Merch Girls
In spite of my trepidation, I spent the next two months getting prepared for the tour. Joey had no problem letting me take a few months off; my schedule had always been pretty flexible due to my classes and his generally laid back demeanor. I had my passport already, too, thanks to the graduation trip to Italy that my aunt and uncle had taken me on a year before. Aside from sorting out all of my bills, the hardest part of prepping for tour was packing.
How did a person condense their life down to just a few suitcases to last them for three months?
It wasn’t until I tried that I realized just how much there was to my life. I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I didn’t even think my little apartment held that many belongings, but I kept finding more and more things I wanted to pack. It took a lot of help from Avery and Annalee, who knew what to expect from a tour, to finally whittle my pile of things to pack down to a reasonable amount.
All too soon, in what seemed like a matter of days not weeks, Labor Day weekend was upon me. Although the tour had begun a few days prior, we had planned for me to join the tour in Long Island. With all my belongings finally packed up, I called a cab to take me to the Paramount that afternoon to begin the adventure.
I couldn’t help being nervous. Although I had spent plenty of time talking to Avery about what to expect and even Skyped with the band a few times, I still felt like I was way out of my depth. I could play and study music all I wanted, but weaseling my way into a touring band’s life was something else entirely. They had treated me like one of the family in Tulsa, but I wasn’t so sure that I agreed with them.
When I knew the cab was close to the venue, I sent Annalee a text. I hoped she would already be there, since she knew what she was doing and I was totally clueless. Sure enough, she texted back just seconds later that she was waiting outside the venue for me. As the cab pulled up to the sidewalk, I was surprised to see hardly anyone lined up. It was still early in the afternoon, but the venue seemed practically deserted.
Annalee rushed over as soon as I opened the cab door, calling out, “Colby, hey! You’re just in time.”
“In time for what?” I asked, pointedly glancing around at the nearly abandoned street. There were less than a dozen or so girls lined up, along with a few more blankets and chairs that didn’t appear to be in use by anyone at all.
She followed my eyes, then laughed. “Oh, they’re doing the walk now. They’ll be back in a little while, though, so we need to get our stuff set up.”
I vaguely recalled Avery and Annalee explaining the walks to me, but I had forgotten all about it. I hoped everything else they’d told me to prepare me for the tour hadn’t fallen out of my brain so easily too.
“Come on, lets get your stuff on the bus and then we can start setting up the merch booth,” Annalee said.
I had no choice but to follow her. We gathered up my bags quickly and Annalee led the way around the back of the venue to a small parking lot that was filled almost entirely just by the tour bus. She had a set of keys that opened the bus itself and the storage area on the side. My big suitcase went in there, and I carried my smaller overnight bag onto the bus with me where Annalee gave me the grand tour.
“So, this is sort of the front lounge, I guess. Table, seats, mini-fridge, the coffee maker you shouldn’t use unless you want Taylor to freak out on you… bathroom to the left there…” Annalee rattled off, leading the way. “And here are the bunks. You’ll be right here, below me. There’s room for some of your stuff in there, but there’s an extra bunk we all usually stuff our bags into.”
She peeled back the curtain to my bunk and I saw that it was tiny. That didn’t bother me very much, since I was on the ridiculously short side, but I was still surprised to realize that little coffin of a bed was my home for the next few months. I tossed my pillow and blanket inside along with my purse, then put my bag in the other bunk that Annalee pointed out.
“What’s that room?” I asked, pointing toward the halfway open door in front of us.
“That’s the back lounge,” she said, sliding the door the rest of the way open. “Just a few more couches and stuff. If they weren’t busy, you’d probably see Zac planted right there playing some video game.”
At the very mention of his name, my stomach began to do flip flops. That was not a good sign. If I didn’t learn how to be around him or even hear him mentioned without falling apart because of some stupid, pointless crush, I didn’t know how I would survive the entire tour.
If Annalee noticed anything weird about my reaction to his name, she didn’t mention it. She was a woman on a mission; like Avery, she rarely stopped talking, and right then, she was running through all the details I could possibly ever need to know about selling merch. I tried to keep up with both her speech and her quick steps as she led me back into the venue and showed me where our merch table would be set up.
Between the two of us, it still took a while to get everything carried into the venue. There seemed to be endless boxes of t-shirts, which we needed to enlist the help of one of the crew guys to carry, stacks and stacks of cds and all sorts of random and probably overpriced goodies that I was sure the fans would still gobble up. Once it was all carried in, it still had to be arranged. Annalee found a ladder and I was enlisted to do the climbing to hang up the t-shirts. I didn’t mind; I kind of liked feeling tall for once in my life.
