Chapter 51

The week following Christmas was a whirlwind as we got ready to leave for New York on Friday. It seemed like everyone I knew, or was at least friends with, was going. Besides me and the band, Hanna, Kat, Sydney and her mother, Mom, and Mrs. Phillips, were all going as my personal entourage, which was a weird thing to say but wasn’t far from the truth. Rowan called to tell me he was meeting us there, and Mr. French was tagging along with him. The only person in my life not coming along was Chef, who did a pretty big business on New Year’s Eve and couldn’t put it all on Vinney’s shoulders just to see me perform. I was sad he wasn’t going to be there, considering everything he’d done for me recently, but I understood.

Friday we got in early enough to see the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Central Park, all stuff I’d seen in movies and on TV growing up, but never thought I’d get to see in real life. It’s wild to think about all the time I spent traveling as a kid and over the last year and yet how little of the country I’d actually seen.

Saturday was all about the concert. We practiced, although I didn’t sing, since I needed to save my voice for the show. They had this prep area set up in one of the hotels off Times Square and a cordon from it to the stage with police barricades and officers to keep people pushed back. Everything else was closed, including the streets. It was still daytime when we got to the hotel where we were supposed to set up, and already there were thousands of people gathering, most trying to get a good spot for the show.

Because it was impossible to move stuff in and out once the crowds started forming, the only thing we could take up on the stage were guitars. That meant no keyboards, which was going to be a hassle. Seth would still be on stage, but off to the side with a mic stand where he could sing his parts of the chorus harmonies. We’d known about that almost from the beginning, so we’d been practicing and making small changes to our songs to pull out the keyboard parts.

Some of the changes I really hated, but there were some parts that I actually thought were better now that we’d taken the keyboard out. We couldn’t exactly change stuff that had been recorded, since I didn’t think we wanted songs to sound radically different than they did on our album unless, like now, we had no choice.

The rest of the gang went to grab dinner while I stayed behind, double-checking everything one last time. Everything was in a secure area and it was probably paranoid of me, but with how everything else had gone lately, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

I was just looking over our set list again when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey, man,” Eli Sampson said from behind me.

I was surprised to see him. I knew they were on tonight’s list of performers, but they were the headliners and would be playing last, finishing up right before the ball dropped, which was hours away.

“Hey. What are you doing here?”

“My manager put us up here, so we could come right down from our rooms and head to the stage. We did this two years ago and stayed in mid-town, and it was a nightmare getting in, and that was with a police escort.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

Although MAC was picking up the bill, we weren’t the kind of name that Nightshade was, and we’d been put up at a chain hotel in Hell’s Kitchen. Warren had been smart enough to suggest we head over after lunch, while the stage was still being set up, to avoid the crowds. Getting out would be hard, but as performers, we could at least get back to the hotel being used as a holding area and wait until the crowd dispersed before heading back to our hotel.