Launi

I have thirty minutes to get into the Uber and rush to the airport to make my flight. So why am I currently breaking into the sticky, over-crowded frat house at the end of my street? To find my roommate and best friend.

"Parker?" I whisper-shout.

My foot slips in a spilled beverage from last night—or let's be real, probably from this morning. The red Solo cup skids away with a loud, hollow echo before rolling in a circle and dying at the beginning of the large staircase.

Careful not to touch anything else, I glance at the big opening to the floor upstairs. I'm going to kill her if she isn't already dead.

"Parker!" I yell with a little more volume.

My feet are barely on the third step when another girl emerges from a room and makes her way down past me with a tight smile and possibly morning after regrets. Her high heeled shoes hang from her fingertips, and she's currently in over-sized basketball shorts and a dingy T-shirt sporting a band name. 

"Parker!"

This time I don't care who hears me. Time is ticking. If I miss my flight, it will be hell to try and catch up with my father. He's been this way since I was a baby. Never in one place for very long and always arriving and leaving with fanfare that drowned out my tears and pleas for him to stay when I was little. I don't cry anymore. I don't beg. As a matter of fact, I don't even meet up with him when he's in the city.

"She's outside," a groggy male voice replies at last.,

I look up to a pair of bloodshot eyes peering down at me from behind a flop of dark greasy hair. He glares for a second to shut me up then leans over the upstairs railing, probably to watch last night's conquest that just slipped past me leave with his favorite pair of shorts.

"Thanks," I say.

Waving me off he heads back to his room, shutting the door with more force than necessary. Morning-after frat house is a cranky place, apparently.

Before I even turn the corner into the giant living room, I hear it. The four chord melody I despise. The wooden heels of my cowboy boots click slowly on the hardwood floor, the fringe of my skirt swishing as I reluctantly make my way to the backyard. Alabama in the summertime is a beast. The heat is suffocating, but this song makes it so much worse.

"Launi!" Parker shouts above the sound of the rock classic belting from the portable speaker above the grill.

How any of them can eat eggs and bacon after drinking the entire town's liquor supply last night is beyond me. A few of the frat boys join in on the chorus, and it feels like nails on a chalk board to my soul.

"You know," Parker starts excitedly in the direction of the hung-over frat boys, "this song—"

"Is terrible," I interrupt.

Parker pouts, mad that I won't let her share this small trivia fact that I made her swear to leave behind in high school.

"We're going to be late," I scold her.

"Shit," she says, quickly jumping up from the small folding chair.

"Did you just say this song is terrible?" some frat boy asks, clearly offended.

I've heard this my entire life. Yes, it's still one of the top songs played on every countdown. It's got a cult following along with the band that plays it. Do I know how important it was for the songs of today? Do I know that Free Pony walked so that other bands could rock? Blah, blah, blah, barf.

"It's a few chords and some catchy lyrics," I say as Parker searches the house for her purse.

"You don't get it," frat guy says. "It's about his love for cocaine, and how it drove him to the brink of destruction."

Ok, that's a new one.

"It isn't," I tell him.

"You don't even like it. How would you know?" he asks, twisting the top off a beer that had been sitting warm on the large picnic table.

"It's about an actual baby girl," Parker says from behind me.

She holds her purse up to show me her accomplishment. Thank God.

"Our Uber is two minutes away," I tell her.

Frat guy hasn't had enough. "It's about his struggle with addiction. I wrote a whole essay on it for my music appreciation class."

"Did you get an 'F'?" Parker asks.

"No. A C- minus," he states as if it proves his point.

"It's about a baby girl. Like an actual baby girl. Look it up. Written in 2003," Parker says as she makes her way to kiss the boy from last night on the cheek. She won't be back, but he doesn't know that.

Frat guy's working hard on Google. "So what? 2003. What does that prove?"

"Look up Justin Kline, the lead singer. I mean, are you even a fan?" Parker asks, giving me a wink. "Come on Launi, better get you to that plane so you don't miss the bus."

Reading aloud, frat guy says to the group, "Justin Kline welcomed his baby girl February 3rd, 2003, inspiring him to write 'Baby Girl,' about his first daughter Launi Kline."

The boys take a minute to let that sink in and then from the far end of the table a very hung-over boy from my media class perks up. "Ha! That's kinda crazy right? She has the same name as you."

"Crazy," I say sarcastically.

I pull the hat I'm wearing lower on my forehead and motion for Parker to make an exit with me.

"I always thought it was about his girlfriend," the hung-over kid says before resting his head back down on the table. He's hurting.

