I’d never seen so many cars parked outside O’Briens Irish Superstore like this before. I didn’t think Irish Navajo had suddenly developed star power with all the ruckus Winona and I had made on Instagram.

  But a mighty ruckus, I realised, as I had to fight off the horde of strange fans who were ready to glomp me at a moment’s notice, we did as I made my way through the endless hordes of fans into the back door of O’Briens Irish Supermarket, slamming the large iron door shut before any fans clawed their way in.

  This was the classic artist entrance. I knew all the chains and locks off by heart. Winona and I had skedaddled our way in many times down the years, when Dr Raj, an Indian immigrant, had decided a business venture was in order by opening up an Irish supermarket and hauling in all those imports.

  He’d turned out to be right. Winona and I had hung around the place long enough with our guitars saddled around our shoulders, picking up the last few snacks before we played a concert or two, that he’d finally taken notice of us.

  We said we were Irish Navajo, an upcoming band, and suddenly we’d found the place for our very first concert. A tiny concert, nonetheless, where the other shoppers rolled their eyes and grumbled on to Dr Raj about the strange buskers who were playing near the Kerrygold import section, but it was a start.

  He’d always welcomed us into his shop, which doubled as his home for him and his family, always smiling and grinning and then giving us all these tasty Indian treats he’d conjured up with Irish ingredients on hand after Winona and I had another pity party for ourselves in the en-suite stockroom that doubled as the backstage for our rehearsals.

  Only, Winona wasn’t with me this time. In fact, I didn’t see her, only Dr Raj and his bucktoothed grin and a whole host of people moving and jostling through the place, which was far busier than I expected it to be for a weekday afternoon.

  “Hi, everybody!”

  “Hi, Dr Raj…” I mumbled out, trying my hardest not to think of Dr Nick from The Simpsons. Or Apu from The Simpsons as well. He was a strange mesh of both characters, and Matt Groening would have a field day if he’d ever come across the man.

  “Is Winona here?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Backstage, as usual. She came with someone else, though.”

  “Who, Dr Raj?” He preferred it when someone called him Dr. He’d earned a doctorate from Caltech (THE Caltech, not the Calcutta Technical Institute as Apu had done) and wanted everyone to keep reminding him of that. All those hard years spent learning about the fundamentals of small business management and then his viva voce weren’t going to be reduced to a degree hanging off in his office.

  He twiddled at the ends of his goatee. “White, with big circular glasses. A lot like Harry Potter, but blonde.”

  My heart sank. “Right, I’ll go and see them backstage.”

  “Naan French toast after the show?” he pressed, then noticing my sombre mood. “With maple syrup and eggs?”

  I nodded, my mood lightening a bit. That was a strange sort of quasi breakfast-dinner dish that Winona and Raj’s wife Myra had concocted when it was time for an after-party feast. Winona hadn’t had her usual fill of French toast that morning, and Myra had some leftover naan bread from a family Diwali festival earlier that week.

  It had been very tasty, and suddenly it was Irish Navajo’s treat to comfort us after we were ravaged ferociously by crowds of onlookers just trying to get through their day. “Yes, I’d like some, Dr Raj.”

  “Wonderful!” he beamed, and I smiled. I moved on, trying to figure out why all these people were here for Irish Navajo when I ran into Benjamin Cohen and his razor-sharp grin coming out of the en-suite stockroom.

  “You’re late,” he grinned.

  I wanted to sock him on the spot. Taking my girl. Bringing his hordes of incessant fangirls with him that were running rampant through the place. Then giving me the nerve to tell me I was late when I’d arrived long before Irish Navajo’s scheduled start time of 8 p.m.

  “Get out of my fucking way,” I barked.

  He took a step back, then shouldered me as he walked past, mumbling under his breath that Winona had been waiting for me for a while and was angry.

  I said nothing. I wasn’t going to give him more ammunition to work with. I pressed my way through the doors, finding a person who looked nothing like Winona checking her fingernails between strumming the last few guitar notes before her concert.

  It was Winona… but not really Winona. She looked nothing like the Native girl who thought nothing of wearing men’s clothes as she went through life. Instead, she’d spruced her sex appeal up a lot more.

  She was wearing a white crop top with Irish Navajo emblazoned on the front, with a pair of short navy jeans and a matching pair of brown riding boots and a brown belt that hung loosely around her waist, letting her short shorts hang low around her.

  I wanted to think she looked amazing, except this wasn’t the Winona I’d known. The activist who’d started Irish Navajo up to scream and shout and let the whole world know about every injustice that was out there, startling in the dark.

