{ Verse 2 }
“So, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Twilight began, “what exactly happened on the last night of the tour? I hadn’t heard you that angry about anything in years.”
I lightly chuckled as I tied my hair back, looking down at the pizza that had been placed in front of us moments ago. “I’m glad you asked, though, have you really not already seen it?”
“Seen what?” Twilight asked as she slid two slices onto her plate. “All I remember you telling me was that Dash did something really stupid, but you were too incensed to articulate exactly what she did.”
I held up my finger, trying to finish my first bite quickly. “The night it happened, I think I saw a dozen different videos on the internet about it. I know Rainbow keeps deleting any mention of it in the group chat—by the way, you should really take away her admin privileges so I can post the video in case any of the other girls haven’t seen it; it’d be super funny—but I figured someone would have sent it to you by now.”
She shrugged. “You know I’ve never been a social media person. That, and I don’t really get sent a lot of things.” She tried to imitate a giggle, but I could tell it was empty. I tried to smile, but with how that stung me on her behalf, I couldn’t tell if it came through.
“Well, okay, honestly that works out because this story is so stupid and that means I get to tell you everything.” I took another bite of pizza. “Like, yeah, I was livid when I called you, but now that we’re in the clear, it’s just funny.”
“What exactly do you mean by, “in the clear”?” Her brow tightened as she tried to maintain her smile.
“Let me start from the beginning,” I explained. “So, when we were mapping out our setlist for this tour, we decided our closer should be a song Rainbow Dash only has to sing for. That way, she can run around on stage without having a guitar around her neck. Before every show, she’d always try to come up with some bombastic way to end our set. In her mind, it would get people to talk about us more, and to her credit, it went over well every single night except this one.
“See, most of her ideas were pretty harmless—picking someone from the audience to get up on stage, throwing t-shirts out to the crowd—that kind of stuff.”
“The use of the word “harmless” has me worried for where this is headed,” she remarked. Both of us had a brief laugh, but I could tell she meant that.
“Don’t worry,” I replied “Everyone was fine in the end.” Twilight looked no more convinced.
“Soundcheck is wrapping up, and Dash comes to me with her grand finale idea. There’s like nine fire extinguishers in the backstage area for some reason, and she brings the dustiest looking one up to me and says, “What if I just start spraying people in the front row with this at the end of our set?”.”
“Why the dustiest looking one?”
“In her words, “They wont miss it as much as the others,”.”
Twilight returned a deadpan stare.
“Yeah,” I say, smiling and nodding. “Of course, I tell her that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard, but by the time she’s telling me this, Dash has already made her mind up.”
“Definitely stupid, potentially very dangerous, too.”
“Oh, yeah, it was. Thankfully, no one got really hurt, but trust me: this ends up being a complete fustercluck1 anyway,” I continued. “As much as I wanted to say no, Soarin and Gilda were in on it too and they would not let this go. So, being outvoted, I just say, ‘fuck it,’ and let them have their stupid fun.
“Anyway, we get to the end of our set, and we’re playing the outro. Dash walks off stage and grabs this same fire extinguisher from earlier, runs back to the front of the stage, and takes an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to spray the fire extinguisher. Like, we had to extend the outro of the song because she couldn’t figure it out, and we were already extending the outro so she could do this in the first place. It started to get awkward. I thought she might start crying.”
Twilight quietly laughs, accidentally snorting with her mouth full of food. A response so cute it was almost enough to make me lose my place in the story. She looks at me, but her eyes quickly dart away as she blushes. After this long together, all it took was a glance to wordlessly tell her how cute she was. Something I’d grown to miss doing while on the road.
“Eventually, she runs up to me and screams in my ear, “HOW DO YOU USE ONE OF THESE THINGS?”—which is kind of terrifying? The fact that she’s made it this far in life without learning how to use a fire extinguisher? Like, come on, I’ve lived in this world for less than half the time she has, and I knew that.
“So I tell her to pull the pin, and that was my biggest mistake. If I’d just told her to give up on this idea, it would have prevented the monumental disaster that followed, and everything that happened afterward too.”
Twilight smirked, raising an eyebrow. “You mean to tell me she didn’t just end up spraying herself in the end?”
I chuckled. “No—good question, though; that’s actually what I thought was going to happen, too—but it’s actually something way worse than that.
