DRASTIC (Book 4 of the Soundcrush Series)

Chapter 82: Rock Stars Debate with Their Dads

Well, everyone seems to have the same question: Oh Snap, what are Matt and Trace gonna say about all this? It's time to hear from everyone's favorite rock star and see where his head is before he heads into the band meeting....a tiny time rewind of an hour or two here...Row's come through her surgery and Adam has not yet heard Marley's confession about Bodie going to jail and  put out the call for the band meeting.

Trace, In a Dive Bar in Atlanta

I haven't been in a shithole bar like this since I don't know when. Before LA maybe. No...once on tour...two tours ago...that private club in Pennsylvania where Bells took her clothes off and Bodie did body shots off her and Adam got wasted because Mac was in LA making out with Dev in an Indian wedding dress.

I guess this must be a private club, too because the sun is coming up but this place is still serving. Private or no, the guy at the door doesn't bar me. He recognizes me and jerks his head to the right end of the bar, invisible from here. I take two steps forward and I stop.

My father has an nearly empty bottle of scotch in front of him. He has a black eye. He has a girl half his age on his lap—pretty but kind of trashy— and she's applying a bag of ice to his eye. He's got a hand around her waist, and he's rambling to her, gesturing expansively with his cigarette-like there's not a law about smoking in public buildings—dropping ash everywhere.

I can't even.

I turn around and walk out of the shithole. I return to my car—one of the Suburbans we keep at the bandhouse. I sit for awhile, in disbelief.

My other father—Ross— I might expect this from, although to be honest, I've never seen even a hint of another woman all the times he was drunk.

But apparently Matt is an entirely different kind of drunk.

The rock star kind.

I don't want to be here. I want to go back to the hospital, where five hours ago my sister woke up from an emergency surgery—an attempt to repair a severed nerve in her injured hand.

Matt wanted to fly her home to LA or to Boston or to Switzerland—where ever the world's premiere hand specialist was, but the local surgeons down at the hospital in Bum Fuck said there's a window of opportunity to repair nerve damage, and the surgery couldn't wait. They rushed her up to Emory in a ambulance and the specialist did his best, but he said we shouldn't expect much in the coming days and weeks. It will be months, maybe years of therapy before the final result will be known.

Still, Matt couldn't quite believe the doctor. He kept telling Marianne that every thing would be fine. When Row woke up, and stoically announced that she couldn't feel a thing in her middle, ring, and pinky fingers, and while Riley sat by her bed assuring her that's exactly what the doctor said would happen for now—and it meant nothing for the long term use of her hand—Matt went quiet.

That never happens.

Then he did other shit that never happens. He kissed Row on the head and said he had to make some calls about security and transport home to LA, walked right past Marianne without even acknowledging her, and left the hospital.

When he didn't come back after two hours, Marianne called me outside Row's room. "You need to find your father. He'll be drunk somewhere," she said coolly. "Maybe high."

I shook my head. "No. No way."

Matt doesn't completely abstain now, but I've never seen him drunk and absolutely never seen him take any kind of drugs. I know he's been to rehab three times in his younger years. I know he didn't drink even socially for a long stretch of time. I honestly believed that his drinking problems were behind him—in the five or six years I've known him I've never seen him have more than a couple of beers at a time. He says he mostly refrains because Marianne nags him about his high blood pressure, but it's not that. It's a promise to her—a balance thing—the same kind of tight reign Leed keeps on himself for Ashlynn, Matt exercises for his whole family's sake.