The Eleventh Hour

ONE

Van

If I was certain of one thing; it was that I would never visit a place as brutally hot as California. We had been submerged in the heart of Los Angeles for just a week, but already my pale skin had circumed to the sun's violent ray's. Not even the fabric of my clothes served as any kind of protection.

I averted my attention back to the interviewer. Her deep brunette hair pinned up in a high ponytail, a few lost strands rested at the sides of her face.
"I love California, but the lads and I, well we don't really got the wardrobe for it." I finally responded. Taking to heart the words my granddad had told me when we started the band all those years ago. Always smile. A smile will make you appear likeable. Is what he had said. A cigarette hung from his mouth, something I saw as a young lad more times than not.

So I did.

I gifted her my best fake smile, letting the words flow from my lips as if I hadn't rehearsed them for several long minutes before speaking. Not that she noticed any, and if she did her face didn't show it.

Truth be told, sometimes I found the simple action of putting on a smile quite difficult. So difficult there were days I couldn't get myself to force the smile from my lips despite how much I tried. Days when the weight of the world felt like it was resting solely on my shoulders. Those days will pass is what Steve would often tell me when he noticed my frustration seep through during a prolonged soundcheck, or an interview that seemed like it would never reach it's end. Much like how this one felt.

Neverending.

The interviewers name had long since left my mind. Samantha, Sydney, Carmen? She had told me such things no more than thirty minutes before, and yet her name was nothing more than a distant memory to me now. Just another face amongst the thousands I had met over the last several years.

I looked over to Benji, his attention was not on the interview in the slightest, but on a squrriel several yards away searching the ground beneath it for any hopes of food. I would have laughed at the sight if my foul mood hadn't captured every fiber of my being from the moment I had opened my eyes less than four hours ago. His eyes, an intense shade of green, a color I used to be jealous of as a teenager had a certain kind of discontent written in them. Benji had always been good at hiding his emotions. A difficult person to read if you had just met him, but I had known him long enough to know that whatever he was trying to hide would carry with him long after the interview came to an end. Something was eating away at him.

Maybe it was merely the heat, or the interviewers superficial questions that had him in such a state. It wasn't hard to tell that the blazing sun above us had properly done him ages ago. It was after all, the heart of summer, and to say we had been taken by surprise by the heat would be one big massive understatement. We weren't just taken by surprise by it, it had consumed us since the moment we arrived. Much different than the first time we had visited California- which was several years ago in mid-January. A perfect contrast of hot and cold is what Benji had said when asked about how he fancied the weather in California. By an interviewer alittle too stunning for her own good. Even if the questions she asked were a bit of a bore; she was dead gorgeous.

A face I doubted I would ever forget.

It was clear that Benji wasn't enjoying this, maybe even less than I was enjoying this. We were musicians. We longed to play music whenever we possibly could, and well, interviews put a pause on that. I would much rather be sitting in the hotel room I shared with Larry. Strumming away on the guitar I had gotten as a gift from my mom and dad for Christmas two years ago. A guitar named Lyla. Writing songs for the third album- an album that seemed so far off now I almost didn't believe it would ever happen. Whether it was the growing tension between the lot of us, or my lack of songwriting, we hadn't discussed the third album for even a minute.