Chapter Eighteen
Nick
Lauren put the kintsugi on the shelf above the TV in the living room so the next day, as I was sitting there playing Halo, my eyes kept wandering up to it. I put the game on pause at one point to take a sip of my blueberry-pomegranate smoothie and I realized my eyes were tracing the gold twists wrapping through the glass, holding it all together. The bowl really was ugly as fuck, I thought, but since Lauren had explained about like why it was all broken and stuff it kind of looked a little cool, too, I guess. Like even though it was ugly it was also beautiful. I couldn’t think what, but something about it kept drawing my eyes to it, making me think about how Lauren had explained it. Something stirred deep in my guts each time I looked at it.
I’d restarted Halo and been playing for a few when suddenly the TV turned off.
“What the hell?” I exclaimed, looking around.
“There’s your attention,” Lauren said, tossing the remote she’d evidently stolen from beside me back to it’s place on the cushion.
“What?”
“I was talking to you,” she replied.
“I heard you,” I lied.
“Okay. What did I say?” she asked smugly.
“Uhhh…”
“I said that I’m going to bring this box up to the attic,” Lauren said. She was holding a box we’d filled with the stuff that had been on the shelf the kintsugi now occupied. She’d thrown some of it out, but I’d managed to whine my way into keeping a box full of stuff at least. Lauren was a clean-and-purge sort of person while I was a hoarding pack rat sort of person. “If I’m not back in ten minutes assume some of the piles of shit up there fell over and crushed me,” she said pointedly.
I nodded, “Boose, I promise if you ain’t back in ten minutes I’ll strap a whiskey barrel to Nacho’s collar and send him up after you ‘til the proper authorities can be notified.”
Lauren laughed. “Right. Like you’ll even notice I’m not here while you’re focusing on whatever game that is.”
“I will!” I said.
“Maybe,” she said, “You could come upstairs with me and we could work on getting rid of some of th--”
I have never been so thankful for a phone ringing as I was at that moment. I glanced at my phone. “Boose, it’s Howie. I gotta take this.” I waved the phone.
Lauren’s lips went tight, “You are some kinda lucky,” she accused, but she had amusement in her eyes. She carried the box away.
I answered the phone quickly. “Yolo Howard. What’s up, man?” I glanced to make sure she wasn’t listening in still, “Your timing was… impeccable.”
“Nick --” Howie’s voice was rushed, “I just emailed you a link - it’s a youtube video - you have to listen to it. Right now. Right now.”
“Okay,” I said slowly but Howie had already hung up.
“Well damn,” I muttered and grabbed my iPad off the coffee table to open my email. A notification came up that I didn’t read before clicking into Howie’s note. The link uploaded and my eyes scanned the title of the video. “Yeah. No.” I said, turning my attention to my phone to call Howie back.
“You didn’t watch it that fast,” Howie accused. “It’s longer than that.”
“Brian Littrell opens up about Backstreet Boys departure on Star 94 Atlanta,” I read out the title. “No. I don’t want to hear anything that he has to say.”
“Just listen to it,” Howie said. “It’s from a radio interview he did this morning. It lasts maybe three minutes, if that. You owe him that much, don’t you?”
My voice was heated, “No - I do not. I don’t owe him nothin’. He owes me like twenty years worth of honesty.”
Howies was quiet a moment before saying, “That’s kind of exactly what it is, Nicky.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“Just listen to it.”
Brian
When we got home from the radio interview, I’d gone right up to the office and closed myself in, sitting in the chair behind the desk and staring out the window at the trees. Jen had said this interview would be the last one I’d do as a Backstreet Boy. I wondered if that meant she officially had all the contracts except mine, which was dependant on the US Postal system. On the way home, everything had suddenly taken on a very final sort of feeling and I’d needed time to process it - alone.
This one part of me was really tense, too, because somewhere deep down I’d almost sort of expected Nick to text me about the interview and I hadn’t heard from him yet. I kept compulsively checking my phone to make sure I didn’t miss it. But there was nothing.
There was no real reason to make me believe he’d heard it. It was a local Atlanta radio station, not even the biggest one in the area no less, and I didn’t have a clue where in the country he was or if he was even in the country anymore (LA, Nashville, Key West? Some other random destination with Lauren?).
I twisted the chair left to right, anxiety churning through me.
I was silly, I thought, tossing my phone onto the desk, to think that a few words on a radio station would be powerful enough to save a broken friendship.
