THE BIG LEAP

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - A BATTLE OF BANDS

To say that Joey was nervous, as she stood looking up at the stage at "The Pit", where one of their fellow competing bands, a Pop-Punk outfit named "Total 76" (A name that came from the combined ages of the band members, when they´d started the band and clearly an attempt to follow in the steps of other "Number Bands", like Blink 182, Front 242, SR-71 and Sum 41), were rocking out some generic-sounding tune about a girl, the lead singer clearly wished that he could have gotten it on with back in high school, would have been one of the biggest understatements of her life. Their band, recently renamed from "Beer Chuggers Inc." to "Joey´s Joys" (since none of the guys in the band thought anyone would believe that she was capable of chugging a beer), were the last band out of eight scheduled to perform in the aptly named "K-WRT 101.3 FM Battle of the Bands 2003" and so far, the three bands she´d seen all had lead singers, that put her own voice to shame. Just the thought that she had to go up there as the last one, after the crowd had sat through all of those other much better singers than her, was almost enough to send her running off to the women´s room to empty out her entire stomach orally, faster than Audrey did, whenever someone sliced an onion anywhere near where she was situated.


The week up to this evening had been a hoot actually, with them having rehearsed three times and her spending most of the rest of her time daydreaming about how they were going to win and get a big agent contract offered to them after the show. She´d more or less missed out on two of her morning lessons, because she was busy coming up in her head with how their band´s "Behind the Music" on VH1 would turn out. They would (in Joey´s wild imagination), right after she finished college, sign with a small indie label, that while they couldn´t offer them much financial support, believed in them and would give them the creative freedom to do what they wanted. Thanks to great word of mouth and their first video being put in heavy rotation on MTV, they would be invited to open for The Smashing Pumpkins on first the US leg of their tour, and after they´d blown all of those crowds away of course, they would be invited to play on the rest of their world tour as well. This would then lead to them signing with a major label and making their own smash-hit records, although by album number four, they would started to become stifled creatively and the resulting world tour, in spite of them playing to full houses everywhere and the album becoming by far the best-selling album of all time, even putting Michael Jackson´s sales numbers from the 80´s to shame, would lead to the band breaking up at their height and herself embarking on a solo career, starting with a hit duet single with Gwen Stefani and with Pacey as her husband/manager/father to her children by her side, it almost goes without saying. Dozens of enormous hit singles later, she would then reunite with her "old band" for the tour and album people had been asking for, for so long and by the end of the episode, they were the biggest band in the world once again, picking up awards and being presented with platinum albums in every new country they went to. Those dreams seemed far away now, where she figured that they would be lucky, if they could avoid getting last place in this competition and that was only against the best bands, her own college had to offer.

"Why did we even bother signing up for this?" she asked Justin, who was the only friend she had there with her, since TJ had to work late and would only get there just before they went on, Charlie had "plans he couldn´t get out of" (which both of them knew was more than likely to be code for some girl, he couldn´t keep his hands off) and Audrey and Dawson wanted to spend their last evening together alone, before he took off for Europe to start shooting "The Equalizer" the next day, a sentiment it wasn´t hard for her to understand. The two of them had become inseparable lately and she knew that Audrey would be needing her shoulder to cry on, until he came back to her. Since they probably weren´t going to win anyway, it was for the best that there weren´t too many people she knew there anyway.

"If we lose, then we´ll just be like the other six bands, who didn´t win anything. Don´t worry about it" he reassured her and she could see the point in his logic. There were only prizes for the top two bands anyway, so they didn´t announce who finished in what order from numbers three to eight and considering that they were bound to finish way down the order, that was actually a comforting thought for her.


"We were "Total 76"! Be sure to vote for us!" the band´s singer, a guy in his early 20´s with multi-colored dreadlocks said to the crowd, before they left the stage and the emcee, a guy who looked like something out an 80´s high school movie, came out on stage.

