Désobéissance - Palaye Royale

Chapter 14

XIV

LE "JOUR J"

Friday August 4. Palaye Royale's French Tour started this week. I decided to put my resentment aside and attend despite what I recently discovered about Emerson. My friends don't have to suffer from the fact that I don't want to take this opportunity to go see them backstage before and after the show. I'm just going to play the ignorance card with him, just to make him understand that I'm not interested in his advances. I obviously talked to the girls about it and they totally understand me on this point.

We hit the road early in the morning to enjoy our day there. We leave with my car. Maxine and Carole are obviously in the game. Only Matt cannot be with us because he works in temp all week.

"Carole, do you have our tickets?" Ellie asks her with her eternal anguish to forget everything.

"Safe in my bag! Don't worry baby!"

"I brought something to occupy our ears during the road". Said Maxine passing Ellie a whole stack of CDs.

"We only have two and a half hours on the road, you know."

"At least we have a choice!"

"I'm dreaming or do you have a Justin Timberlake album?" Ellie asks, taking the CD out of the pile.

"Yeah well... I put everything up in my bag... And then, we have all our little weaknesses!"

"He's good-looking Justin!" Carole announces between two handfuls of crisps.

"How do you manage to swallow so many different things in the morning?" Asks Maxine visibly disgusted by the feast she took out on the back deck.

"You will ask my tapeworm!"

We start laughing. Carole is really great. From the top of her twenty three years-old, she still sees life through the eyes of a child and has lost none of her innocence.

I start the car.

"Let's go girls!"

Ellie launches the first CD that comes to hand. It will be "Toxicity" from System Of A Down.

At the end of our trip where we sang our favorite songs at the top of our lungs, we arrive in Rennes to the sound of "mOBSCENE" by Marilyn Manson, windows wide open. What to go completely incognito! The hall where the concert will take place is called "Le Liberté". It's barely 10am, but already a good hundred fans are standing in front of the doors. I get out of the car and stretch. It was then that I saw the Palaye Royale tour bus maneuvering in the back yard. I realize then that we will see them again in a short time, and that scares me. What will Emerson think when he sees me again? I didn't send him the slightest message following the word he passed on to me... I'm so undecided that I am starting to regret it. I have always hated groupies, and yet I gave a lot of importance to what they said on the forums. Maybe I shouldn't have?

From a distance, I see a man getting off the bus and stretching himself. No doubt he's the driver. He's followed by Kylie and just behind her, Roxane. I look at Maxine. I know she loves Sebastien a lot. She looks away. After them, no one else gets off the bus.

"Maybe we arrived a little early, don't you think?" Ellie asks us.

"Perhaps, at worst it's okay, we'll wait." I said. "Where did Carole go?"

As a true free spirit, we no longer see our friend. We find her a few meters away taking a poster of the concert from an electric pole.

"Do you realize that we're going to see them for real?" Maxine asks her.