I did not have a good day, so I decided to ignore my responsibilities and write some more. Hope you enjoy.
ALSO: This chapter alludes to some implied homophobia and sexuality assumptions. Just FYI.
Despite popular belief, Seth and I didn't get along at first. It took a very, very long time for us to click in rehearsals, and even longer to click onstage.
He and I were just naturally very different. He had more of an inclination for pop music, while I preferred harder and heavier rock. As Sami will attest to, we spent many hours in rehearsal arguing over which was better instead of actually rehearsing. The only thing we could agree on was Queen. We came to the consensus that Queen was, and still is, fucking great.
For the longest time, I never understood why he wore makeup or all that damn glitter, and many times at rehearsals I'd be bothered by the mess of multicolored glitter across the floor, falling like snowflakes from wherever he'd decided to put it that day – his wrists, his cheekbones, his collarbone. I still remember the day I rummaged through his bag and found one of his tubes of glitter, this one bright red, and dumped it in his hair, just for the hell of it.
He was pissed. But man, was it funny. (And he didn't look half bad covered in glitter anyway.)
What Seth and I lacked in common interests, we made up for in chemistry. Not that kind, for those of you who aren't musicians and immediately assume that chemistry = romantic chemistry. No, this kind of chemistry is musical chemistry, and it's very important in this industry. If you don't have musical chemistry with someone, you can't write a song with them or even perform with them. It's just the rules.
Seth had a talent for being able to play things by ear, and my favorite talent of his was his ability to create a riff matching the pitches I'd hum sometimes, when I was at a loss for ideas and trying to buzz my brain back to life.
He was fairly talented, period. I don't say that often; I've said that in regards to maybe five people in my entire twenty-two years of life. And I know talent when I hear it.
It didn't take us long to work out the issues he had with the riff used as an audition piece, and soon enough he was able to hold his own, with or without me up there playing with him, singing with him. Even Sami sometimes commented that he thought Seth might actually be a better guitarist than me (to which he'd earn a slap to the back of his head), but Seth was pretty damn good.
Like I was ever gonna tell him that, though. His ego didn't need to be inflated any more than it already was. He'd strut around at rehearsals like he was already on stage, even though his only audience was me and Sami (and Roman, whenever he decided he could come back and play bass for us, which wouldn't be for a while), fucking flaunting his shit like he was a god's gift to earth.
He probably thought he was.
But I'd sit and take a break at rehearsals, drinking water, and I'd watch him and Sami working together, and it occurred to me that somehow, they fit; we all fit, like a slightly dysfunctional, musical family.
And when Roman came back, his presence only solidified my thought that picking Seth had been the right decision. Roman treated Seth like a little brother, lightheartedly picking on him and sometimes stealing his makeup and hiding it in my bag to piss both me and Seth off, but when they had to sit down and make music together, they fit perfectly.
I hoped Seth would never prove me wrong.
When we acquired a decent fanbase, Seth became pretty popular with the fans. He was different from the rest of us, and the fans liked that. Sure, we were nowhere near average stylistically; Sami liked to make his hair spike in as many different directions as were physically possible, Roman looked like the Hulk compared to the rest of us, and I only bothered to brush my hair once a week, but our deviations from the norm were different from Seth's.
It was the extras that caught everyone's attention. The way he wore black eyeliner and eyeshadow to every show, regardless of where we were or what songs we were doing. The way he'd always show up with glitter on his skin somewhere, a different color every show, and by the end of a show it would somehow end up all over the floor of the stage, and more than once my manager chewed me out for getting chewed out by a club owner for his stage floor being turned into a mess (and not just because of the glitter).
But he was also popular for, as people whispered in rumors chased across dingy nightclubs and seedy-looking parking lots, his sexuality, which he never confirmed nor denied, or said anything about to the fans, or to us, even. But I heard the fans talk, heard them saying he was gay, and that was why he wore so much makeup, that was why he wore the glitter, that was why he 'kept looking at Dean like that,' whatever the hell 'like that' was.
I never listened to the majority of our fans, because somehow we ended up with a shit ton of teenage girls in our fanbase, probably because of Seth, but we were making good money and I was getting to write and perform like I loved to do and I couldn't complain.
But I never asked Seth, either. As our friendship slowly developed, and we opened up to each other on a wide variety of topics, that seemed to be the one topic we could never discuss – what we really were, who we liked. Anything but that, it seemed.
I never knew why that was.
Not until the world told me why.