  No, this was a Winona that had been prettied up for record labels. For music producers. For Hollywood, once Irish Navajo left behind all the headaches that came with being a part of Boston’s underground music scene. Even the American Indian Movement stickers and Navajo tribe symbols on her blue Fender pickguard had been torn off.

  This wasn’t her. I didn’t want this to be her. I didn’t want to feel the Winona I’d always loved had been destroyed by Benjamin and his horrible, maleficent influence, trailing his fingertips all over her until she was nothing but a pop-punk caricature crafted from the devious minds at the Fueled by Ramen label.

  “Hello,” she said, not even looking up from her fingertips.

  “Hello,” I whispered back. “Have I kept you long?”

  She shook her head. Again, she didn’t even look up at me. Not giving me the time of day. I’d experienced that from so many different women in my life before, but not Winona.

  “Glad to hear that,” I grunted. Now I was getting irritable. “Well, what songs are on the track list? Did you pick any out?”

  Silence. Then a few notes were strummed out on Winona’s blue Fender in response. Just like how she’d acted these past few days, I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

  “Did Benjamin pick something out instead?”

  Winona exploded, her head shooting up like a whack-a-mole. “Would you just stop talking about him?” she snapped.

  “Me? Talking about him? You’re the one who let him into our little band, Winona,” I growled back.

  “Because I was trying to stop us playing in fucking basements and Starbucks.”

  “And you couldn’t even think of telling me that?” I stepped in. “That Irish Navajo was going to play at O’Briens? Or that Irish Navajo was going to be in Benjamin’s student music video?”

  I felt my eyes sting. I hated arguments. I hated how emotional they made me. I hated arguing with my best friend. And I hated how our friendship was beginning to crumble into dust over this.

  “Benjamin needs the credits,” Winona hissed, “and the connections. And the money. I couldn’t count on you for that.”

  “You could’ve told me instead of discovering it on Instagram,” I paused, “or finding you in Benny’s lap down in the practice room.”

  “What? Don’t like it when I’m with other men?”

  “Obviously, especially when you whisper about booking shows into his ear while flirting with him.”

  “Funny, you might say I took after you and that Felicity harl—”

  “Did someone call my name?”

  We both turned in the direction of the doorway, finding Felicity sticking her head into our little spat. She was dressed up too, but, like Winona, not as her usual self. Her red hair was bundled in a ponytail, and she was wearing a brown flat cap on top.

  She was dressed a lot more modestly too, conservative even. Dark denim jacket over a white blouse, alongside thick grey trousers and black combat boots underneath. Dare I say it, she looked more like a Winona than even Winona did. I hadn’t expected her to come along and watch Irish Navajo play.

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  “Fuck off,” Winona yelled.

  Felicity didn’t hear her. She didn’t even need to pretend; never had the animosity between them seemed so one-sided as it did now.

  “Oh! There you are, Nate! I’m here for the acting job!”

  “Fuck. Off.”

  “I think you need to run down Benny instead,” I replied. I didn’t have much desire to deal with Felicity either. “He’s the one who’s crazy about this whole musical thing.”

  Felicity twirled her ponytail. I wasn’t sure if she or Benjamin was the more devious one.

  “That’s the thing, Nate, I did….”

  “And?”

  “Just fucking leave us alone, you redheaded slattern!”

  Felicity beamed. “I GOT IT! I GOT THE ROLE!”

  That’s when Winona shot off the table she was sitting on, and I had to pull her into my chest before she tore large lumps out of Felicity in anger. Never in my life had I felt such fury emanating from a person.

  “You did?”

  Felicity nodded. “Yep. Benjamin wants me in. Tell him, Winnie, what’s the music video about?”

  Winona was irate, fuming, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. I steadied her back. I didn’t want the lead singer of Irish Navajo to be charged with first-degree murder. That would spell the end of any attempts of us being signed by a record label.

  “Oh, feisty today, isn’t she?” Felicity giggled. “Oh well, I’ll just leave you to your mutt, Nate, while I’ll get some seats.”

  Felicity left, and then I felt Winona beginning to settle down a bit more. Her eyes stung too. Once I felt she wasn’t going to run out the door and make mincemeat of the Brigham family heir, I let my hands go.

  “What’s the music video about?”

  “It’s Benjamin’s idea,” she whispered.

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” I said.

  She sighed. Then she got flustered. That usually meant Winona was embarrassed to even talk about what it was that she’d planned.

  “It’s about a road trip,” she mumbled, “between friends.”

  “You mean, us?”

  She nodded. “And their partners,” she explained, “and we’re all on a road trip to—”

  There were three quick knocks on the backstage door. That was Dr Raj’s way of letting us know the crowd was getting rowdy and we should get our butts out there right this instant.