I stood up, unable to stay sitting any longer, and leaned against the window sill, enjoying the feeling of the cool air coming off the glass. I pressed my forehead against it, eyes closed for a moment before reopening them. They landed on Baylee’s old fort out there and I thought about when Leighanne said he never used it and the feelings that had conjured. The longer I stared at it, the more those feelings returned and finally, I just couldn’t stand it any more.
I turned and quickly thundered down the stairs to the front door and went outside, my feet hurried, my breath crystallizing in the chilly air outside as I went over to the shed. I pulled the shed door open and rooted around inside among all the tools and sports equipment and lawn stuff until I found what I was looking for, then quickly carried the baseball bat with me out into the woods. Leaves crunched under my feet, and I felt borderline insane as I sloshed through a couple muddy patches, dirtying my sneakers as I went. I got out to the old fort and with every single ounce of my soul I swung the baseball bat in an almighty wind-up backed by all the frustration and anxiety that had been building and building in me for -- well, evidently for twenty years.
The moment the bat connected with the old fort’s walls it collapsed, the pallets so weathered and mildewed that there was barely any backbone to the structure. I stood there over it, holding the bat, breathing heavily from the exertion of it, my muscles tensed and heart racing in my chest cavity. I felt so angry, I felt unjustified by the pathetic collapse of the stupid fort. I’d thought when I’d gone for the bat that knocking the thing down would make it better, but it hadn’t, it had actually only made it worse.
The next thing I knew, I was swinging the bat at random trees around me with all my might, my fingers shaking from the vibration of the bat as the trees refused to give, but just the feeling of the connection making me feel better. “Stupid,” I yelled, “Stupid. Fuck. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Not … fair...”
“BRIAN!”
I stopped swinging the bat at the sound of Leighanne’s voice. She was standing a few feet away, staring at me with this terrified look on her face. “What in the world are you doing?” she demanded once she’d gotten my attention.
I dropped the bat to the ground, suddenly aware of how insane I probably looked.
“I don’t know,” I croaked.
She picked her way over, careful not to step in any mud, and grabbed my hands, “Come inside,” she said.
Nick
Lauren came back downstairs almost an hour later. I heard her footsteps echoing all the way down. “Nick… I found something that you might be interested in,” she said, coming into the room. She was holding a small box. “It was under a bunch of other stuff up there and --” she stopped talking when she saw my face. “...Nick? Are you okay?”
I looked up at her numbly.
“Honey?” she hurried to my side by the couch, her face paling as she came. “What is it?”
By that point, I’d watched the video of the snippet of Brian’s interview a couple times. It was one of those grainy in-studio cameras and all he did was sit there holding his hands over the headset’s earpieces, like he thought he needed to hold them in place or something. He leaned into the microphone as he spoke. Lauren watched as the video played, as Brian talked, going on about how Superman can’t fly and all of the things he’d said, his words so raw they stung. ”I want Nick to be happy. That said… I can’t think of single reason to reconsider.” The deejay said a lead out to a commercial break and on the screen, Brian looked down at his lap and brought one hand from his headset onto his face. Then the video ended.
Lauren stared at the screen, her jaw dropped a little. She looked at me when it ended. “Wow,” she said.
“I know,” I answered. “Howie sent me the link. That’s what he was calling about, to tell me to watch it.”
She leaned back, her arms around the little box she’d carried down.“What do you think about it?” she asked.
I shrugged because I hadn’t quite decided yet what to think about it.
“Well,” she said slowly, “Maybe… maybe this will help.” She held the box out to me.
“What’s this?” I asked, taking it. I pulled the lid off the box and as I did, I remembered the box, even before I’d looked inside. The box had been filled on a night in 1998 when I’d been drunk from about five of those little bottles of alcohol that I’d stolen out of a hotel room minibar during the tour we’d just finished. Brian and I had plans but he’d called and cancelled because he was tired, a side effect I learned less than a month later of him needing a heart surgery but he hadn’t told us yet, so it just sounded like a lame ass excuse at the time, especially since I’d heard Leighanne in the background.
I’d been angry because he was blowing me off all the time back then. He never wanted to play basketball, and he was always hanging out with Leighanne, even on the tour she started coming along and suddenly he wanted his own room with just him and her in it and I was stuck rooming with AJ and he was getting mad because me and AJ were getting into trouble a lot together and I felt like he was judging me all the time, trying to be my father instead of my friend. And it was rocky ground anyway because I’d already decided I couldn’t trust him because of that night with Lou and everything. I was still going through stuff at home and trying to ignore any of the suggestive things that Lou said to me about knowing where I could go if I needed help.
I remember brewing, worrying about all that stuff the night I filled the box, a hurricane of emotion, I’d walked around my room collecting things that reminded me too much of a friendship that I’d decided was really, truly dead to me.
