Long Live the Kids (an All Time Low fan fiction)

Cheap Shots & Set Backs

SOME TIME LATER

I woke up to all three cats on or around my head. I pushed them off lightly, which earned me a few angry meows. I tossed off my covers and stretched as I stood up. We had exactly one week until we left for Warped Tour, which none of us could wait for. Sara woke up every morning and shouted, as loud as she could, the day count. I opened Twitter as I walked down the stairs, hearing Sara jump out of bed and come running after me. 

"Seven days," she said excitedly, skipping past me down the stairs. "SEVEN DAYS!"

For them, that meant seven days of excitement. For me, that meant seven days of non-stop laundry, packing, shopping, and cleaning. A few weeks go, we'd gotten our tour bus, which wasn't actually a tour bus. I mean, it was now, but it hadn't been originally. See, our friend Axl worked at the local junk yard, where plenty of people and companies drop off their old cars and buses and other forms of transportation that are no longer of any use to them. We'd gone and visited him, and we found a very broken down, completely gutted deluxe RV thing. It was dirty and grimy and without a motor, but it was also in our price range. We sometimes liked a project, and this one was perfect. we knew that we could find all the pieces we would need somewhere else in the junk yard, and Axl offered up anything he could. 

So we spend days doing nothing but cleaning and piecing together. We'd taken things out and put things in and used a plethora of cleaning products until it was good enough for a summer long tour. A couple of the boys and Axl had painted the outside to make it as aesthetically pleasing as they could. It wasn't ideal, but it would work. Basically, it had four wheels and insides that worked, it would take us where we needed to go, and it would house us while we weren't anywhere near our actual houses. 

All of this Warped Tour preparation sent both Austin and Riley into fits of anxiety. Riley was worried about Austin, and he was also worried about his exams, and it was awful to see him freak out over the fact that I wasn't going to be there to help him. As always, I told him he could call me if he needed to, and he kept pushing that he wanted to drop out of school and work for Mirror Image. I told him it wasn't solid enough and that he needed a high school diploma as a safety net. 

Austin, on the other hand, was on edge about everything. He still had nightmares about Caroline, and he slept on the floor of my room at least three times a week. I knew he was hurting, so I let him, but his grades were dropping and the only thing he had to look forward to was this tour. However, when I'd told our parents, their only condition had been that he pass every exam and class. If he didn't, he wasn't allowed to go, and he couldn't imagine an entire summer stuck in the house with my parents, without a girlfriend and possibly in summer school. It was hard for me to imagine, too. If he was stuck here, he wouldn't have any of us to run to. My parents would be the ones woken up by his night terrors, and they didn't understand him like I did. I would be gone, so would all the members of Mirror Image, and so would Nate. Even Kyle's little sister was coming with us, working our merch booth. He realized this just as much as I did, and it terrified him. 

We had a lot to take care of in the next week, sure, but we had a magical way of getting everything done. I poured myself a cup of coffee before I took a seat at the kitchen table.

@halfwaygone: @MirrorImageBand can't wait to see you badasses on Warped Tour (: you're number one on my list of must see bands!

Not only was receiving this tweet the most perfect way to start a full day, but it calmed a few nerves. We'd obviously been seeing the album sales, but there was still the fear that people wouldn't want to see Mirror Image. We were convicted felons. Would anyone want to see the band of convicted felons when there were plenty of bands all around them that were innocent and wonderful? But this person, who happened to have one of Mirror Image's song titles as her twitter handle, wanted to watch them.