever so nobody was keeping track of how many they'd had to cut them off. When Lou found them, they were with a bunch of guys in a VIP booth upstairs, doing lines of coke."

"They did co--"

"No," Kevin shook his head, cutting off my panic. "They were going to, but Lou found them."

I couldn't picture Nick agreeing to do drugs. He knew better than that, I knew he knew better than that. My throat seemed to swell as I thought about what could've happened if Lou hadn't have found them and brought them back to the hotel. They could've been killed, the both of them. I felt a tear run down my cheek and guilt settled over me. I felt bad for having asked Nick to keep my secret and I wished above all that I could just rewind everything, and not ask him to play basket ball that night. I mean sure it made him happy at the time but what happened was ruining everything.

As I sat there feeling horrible, Kevin was finishing up getting ready, changing his shirt and running a comb through his hair, the whole nine yards. He stood leaning against the wall between the bathroom and the main room, after having finished brushing his teeth, had his wallet out and was going through it. "You ready to head down?" he asked, glancing at his watch as he refolded his wallet and stuck it into his pocket, "It's almost been the fifteen minutes."

"Kev," I said, "I wanna talk to you about something. See, I -- I did some math last night..."

"Yeah?"

"You realize that we've only made $59,750 each in the last two years?" I said.

Kevin leaned against the wall. "Seriously?" he asked. "What's that work out to by the hour?" His forehead wrinkled as he started doing the math out.

"Five seventy-five, give or take," I answered.

"Wait, what? But minimum wage is five-fifteen," he said, his brow stitching together.

"Yeah," I answered, "I know. That's what I was making at Long John Silver's back home."

Kevin stared at me for a long moment. "Are you sure you did the math right? Didn't forget anything?"

I shook my head.

He frowned. "That can't be right," he argued.

"Kev, I'll show you the balance sheet I did up, but I'm really good at math and I know it's right." I shook my head, "It's not fair, but it's right."

He contemplated for a long moment. "I'll ask Lou if I can see our books," he said.

I stared at my hands, "Also... about Lou..." I started, but a knock on the door interrupted me. Kevin turned around and opened the hotel room door.

"You two coming or what?" It was Johnny.

"Yeah we're coming," Kevin answered. "Cuz, let's go."

I grabbed the bottle of aspirin from my bag and shoved it into my pocket and followed Kevin out the door into the hallway.

At the venue, the stage was still being set up, but we managed to squeak in some choroegraphy on the floor before heading off to do a meet and greet with a radio station's contest winners and wardrobe. At dinner, I sat next to Nick wanting so badly to talk to him, to ask him what he'd been thinking, but I didn't get the chance. We were whisked back to the venue right after and onto the stage for the show, and that night at the hotel Nick and AJ hustled into their room before I could pull Nick aside. I was going to head over and knock on the door, but Kevin pulled me into our own room and got his checkbook out of his bags and we went over the balances again using both our records to confirm the amount I was coming up with was correct. And it was.

Kevin sighed and rubbed the back of his neck as he paced across the length of the hotel room, shaking his head. "How in the hell are we just making minimum wage?" he muttered, "That can't be right, can it? it can't be the norm. Singers don't make minimum wage... Even if we were only being paid minimum on the actual per hour work, where's our royalties for the CDs and tickets and video tapes that we're selling, where's the contract bonuses..." he gnawed his lower lip. "It doesn't make sense."

"I know," I agreed.

The next morning, bright and early at six o'clock, Kevin was down the hall, whaling on Lou's hotel room door. Lou opened it a crack and peered out at us. "Yes?" he asked.

"We were hoping to talk to you," Kevin said, "About our contract?"

Lou glanced over his shoulder into the room. "Look right now isn't a good time."

"When will be a good time?" Kevin asked.

"I don't know, just not right now," Lou replied, and he closed the hotel room door in our faces.

Kevin looked at me, his eyebrow raised. I shrugged. We headed back to our hotel room. Kevin looked deep in thought across the room, and I laid back across my bed, staring up at the ceiling. "He's just busy," Kevin said.

"Yeah," I answered.