  I shook my head. “Just tell me all about it after the show, okay? Not through Instagram posts and notice board flyers like last time.”

  Winona gave a faint smile. It was the first time I’d seen her smile in days. “Okay.”

  “Now what’s the set list?”

  She paused. “There’s something else,” she said. “Benjamin’s going to be recording this.”

  “He is?”

  “For the music video. I mean, not for all of the music video. But for parts of it.”

  This was all getting blurry. We needed a song with themes that matched a road-trip music video between friends and their partners. Or rather Benjamin and Felicity.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I said. We’d written far too many activist songs and not anything that was simply commercial enough yet.

  “I have one,” I mumbled out.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I’m not sure it fits, but it’s the closest thing we’ve got.” I began poking through the guitar case before tugging out a tattered old music notebook. I wasn’t much of a songwriter compared to Winona, but every once in a while something or someone would catch my inspiration.

  “This might do,” I murmured, handing it over to Winona. It was a slow, soft ballad about a Native woman called Redbird. Well, her real name was Zitkala-?a, but Redbird was just the English translation of that from Lakota, and I couldn’t pronounce it correctly no matter how hard I’d tried.

  Much like Mary Crow Dog, Zitkala-?a was an activist for Native Americans too, lobbying for Natives to have American citizenship when she founded the National Council of American Indians back in 1926. She was also an accomplished writer and musician too, which meant she was catnip for Winona to start prattling on about when we were playing Overwatch 2 together.

  Funnily enough, Winona looked a whole lot like her too. I’d written a few verses here and there to give Winona something to work with, but I’d never had the time to tell her about it until now.

  She started flicking through it, then flicked through it again. She hummed the first few words of each verse, getting a feel, sussing out any odd lyrics that might cause a mishap on stage. She strummed the blue Fender gracefully, a whole world of musicianship I’d never be allowed to grace. Then she looked up at me, her face beaming.

  “Nathan, this is amazing!”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes!”

  “Yes, yes?”

  I had to steady myself against a wall when Winona rushed me, pulling me in for a thick hug, pressing her head against my chest, taking in a deep sigh of relief. It felt like I’d seen her go through every distinct emotional phase over the span of a few minutes: indifference when I came in, the anger, then pure spiteful malice towards Felicity, then overwhelming relief once she’d found what it was she was looking for.

  “It’s perfect for Irish Navajo! It’s everything we stand for!”

  “And the music video?”

  “It works for that too!” She took me by the wrist. “Come on, let’s show O’Briens what Irish Navajo really is.”

  “But we haven’t practised it yet,” I said. You don’t just write out a few verses here and there, then call it a song and perform it. You needed notes. Practice. The certainty that you and your partner weren’t going to cock it up in front of hundreds of people beforehand.

  Not that it hadn’t happened before for Irish Navajo even when we did practise, but Winona always seemed to grumble on that we did far too much practising and not enough performing. I still had to do that, even as she dragged me out of our makeshift backstage area.

  “We don’t need to practise! We’ll just make it all up as we go along!”

  Stumbling through the heavy door, I realised that really described Irish Navajo’s whole musical journey thus far.

  Winona blew into the mic. She always did that. It was the closest thing we had to a pre-concert ritual to make sure we performed well. I just wish she did it long before we were on stage, all these eyes glued to us, watching every single strum of our guitars and the beads of sweat that rolled down our faces. (More so me than Winona. Scratch that. Just me, not Winona.)

  I’d never conjured up any sort of solution to settle my nerves before playing music in front of people, to get rid of that awful gnawing feeling of butterflies in the pit of my stomach.

  I’d looked elsewhere for advice. Not from Winona or any of our other music friends, but from reading the autobiographies of famous rock stars I’d idolised. Strangely, despite the hundreds of pages of self-gloating and sexual escapades with groupies written in lucid detail, I could never find a single answer to the solution of stage fright. It was almost like the Gods of Rock had blessed these legends with balls of titanium steel whenever it came time to rock out in front of millions of people.

  Then I found the answer. Not necessarily from a rock star, but from listening to professional wrestler Chris Jericho’s podcast Talk Is Jericho. Okay, he was a rock star as well with his band Fozzy, but he was far more famous as Chris Jericho, the Ayatollah of Rock ’n’ Rolla Wrastlin’.

  His advice was just… to do it. Do it. Your first few times at anything were going to be imperfect. You’d probably be laughed at during your first few attempts at playing. You’d probably wind up hearing a harsh review somewhere in the wild about how you’d performed. But you know what? Fuck them! At least you’d tried, which is far more than many aspiring pro wrestlers and musicians could ever say.

