The Eyes of September

Part Two: In Between

Chapter Sixteen:

Seven – the musician

Even the silence had its own sound.

Buzzing. Not screaming. Instead, a buzzing – a hundred bees beating wings in unison. Mindless and chaotic, it was a roar that pressed against the windows of his empty room. It trapped him; at night, three o'clock, it wrapped fingers around his neck.

For the past four weeks, he had learned to live with this. Because there were only two alternatives: one involved death and the other involved therapy. Seven shuddered away from both. Instead he stopped trying to push fear, anxiety, off his shoulders. He hunkered down and, in a manner that was not quite evading it but not quite dealing with it, either, he held himself back from whatever edge he was standing on.

The first week home he had awoken each morning, screams rising from his throat as if ripped from some grotesque nightmare. Unfortunately, that first day, Corrin and Eden and Taegan and Percy had been congregated at his house. Fresh off their manhunt, sprung upon his disappearance, they had

Crazy, his bandmates said; disturbed, his family corrected. The next week he had come up for dinner and stumbled into a conversation about the cost of mental hospitals. His mother, holding a wad of pamphlets. His father, looking cross, grease-stained bandana hanging from his jeans, complaining in his slow timbre about budgets. burst into his basement and shaken his shoulders and the screams hadn't abated – just, died.

"What the hell are you people talking about?" His shout became a whisper. "There's nothing wrong with me."

His mother had dropped the papers in her hand. She wore concern like face paint; it rested heavy between her eyebrows, creased the skin around her mouth.

"We're just –" she said.

"Just nothing," his father said, "we're trying to look out for you, Seven. You can't ruin your career like this."

"Oh, yeah?" Shout to whisper, whisper to shout. He imagined his voice, cracking whip-like in the still kitchen silence. But in the end it backfired; when the whip came down it bit his own flesh, and he cowered from the red stirring of his anger.

"You know what –" he pointed his finger. Then realized it was shaking. Was he drunk? Was he seeing things, yet again? Sometimes – the hallucinations crawled into his mind, and he wasn't sure what had caused them, be it pills or alcohol or simply the pandemonium of his own dread.

He dropped his finger. "I'm not giving up on my career."

"What do you call this, Seven?" His father – he kept saying his name. "You left. Dropped out of the band."

"I didn't..." at this point, he had wandered away. Left his parents in the kitchen and rested his legs against the stairwell. Seven put his feet through the slats at the top of the stairs, looking down at the clear drop below, seated in the junction of hallway between bedrooms and bathrooms, sanity and complacency, a world in which he rarely ventured.

"I didn't give up," he had said to himself. "I'm not giving up."

This was a lie.

In the weeks that followed, October slipped from his grasp. He retreated to the basement; the ceiling became a slideshow of festival memories, daydreams on the road, the terror he had felt, over and over, as fans ran after his tour bus after shows or public appearances.

For his bandmates, fame was an ideal. It was fun. They used to time – and money – to buy new instruments, to hone their skillsets, to develop friends with other rising musicians, photographers, and entertainment gurus on the scene. They became emboldened, confident. Wore what they had accomplished like a patch upon their sleeves, a mark that proved their lives meant something.