“Something important to this is that I ended up talking to one of the venue managers after tearing down for the night. The first thing I asked him was why they had so many fire extinguishers backstage in the first place. Apparently, the venue’s been around for a long time, and the management has never thought to dispose of their old ones—instead, they just buy new ones after a decade and stash them with the rest. And the one that Rainbow Dash picked up just so happened to be–”
“–one of the old ones?” Twilight finished, her eyes wide with shock. “Do you remember how old it was? Because depending on that, this could actually be really serious. They used to put carbon tetrachloride in some fire extinguishers, which is a highly toxic and carcinogenic compound–”
“You would know that,” I playfully interrupted.
“Sunny,” she replied, clearly not amused, “she could have poisoned people! She could have poisoned you!”
I reached across the table and placed my hand over hers. “Babe, it’s okay. I did my research. It’s not good for human contact, but it’s also not deadly or anything. Part of why I was so mad when I called is because I was worried we were going to get sued, but no one got hurt in the end and the venue just docked it from our pay. And besides, I didn’t get any on me, anyway.” A smile spreads across my lips, which puts her at ease.
“But anyway, I immediately knew something was up when I looked up from my guitar, and the front row was suddenly shrouded in powder instead of foam.”
Twilight tensed up again. “Oh no.”
“Dash is still standing at the front of the stage with this fire extinguisher, and people start flailing around trying to get out of the way, but she just starts doing it again because she thinks they’re just having fun.”
“Oh, Dash,” she says with a sigh.
“I’m about to run up to her and tell her to stop when one of the security guys standing in front of the stage climbs up to Dash—he’s coated in dust, coughing so loud that I can hear him over the music—and he rips the extinguisher out of Dash’s hands and starts yelling at her between coughs.”
Twilight is leaning forward, looking equally amused and terrified at where this story is going.
“After she gets yelled at by this guy who’s easily a whole head and a half taller than her, Dash looks back at me like she just shit herself and bolts off the stage. I think I saw a guy throwing up after that, so I tried really hard not to look at the crowd because I was terrified of how bad the damage was. I just looked over at Soarin and Gilda, and could see we all knew we had to get off stage quick.
“We don’t even bother hitting the big finish; we just stop playing entirely. I thanked the audience and rattled off the spiel about visiting our merch booth and sticking around for the next act, even though I knew I would have to find Dash and dip from the venue as fast as possible.”
“So wait, you mean the show wasn’t canceled after people started vomiting?” Twilight asked.
“The show must go on, as they say,” I replied. “Besides, even if several of the audience members dropped dead, I doubt Adagio would have let anyone cancel the biggest show of the tour right before they were about to go on.”
“I guess so,” she conceded, her brow furrowed. “So, what happened after that?”
“When I found Dash backstage, she was absolutely furious. There was this black duffel bag she was tossing around and beating the shit out of, but I pulled her off of it, brought her outside, and had a talk with her. Eventually—and I still don’t know how I managed to pull this off—I got her to calm down, and things seemed alright. Only for a few minutes, though. Then, things almost got worse for Dash.”
“It’s hard to imagine anything worse than making your fans sick,” Twilight replied.
“Well, while we were outside talking, the road crew for The Dazzlings was going in and out of the building frantically. At one point, we overheard one of them tell the others not to go anywhere near Adagio because she was fuming. At first, we thought it might have been because of what Rainbow Dash did on stage, but that was only her first mistake that night, and it wasn’t even why Adagio was angry.”
Twilight squinted, tilting her head. “What else did she do?”
I couldn’t stop myself from giggling before continuing. “The guy said someone took the bag with Adagio’s entire outfit, her makeup, her perfumes, and a bunch of other stuff and mangled it. Everything inside was ruined.”
Looking away for a moment, Twilight’s eyes went wide as she made the connection. “The duffel bag?”
I nodded.
She covered her mouth again. “What happened when she found out?”
“That’s why I said things almost got worse for Rainbow Dash. Miraculously, no one ever found out it was Dash. But that doesn’t mean she’s off the hook. That just means I have ammunition. We’ll probably end up touring with The Dazzlings again, and if we do, I’m gonna threaten to snitch on her any time she’s late for soundcheck.”
