December 22nd 2019

Chapter 356
Their Cheers For Choices

Maya: We're leaving for Austin at 11. Can you come over before then?

Kayla: I can be there by 10.

Willow: Kay, I'll pick you up!

"Got the dresses and the suits here," Dylan called down as he started down the stairs, with several covered hangers slung down his back and over his shoulder.

"Careful with those!" Sophie told him, hurrying to go and help him.

"Back of your car?" he asked as they split the load in two.

"Yeah, come on…" she got the door open, just as Kayla and Willow came up toward the house. "Hey! What are you doing here?" she asked, clearly unaware that they were going to be coming over.

"Band stuff, real quick," Willow told her, cutting past with Kayla.

"Wait, are you coming back in?" Sophie called after her, but they were already gone. With a shake of the head, she and Dylan went off to put the clothes in her car.

"Guys?" Willow called around.

"Down here!" Rosa's voice was heard from the basement. When the duo went down the stairs, they came upon Rosa, Maya, and Riley, apparently passing the time as they'd waited for them by practicing potential wedding hairstyles on one another, going by the variety of strange and elaborate half or fully formed hairdos.

"What is that?" Kayla pointed to Rosa's head with a smirk. Rosa's response was to point accusingly at the other two, who had somehow conspired to give her hair so much height as to rival beauty pageants. Now that she was free, she started to work the whole thing down, and Willow came up to assist.

"Okay, look, we don't have much time," Maya told the others, signing along. "I know we said eleven, but Nadine keeps texting me to hurry up with some choice expletives, so she's not on her own with her relatives and Zay's."

"What's going on?" Willow asked, frowning as she tried to undo Rosa's hair. "Did the woman from the label call again?"

"No, no, she's still waiting," Maya assured her. "But, seeing as we're going to be split up for the next few days, we figured it would be best if we talked again before then. Last time, we didn't make up our minds, and we said we'd all think about it. How… How's that going for everyone?" There was a beat of silence, as everyone looked around to the other band members, maybe hoping that someone else would break the ice. Finally, Willow had gone ahead and done that, seeing as they all likely knew what she was going to say anyway.

"Well, you know where I stand," she told the others. "I already needed to back down when we were still doing everything on our own, so going any bigger, it just… I couldn't do it."

"We know, don't worry," Maya promised with a smile. The others nodded in agreement; Rosa yelped when her nodding led to her hair being tugged. Now that someone had said something, their twisted game of musical chairs carried on. Who would pronounce herself first, for real this time?

"I don't know what to say," Kayla finally pronounced herself, sitting on the armrest of the couch. "Part of me wants to take her up on that offer. I've seen what it can be like for kids, for young girls especially, to see someone like them do what… what I do. If we had a bigger audience, think of the people we could reach."

"What does the other part say?" Rosa asked, keeping her head very still as Willow worked at her hair.

"The other part… I would only want to do any of it if you three were there, too," she admitted, indicating Maya, Rosa, and Riley.

So, that was a known no for Willow, and a maybe for Kayla. Now what did the others have to say?

"I don't want to do it," Riley quietly admitted. They turned to look at her, which only made her look more nervous.

"You don't?" Maya asked, not as any kind of reproach, just a question. Riley looked at her, her best and oldest friend, like she thought she had to explain herself to her more than anyone.

"I… I like the way we do things now. We're small, but we're not," she told them.

"According to Sophie and Chiara, we're big in Japan," Willow reminded them with a smirk.

"Yeah!" Riley turned to her with a nod before looking at the others, too. "So, why can't we just keep doing that?"

"I'd be okay with that," Rosa piped in now, as Willow finished and she was able to run her hands through her hair, finally freed. "Besides, if we go all signed and everything, I probably won't be able to go to school anymore, which would really suck when I'm finally… well, declared, I guess."

"Wait, you are?" Maya blurted out, as surprised as the others. Rosa nodded with a beaming look of pride. "As what?"

"Don't laugh?" Rosa asked, taking a slight dip into awkwardness.

"We would never," Kayla vowed.

"Architectural history and interior design," Rosa revealed. "And please, no joke about the store windows. Anyway… It took me two years to figure that out, and I… I kind of want to see it through. So, I'm with Riley. I like what we have now. If… if that's cool with you."

She was looking at Maya now. They all were. She was the only one who hadn't said her bit. Willow was out, and by virtue of what she'd said, since Rosa and Riley were both out, so was Kayla. All that remained was Maya. Would they assume that she'd want to go through with the deal, because she was more often than not the lead singer?