That’s what was in the box.
I reached in and grabbed a little Nerf basketball set that magnetized to metal doors that we used to set up in our hotel rooms back when we shared them. We had a lot of fun with that thing. We used to tumble all over each other, banging into walls, falling to the floor in a heap of laughter as we fought over the stupid foam ball, wrestling until one of us had won. There was my old Frack hat in there. I wondered if he still had his Frick hat. A VHS copy of Dumb & Dumber, our favorite movie back then. We watched it so many times that we knew every line by heart and when we didn’t have a tape player we would just sit around reciting it, laughing even harder at each other than we did at Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. There was lots of stuff like that, old momentos of our friendship, and as I sifted through it I felt like my heart was gonna pop.
Then I found a Polaroid picture.
My throat tightened and I put the box on the coffee table next to my iPad, staring at the picture.
Brian
I checked the tracking number on my contract about a hundred times throughout the day. It took most of it before it finally said that delivery had been completed. I stared at the word delivered and the timestamp for a long time when it finally said it. I memorized the time: 16:24:44. Four twenty-four-almost-twenty-five in the afternoon eastern time. That was the time when I had officially become a former Backstreet Boy, I told myself.
Leighanne had dragged me inside from the woods and sat me down in the kitchen at the table and made a sandwich and gotten me a drink because that was one of her ways of comforting and calming people down was making them eat food. I’d sat there feeling just so numb and empty after breaking apart the fort, like a ghost of myself somehow. We’d ended up splitting the sandwich while we talked about anything but what I’d just done and what it meant. I was thankful she didn’t ask because I didn’t really know, other than this nagging feeling that had been ebbing at me that somehow in my head the fort was me.
I’d gone back up to the office after because I’d wanted to email Jen and confirm that all the paperwork was good and I was, indeed, completely finished with the band. I felt like I needed the words in writing from her before it was absolutely done. I mean yeah I had the delivery confirmation and that had basically been all we’d been waiting on but I needed her to say it was over before it could be completely over.
As I sat there, waiting for her to reply, I thought about how strange it was that less than a month before if I’d had time off I wouldn’t have been able to get everything done that I wanted to do. Time off was a precious commodity, something there was never enough of. But now it was like there was nothing to do in the time I had, and it stretched on forever and ever all daunting and huge and wide open. It was strange feeling, having a clear schedule ahead of me, no looming tour dates or trips out of the country, no trying to plan and organize every tiny detail of life around the possibility of needing to fly to LA or New York or wherever to record or do an appearance or any of that.
Leighanne pushed open the door. “I’m going to pick Baylee up from his rehearsal,” she said.
“Okay,” I answered.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“I’m waiting on an important email,” I answered, waving my hand at the computer.
“Okay,” she answered. She smiled, though I could tell she was worried about me. “I’ll be back in a few. I’m not going anywhere else. Just to the school and back.”
“Okay.”
“Love you husband,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I replied.
She left, but I felt like it was reluctantly.
I listened as she went downstairs and the front door closed, then strained to hear the car engine, but I couldn’t hear it from where I sat, but I imagined her backing down the driveway anyways.
The moment I was sure she was gone, I cleared my throat.
“Do ra me fa so la ti do… do ti la so fa me ra do… do ra me fa so la ti do…” I started doing my warm up, going as low as I could and then as high as I could on the scales. I stretched my neck side to side, massaged my throat like I’d been taught by my therapist, my heart racing at the thought of doing my exercises for the first time since Nick and I had sat on the hotel room bed doing them together. “Do ra me fa so la ti do… do ti la so fa me ra do… do ra me --”
An email alert popped up on my computer screen and I stopped mid-scale and stared at the little bubble.
I clicked it slowly.
I felt like my entire life was leading up to this moment. I knew that it would load and there would be one sentence there that would change everything in my entire life. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes as I let up the mouse click and it loaded. I counted to twenty-five, trying to calm my nerves.
When I opened my eyes, I told myself, it would be official. But not until I opened my eyes. So I kept them closed for a long moment, thinking about all the times - good and bad and in-between - that had led up to this moment. I thought about all the fights and the laughs, the tour buses, the fans, the arenas, the awards and setbacks. I thought about what it meant to be a Backstreet Boy and what it meant to no longer be one.
And finally, when I was sure I was ready for it…
I opened my eyes.
Hey Brian…
I did receive your contract today, thanks for sending it priority. I’m still waiting on one more contract from the guys, though. I’ll call him and see when I can expect it. I’ll give you a call when everything’s submitted.
Jen.
There's Us by Pengi
