Stella

The next couple of days go by without any problems. I don’t see Zack again but the post-it note with his phone number sits in the drawer of the table beside my bed. That’s not to say that I don’t want to use it, I look at it every morning but always put it back in its place. Instead of texting Zack, I spent my time distancing myself from him. After hanging out with him at his warehouse, I was reminded of how charming he is and how easy it would be to get attached to him again.

To distance and distract myself from Zack, Vivian and I went to Disneyland and I told her about the time I went as a teenager with Zack and the guys and we tripped on acid there. We went to the zoo in San Diego and spent hours and hours at the beach. Time went by so quick, and before I know it, Vivian’s bags are packed, and a cab waits for her outside the hotel.

“Do you have to leave so soon?” I ask her, pouting.

Vivian gives me a small smile. “I’ve stayed as long as I can. I have to get back. I have balls to help plan and dinners to coordinate.”

I frown. “Yeah, I know. I should get my card in the next day or two, and then I'm out of here. What are you going to tell Liam?”

Vivian shrugs. “My flight lands at five, so expect a call from him shortly after that. You know he’s going to flip out when you’re not stepping out of that plane with me.”

“I know,” I tell her. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Okay,” she says. “I have to get going. I’ll call you when I get home.”

“Alright,” I tell her. “Thanks for coming to visit me.”

She pulls me into a hug and holds me there for a moment. “Let me know if you need anything. And stay away from Zack…I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“Okay,” I tell her.

The cabbie honks his horn. “I’m coming, Jesus!” Vivian yells as she pulls away from me. “Alright. I love you! I’ll think of something to tell Liam to give you time to get away.”

“Okay, thank you,” I smile as she starts walking to the cab. “Have a safe flight!”

Vivian waves at me before she gets in the cab, which wastes no time pulling away from the curb and disappearing down the street. I turn on my heel and head back into the hotel. The loneliness starts to immediately creep in and I'm restless before I enter my room.

I decide to try to find something to watch on television, hoping to get my mind off the creeping loneliness. Flipping through channels doesn’t help, though and I can almost hear the post-it note calling my name. I chew on my lip and eye the drawer. I feel like Zack is the only other friend I have here in California but that’s not true. Zack isn’t my friend, and it’s important that I keep reminding myself that. I just need to stay away from him for a couple more days and then I can get out of here – and away from him – for good.

I run my hand through my hair and the post it stops whispering for a moment. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know why I left Manhattan in the first place. Liam was a good man, once upon a time…I just need him to go back to being the man I fell in love with. Then, everything else would fall back into place. I could go back to Manhattan and forget about Zack. I could go back to my life…

I don’t want that, though, either. I should have thought this out more before flying across the country, demanding my inheritance check and deciding to disappear from my old life. This was a stupid plan. Seeing Zack at his warehouse was stupid. And still, I want to pull the post it out of the drawer and call Zack. But I can’t. I can’t, right? Vivian said I should stay away from him and that’s for the best. Right?

I pull the post it out of the drawer anyway. I study the numbers on the paper. He writes his eights the same way he did in high school, but his fours have changed. My hand searches the bed for my phone and my fingers hesitate above each number as I slowly enter it into my phone. Once all of the numbers are entered my thumb hovers over the “add contact” button.
“Zack Baker,” I mumble to myself as I enter his name and hit save. Alright, the hard part is done and now all I need to do is…

I groan. What am I even supposed to say to him? I go into my text messages and select him as the recipient. I stare at the blank screen, words failing me before shaking my head and tossing the phone to the other side of the bed.

“Nope, not today,” I tell myself. I get off the bed and walk over to the closet before stripping out of my clothes and putting clean ones on. The red blouse is one of my favourites; Liam bought it for me when we were on vacation in Paris, which, cliché enough, is where he proposed. I silently trace the thin, barely there tan line where my engagement ring used to reside. I shake the thoughts from my head once again and pull on a pair of slacks and a pair of heels.

I don’t know where I'm going or what I'm doing, but I get in the car and start driving. Part of me wants to just keep driving, another part of me wants to pick up the phone and call Liam. Another part wants to call Zack. Before the loneliness can drive me crazy, I pull into the coffee shop I ran into Zack and Brian at.

I take a good look around before getting out of the car, making sure Zack, Brian or anyone else that I used to know isn’t around before getting out of the car and walking into the coffee shop. It looks dead inside, there are a few people in the sitting area on their computers or with friends, but it’s quiet inside. There’s no line at the counter, and in the next few minutes I'm sitting at a table – one off to the side and away from the windows – with an extra-large coffee and banana nut muffin. Grandmother Saint-Clair would be so disappointed in my dietary choices right now.

