Chapter 25

The next few weeks passed more or less uneventfully, for me at least. UNC was in an uproar. Although the reason wasn’t made public, Kat said the sudden firing of Cross had created a huge commotion across campus. Everyone knew about his dating students and the public spectacle Hanna had put on, so it wasn’t hard to figure out, and most of the student body had more or less worked it out themselves.

At first, Hanna was very nervous about all the attention, but when it turned out that most of the attention was supportive, since his being fired all but vindicated her, especially with the fact that she was back and no longer expelled, she started to relax. Kat said it was still a little strange, and random strangers would come up and talk to Hanna, but after a week, it mostly died down.

Things had more or less died down for me at school, too. Not completely, since the market for the EP had ramped up for the last two weeks, especially on streaming music sites, so my name was out there a lot, but at least the talk about my advance and being a millionaire had slowed.

I’d entered into a new kind of normal that, I hoped, would last until graduation. I wasn’t touring until this summer. We were going to do more weekend shows, being flown out to places like Houston, Seattle, and Miami, which was going to be fun. The venues were bigger than anything I’d done before signing with ARC, but they weren’t as huge as the ones I’d done on The Stage tour, with the largest of those venues capping out at about seventy-five hundred people.

We’d also been working a lot during the week, getting new songs prepared so we would have enough for a full album. Hal had said that if the EP did well, he’d be interested in a new album, and we would put the songs from the EP on it too, so we only needed between eleven and twelve songs, which was still a lot.

Today was release day for the EP, and as soon as the last bell rang, I grabbed my stuff and dashed for the door. Part of me had wanted to skip school so I could stay home and obsessively refresh the streaming numbers. But Mrs. Phillips had all but put her foot down, so I’d been stuck checking the numbers between classes and at lunch, and it was hard. The band, several of my friends, and Warren were all gathering at the house this afternoon to watch the streaming numbers and to see what people were saying. Warren and the band had been there for hours, and Mrs. Phillips had taken the day off, so it was all I could do to focus through the last few classes.

Everyone was huddled around the living room when I got home, looking at laptops and phones.

“What did I miss?” I asked as I burst through the door.

“We’re climbing fast, Charlie. Like, scary fast,” Lyla said, looking up from her phone.

I dropped my bag and wedged myself between Seth and Lyla on the couch. Seth tilted his laptop screen towards me, showing the weekly top ten chart.

“They added us to the chart about an hour ago at number eight,” Seth said. “We’re now at four and still rising. Ronnie Ralston and Trisha Loren both dropped new albums this week though, and their numbers are scary big. They’re currently numbers one and two, and I’m not sure we can move past them.”

Warren was pacing behind the couch, his ear glued to his phone, talking to someone.

“What about Julie?”

Julie had an EP come out two days before, which seemed really calculated. It felt like GLR saw our marketing and decided to try and get ahead of us, with her marketing almost completely focused on her time on The Stage and her performances on The Stage tour.

As of that morning, she hadn’t broken the top fifty, but she was slowly moving up, and could have been a problem.

“Stalled out at number forty-eight,” Lyla said, grinning.