He sat on the edge of his bed. "What's going on," he said, "Seriously, with you and Nick and Lou?"

"I don't know, really," I answered.

"Well you two seem really against him lately, and I'm just trying to figure out what's up," Kevin answered.

I couldn't very well tell Kevin about the conflict with Lou's perfectly coordinated schedule and my doctor's appointment without telling him about my need for a doctor's appointment, which would lead into what happened on the basket ball court, and probably to a phone call to my mother, which I didn't want happening. She'd only worry pointlessly and there was nothing to worry about. I probably just needed a change in my meds or something.

So I lied to Kevin.

"He's just been crankier than usual I guess," I replied.

Kevin sighed, "We've all been crankier. It's been a rough couple weeks."

"Yeah," I answered. I couldn't help but add on, silently, that it was only gonna get worse.

The next day we were playing in Atlanta, Georgia, which is probably one of my favorite cities that I've never lived in, though I'd only been there a few times. It was on the flight to Atlanta that it occurred to me that Leighanne's parents lived somewhere near by, and I realized I was forgetting an important step in the whole process of getting engaged to Leighanne. Her father's approval.

When we got to the hotel and I was once again paired with Kevin in the rooms, I pulled the phone book out of the night stand and started flipping through it during a forty-minute break we had before heading to rehearsals. My finger scanned the book until I'd found her step-father's name and the address right next to it. I got up. "I'll be right back," I said.

Kevin looked up from the book he was reading. "Where are you going?"

"I just wanna go see Leighanne's step-father," I replied. "I should be back before we gotta go, I think, but if I'm not, I'll go to the venue and see you there."

Kevin raised an eyebrow. "Lou's gonna skin you alive," he said, shaking his head. But he turned back to his book and didn't say anything more, which I took as his permission to go.

I didn't start freaking out about the idea of what I was doing until I was already in a cab on the way to the address that had been given in the book. I felt ridiculous all of a sudden. And why wouldn't I? I hadn't met Leighanne's parents at all before and now here I was about to drop in on them. I only vaguely knew their names. But it was too late to turn back, and so when the cab rolled to a stop in front of a very normal-looking suburban looking home, I gave the guy my fare and started up the walkway, my palms sweating.

When I knocked on the front door, a woman who looked remarkably similar to Leighanne - just older - answered and stared at me for several long moments before she smiled and said, "Brian. Come in, doll."

I stepped inside.

"Jaa-aack," she called into the house, "Jack, we have company! And not just any company!" she added.

"Shirley, you don't have to go yelling all over the house," came a man's voice, and just as suddenly as his answer had come, he came stepping into the foyer where we were standing. He noticed me and he stood up straighter. He had a golf club in one hand and a cap pulled down over his forehead. He struck out his hand, "You're the Backstreet Boy that's dating our little girl," he said simply.

I nodded, "Yes sir, I am," I replied.

He eyed me a moment distrustfully.

"I'm here to introduce myself," I said, "And also to speak to you about your daughter," I added.

Leighanne's mother's eyes widened. "You want to talk about my daughter?" she gasped. She fanned her face with her palms. "He wants to talk about our little girl," she informed Jack, her eye welling up.

"...if that's okay," I said, "Sir."

He studied me for a moment. "Jack," he said, "You can call me Jack." He looked me head to toe. "You play golf at all, Brian?" he asked.

"Yes sir -- Jack," I stammered, "Yes, I do."

"Well then." Jack nodded toward the room he'd come from, "Shirley, could we get some sweet tea on the back patio? And while you get that all readied up I'll be showing Brian how to drive like a man."

Shirley grinned and bolted off.

Jack smiled at me, "You ain't never had no sweet tea like Shirley makes." And he patted me on the back. "Come show me your golf swing," he said, pulling me through a parlor toward a couple of large sliding glass doors that seemed to lead to the back yard.

I glanced at my watch, "I only have a couple minutes, then I gotta head back. I've got a show tonight, and I really can't be late for rehearsal --"

But Jack was already balacing the ball on the tee, a happy expression on his face. And a happy expression was exactly what I needed to get my way after all... And hell, I had a few minutes to spare anyhow, didn't I? Might as well use them...