3

Hayley's POV

I felt like I was on top of the world. All these people who didn't know me cheered for me like I was the queen. They followed my every more, listened to every word coming out of my mouth. And strangely enough, I didn't feel so stressed out anymore. I actually felt… good. It was all so unreal that I started thinking it was only a dream, and I didn't care about messing up anymore.

"We are Paramore!" I yelled. Everyone yelled back incomprehensible words of encouragement. Wow, was this real?

The next song we were playing was Conspiracy. Ah, that old thing… As the drums and guitar kicked in for the intro, I threw my head backwards and stared at the sky. Wow, this was one beautiful intro. I felt really proud of myself all of a sudden.

I looked back at the crowd and brought the microphone to my mouth. "Please speak softly for they will hear us… and they'll find out why we don't trust them…" My voice echoed through the sky, returning to my ears with a foreign undertone. I barely even recognized it, but I was slowly getting used to that. It was becoming so easy, almost natural. "Speak up dear, for I cannot hear you… I need to know why we don't trust them…"

The speakers exploded then, flooding the crowd with our melodious noise. The response was almost immediate. Soon, everyone was yelling their throats out. "Explain to me this conspiracy against me!" I had done this a hundred times, but the feeling still surprised me. When I sung, I felt like I was in a different dimension. Nothing else mattered. It was just me, my voice and the music spinning around me. The crowd vanished, their yells molding into the music and eventually disappearing as well. For a second I was flying.

And then, I opened my eyes again and a new energy filled me. I didn't care about the heat, the sweat covering every part of me, the sharp pain at the bottom of my throat. I couldn't stop moving. I danced and jumped and spun around to release the energy, but I felt like the more I tried to get rid of it, the more there was. It was truly incredible.

We finished the song without any trouble. I didn't even understand why I'd been so stressed out before. This was so easy. "You guys having a good time?" I asked happily. I took their screams as a "yes."

"Alright!" I yelled back. "Give it up for Jeremy, Zac and…" Come on, just say it. "Josh!" My moment of hesitation had been so short I didn't think anyone had noticed. The crowd yelled even louder—wow, how was that even possible?—and we started our fifth and last long. "I'm Hayley, by the way," I said quickly and everyone laughed. Phew, wasn't I funny! "This song rhymes with the last one!" I said then. My own statement honestly surprised me. I hadn't even realised that until I'd said it. My brain sure worked in strange ways onstage. "It's called Emergency!" I added, thinking it would probably be a good idea to mention that.

And we were off again. The magic was back and I welcomed it happily. This would never get old. This was the best day of my life.

And I couldn't help but look forward to the next ones.

Josh's POV

The more time passed, the less I noticed it. My life had broken down to a pointless boredom. I couldn't even call it "life" anymore. Just like I'd expected it, the craving had come back. But it was easy to ignore now. It couldn't help me anymore. I didn't want its help.

"Fuck heroin," I muttered to myself as I stared at the ceiling, slumped on my bed like an old rag. That's pretty much all I did anymore. I lay in bed thinking about how much I hated heroin—and pretty much anything else—and not doing anything about it. My mom urged me to get up and do SOMETHING, but gave up after a few tries. Maybe she just thought this was the post-rehab effect. Maybe it was.

Fortunately, my life DID have a better side to it. It stretched from five thirty to nine on week days and filled up the whole weekend. That part was called Matt. Matt had somehow miraculously convinced his parents that I wasn't a terrible influence and that I wouldn't turn him into a reckless, Satan-worshipping junkie, and was now allowed to see me every day, whether it was at my house or his. For now it was only after school, but summer was coming quickly and pretty soon we'd be practically living together.

All we ever talked about was music, mostly because everything else was too painful to talk about. Oh, and he sometimes rambled on about sports, but I usually blocked him out when that happened, nodding once in a while to keep him thinking that I was listening. Either way, it felt good to have someone to talk to, even if our conversations were pretty pointless.

The only other thing we did, apart from talking about music, was making music. We relearned some of the old songs we used to play together—ah, good times—and made up some new ones, since we were too lazy to learn a song that had already been written. The subjects varied from our love for junk food to Dora the Explorer, and the songs were usually shorter than twenty seconds. But it was hilarious. We could practically make up a song about anything. And I mean ANYTHING. A song about brushing your teeth in the morning, a song about the weatherman's red polka dot tie, a song about Matt's funny bed head—ok, that was my idea entirely. I could have done that forever.

Unfortunately, Matt had something else in mind. "We need a real song, man," he said to me one day as we were peacefully sitting on my bed after a long day of school-slash-lying in bed hating stuff.

I looked up at him in confusion. "What's wrong with our fake songs?"

He shrugged. "I dunno. They're not… real?" Wow. Now that was a mind-blowing discovery.

"So?"

He threw his arms into the air desperately. "SO, I wanna write some real songs! And we could start a band or something. Wouldn't that be awesome?" He looked at me expectantly.

"Uhhh…" Well, it wouldn't be a bad idea. But it wouldn't work. It would definitely fail. Everything I had ever done had failed. "Maybe," I said finally.

Matt beamed. "Really? Awesome! So…" His voice faded out as he gazed into nothing thoughtfully. His plan pretty much ended there.

That's when I remembered something. Something I would rather not have remembered. I reached for the untouched suitcase that had accompanied me through rehab without a word. I unzipped it slowly and dug through the old dirty clothes until I found what I was looking for. It was a crumpled piece of paper with an unbelievable amount of almost incomprehensible words scribbled on it.

"What's that?" Matt asked.

"It's your song," I said simply, staring at the paper like it represented my whole life. I couldn't believe I had actually recalled its existence. I wished I hadn't. It was too fucking painful. I sighed heavily and decided to tell Matt about it. It would be nice to finally talk about this for once, take it off my chest a bit. But it was harder than I thought. "One night I… I couldn't sleep and I was just… thinking and stuff." Thinking about death. And heroin. And death. "And then these random words started popping up in my head, and spinning around and driving me crazy… so I wrote them down." I bit my lip. Matt was silent, listening carefully. I wished I could explain to him what it felt like, what I had been through. But at the same time, I was glad he didn't know. He didn't need that, and I didn't want to hurt him.

"It was really bad, wasn't it?" he asked silently, as if reading my thoughts.

I nodded, feeling my hands starting to shake at the memory. I couldn't look at him. I stared at the ground silently, trying to think about something else. But I couldn't. "It's like… being forced to live underground with no air and nothing but time to think about it." I spoke slowly, detaching every word. "I can't even count the number of times I wished I was dead." My voice broke on the last word. I gulped. I hoped Matt wasn't too freaked out.

I felt better all of a sudden. This was the first time I'd ever talked about it to anybody, and the relief was incredible. Wow, I hadn't realised how hard it was to hold it all in for so long.

"Hey now, s'alright…" Matt whispered, laying an arm around my shoulders awkwardly. That's when I noticed the tears prickling my eyes. I blinked quickly, trying to stop them from overflowing…

Shit. Too late. Matt gave me a small squeeze, pursing his lips. He obviously had no idea what to do with me. But he didn't have to do anything. Just the fact that he was there was enough to comfort me, and soon I managed to smile again. I sniffled and wiped my eyes, feeling a bit stupid.

"Sorry," I muttered, letting out a hoarse laugh.

"S'okay. You gotta let it out at some point." He chuckled nervously, pulling away from me.

We sat there awkwardly for a second, and then Matt said, "So…" And that was the extent of his sentence.

"Matt?" I said suddenly, with a disturbing intensity. He looked up at me expectantly. "You're my best fucking friend, man," I said seriously. "I hope you know that." I didn't know why I had told him that. I just needed him to know how much he meant to me. Hell, I would have died for him.

He didn't say anything for a second. And then he smiled. That smile said it all.

Happily, he picked up his guitar and strummed it almost compulsively. "Let's write that song, Ramsay."