Ketchum, ID

ch 30 - both

Julien

    "I miss you more, but I know you're going to kill it tonight. You said you go on at 9?" Jo's voice came through my phone speaker.

    "Yes ma'am. Our opening act goes on at 8, and we go on at 9," I said proudly.

    "I'll call you as soon as I get off, baby," she said, a smile evident in her voice.

    "Okay, I'll talk to you later," I said, not really wanting to hang up just yet.

    "Goodbye, angel."

    As we hung up the phone, I walked to find Phoebe and Lucy.

    "There she is!" Phoebe said as I walked into the room.

    "What's wrong?" Lucy said, immediately noticing something was off just by looking at my face.

    "Just nervous for tonight," I answered honestly. "I really wish my girlfriend was gonna be here."

    "I know buddy, " Phoebe said. "But you know she has work. We'll see her soon."

    We all decided that we were going to wear our custom jackets for tonight with our initials on them to set the tone for this tour, so we all went to get ready. Once everyone was ready, we did some vocal warm ups and headed to watch the opening act. Our opening act for the first three shows here in New York was a local kid that played by himself, and we all wanted to watch. We watched as the crowd grew as his set went on, and I found myself getting more and more nervous as time went on. When he announced it was his last song, I could tell Lucy and Phoebe were getting nervous too. Technically, we still had 20 minutes before we went on, but that thought did nothing to calm the nerves creeping into my body.

    "We got this," Phoebe said with as much courage as she could muster.

    "What if we took a selfie?" Lucy asked. "We could post it on our boygenius account, and we could even send a special one to Jo and Alex so they feel like they're here with us."

    "Yeah! Let's do that," Phoebe said.

    We took the one for Jo and Alex on my phone and sent it in our group chat. Alex immediately loved it, and Jo replied saying she missed us and wished she was here. Lucy took the picture for our instagram on her phone and posted it with "the boys are geniusing" as the caption. Likes and comments flooded the account's notifications, all of our phones buzzing in our hands. We each liked and reposted the picture to our stories, and then it was time to go on. We all left our phones backstage, and got ready to go out and give the performance of our lives.

    As we walked onto the stage, I popped one of my in-ears out to hear how loud the crowd was. I immediately put it back in my ear. I looked out into the crowd and read some of the signs that people were holding up. One of the signs that said "I WANT THE LITTLE BOYGENIUS" caught my eye and I laughed. I wanted to tell everyone I was taken, but I didn't want to force Jo into the spotlight. I know she could handle it, but I don't think I could handle watching people be mean to her for simply dating who she wanted to date.

    "Hello," Phoebe said into her microphone, causing the crowd to absolutely lose their shit.

    "Hi," I said, causing the girls holding the sign to start aggressively fan themselves.

    "Hey," Lucy said, causing me to laugh that we were all so informal.

    "Uh, we're boygenius," Phoebe said. "And we're gonna sing you guys a few songs if you're okay with that."

    "I think they're okay with that," Lucy said, causing us and the crowd to laugh.

    "Okay, then let's do it," Phoebe said back.