I pick up two of the closest magazines and begin to flip through them. Celebrity gossip was never really something that interested me, mostly because the Saint-Clair’s were somewhat of a celebrity in the right circles of people and I had my own drama to deal with. Also, because I knew what it was like to be watched every second of every day, knew what it was like to have my private life publicized and secrets told. Celebrities are just people, they deserve their privacy.

I close the tabloid and pull the other magazine closer to me. Its cover is torn off, but still, I flip several pages into it before my heart drops and I nearly drop my coffee that I was in the middle of sipping. On the left page, stands four familiar men. Zack stands in the back of the group, looking just as he did when I saw him at his warehouse. On the right page, there are five shadows and I realize Jimmy is missing in the group. I furrow my brows, thinking it is a weird screwup the photographer, editor and whoever else saw this page made. Who edits a photo so bad they completely take a band member out of the photo and forget to add him back but keeps his shadow? I shake my head, preparing to turn the page, after all, I came here to get my mind off of Zack, I didn’t need to read an interview about his band. Then, my eyes scan the words beneath the five shadows.

Out of the Shadows
With this week’s release of Nightmare – their first album since the death of Jimmy ‘The Rev’ Sullivan in December – Avenged Sevenfold are slowly getting back into business.

My heart is racing. I read over it again and again, but it doesn’t make sense. “Since the death of Jimmy ‘The Rev’ Sullivan,” I whisper. “Since the death of…” Jimmy’s dead? My hands are shaking but I am able to successfully flip the page to the interview. The interview starts on the first page, and on the other side is another photo of the four guys.

On December 27, 2009, the members of Avenged Sevenfold were at their friend Matt Berry’s wedding reception in a park in their hometown of Huntington Beach, California. It was a fun day, a family day, a day for broad smiles and tall stories, warm hugs and cold beers. Marr and his twin brother, Jason, A7X’s merch guy and drum tech respectively, had brought in kegs for a lager for their guests and, as the sun dipped, and the day drew to a close, someone suggested wheeling a keg over to M. Shadows’ house, a couple of minutes away, to continue the party. The band’s frontman politely declined the idea: he had to be up at 6am for a two-hour drive to play gold in Santa Barbra and embarking upon that journey with a hangover wouldn’t be the smartest idea. That was the cue for his buddies Synyster Gates, Zacky Vengeance and Johnny Christ to call it a night too, but drummer Jimmy ‘The Rev’ Sullivan – always the life and soul of every Avenged party – decided he was up for more fun, and disappeared into the night with friends, “happy as a clam” as M. recalls.

I don’t want to read the rest of this. I don’t want to know what happened next. I don’t want to read how a childhood friend had died. As much as I don’t want to, I know I must. I tuck my hands between my thighs to keep the bones inside them from rattling and continue reading.

At 1pm the next day, as he was finishing off his round of golf, M. received a phone call telling him that Jimmy was dead. His best friend was just 28 years old. On the dark, distressing, damaged days that followed, the singer kept asking himself ‘what if’; ‘What if he’d thrown open his door to his friends that fateful night?’. ‘What if they’d drunk the keg dry, talking shit ‘til the sun rose, and crashed out on his floor as so often before?’.

My eyes burned, my throat clenched, and my heart felt as though it was literally breaking in half. I stared at the words in the next paragraph, but my brain refused to process them. It hasn’t even been a year since he had passed…if I had just left Manhattan a year sooner, I could have, maybe, seen him one last time.

I don’t know how long I'm in my thoughts, but when I absentmindedly try to take another sip of my coffee, I notice how much cooler it is. I turn to get out of my chair, but before I can stand, I notice a figure that had just walked up to me. He’s wearing eyeglasses this time and a cardigan of sort, he has a coffee in his hand that’s so hot I can see the steam floating away from it.

“Hey, I thought that was you,” Zack smiles. His eyes flick to the magazine my hand instinctively tried to cover. He frowns. “Oh. I didn’t realize that had…” he clears his throat, “I didn’t realize that had come out already.”

“Sorry, I…it was here…I didn’t even know it was about…Zack, I’m so sorry for your loss,” I stumble.

Zack gives me a soft smile. “Thanks,” he says. “May I join you?”

Everything Vivian had told me escapes from the window in my brain that Zack and this magazine have opened. Things seem somewhat different now, but I know they aren’t. Still, I scoot back into my seat and motion to the chair in front of me. “Of course,” I tell him.

Notes

Hey guys! So sorry for the delayed update! This chapter was a little hard to write because any chapter with Jimmy's devastating death is hard to write, plus it took me a minute to track down the magazine this interview is from. I eventually found the scans here. All of the scans, and the interview/photographs, etc in its entirety belong to their respective owners.

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Title credit: Faber Drive “By Your Side”