"It's more than cool," Maya told her, looking around to find some surprised faces. "Lucas and I went out on a walk last night, after we finished cleaning up, and I got to thinking about what it would mean for us to say yes. I thought about what it would do to us as a group, to me personally. And I figured out what I wanted for myself in the future. I'm… as surprised as all of you that it's not what Audra's offering."

There was a beat of silence now, as they all processed what had been said by everyone, and what it all boiled down to.

"So, just to recap," Rosa held up both index fingers. "No on the deal, yes on the band?"

"TXNY forever," Maya nodded with a smile. Rosa rush hugged her for that, and in no time it was a pile-up five strong.

"Should have gotten that done when we got our clocks, too," Riley declared when they all pulled back. By both Rosa and Sophie's accounts of 'clock night,' she had been the most fearful of the needles, that night at the tattoo parlor, to the point where she'd been the very last of them to go and sit in the chair. And yet, it hadn't taken long for the once again sober Riley to find herself enamored with the small round marker, which she'd had done on her ankle. She had yet to show it to her parents, even though she was in her twenties, living out of home for four years, and, well, an adult. But she loved it, and they had a feeling she wouldn't need any sort of convincing to go again.

"Let's just get through this wedding before we start talking about more tattoos, okay?" Maya laughed, even as the thought was sending her mind into full design mode.

"Are you going to call Audra now, or…" Willow asked.

"Again, the wedding," Maya reminded them. "I will call her in a few days… or I'll write her… Although I should tell her face to face, or more personally than an e-mail, right?"

"No sense in burning bridges," Kayla suggested. "Just because we won't sign any deal, doesn't mean she might not be willing to help us somewhere down the line."

"Yeah, that's fair," Rosa nodded.

"Hey, how's it going down there?" Sophie was heard calling from upstairs now. "Maya's phone is blowing up with bridal panic!" The girls looked to each other, biting back laughter, while Maya signed to Kayla and she told them they should get going.

Kayla and Willow wished the others a good time in Austin and asked that they give their best to Zay and Nadine before taking off and leaving the roommates to get back on track with their preparations.

"Wait, Nadine must know how she wants us to look, yeah?" Rosa asked Maya and Riley. She'd been surprised to be called on as one of Nadine's bridesmaids, but she'd also been honored enough that she had agreed to go all in, dress, hair, makeup, heels, the whole deal.

"Uh, yeah, more or less," Riley coyly replied.

"So why were we doing all that hair stuff back there?" Rosa hooked her thumb back toward the basement door. Maya and Riley looked to one another before turning back to her.

"Pass the time," Maya shrugged, grabbing Riley's hand and pulling her away before Rosa could get at either of them.

"Maya, here," Chiara came over, holding her phone out like it was possessed. Maya took it and she could see now what Sophie meant. There were several messages waiting, by now unapologetically all in capital letters and with an excess of both typos and unnecessary punctuation. She wasn't sure if Nadine was even checking for replies when she would write another. She could imagine her going around with her phone in her hands, bending her thumbs to sail across the keyboard whenever she encountered a new problem or frustration.

"She's always so organized… and calm…" Riley blinked, reading over Maya's shoulder.

"Well, weddings happen to the best of us," Maya scrolled through the messages.

"I did not lose my mind," Chiara declared, like she couldn't understand why Nadine was freaking out so much.

"Yeah, but you're an angel," Maya tossed her a smile, which got her one from Chiara in return. "Look, we just need to finish grabbing our things and we're good to…"

"We have everything, we finished while you were in the basement," Chiara informed her, with a lift to her brow as though to say 'you wouldn't be so kind as to tell us what that was about?'

"I'm going to go double check real quick," Maya just smiled, heading for the stairs. There would be time aplenty, depending on who ended up in which car, for the story of the deal-that-wasn't to go through their unaware roomies. "Hey…" Maya moved into the room to find Lucas searching through her sketchbooks.

"Sorry, I just had this thought while we were packing," he stepped back, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to go through those. She smirked.

"Looking for something?"

"You've drawn Zay and Nadine a bunch of times over the years, right?" Lucas asked. He didn't have to say anything else; she was way ahead of him.

"Some of the old stuff is still at my parents' house," she explained, moving to scan through the spines of her sketchbooks, which she'd had the presence of mind to number. "But I should have some things here… and here… and here…" she picked out the books and put them in Lucas' waiting hands. "Just put them in my bag, I'll sort through them in the car."

"So, did you decide?" Lucas asked, as she held her bag open and he stuck the books inside.

"We did," Maya nodded, looking back at him. He gave her a look, as good as asking 'and?' "We're not signing," she simply said, with a smile that said 'and we're satisfied with our choice.'

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners