Seven minutes into the wash he helped himself to, someone interrupted his hoarse yodeling, startling him so much he nearly toppled over in the tiny stall. When he peeked out from behind the shower curtain, he saw a shaggy-haired man grinning at him.
“You’ve got some pipes,” the man said. His accent held a heavy Australian influence.
“Oh, I’m just warming up,” Krishna returned, winking to wipe away the embarrassment of his recent high-pitched yelp.
Davi appeared in the bathroom looking thoroughly hung over. He glanced between Krishna and Mikey, but he didn’t hesitate much longer before dropping his pants and stepping into the shower, too. The stranger looked unfazed, and Krishna realized that this was because he wasn’t actually a stranger at all: he was Mikey, one of Davi’s roommates, and he and Krishna had been introduced the night before over a keg.
“What’s your number?” Mikey asked, holding up his phone.
Krishna rattled off the digits while Davi reached clumsily past him for the shampoo.
*
Two weeks later, during a kind of informal jam session that Krishna found himself invited to, a new person walked in - new to Krishna, anyway. Judging by the series of greetings the guy received, he was pretty familiar to the other members of Mikey’s band. In fact, he was one of the band himself.
“Don’t even think about it.” Mikey nudged him into paying attention. “I mean it.”
“I didn’t even say anything!”
“You didn’t have to. You’ve got that look in your eye. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
So maybe Mikey had a point. The new guy (Emre Turkmen, keyboardist extraordinaire) was cute, in a dorky normcore kind of way. And, as became increasingly clear over the haphazard practice, he was a genius.
“So, it’s Krishna, right?” Emre asked during a small break during which everyone was fueling up on cheap noodles with generous amounts of hot sauce.
He was wearing an obnoxiously patterned button down. Short-sleeved. It would have been tragic were it not for the fact that everything about it suited him to a tee - a pun he latched onto when Krishna voiced the sentiment.
Really, there was no other response but a groan.
*
Krishna was late to their first gig.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he came in saying, a small tornado as he dropped his backpack and coat. They had no green room, and the venue had no coat check; they had set up another friend as a guard during their set. “Kazza got in late, so I couldn’t leave when I wanted to - all the shifts got all fucked up, so -”
“It’s fine,” Mikey assured him. He handed Krishna the set list. “We’re up in five, supposedly.”
They were up in forty, and to say they bombed would have been the understatement of the century in Krishna’s opinion. By the time they left the small stage area, all five of them “looked like dwindling members of the Fellowship of the Ring,” their belongings-guard informed them.
“Gee, thanks,” Krishna snapped.
Emre shook his head. “Ukeleles are pretty panned out.” He wiped his brow with the back of his wrist. “Maybe we should try new stuff.”
“This crowd was just bad,” Noel insisted.
“People aren’t ready for us,” Olivier posited.
“I’m fucking starving,” Mikey said. “Is there a kebab joint around here or what?”
In the chippy, just him, Mikey, and Emre, Krishna complained (while helping himself to their fries) that he couldn’t eat anything on the menu. He announced to them that he’d have to drown himself in beer while resting his head on Mikey’s shoulder. The run down restaurant was empty except for them, and it was quiet except for the occasional metallic clang from the kitchen.
Krishna had an early shift in the morning, but he found that he didn’t particularly want to leave. Even a little hungry, even with no party going on around him and the distinct promise of waking up cloaked in the aromatic combination of fish, lard, and sweat. He palmed out a cigarette.
“We’ve still got to find it,” Emre said. When Krishna looked at him with raised eyebrows, he shrugged: “Our sound.”
*
“Holy shit!”
They had signed with Kitsuné. They had signed with Kitsuné.
“Didn’t I tell you that breakup was a good omen?” Emre said, nudging him. “That guy was seriously holding us back.”
“You guys weren’t seeing him,” Krishna said back.
Emre gave him a look.