"Give them a big hand! That was great, guys. So, that´s our first three bands down, but don´t go anywhere because we´ll be back in a few with the hellish Heavy Metal of "Firestorm", he announced, while making a horrible attempt at growling the band´s name, that sounded more like he had a bad cold, than it sounded like one of the guys, who actually know how to do it properly. It was at that moment that someone tapped her on the shoulder and as she turned around, she was more than a little surprised to see Jack there, with his sister Andie by his side. She instinctively flung her arms around him and gave him a big hug.

"What are you guys doing here?" she asked them.

"I´ve had some stuff in storage up here, since we moved to New York. I figured it was time I finally picked it up and stopped wasting money on paying for a storage unit every month" Jack explained to her.

"I just felt like seeing Boston again, now that Jackers was going anyway" Andie added.

"So, when are you guys playing" Jack asked her.

"Last, but there´s no chance we´ll win! Everyone else here are practically pros" she explained to them.

"Aren´t you going to introduce me to your friends?" Justin asked her.

"Sure. Justin, this is Jack, one of my oldest and best friends and his sister Andie, who I used to hang out a lot with back in high school. Guys, this is Justin, guitar player and father to the cutest little girl, extraordinaire!" she introduced him as and Justin shook hands with the siblings.

"She´s overselling it big time. I´m no one special" Justin said.

"You are! You´re just special in your own, kind of understated way" she told him and the glances between the twins didn´t escape her eyes.


After sitting through "Firestorm" and their take on Gothic Metal, as well as a few more acts, the rest of the band finally arrived, less than half an hour before they were scheduled to go on. It didn´t mean that her nerves subsided however, and several times she couldn´t follow conversations thanks to images flashing in her head of them being bottled off stage or chased out of there by an angry mob for being so bad.

"Nervous, huh?" Andie asked her, seemingly the only one, who picked up on it.

"What makes you think that?"

"Because the last time I saw this expression on your face, was back when you were afraid of you and Pacey getting caught living out your teenage lust fantasies on one another by me or Dawson" Andie told her and just thinking back to those early days, right after they´d finally given into the massive temptation, that had been building up for months, if not years, where they couldn´t keep their hands off each other and all that mattered in the world to them was the other one and the love they shared, could still give her goosebumps.

"You´re not entirely wrong" she confided in Andie. "These are the times, where I wish that ..."

"Pacey was here?"

"Yeah."

"You´re not the only one who thinks that to herself now and again. You seem to be doing okay though, on the romantic front, with your new guy."

"Who, Charlie? We tried it, but he´s far too much of player for my liking."

"I´ve already heard all about him from Jack and I agree, stay far away from him! I meant Justin" she said and for some reason, it immediately sent Joey into defensive mode.

"He´s not my boyfriend!"

"Then why do you look at him, like he is? I get it, Joey. You miss Pacey, so you go out looking for a Pacey number two, plus he´s got that whole rock-star look going for him"

"I can just imagine how my dad would react, if I brought him home" Joey said, while thinking of the shocked faces of her family, when she announced to them that this long-haired, mostly dark leather clad guy with tattoos covering most of his arms, a nose piercing on the right side of his face and three ear rings in his left ear, to add to the two in his right, was the guy she´d chosen for herself. The sight of him alone was likely to send most of their BnB guests running for the door.

There was no time to continue the conversation however, since it had become time for them to prepare to go on stage. When she walked out there, suddenly her clothes started feeling sweaty and clammy, her heart started racing like crazy and the crowd, who were made up of a hundred people at the most, started looking to her like there were thousands of them. That she forgot the first part, she was supposed to be singing, didn´t help either, but a calming smile from Justin helped her to get it together and by the end of their twenty minute set, she´d loosened up and started enjoying herself, which had clearly started to rub off on the crowd too.


They didn´t end up winning, or even coming second, but they´d had several people asking them, how they could hire them for a show, so in that way, it had still been a relatively successful evening. After they´d dropped their gear off at the rehearsal room and driven TJ and Charlie home, it was only her and Justin on the last part of the trip.

