The Last Tour {COMPLETED}

Chapter Fifteen: Like You

Chapter Fifteen

Like You

There had hardly been anything left of the night by the time Jade got back to his hotel room, but he woke right at the break of dawn nonetheless, not refreshed, but too uncomfortable to sleep anymore.

With a heavy sigh, Jade sat up, swept his hair back out of his face, then dropped his feet on the floor. Instantly, his injured leg began aching. The doctor he had seen the night before had told him the injury was not trivial, but not serious either.

"You've strained your tendon. There are a few minor tears in it, but no serious ones. This will heal on its own if you go easy on it. If you stress this knee too much, you risk seriously tearing the tendon which will involve either a long healing process off your feet or a surgery."

Jade had been discharged with a velcro knee brace and a crutch he had no intention of ever using. But the crutch had done a good job of soothing Rudurhans' temper when the band leader was notified that Jade had returned from oblivion. He had given Jade a warning glare, a brief lecture, then let the teenager go to his room.

Jade hated hospitals with a passion, but he had been desperate. And considering the final outcome, going to one had probably been worth it. Besides, the brace really did make walking and standing easier for Jade. It was still painful to put weight on his left leg, but his knee hadn't buckled since he'd been fitted with the brace.

Jade stood up a little unsteadily, then stepped toward the far windowsill. He took two pills dry, then walked back over to his bed and sat down on it. Jade leaned over and pulled his travel bag out from under his bed. He unzipped it, then pulled out his laptop. The computer was supposed to be what Jade used to keep up with school while he was on tour, but the vast majority of its single terabyte was taken up with song records, demo tunes, and vocal recordings Jade made to carefully critique his own voice with a note sensing software.

With half a mind to go through some demos as a means of mild entertainment, Jade turned on the laptop. But pretty soon, he was connecting to the internet instead. Feeling random and simply wishing to escape the anxiety brought on by constantly thinking about the same things over and over again, Jade opened his Facebook page.

546 messages awaited him, but Jade used the selection tool to mass-delete them all without even looking at a single one. He cleared out all his notifications, then began scrolling through his timeline.

Rudurhans had access to Jade's Facebook account and the teenager raised his eyebrows at several pictures of the current tour that had been posted within the past few weeks—despite the fact that Jade had not been on in exactly two months, two weeks, and four days—according to the age of the oldest notifications he had just finished deleting.

But Jade did not get far from the top of the page before he halted in front of a Facebook notification block.

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"

Jade blinked at the digital yellow banner, brightly colored with cartoon balloons and falling confetti. Then his eyes dropped to the date and time at the lower right corner of his screen.

May 14th. It was his birthday.

The realization had surprisingly little effect on Jade. Maybe there was a little dread. He was eighteen, now. And everyone—everyone would know about it.

Jade's fingers returned to the touchpad and he continued scrolling down through his page.

He deleted a few posts he found
embarrassing for one reason or another...