Chapter 8

After dinner, Kat, Hanna, and I went back to her aunt’s house to get ready while the rest of the band headed back to their apartment. Although the last time we’d been in Raleigh our club experience had some hitches, we ended up picking the same one, since it was the only one we knew of that allowed under-eighteens.

Since Hanna had nearly been assaulted the last time we’d been here, we all agreed that we’d leave in a group, to prevent further incidents. We didn’t have Victor with us this time, but I was more comfortable since I’d been there before.

Honestly, clubs weren’t really my thing. I liked to dance okay, but if I had my choice, I’d rather be playing the music that people danced to than doing the actual dancing myself. Still, I danced with Kat and Hanna most of the night. I’d join them, the three of us would dance, then I’d go sit down while they stayed out on the dance floor, sometimes dancing with each other, sometimes dancing with Marco and Seth, and sometimes just dancing with strangers.

Lyla disappeared almost as soon as we got into the club. Of all of us, she was the most used to this kind of environment and she had a lot lower inhibitions than the rest of us. We’d track her down at the end of the night, probably having to pull her off some random girl, making out in a corner.

The only time things got really weird was after a set of songs when I went back to the table we’d scooped up as ours to rest for a bit before the girls dragged me back on the dance floor. We hadn’t had any problems yet, so I wasn’t really paying attention, which is why I was surprised after two songs when, instead of both Kat and Hanna coming through the crowd to get me, it was Kat and some girl I didn’t know.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Come dance with us,” Kat said, reaching across the table and pulling on my hand.

“Where’s Hanna?” I ask.

“She’s dancing with Seth. This is Katy. Now come on, let’s dance.”

I was a little bit confused by the switch. Not so much that Hanna was dancing with Seth, since she was friends with the whole band and had danced with all of them already, although she stopped dancing with Lyla after she got a little handsy. What confused me was first that Hanna would have left Kat alone at all, and second that Kat would have gone, made friends with some random girl on the dance floor, and then come to get me to join them in the span of two songs.

Still, since Hanna wasn’t around, I didn’t want a rehash of what happened last time, so I let her drag me onto the dance floor. From the moment I got there, things got uncomfortable. I’m not a great dancer, so my go-to move is to just kind of bop side to side with the beat, sometimes moving my arms in unison, and trying to kind of imitate the person I was dancing with. When I’d been dating Rhonda, we’d done the grinding kind of dance a few times, but I always kept some distance between myself and Hanna or Kat.

This time, Kat started dancing closer and closer to me, encouraging the girl she’d brought along to do the same from the other side. I guess some people would have found it hot, but I was just uncomfortable. I’d already had to talk to Kat just a few hours before about pushing boundaries where she shouldn’t, and this was way beyond the innuendo she’d used then. The weirder part was the other girl, who Kat was egging on more and more.

The final straw was when Kat grabbed my ass with one hand and mimed the girl doing the same thing on my other side.

“Okay,” I said, loud enough for them to hear me over the noise as I moved out from in-between them. “Katy, it was good to meet you, but we have to go now.”

I felt a little bad about ditching the girl on the dance floor, since she looked mostly confused, which wasn’t surprising since she was getting some pretty significant mixed signals, but I needed to put a stop to this before things got out of hand.

Kat started to protest until she saw my face. The confident, flirty Kat disappeared, replaced by the version of her that she retreated into when she was too scared to face whatever was happening. I hated to see this version, because it was the same one her father had always seen, but the other Kat from tonight wasn’t the real her either. It was an overcorrection as she actively tried to stop being the girl her father abused. In a way, it was healthy she was actively trying to find herself, but it still caused her to treat herself unhealthily.

“What are you doing?” I asked Kat when I got her outside the club, where we could hear each other.

“I don’t know,” she said, not making eye contact. “I just thought we could have some fun.”

“I thought we were having fun.”

“We were, but you were sitting by yourself and I started talking to Katy, and she said she was single, and I thought you two would hit it off. You’ve been by yourself since Rhonda.”

There was more to it than that, I had no doubt, but I also knew I wasn’t going to get a straight answer from Kat any time soon. Probably, she didn’t really know why she did it herself. If I had to guess, I’d say it had something to do with my rejecting her, maybe wanting to live through someone else vicariously by having a hand in making it happen. Of course, it could be anything. She still had a long way to go on her mental illness recovery, and it was often pretty hard to figure out why she did things.

“I appreciate it, but you need to let me find my own dates.”

“I just want you to be happy,” she said, a tear sliding down her cheek.

I felt bad for coming down on her, but she got into patterns of behavior very easily, and this was definitely one pattern I didn’t want to keep happening.

“I know,” I said, pulling her into a hug. “You have to let me be happy on my own terms though. I mean, I’m happy right now. I just finished my first album and I’m about to go on tour with my two best friends. How could I not be happy?”

“Okay.”

“I really do appreciate it. Just next time, talk to me before you start making decisions for me, okay? Give me a chance to decide what I want to do.”

“Okay,” she said again.

It was hypocritical, in a way, since I still made so many decisions for her, but it was the situation we found ourselves in.

“I’m about danced out. Let’s grab everybody and head home.”

“It came,” Hanna said, bounding down the stairs to meet the delivery driver walking towards the front door.

After a week filled with constant work getting the album recorded, we’d spent the entire weekend doing nothing. The rest of the band had gone out to a club again on Saturday night, but they’d wanted to go somewhere with an older mix of people, which meant a place I definitely couldn’t get into.

That worked out for me. Dancing wasn’t my thing and I’d been wiped after being drug around by Kat and Hanna all night. Instead, the three of us had reverted to being teenagers, sleeping half the day away, watching movies, and just lounging about the rest of the day.

Sam hung with us some of the time, although with his energy level he wasn’t able to sit still through two movies back to back. Sometimes he disappeared to entertain himself, and sometimes he dragged Kat with him to play a game, since they shared interests.

‘It’ turned out to be a large box that she could barely get her arms around with a logo on it I didn’t recognize. Kat, Sam, and I huddled around her as she tore the box open and pulled out the packing material on the top.

Inside was a bunch of clothing, mostly shirts. Pulling out a black shirt, she unfolded it, displaying the all-white logo on the front. In the center was a sketch outline of some kind of cat, maybe a bobcat or the like, roaring. Above it in a shallow arch was my name and underneath, in an arch bending the opposite way, it said ‘and the Wild Cats.’

We’d let her run with merch and she hadn’t shown us any of the designs she’d picked, so I hadn’t really known what to expect. Honestly, I’d been so wrapped up with recording the album that I’d completely forgotten about the merch plan. I did know she’d gotten all of the money needed from people investing in it, but after that, I’d kind of put it to the side.

There were three other logos and a couple styles of shirts, each with a different logo, along with two hats, each using one of the logos.

There was a logo that looked almost like a college sports team, still with the roaring cat, but in a circle, with ‘Charlie Nelson and the Wild Cats’ going around the middle of the circle. It also had twenty-twenty-two, with twenty on the left of the circle and twenty-two on the right and a pair of lines, one thin and one thick, on both the top and bottom of the logo. That one was probably my favorite of all of the shirts, although it kind of locked us in to sell them only this year, so if we didn’t sell them on this tour or back at the Blue Ridge, we were going to be stuck with unsellable shirts.

The other two logos I didn’t love as much. One had the cat on the right and the name on the left and the other had the name on the front and the cat on the back. They were okay, but I preferred the first two. I preferred the standard short-sleeve crew-neck shirt, but there was a long sleeve, a V-neck, a long sleeve where the sleeves were different colors to the middle of the shirt, and something called a women’s cut, which just looked like a fitted t-shirt to me, but then I didn’t know much about clothes.

There was one thing I did worry about as she pulled everything out, though.

“This is all the merch we got?” I asked, realizing how little was actually in the box.

“This is just the samples of the logos, shirts, and hat styles. We need to go through them and pick which ones we like and place the order. I was hoping they’d be here last week, because we’re cutting it close getting them in before you start your tour, but they told me it could take up to two weeks to get the samples.”

“Should we call the rest of the guys?”

“Yeah. We need to make a decision today.”

“Is this going to be a problem?” Kat asked, pointing at the name.

I instantly knew what she meant. Although he’d been on board when we’d signed the contracts, Marco had been increasingly insistent that I was being singled out above the rest of them, even though Seth and Lyla hadn’t had any problems. He specifically had made comments about the band name, since in all of our materials, we were listed as ‘Charlie Nelson and the Wild Cats’ not just ‘The Wild Cats.’

Rowan had had to put his foot down one day at recording, telling him to drop it. That was something the studio wanted, so it was either live with it or find another record label. That had been enough to get him to shut up, but no one believed he was actually dropping it.

“Even though we didn’t have to, I checked with Kent before I put in the request for samples, and he made it clear we needed to keep all merch in line with the rest of the marketing the label was doing.”

“He agreed to the contract,” Kat pointed out.

“I know, but that doesn’t matter. If you talked to Kent and he said we needed to do it like this, then we will. I just know this is going to be a problem.”

I wasn’t wrong. When the three of them got to Hanna’s aunt’s house, with Lyla looking particularly wiped out, since she’d gone out again Sunday night after even Seth and Marco had called it quits, Marco took no time being angry about it.