Adopted by Ryan Ross

chapter seventeen

We later got to the venue, which was in San Francisco. I could finally get off the fucking bus . It's so cramped and hard to breathe in here it's insane.

"Ugh. Finally, not recycled air!" I yelled the moment I stepped off the bus, taking a deep breath.

I heard Ryan chuckle, but he's not allowed to laugh at me. Because he was doing the same thing.

The air on the bus is so dry, I'm pretty sure I've woken up to a bloody nose every night since I've been on the bus.

And we have like five humidifiers on the bus too.

The guys and I went to go check out the venue, and it looks so much different when it's empty.

Ha, that's what she said.

Brendon is getting to my sense of humor.

So, while the guys did band things. Zack helped me learn how to do things.

Like make sure the monitor boxes were synced with whatever the guys were doing.

And we did have an audio guy to help out with that too.

It was really fun, it felt like I was apart of a team.

Which I haven't been apart of, in so long. Last team I was apart of was a softball team.

When it was time for the show, I hoped that everything went well.

Then Brendon broke his fucking toe.

"No, it doesn't hurt that much. Let me finish the show, please." Brendon begged.

I know what a broken toe feels like, and I have a pretty high pain tolerance.

"Will you at least let me buddy splint it until you get finished with the show?" I asked.

Brendon sighed, but agreed. I carefully slid his shoe off, I let him take his own sock off because I was not about to touch his sweaty socks.

Zack handed me a roll of duct tape, because that was the only thing we had on hand at the moment.

He broke his big toe, so I taped it up with the one next to it. Brendon calls it his index toe.

Brendon put his sock back on and he let me help him back to the stage.

He leaned against the drum riser while I grabbed the extra drum stool.

When I did, I had various fans waving at me, so I smiled and waved back.

I sat the stool in front of the mic, then went to go get Brendon. While I did all of this, the guys kept playing the song.

Brendon leaned on me as I helped him to the stool.

"Bitch how low you want this shit." I asked, into the mic while looking down at Brendon.

"Hey! Language!" Ryan said into his mic as the song finished.

I think it was She Had The World.

"My language is English." I said.

Ryan rolled his eyes as Brendon told me to lower the mic stand and he'd tell me when to stop.

So I did, and my eyes drifted towards the crowd. And I remembered the capacity of this particular room. Four thousand.

And it looked like a full house.

"How do you not get nervous?" I mumbled.

"What? The crowd. They're like my family. How can you be nervous around your family." Brendon smiled, right when the mic was low enough for the crowd not to hear, and high enough for Brendon to speak without them hearing either.

"You'd be surprised." I replied, just as the mic got low enough. I tightened the stand and walked off stage.