Growing up, I’d been Flabby Gaby. Well, it should be said that I’d been Flabby Gaby even up until the last time I saw them during Christmas. Except now they’d graduated past pulling on my ponytail constantly and intentionally doing things to piss me off. At this stage in our lives, they usually settled for just teasing me, but I wouldn’t expect anything less.

The point was, you could love someone and still dread traveling with them, especially when it was going to be for three months straight.

It’d be fine. It really would be fine. Right. It sure would.

Yeah, I couldn’t even find it in me to completely believe it.

I was wringing my hands nonstop on the cab ride to the venue, and I hoped like hell that my deodorant would hold up through the rest of the night. Glancing at my watch, I realized it was after seven. Eli had told me they didn’t go on stage until at least nine.

When the cabbie dropped me off at the end of the block, I called my jackass of a brother.

He answered on the second ring. “Are you here?”

“No, I’m in Antarctica.” I was already pulling my suitcase down the block.

The marquee was mounted on the opposite corner but I couldn’t miss the lettering.

TONIGHT

THE RHYTHM & CHORD TOUR

SOLD OUT

Eyeing the massive bus parked on the street about thirty feet away, I couldn’t help but remember Pepe, Ghost Orchid’s old van. On the tours I’d gone on with them before, we’d stuffed ourselves into their Chevy fifteen-passenger van and their faded red cargo trailer. With peeling paint, duct-taped seats, and sketchy-looking rigged up doors—you couldn’t help but love Old Pepe. He’d racked up more than two hundred thousand miles before he’d been retired. Some of my fondest memories came in thanks to his loyalty. Now that the band was making money, they’d upgraded to nicer things.

I couldn’t say I wasn’t excited to not have to sleep on a bench seat and pray every day that one of the guys wouldn’t fall asleep behind the wheel on overnight drives, though.

“Flabby!” a voice that had begun haunting me from the moment I’d been born hollered.

I groaned but couldn’t help but smile, excited to see my twin for the first time in more than five months, the longest time we’d ever been apart by far. His bulky and gigantic head popped out from around the corner of the green, silver and black touring bus as he made his way toward me in aqua-colored swim trunks, a white tank, and a flat-brim baseball hat. With hair the same shade of black-brown as mine except it was straighter, the same green eyes, and peachy-colored skin, Eli grinned like he’d just found out Sam Adams was endorsing him.

“Eliza,” I sang out, calling my brother by the nickname I’d bestowed upon him at the age of four.

He flashed a big smile and held his tree trunk-sized arms forward, crooking his fingers in my direction. “Come to me.”

I took Eli in for the first time in almost half a year. He still looked exactly the same… except it looked like he had a hint of a beer gut growing. That was only a slight surprise.

Ever since we’d been sophomores in high school, I’d sworn he used steroids but it didn’t matter how much I looked, I never found any on him. Eli was built slightly shorter than six feet tall with biceps the size of my head and a neck I couldn’t attempt to try to choke because it was too thick. I used to ask him when he was making his professional wrestling debut. He’d then ask me when I was planning on becoming the newest Extreme Makeover contestant. Jackass.

But the thing about him that was the most apparent was how clear his eyes looked. He hadn’t started drinking yet—one of the stipulations I made when I agreed to come on tour. I don’t want to see you shit-faced, I’d told him, and surprisingly, he’d agreed without arguing.