Twilight laughed so hard she snorted again, and I couldn’t help but laugh almost as much as the story concluded.
“Of course, I would never actually do that. We’re really lucky she didn’t find out,” I added. “As much as I hate saying this, The Dazzlings are a much bigger act than we are, and our association with them is probably the biggest reason Daybreaker has had as much success as we have. They’re also basically the only reason we made any money this tour, especially after Dash’s little stunt fried some of the on-stage speakers—that wiped out half of our payment for the show. But if Adagio ever found out what else Dash did, she’d find a way to blackball us for sure.”
“Hey, would that be so bad, though?” Twilight grinned. “After all, that would mean you’d be able to visit more often, right?”
“Heh, I guess so.” I took another bite of pizza, my eyes fixed on the plate below me to hide my dejection. I know that was her way of saying, “I wish you were here more often,” but I don’t think she understood that if that were to happen, I wouldn’t just be visiting—our careers would be over. Still, she just wanted me to know she wanted me around more because she loved me. And yet I couldn’t help but feel like that comment admonished me for being away. Then again, would that really be so bad?
That wasn’t the right time to get into that. I could think about that later. I needed to live in the moment, and the only way to shove those thoughts from my mind was to push the conversation forward.
“So what about you?” I asked. “I’ve talked about myself so much the last few days, I haven’t even asked you how school’s going.”
Twilight smiled. “It’s been going well! My advisor says I’m well on my way to getting my bachelor’s one semester early.”
Blinking a few times, I waited for more of a follow up. When none came, I pushed again.
“Only one?” I half-joked. “I would have expected you to be looking into your master’s thesis or whatever you college people do by now.”
“Ha,” she fake-laughed. “Though, to be honest, even though I’m double majoring, I probably could have gotten my degree faster than that, but I’m not in any rush to finish school. That, and, well…” Twilight’s eyes wandered around the room momentarily. “That’s pretty much it.”
Pursing my lips, I gave her a half-lidded glare. “Come on, Twi. You should know better than to think I’m gonna fall for that. What else is it?”
Her smile slowly fell as her guard came down. “I just… I guess I haven’t had the motivation I usually do lately? Don’t get me wrong: I’m still getting perfect marks in all my classes, and the work is still effortless, but I haven’t been as engaged as I used to be.”
My brow tightened as I frowned. “Any reason why that is?”
A stupid question; one I already knew the answer to, but depending on how quickly she could come up with a reason other than the obvious, the better I’d feel.
“Well…” Twilight’s eyes wandered again, darting from the pizza on her plate, to the other tables around us, to the decorations that adorned the walls—everything besides me. So much for feeling better. “I just don’t want to burn myself out. I’ve been considered for post-graduate level projects, but even if I were invited, I’d probably turn them down. I’m just trying not to stretch myself too thin, I guess.”
“I get that,” I replied. “You got a full-ride scholarship, might as well coast and squeeze all the value you can out of that, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, the tension in her body dissipating. “Why rush to join the workforce, you know?”
My response was only an empty laugh and a half-smile. I felt stuck. Pushing her for another answer would just make things awkward, and it was clear she’d already been struggling through this interaction, but part of me wanted her just to be honest. It wouldn’t do either of us any good—if anything, it’d make sitting in the middle of this pizza place awkward when we both inevitably started crying—but part of me felt like I needed that. Like we needed that.
I wanted to pry—I knew I could get her to open up more if I tried—but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Running the scenario through my mind made me feel dirty. I may have suspected she was suffering from my absence, but what if I was wrong? All that’d do is make me look like a selfish, self-absorbed asshole. There could be a variety of other reasons she wasn’t pushing herself like she used to. She could be telling the truth for all I knew.
But I knew she wasn’t. Twilight wasn’t the kind of person who coasted; as long as I’d known her, she was ahead of the curve, and the next several after that, too. There were many reasons for that before I came along, but after being together so long, somehow, I’d become the primary one. In any other context, I would have embraced that. But in that moment, I almost resented it.
A few uncomfortable minutes dragged by after that conversation concluded. The rest of the date went well, but for the rest of the night, all I could think about was the emptiness in her voice, and her reluctance to tell me how she really felt. It was frustrating, but it would come out when she was ready.
I just hoped I would be ready, too.