  I clenched my eyes, then looked over at Winona. I found her looking at me too. She was growing impatient, clicking her heels together, waiting on me to strum out the first few bass notes of Redbird’s Reckoning so she could start singing.

  I looked out at the crowd once again. There were a lot of smiling Benjamin fangirls dotted around the place, all their previous venom directed at Winona nowhere in sight. Dr Raj and his family were on our left side, raising their hands in a horribly out-of-place gang sign that didn’t mean the words of encouragement they thought it did in America.

  Then the other shoppers, who regarded us with a bit more curiosity now than the usual reactions of displeasure we’d gotten in the past. But I couldn’t make heads or tails of Benjamin and Felicity anywhere in the crowd. Anywhere at all. No sign of red hair or circular-rimmed glasses among the many faces.

  I realised it was probably better that way. I just wanted to be with Winona as I played. I strummed out a few notes, then Winona started whispering into the microphone with a long, slow drawl that gave me goosebumps on my neck.

  “They gave me a name that wasn’t mine,” Winona breathed out. “Said, ‘Wear it smooth and small.’”

  She trailed her hands down the guitar, playing wildly, not caring if she landed the right or the wrong note.

  “Took the braids from my spine. Hung my language on the wall.”

  I tapped my foot on the makeshift stage in answer. It had happened so many times to Winona in her life, most of which I’d been witness to. That stopped now with Irish Navajo.

  “But there was one who knew me then,” Winona wrapped her hands around the microphone stand, “before the ink ran dry. Before I learned to split my tongue and answer in reply.”

  “He said, ‘You don’t have to shout to burn.’” I murmured out, red in the face. That was my call to speak. I’d written that I would do so in the notes of the songbook. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, but now what I’d done petrified me.

  Winona glanced over at me, then I looked away. Looked around the crowd, hoping there was something far more important going on amongst the crowds of O’Brien’s patrons who were now getting into the groove. Something that would save me the blushing embarrassment of hearing Winona speak the words of a song I’d written for her to sing.

  She snapped the guitar pick down the Fender. “I said, you don’t have to learn to yearn.”

  “Between the silence and the flame,” I mumbled out, already a nervous wreck.

  “We never spoke the same thing by name!” Winona rattled out a few more notes, then I quickly moved my fingertips through the notes of the chorus bass.

  “Redbird rising, soft and slow, I never left — I let you go.”

  “We were young beneath that sky,” I added, “too proud to ask one another why.”

  The crowd started to cheer a bit. From the corner of my eye I could see Dr Raj and Myra giving us another strange gang sign. From all my years of watching Beyond Scared Straight, I deduced that was a Crip one rather than a Blood one. It was his very strange Indian-masquerading-as-an-Irishman way of giving us his seal of approval.

  I pressed my fingertips harder into the strings, and suddenly there was a wave of lights flashing in Winona’s direction. Benjamin really was putting his all into making this student music video of his come into reality.

  I gritted my teeth. So long as Winona was happy, I was happy. I was content to play the middling background bass player if it got her smiling again. And she was smiling. She was moving her slim body around in sensual ways I’d never thought she was capable of.

  It aroused me. Then I suppressed that thought when I heard it. Winona was arousing me, and it didn’t help that she was moving her body around in that tight-fitting crop top and booty shorts as she went through the rest of the choruses.

  I felt myself panicking. I tried to keep up, but I struck a note off-key every once in a while. It didn’t matter. Nobody seemed to notice. Not Winona. Not anyone else in the crowd who kept cheering us on as we reached the last few lines.

  “Redbird reckons, late but sure,” I mumbled.

  “That some silences will forever endure,” Winona sang.

  “But if I sing it loud tonight…” Somehow the words, and not my soul, came out instead.

  “…it’s because you held the light.” Winona finished, the pair of us letting the last few guitar notes ring out without another word.

  All of O’Brien’s erupted into the air, clapping their hands and asking for more. An encore. Anything else this strange partnership of a band had crafted up and were willing to share from their musical trunk case.

  Winona turned to look at me again. Confident. Poised. A little bit sassy and a little bit content we’d gotten the message out about Zitkála-?á in our own way. The Winona I’d always known, save for the recent spruced-up sex appeal.

  “Well, what do you think? How about the Ballad of Mary Crow Dog? Or the Irish Lockout of 1913?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was beginning to realise something absolutely awful.

  “Nathan?” Winona asked, raising her eyebrow in such a way that made everything she would say after this so seductive to me.

  I… I was beginning to fall for Winona.