They Don't Believe In Us

chapter xxviii // the epilogue

Chapter 27 // Epilogue

They Don’t Believe In Us

I held my ticket nervously, clutching it to my chest and feeling like I was sixteen again. I’m Hope Brown and I’m twenty-two. I moved out of New Jersey, far away from Belleville, at the age of eighteen, after finishing my A-levels. I moved to New York, New York City to be exact, after saving up plenty enough money from the supermarket and bar job, I graduated with good results, and I continued studying at the Grand Central Academy of Art located at 20 West 44th Street in New York City. I did a three year course, graduating last year with firsts.

My Chemical Romance was coming to New York on their US tour, playing at a venue named Terminal 5. Naturally as soon as I heard the news I bought tickets. In the five years since Gerard had written the album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love a lot had happened. It had taken awhile for the album to reach the popularity that it deserved, Eyeball Records managed to boost the sales, so much so that during the summer that the album was written, the same summer that Bob and I became official, the band went on a tour. The tour was small, around New Jersey and New York, playing a few small dates here and there – but it seemed it was all the band needed. After the summer, I went back to school, completing my last year of A-levels, studying art, photography and English. However, quite like Mikey had previously spoke of, they all dropped out of school, Frank, Mikey and Ray only coming out with their GCSE’s and Gerard dropping out before he could complete his last year of further education.

Things had moved extremely fast after that, however not for me, I continued studying at school, whilst the five boys went off, spending months away from New Jersey, months away from me, Lindsey, Bree, Alicia and Jamia. The places the band went extended, they were gradually moving across the States, one month they played a whole tour in California. Their names were everywhere, their merch being sold on the street; MTV even had them play on live television. And of course, throughout it all I was proud. These where my friends, my best friends, Bob was my boyfriend. But it was never the same; we settled on phone calls, occasional Skype calls when they had the resources necessary. Frank would say that they never showered; Gerard would go on stage wearing dirty clothes that we’d all seen him in the weeks before. But still Alicia, Bree, Jamia and Lindsey managed to keep about their lives, going to school, keeping track on studying and still managing to find time to hang out with the boys, even travelling over to Texas when they played there. At first they’d all been urging me to come along, and each and every time I declined, knowing that I had to study – they may be famous but me ditching my studies wasn’t going to get me anywhere, at the time I was saving money for art college, for a small apartment somewhere out of central New York, and soon enough I stopped getting phone calls, and continuous messages, Lindsey stopped asking me to meet them, I grew further and further apart from the people I once called my best friends, and I did nothing about it.

The worst part about it all was when Bob and I broke it off, it was mutual thing, quickly agreed on with no arguing, I felt sad but I didn’t cry. The boys had been home for a few weeks before moving onto more dates, they all looked exhausted, although somehow still as alive as I’d ever seen them.

Bob and I had just been hanging out, a regular occurrence, when the subject just came up, something I knew we’d both been thinking about in the year that they’d been on tour, especially in the past few months. We didn’t even speak once a week anymore, we both stopped making the effort, and it was then that I knew it was over.

“We’ve been moving apart, Hope.” He said, licking his lips nervously. I nodded, knowing what was coming.

“I just don’t think we should be together anymore, it isn’t working out, with your studying and the band, these two things both mean a lot to the both of us, but I just don’t think we can accomplish them together, at least not happily.” It was just like that, and our relationship was gone. I guess we remained friends, the boys and their girlfriends all came to my graduation, cheering and clapping the loudest, other than my family, when I received my high school diploma. We had a party afterwards, but it wasn’t the same. So after the summer, I left for college and I left New Jersey behind, knowing that I wouldn’t miss Belleville at all. Then we all stopped speaking, and occasional text, happy birthday or merry Christmas every year, keeping up with the band, they asked me how College was, I answered truthfully; hard but rewarding. They told me they were writing their second studio album, and this time they were releasing it through Reprise records. They did a lot of the recording in California.