Reduced - for the better, they had found - from a quintet to a trio, they spent the day boozing in the park to celebrate. Krishna dotted Mikey’s nose with sun lotion and Emre let Krishna use his jacket as a pillow, and even though he wound up throwing up before dinner thanks to all the cheap bubbly, it was a wholly good day.
*
Their first tour was both a whirlwind and never ending. Somehow, Krishna managed to carry on several haphazard, non-monogamous, quasi-relationships along the way, much to his band mates’ disappointment.
“It’s not that we don’t want you to get laid,” Mikey said. Although he didn’t actually sigh, he didn’t have to. “You just make the worst decisions about guys.”
“It’s not that we don’t want to help you out,” Emre said. “You know we’ll be here for you no matter what. You just wind up looking so miserable that it’s hard to stomach.”
“You do the kicked puppy look quite well.”
“You wear your heart on your cock.”
“Fuck off,” Krishna shouted. Unfortunately, being on a bus meant that there was no door he could properly slam - except the bathroom door, which he did slam, with enthusiasm. Tour weighs on him more than he thought it would. How could he have predicted it? He had never traveled so extensively and unforgivingly before now. The paltry school and family trips he had gone on were nothing compared to this. He had never been this exhausted and ecstatic in his life, and he had underestimated how draining the latter could be.
Approximately five minutes later, they knocked at it.
“We were just joking, Krishna,” Emre’s voice said through the door. “Come on. Don’t be cross. I’m sorry. Mikey is, as well.”
Caving was always guaranteed when they sounded like that.
He had never experienced friendships like this, and maybe that was why he felt so often at a loss when he thought about Mikey and Emre. He had gone to an all boys but made very few friendships with boys. There was Archie, but he existed in a category of his own. There was Nico, but he, too, was unique. Mikey and Emre -
Maybe they were different, too. Maybe every relationship was contained to its own particular bubble. Squeezed on his bus bed alongside them, Krishna looked from Emre’s face to Mikey’s, scooping almond butter (an olive branch) from the jar with his fingers.
“I’m sorry, too,” he said through a full mouth, far more emotional than he should have been considering the situation. “I love you guys.”
*
(Various interviews:)
Mikey: “I heard him that morning in the bathroom, and I was like, shit. You know? Shit. I knew we needed him. It wasn’t even a question. Our sound was still rough, and we didn’t know what direction we wanted to go, but I heard that weird, warbley version of Justin Timberlake and I knew that was what we needed.”
Emre: “He came in, and it was like magic. It clicked.”
Krishna: “They’re my best friends, and my family. They’re the annoying big brothers I never had. I was kind of, you know, floundering before I met them. It wasn’t anything that dramatic - it wasn’t like my world was in black and white and then got shot into color when they appeared, but… maybe it was sepia.”
*
There were hard times, and weird times. There was a lot of fanfiction that Krishna insisted on staging dramatic readings for until that got too uncomfortable even for him (who knew teenagers on the internet could get that explicit?). There was a number one single and a sudden flood of nominations. There were fans approaching them while they did their grocery shopping. There were fraught conversations with family and friends, and the distinct loneliness of tour alienation - the FOMO, the anxiety about being a bad friend/brother/son/lover, the guilt. There was joy and humor and punchy affection and exhilaration and the sheer bafflement of playing to 12,500 people at a sold out show at Wembley Arena. In many ways, Krishna grew up on the road this way. He learned about himself, and he learned about these strange, still relatively new human additions to his life.
*
In America, he got sick again; this time, he was sick enough that they were forced to cancel shows.
An unexpected bouquet of flowers sat on the nightstand of his bed in their Pittsburgh hotel suite. They had three beds but only used one.
He must have looked like shit - he did look like shit - but they didn’t seem to mind as they sandwiched him between their bodies with casual intimacy. He played with Emre’s free hand as Emre read a book and let Mikey drool on his shoulder in his sleep.
“You should eat something,” Emre said idly, turning a page.
“I’m not hungry,” Krishna demurred.
Mikey mumbled something sharp but incoherent that probably meant do what Emre says, asshole.
Krishna relented.