But someone else has already caught his attention and he’s brushing past me with a distracted apology.
At first, a wave of relief rolls through me, and I walk back to the sofa we’ve staked out to tell the guys the news, but then I stop.
A sudden block of ticket sales?
That has rich boy written all over it, and I fight the urge to rub my hands over my face so I don’t smear my heavy black eye makeup and violently pink lipstick.
I’m sure Josh thought it would help if he bought up a bunch of tickets, but that’s dozens of tickets that didn’t go to actual people. This isnotgoing to be a full house tonight, and it’s going to be almost fifty people quieter for Pixie Luna than the ticket sales say it should be.
Once again, he’s making a bigger mess by trying to solve things with money. I appreciate that he wanted to do something good, but I wish he would have asked me first. Still, I can’t get mad. If he wants to blow his money like that, so be it. But it doesn’t change what we have to do when we get onstage. We’ve got to whip up thewholecrowd, not just the few dozen fans that bought the tickets in our allotment.
The crowd buzz builds over the next hour as the two opening acts go out and complete their sets. Near the end of the set before ours, Wingnut comes in from a recon of the crowd.
“Yo, it’s wild,” he says.
Anthony pokes his head in. “Pixie Luna, you’re on in fifteen,” he calls before disappearing.
“Good crowd?” Luther asks.
“Packed,” Wingnut confirms. “Preppy but into it. Keeping the bar busy, everyone’s vibing. It’s good.”
“I’m going to check.” Preppy? I need to see this for myself.
Sure enough, when I slip past the security guard to check out the floor, it’s packed with barely any room around the outskirts of the crowd.
Whoa. We reallydidhave a ticket surge come through. I look for Josh, but I can’t pick him out of the crowd from the floor. If he’s here, I’ll be able to see him from the stage.
My heart gives one hard thump, then the familiar pre-show adrenaline pumps through my veins, moving in time with the beat from the kickdrum on stage. These people are primed and ready, and whether Night View or their producer or anyone else hears our set, I’m ready to sing my face off. I will feed off this energy and send it out from the stage, and they’ll pay it back times ten.
I’m practically hopping by the time I reach the green room. “Wingnut’s right,” I tell the rest of them. “It’s a great crowd.”
Jules nods. “We best get ready to swap out our equipment.”
He and Rodney head down the hall toward the stage. Luther, Wingnut, and I follow, grabbing our gear from the van behind the club and bringing it in through the back. The current band finishes to loud cheers and comes off the stage with their instruments. Rodney will use the drum set on the stage, but like most drummers, he’ll switch out the snare and cymbals for his own.
“Great crowd,” their singer says, nodding and fist bumping with us as they squeeze past in the hall. “Kill it.”
“Thanks, man,” Luther says with his usual chill.
Me, I’m bouncing on the balls of my feet. The longest wait is for Rodney to configure the drums, but the club is pumping loud, fast music through the PA, and pretty soon he’s back in the wings with us. He nods.
“Let’s do this!” Wingnut shouts. They head onstage while I grip my mic and bounce from side to side, trying to give the energy somewhere to go while I wait for my cue.
Wingnut does his four stick strikes, and the sound roars out of the amps, the deep chest-vibrating notes of Luther’s bass, the snarl of Jules’s electric guitar, and as they reach the end of the first four bars, I run out to hit front and center stage in perfect time to sing out the first words of our opening song: “Who do you think you are?”
We’ve definitely got fans in the crowd, because a cheer goes up at the sound of those lyrics. It’s been a great opener for us because it’s a song about everyone in your life you’ve ever wanted to tell off. It’s an homage to an old Twisted Sister song called “We’re Not Going to Take It” that Grandma used to blast when it came on the classic rock station. That song was a big old middle finger to every authority figure of the time, and this is kind of like that but more personal.
Sure, the line, “Bye-bye, dumb guy who always made me cry” is a Bryce callout, but Rodney and I wrote this together, so lines like, “Adios, chief, to the boss who gave me grief,” is him checking the project manager who takes all the credit and none of the blame at his coding day job. It’s more people power than girl power, and it always gets the crowd moving with its gleeful takedown of every personal nemesis we could imagine.
Jerk cops, absent dads, Kevins, Brads, and Chads . . . all of them can “Shove it, bro.”
Immature? Yes.
Better even than one of those rage rooms where you smash stuff when a crowd is singing it with you at the top of your lungs? Yes. Every time. That’s why we start with it.
We follow that with a more party anthem, “Here For It,” and that’s got the crowd bouncing and dancing.
It’s not until the fourth song, “Crybaby,” that we shift down to mid-tempo, and I can prowl instead of jump and run, a deliberate stalking of the stage as I sing that gives me a chance to search the crowd for a familiar face.