"Naw man," Parker's boy says, flipping bacon and holding a beer, "I thought it was about his bandmate's old lady."

"Jesus," I whispered exasperatedly.

"I didn't sleep with him for his brain," Parker says as we make our way to the front yard. "He sure is pretty, though."

That's our code for boys who are lacking in intelligence but still make Parker's list for a little fun.

My dad's manager texts that he won't be able to pick me up from the airport because he needs to rest before tonight's performance. Jokes on them—I already suspected that and arranged my own ride. Depend on my dad? The lead singer of one of the most famous bands since the Beatles? No, thank you. I learned that lesson the hard way multiple times. I'm taking this summer job only to build my resume and if I'm honest, my bank account for next semester.

Of course, our suitcases are on the porch. I'm the responsible one. Parker is the fun girl; I'm the mom of the group. My bags have been packed for a week, hers were thrown together last night before the party. If you look closely, the zipper isn't even shut all the way on hers because a pair of panties is stuck in it.

"How are we even friends?" Parker asks with a small chuckle. "I'm going to miss you this summer."

Parker is my bestie. She is the 5'3" blonde to my 5'7" brunette. She's one of four sisters in a tight loving family, to my estranged sister of one brother divorced parents family. She's a coffee in the morning, and I'm a soda at 10am. What I mean to say is she's meant to be the answer to everything I question about myself. Am I smart enough? She thinks so. Am I too thin? She'll have a burger in my hand but also a pep talk about loving myself to go with it. And sure, maybe she's a lot of energy in a little package, but she's my girl. The only things we have in common are our senses of humor and taste in men.

How are we still single on a campus full of bad boys? Well, that would be because I'm a hopeless romantic that gets stuck on one guy at a time, and she's anti-love with attachment issues so she runs the second a boy likes her back. If a man walks into the room who we both find attractive, well then he's just going to keep on walking because we don't fight over men. If she likes him, I want her to have him, and if I like him, she feels the same. So usually, it's eye contact with each other to let the other know we've clocked a potential guy, but then a shrug to say, "Ehh, you can have him."

This is going to be our first summer apart in seven years. I'm going on tour with my dad's band, and she's going home to be the maid of honor in her sister's wedding. We're meeting up in LA at the end of summer to come back here together.

"I can't believe you get to see Rye," Parker says as our Uber pulls up to the airport.

"Don't start with me," I warn.

Rye Banning is our type. The very definition of the men we find most attractive. He's got messy blond hair, blue eyes, and two sleeves of the most beautiful tattoos. He didn't always look like that of course. He used to be a puny little boy who carried around sticks to bang on anything he could. I guess that's to be expected of the son of the drummer for Free Pony. Those little sticks would often find my head, my knees or even my favorite doll at meets when we'd be thrown together while our dads wrote music.

"I'm just saying, you could have a great summer. With some of that good vitamin D....you know...."

"D plus," we both say before laughing.

Vitamin D minus is the kind a doctor might prescribe. It comes in a little bottle and could be found at any drug store. Vitamin D plus, well that can only come from the males of our species, but Parker and I often joke it's also exactly what we need.

"Not going to happen, Parker," I tell her. "We haven't even seen each other since his dad's funeral."

He didn't even cry. I remember watching him from across the grass as they put his father in the ground. He stood stoic, two drum sticks in his hands to lay on top of the grave. I watched his jaw tick from the tension, but he never cried. I wondered as I watched if I would cry for my dad. Kids like us, we're raised in a weird bubble. We know our dads, but we don't really know our dads. And there's so much false information on the internet that it's started to get jumbled up in my head. Sometimes, I think there are groupies and fans who know my dad better than I ever will. And if I'm being honest, I don't care. It's not the life I would have chosen for myself, and I watched my mom suffer trying to make herself a part of something my father loved for years just so she wouldn't be left behind. In the end, she never had any hold on him at all. No one gets to keep a rock star.

"I heard might be single again," Parker practically sings. "Him and that movie star are having trouble."

"It's all PR," I tell her. "I'm sure they're just trying to get him in the public eye and accepted by the Free Pony fans. It's all a game."

"A game you'll be playing this summer, my friend. And one you love," she says.

She's right. I do love this game. I love the idea that someone can shape the world's view of a person or their experience just by posting a few seconds of a clip or an interview. It's exhilarating.

My job this summer is to chronical the band and make sure the fans have faith that Rye can fill his father's big shoes. I just wonder if he'll be as good at leaving a trail of hearts as his dad was, because if he doesn't bring in those numbers the future of the band is toast. SUGAR CUBE RECORDS has made that clear in no uncertain terms.