“Is this the new merch girl?” Someone called out from somewhere below me.
It wasn’t a voice I recognized, so I carefully turned around on my ladder to see who it was. I nearly fell off the ladder entirely when I saw Zac standing behind the guy I had assumed asked the question. That wasn’t a particularly good impression to make on my first day on the job, and it didn’t help at all that both Zac and this new ginger dude started laughing at me.
“Yeah, this is her,” Zac said, once he managed to stop laughing. “Avery’s friend Colby.”
And that was all I was to him. Of course it was. Why did it even hurt to hear him say that when I already knew it was true?
“That’s the guitar tech, Muff,” Annalee offered while I was still trying to collect myself and not trip over my own feet again as I lowered myself back to the floor.
“I thought you looked young,” he said, eying me.
“I’m twenty three,” I replied, crossing my arms over my chest self consciously. Maybe I should have worn heels so I didn’t look like a teenager, but that probably wouldn’t have helped with the whole ladder situation.
Muff eyed me a moment longer, then gave me a nod. “Nice tats.”
Crossing my arms had drawn attention to them, I supposed. After collecting new ink for so many years, the tattoos were just a part of my body, as mundane as my eyebrows or fingernails. I always felt a little surprised and awkward when someone drew attention to them. It inevitably led to stares and questions. Zac’s eyes seemed to bore into my skin, lingering on me in a way that made me nervous even though I knew he was only looking at the tattoos and nothing else.
Somehow, it still made me feel like a piece of meat.
Evidently content with that short introduction, Muff turned away from me then and began talking to Zac about the guitar setup for the show. Zac’s attention lingered on me for a moment, but it still felt like he was looking through me, not at me. I tried to ignore him, turning my back to him and continuing to hang the t-shirts and things on the display, but I could still feel his eyes on me. Evidently he and Muff had decided to have their little conference right there. I supposed I would have to get used to Zac being around constantly, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
The problem was that I did like it—far, far more than I should have.
When I finished the display and had no other reason to keep my back to Zac, I spun back around and began to ask Annalee what I should do next. The words died in my mouth when I saw Zac’s face. His intense stare had turned into a glare, and I had no clue why. Had I done something wrong? I looked at the display, then back at the diagram we were supposed to follow. I’d hung everything up correctly, so why was Zac glaring at me like he was trying to set me on fire with his eyes?
“Umm,” I squeaked out, turning toward Annalee. “I’m just gonna run to the bathroom, unless you need me to do anything else right this second?”
She considered my words for a moment, then said, “Actually, if you could run across the street and pick up some dinner? I mean, not right this second. When you get back.”
“Yeah, I can definitely do that,” I replied.
Anything to get away from Zac, I thought to myself.
As I wandered around the venue in search of a bathroom, I tried to figure out just what the hell had gone wrong so early on in this tour. We hadn’t even left New York and I already felt awkward and unwelcome. It couldn’t have been my fledgling crush on Zac; I really didn’t think I had been obvious enough about it for him to have any clue how I felt. In any case, it was just a crush. Nothing serious, just a physical reaction to how gorgeous he was. Even if he did notice it, why would that make him suddenly hate me? It didn’t make sense.
I decided that I would rather have remained practically nothing to him than to suddenly have this strange hatred directed toward me.
By the time I worked up the nerve to leave the bathroom and return to the merch table, he was gone. Annalee had written a list of dinner orders for me, and I was happy to have a task to occupy myself with so I didn’t have time to think about Zac. Even though we could hear the band rehearsing while we ate, my mind was elsewhere, focusing on all the things I needed to know and be prepared for before my first official night as a merch girl began.
It wasn’t even all that difficult to ignore the actual concert, even when Zac took his turn singing lead. There seemed to always be a stream of girls wandering over to check out the merch, and rarely a moment to stop and think. I liked that. When I was already working myself into a nervous wreck over one stupid glare, I didn’t need any time to sit and analyze all the different looks Zac had given me. I could do that later while I tried to fall asleep in my coffin of a bunk.
Two hours later, when the show was finally over and it was time for us to pack up for the night, I actually felt a lot better. I had survived my first night on tour. Despite my nerves and Zac’s weirdness, it hadn’t been that bad.
One night down, one hundred and thirteen to go.