Two Punks In Love

Harsh Sunshine

Trace

I will never understand Leed. I beg him to go search for Kat and what does he do?

He says, "You got it, Brother."

And then he spends three hours standing on his head.

He has one hand planted on the ground, one splayed from his side for balance, his legs vee'd, and his feet are caked completely grey with dirt and dust, as always. I study the soles of those feet from my perch in the attic. He will probably stuff those dirty feet sockless into shoes and stink up the entire plane he will get on in an hour or two.

The smell of coffee precedes the one I knew would come last. She's the only person in the house I haven't seen in two days, but she and Leed will be leaving on their mission to look for Kat soon, and she and I have things to talk about, so she can't put it off any longer.

She joins me at the window, handing me a mug. We watch Leed.

"What the fuck is he doing?" I say. Not because I don't know, but just because it's a habit between us, for me to annoy her by picking at Leed.

She rolls her eyes. "You know perfectly well he's focusing his third eye. Trace, you stink. You really need to come down from this attic and take a shower," she says, moving away from me and opening the long bay of windows that line the attic, letting the breeze in.

I smile. Ashlynn is still Ashlynn. She finds it hard to abide any one in any way but perfectly deodorized and layered with expensive smells. Her face literally pinches in any green room Soundcrush fills after a show, all of us stinking of sweat and adrenaline.

However, she has a complete tolerance for Leed's earthiness, and I've never seen her complain about her kids' various and occasionally awful smells. I suppose Ashlynn's nose is her "love tell." For the brief time when we caught feels for each other, I was also exempt from offending her delicate sensibilities. When she loved me, she didn't mind if I stunk after a run in the canyons or an all-nighter of booze and songwriting and Doritos.

She stands apart from me at the next window, joining me in my Leed-watching vigil.

"Did Riley tell you?" I ask.

She nods.

I sip the coffee. "So the gig is up. Soundcrush's biggest secret is about to be revealed."

"Looks like just a matter of time, yeah."

I give her a sidelong look. "You okay? I mean...are you prepared?"

It's a toss up as to how the media is going to play the story, if our wedding video is in fact released. One of the sisters will be shamed. The story will either be that Ashlynn is a faithless grasping famemonger that abandoned her guitarist to climb the ladder to a frontman, or that Kat is a homewrecker that seduced me away from her sister. 

Leed and I will probably be portrayed as hapless bystanders in the war between the sisters, basically led around by our egos and our dicks, but no one will really blame us, because hey...we're rock stars. We can't help ourselves, right?

"I'm not worried what the media says about me..."

I exhale, relieved that she's putting Kat's feelings first, but then Ashlynn puts her hand in front of her face. "This is going to hurt Kat so much, but she's not the only one who's going to be affected. I don't know how I'm going to explain to Luis. He's going to feel...so separate from this. Leed and I have treated him so much like an adult in our world—privvy to all the stuff his younger siblings aren't. It's the thing that binds him to us. The respect we treat him with. He's going to feel disrespected, like a kid kept in the dark. Like you did, when you found out your family wasn't what you thought it was."