"Michael?" I knocked on the door to his basement bedroom, hoping that I could get him to let me inside. "Michael, I know you're in there. It's not like you can go anywhere else." But after a few more minutes of waiting and calling for him, it seemed like he had, in fact, disappeared.
I sauntered back into the room, the four distraught Aussies awaiting their friend's return - well, if they were even friends anymore.
"Well, great. Just great. He won't even talk to his girlfriend," Ashton commented when he saw me return.
"I knew we shouldn't have told him," Luke mumbled under his breath as I plopped down on the couch next to him.
"Well what were we supposed to do?! Have him find out via Twitter?" Ashton ceased his pacing around the room to turn to us, his arms held out to the sides.
"Maybe he didn't have to find out at all," Nate put in.
"And how exactly would that work out?"
Nate shrugged as he thought this over. "If we didn't tell him, social media would've. Then we wouldn't have had to confront him at all. It's better that way."
"God, mate, that's so shitty," Calum scoffed at the new band member.
And at that point, I had heard enough. "No, hell no." I stood up and spun around to address all four of them. "What's shitty is the fact that you're acting like you don't even want him in the band anymore."
"Kelsey, that's not - "
"Shut up, Ashton," I snapped. "How could you do this to him? You guys are supposed to be friends, all living out your dream together and just because he's not with you, you want to erase him from the picture altogether. It sounds like you guys've been together for a long time and that... that's really fucking awful to do to someone."
"We're sorry," Calum said. "We didn't think - "
"Right, that's exactly it - you didn't think, not about him, at least. You did think about yourselves though."
I had expected one of them to counter my statement, but all I got were four heads angled toward the floor.
"Am I not wrong?" I asked after a minute had passed without a word from them.
Nothing.
"Jesus, you guys are so selfish." There was no way I was going to stay in that tense room any longer, so i sprang up from my seat and stepped out onto the snow-covered back patio, ignoring the frigid temperature and the rapidly setting sun. It would have been the perfect time to whip out a cigarette and smoke my lungs dry, but fortunately (or unfortunately, in this case) I didn't smoke.
Michael had originally made it seem like these guys were genuinely good people, but I couldn't see it anymore, even if it was just the first time meeting them. And this wasn't just some stupid "he said, she said" middle school fight; this was about their goddamn careers. Michael's friends were essentially ruining his career and crushing his dreams, whether they were doing it intentionally or not.
I let out an exasperated groan as I kicked at the snow surrounding me. But what I hadn't realized was that it had frozen with the abnormally below-freezing temperatures, so instead of the bits of snow flying into the air, my foot made contact with ice, which caused me to stumble backwards right onto my butt. "Dammit!" I cried, punching the air with my fists as I laid in the snow.
Rolling over onto my side to get back up, I noticed a patch of light on the ground, making the snow glitter in the near-darkness. But when I looked to the source of the light, I immediately went over to it.