"It´s really cool to see" he said.

"What is?", she asked him.

"To see you finding your voice more and more every time we play. You told me earlier tonight not to sell myself short, but I can say the same to you" he told her and looked her in the eyes, making her smile shyly to herself. It wasn´t like she hadn´t had people that believed in her before, but somehow when it came from him, it felt like it meant a little more.

"So what, if there are other more technically gifted singers than you! Those guys in "Right Said Fred" can´t sing a lick to save their lives, but how many times have you heard "I´m Too Sexy" in movies, TV series or commercials?"

"An untold amount of times!" she blurted out, with the memory of how it had been stuck in her brain for three weeks after a grade seven dance, still being somewhere in the back of her mind, where she preferred it to be kept under strict lock and key.

"Do you think they care what some people think of their lack of singing skills? Of course, they don´t! They´re far too busy laughing all the way to the bank!" he said and she couldn´t help herself from chuckling a little.

"What most people want is simply to be entertained and for their singer to be someone, they feel like they want to party with. You have that part locked down already. The rest can come later" he explained and the way he said it, filled her with a confidence, the likes of which she rarely felt. It wasn´t like she was planning on making a career out of singing or anything like that, but she still wanted to feel like this was something she was good at and felt confident doing.

As she walked up to the door to their room, she first put her ear up to it, to make sure she wasn´t interrupting anything in there. Since all she could hear was silence, she opened the door and was slightly surprised to see Audrey in there by herself, lying on her bed and reading a book for one of her classes.

"Where´s Dawson?"

"He´s taking a shower. I´m afraid that I wore him out tonight, the poor boy" Audrey replied and smiled cheekily at her.

"I don´t need to hear any details" Joey told her, as she took her coat and shoes off.

"So, did you win?"

"Nah. We came in somewhere between third and last place. Jack says hi. He was there, along with his sister."

"And did Justin kiss you goodnight, when he dropped you off?" Audrey asked and made kissing sounds at her.

"Why does everyone think that I want to be his girlfriend? So, he´s a lot like myself and I enjoy spending time with him a lot, but it doesn´t mean that I like, like him!" Joey defensively retorted.

"Joey, you´re rambling!"

"Plus, he has a kid. I don´t have the slightest clue where I´m going with my life or what´ll happen after college ends. Can´t you see what I mean?"

"Answer me this then: If you had to kiss one guy in the entire city of Boston tonight, who would it be?"

Joey thought hard about it, just so she could shut her up.

"Professor Wilder! Remember, I had that crush on him a few years ago?"

"Yeah, right! I know that you got over that creep long ago and thank heavens for it! What you were doing with him was icky, to say the least! We both know that it´s a long-haired, strikingly handsome and very talented young van-driving guitar player, you would have in mind!" Audrey triumphantly declared and while it wasn´t every part of her that wanted to admit it yet, she was one hundred percent correct. Both about Justin and Professor Wilder, who she did everything she could to steer clear of at school and never wanted to speak to again. Thinking back on it, he had been a selfish as hell A-Hole, who had taken advantage of how much he knew she looked up to him and the fact that they´d actually gone as far as kissing, while being a fantasy come true at the time, now felt like he had seriously violated her somewhat naive trust in him and that he should have been fired for it.

Justin wouldn´t do that sort of thing, just like Pacey wouldn´t either and it wasn´t that there wasn´t a physical attraction there or that she couldn´t see them making a go at it, her dad´s opinion of people like him be damned. It was the thought of how much her mom had meant to her and how much it had hurt, when she didn´t have her anymore, which kept her holding back. To step into that kind of deep commitment with him also meant stepping into one that´s just as important, if not more, with his five-year-old daughter, essentially becoming a mother to her and how could she do that, when there was someone else, she would always love more than him? Even withstanding how unfair it would be on him, there was no way she could do that to a little sweetheart like Jamie, who would be bound to get caught up in the middle of it, sooner or later.

END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO