Ripple Effect

by J. Bengtsson

  Of course, Alexa would choose this song—the one AnyDayNow tune that gave me crippling anxiety and depression every time it came on the radio. “Desperate for You,” our biggest hit, was the last song we’d performed that night. Our final bow. And once we walked off the stage after performing it, AnyDayNow was no more.

  I dropped into a chair, instantly morose as I tossed an old band shirt over my head and listened to the lyrics of the song that had ended it all. I took a deep breath in and remembered—my brothers and me standing at the edge of the stage, arms linked, as the screams from the stadium grew louder and more persistent. Emotions were running high. We couldn’t even look each other in the eye for fear of breaking down.

  God, how I missed them… and the nights we’d spent rolling down those lonely highways, sprawled out on the leather sofas, exhausted from consecutive nights of performing. It was in those quiet moments when our bond was tightest. The laughter. Our dreams. Even sharing some of our deepest fears. Okay, maybe not Shawn… That dude was a dumbass… but even he had been a necessary part of our dynamic. I’d never had bonds with other guys before. My brothers had always been competition. They’d never had my back and would just as soon have pushed me off a cliff if they thought their names might be in my will.

  Looking back, it was hard to believe we’d once been strangers, teens brought together for the ride of our lives. We’d strapped in and gone wild—some of us more than others. Look, I’d be the first to admit, I let it go to my head. After a lifetime of being a second-class citizen in my own family, I’d emerged into a whole new world where I was important and girls worshiped the ground I walked on. I’d become a cocky shit, thinking I was invincible and that anything I touched would turn to gold. Time—and an ill-fated solo career—had proven me wrong. And now I’d come to the inevitable conclusion that I was only great as one tip on a five-pointed star. I missed touring and performing. I missed the guys. I missed my whole life.

  We should’ve stayed together.

  I know what you’re thinking—that I was the cause of the breakup. That was, after all, the headline splashed across tabloids the world over. “Jealous RJ Quits AnyDayNow Over Bodhi’s Rising Fame.” That never happened. Sure, I’ll admit to having one foot out the door well before the band actually imploded, but it was Mother Nature who’d dropped the final shovel of dirt on AnyDayNow’s grave.

  If you somehow missed the story of our destruction, a quick Google search would pull up the cautionary tale of my bandmate Bodhi and the swift-moving firestorm that nearly ended his life. But it was the chaotic aftermath, with the news falsely reporting Bodhi’s death, that made the four of us remaining band members unanimously call it quits. At the time, it seemed impossible for the band to weather his loss. Of course, that same Google search would tell you Bodhi showed up alive the next day, having survived the fire by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin. But by then, the damage had already been done.

  My phone buzzed. I swiped it off the counter, saw it was Bodhi, and set the phone back down. This was a pattern that had repeated itself daily ever since I’d walled myself up in this suck-ass fortress.

  “Sorry, dude, not today,” I said, hitting the ignore button. Keeping Bodhi and the boys at arm’s length was essential if I wanted to continue wallowing in my own misery. They had a way of lifting me up, and I had no interest in such positivity.

  Speaking of which…

  “Alexa, play ‘Apologies.’”

  Yeah, I was pushing it now. “Apologies” was the first single off my debut album, and the one I’d been sure would catapult me into a successful solo career. I’d put everything into its creation, nurturing it to perfection. And once it was ready to share with the world, I’d sent it off like a baby bird learning to fly. God, I’d been so proud. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined my songbird would slam into a closed window and plunge to the earth with a sickening thud. But that was exactly what had happened following that disastrous concert on the pier—with the added horror of watching “Apologies” barely slide into the Billboard Top 100 charts before dropping away soon after.

  Yeah. Too bad I couldn’t swipe left on that memory.

  I listened to the lyrics, trying to decipher just what it was about the song that people hated, but as hard as I tried to find fault, I couldn’t. Despite what everyone else thought, I still loved my baby.

  “Alexa, do you like this song?” I asked.

  “Hmm…if you like this song,” she replied, “maybe try Nickelback.”

  “Fuck you!”

  I shot up from my chair and threw the shirt across the room. Everyone was a goddamn critic. Silencing the shrew, I headed for the kitchen and tossed all the ingredients into my blender for the perfect smoothie. Even as everything was collapsing around me, I held onto my fitness routine, eating clean and continuing my workouts, because as my life spiraled out of control, my body was the only thing I had left to count on.

  My cell rang again. Bodhi. Answer the damn phone, I told myself. You can count on him. You know you can. But try as I might, I couldn’t get myself to answer. Grimacing, I let Bodhi’s call go to voicemail. I loved the dude. He was my best friend. We’d done everything together, including being the dueling heartthrobs in AnyDayNow. Ours were the names screamed from the stands. RJ and Bodhi. Bodhi and RJ.

  But then he’d gone on to bigger and better things, leaving me stuck spinning my wheels in the mud. I should have been where Bodhi was, slowly building a solo career with a kick-ass woman by my side. But instead, I’d been overconfident, rushing things in order to be the first Dayer to release a solo album. And now here I was, paying the price for my arrogance. Fuck me. Fuck all those armchair critics who reveled in my despair. And fuck Bodhi Beckett.

  Whoa! Easy, son. This wasn’t Bodhi’s fault. Not even close. He was only calling me because he was worried. They all were. How could I blame them? I’d basically dropped off the face of the earth, ghosting the guys I’d claimed would always be my brothers. But here was the deal: they wanted me to be fine. And I wasn’t fine.

  So I hid, holing myself up in this shitty apartment and living under the alias Chad Woodcock—one of the many fake names the guys and I had dreamed up on our multiple tours together. Back then, it was funny as shit. Now it just seemed sad. Maybe, deep down, I wanted them to find me, and that was why I’d picked Chad Woodcock. It was a clue—a piece of low-lying fruit ripe for the picking. If my buddies were really motivated, if they put their collective brains together, then maybe, just maybe, they’d find me.

  I wasn’t holding my breath.

  “Shit,” I whispered, disappointed in myself. I was such a bad friend. A bad singer. A bad human. I should just go back to bed, pull the sheets up over my head, and drift away. But there was nowhere safe for me. Not asleep. Not awake. Not work. Not home.

  I flicked the blender switch to ‘on.’

  Here’s to the start of another wasted day.

  2

  Dani: Repeat After Me

  Why did he have to be so perfect?

  I dropped my forehead to the table and did a little no-hands head bang. It seemed appropriate, given the circumstances. Last night, I’d been on my first date in months, but somehow, I’d managed to ruin a perfectly good evening by slut-shaming the dude’s mother over a slice of cheesecake.

  “Uhhh,” I groaned, smacking my head against the table one last time. What was wrong with me? Most girls would feel so lucky to get a date with a man like Jeremy. Set up through mutual friends, he and I seemed perfectly matched—so much in common. Some might even say too much. Both driven, articulate, and, dare I say, attractive, we really should have had instant chemistry.

  Jeremy was a catch in every sense of the word. He was gainfully employed and loved his mother—like, a lot. Maybe even more than most. But you know, there was nothing wrong with a strong parent-child bond, even if the son was in his late twenties. Right? I mean the fact that I found it even remotely creepy spoke more to my less-than-stellar relationship
with my own mother than it did Jeremy’s with his.

  And don’t even get me started on my father. Let’s just say he wasn’t in the picture—nor on my birth certificate. My father was nothing more than a vial of sperm, yet he’d still managed to wreak havoc on my personal life. In fact, if my dad hadn’t been such a Lothario in his early years, I wouldn’t be in this predicament with Jeremy. And, yes, I understood that made me sound like I was shifting the blame for my own bad behavior onto my father, but his bountiful right-handed tug-and-pulls in the sterile back room of a fertility clinic really was the bane of my existence.

  Last night was a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Within minutes of the start of the date with Jeremy, I began noticing little things about him… eerily similar things. The way he used ‘so’ as a filler between pauses. The way he traced his finger along the tabletop. The color of his eyes. The brightness of his hair. The dimple in his cheek. It was then I realized—Jeremy and I could be siblings. And once the thought permeated my brain, there was no shutting it off. Suddenly all I could do was picture us finishing each other’s sentences, and not in the cutesy, unrelated sort of way. Or us celebrating the birth of our future daughter, who would arrive in this world sporting an extra nose protruding from her belly button. Dating in the city was hard enough without having to worry that every man I met might actually be my brother.

  The sound of the blender next door pulled me out of my thoughts.

  “Chad,” I mumbled under my breath, steam venting through my ears.

  Every morning, like clockwork, Chad’s NutriBullet roared to life, and given that the wall separating my neighbor and me was as thin as a seaweed wrap, I got to be right there for the action. Living next to Chad was like interactive live theater. If he was watching sports, I heard the cheers. If he was taking a shit, I heard the plops. And if the muscleman next door was making a protein shake, I heard the high-powered crushing. What the hell was he grinding in that thing anyway—a sliding glass door?

  When I first moved in, I’d tried to give Chad the benefit of the doubt, even slipping a reverse-psychology ‘good neighbor’ contract under his door, promising to keep my noise levels down for his comfort—when in reality he was, and always had been, the problem. Not that the strategy worked. If anything, the contract only made him louder and more difficult. The guy had an ornery side to him that I found nearly as off-putting as the shaggy brown carpet covering nearly the entire landscape of his face. But why stop there? Since I was currently on the subject of Chad, I’d be remiss not to mention some of the weird shit he did, like avoiding all face-to-face contact. Look, I’m all for maintaining some distance, but this guy’s aversion to eye contact bordered on obsessive, especially when he covered his face with his hand as I walked by.

  Um…okay, weirdo. You do you.

  I’d originally just shrugged off Chad as one of those antisocial video gamers who’d been weaned off the teat not with a pacifier but with a controller in hand. I imagined the poor guy had only recently discovered the outside world. It was a plausible theory, for sure, but it didn’t account for the muscles I spied every time he came home from the gym. Nor did it explain that heavenly voice of his when he sang along to his guitar. Or the tattoo sleeve that traveled up his arm and over his broad shoulder. Or those striking aqua-blue eyes that occasionally peaked out from under a feather duster of lashes.

  Wait. Why was I thinking about my hairy, jacked-up neighbor? Chad was nothing like clean-cut Jeremy—my possible genetic twin. Oh, man, I had to stop thinking of him in those terms.

  Repeat after me: Jeremy is not your brother.

  I mean, come on. Get a grip, girl. There were four million people living in Los Angeles. What were the odds I was related to a good percentage of them? Deflating at the thought, I realized for the average girl, the odds were very slim, but for me the probabilities were surprisingly high.

  See, I was the offspring of a woman who was too picky to settle down with ‘just any man,’ so instead, she’d handpicked the perfect one—Sperm Donor 649. Don’t get me wrong—I’d never had a problem with my artificially inseminated beginnings. On the contrary, I was proud to share my story, even playing the papa game with the other kids in school until the principal called my mother into the office and put a stop to it. My dad’s a doctor. My dad’s a fireman. Yeah? Well, my dad’s a test tube.

  Yep, it was all fun and games until I got an email from a lawyer two years ago warning me that just as my mother had found Sperm Donor 649’s profile irresistible, so had lots of other women—in total birthing one hundred and eleven artificially inseminated offspring. To date, I had forty-four confirmed half-siblings. Plus, thanks to the rise of the DNA testing sites and our accompanying Facebook page, The Lucky Swimmers Club, the numbers were continuing to rise. And because more than half of us had yet to be identified, that made Jeremy guilty until proven innocent.

  Certainly, my life on the dating front would have been so much easier if my dear ol’ test tube dad hadn’t financed his college education one ejaculation at a time. I don’t want to brag or anything, but the man was a bit of a rock star in the semen-seeking world. Who knew in the mid-90s that blue-eyed med students with above average intelligence and six-foot-one frames would be all the rage? My prolific pop’s ‘contributions’ were so sought after, in fact, that an unscrupulous doctor kept his seed in rotation long after it should have been retired, making Sperm Donor 649 the unwitting commander of a small army.

  Sometimes I imagined my father and wondered if he knew he’d had a part in bringing so many humans into the world, but more specifically, I wondered what he’d think of me. My whole life, I’d tried to live up to his ideals, excelling at school and getting a degree. Would he be proud? God knows, my mother never was. It really didn’t matter what I did in life; it was never good enough for her. Hell, I could bring home Neanderthal Chad to meet the fam and that still wouldn’t come close to the disappointment she’d felt when I’d failed to get accepted to medical school.

  But then I went and totally ripped her heart out by refocusing on another profession—teaching. I swear my mother would probably have preferred I slide up and down a pole rather than have to tell her friends I taught first graders Common Core curriculum and modeled for them how not to hold their crotches when they had to go pee pee. If I was going to disappoint, Mom wanted it to be something grand, something she could then blame on my father’s side of the family. Obviously, Danielle got her severe acne from her father’s side of the family. Or, Of course Danielle is a stripper. What did you expect when her great-great-grandmother, on her father’s side, liked the feel of metal between her legs?

  Don’t get me wrong—my mother could be sweet and loving. If the sun and moon aligned just right. But it was her disappointment in all things ‘me’ that had led to our mini estrangement and my accepting a job in Los Angeles, where the inflated rents forced me to seek out cost-effective housing and live next door to a dunderhead like Chad.

  The blender continued to whirl. Jesus, how long did it take to grind up kale and broken dreams? I got up from my chair, made a fist, and pounded on the wall. In true meathead fashion, my neighbor defiantly switched the blender setting to high and let that baby churn. Such a colossal jerk. Why couldn’t he just fall in line, like all twenty-six of my sperm brothers?

  My phone buzzed on the kitchen table. I picked it up and raised a brow. Well, I’ll be damned. Speaking of sperm brothers, a text had just come through from possible number twenty-seven: Jeremy.

  Had a great time last night, he wrote.

  Really? How? If my excessive incestuous sweating hadn’t turned him off, I was sure the Ancestry.com survey request of his mother’s sex life just before his conception would have done him in. Wow, Jeremy was a hardy fella—like a drought-resistant weed.

  Yes, it was fun

  Can’t wait to see you again. How about tonight? Does a movie sound good?

  Tonight? Huh, let me think. I did have plans to practice knuckle-knoc
king Morse code on the wall I shared with Chad, but I supposed I could put it off for one more day.

  Um, okay, that sounds fun, I typed. What theater? I’ll meet you

  How about I come pick you up instead? Around six

  Pick me up? Given the considerable amount of time Jeremy had spent detailing his high-end apartment, I found it a rather bold move on his part to now freely volunteer to venture over to the dark side of Los Angeles living. But bolder still was that he assumed I’d give out my address to just any old serial killer.

  You live in the Freeport Building, right?

  My eyes rounded. What the…? I was going to die. Right here. Tonight. And it wasn’t like I could count on Chad to save me, what with Wednesday being American Ninja Warrior night.

  But as if reading my mind—don’t siblings have a weird form of telepathy? Or is that twins?—he followed his text with, Not a stalker. Ainsley is my cousin, remember?

  Oh, right. Ainsley. Lives in the apartment complex across the street. Ainsley. My coworker. His cousin. The matchmaker. See? He wasn’t Ted Bundy. Silly me.

  I know, I wrote back adding a crazy-face emoji to throw him off the trail of my craziness.

  We spent the next few texts discussing what movie we’d like to see before he ended our digital chat with: I dig you, Dani. Haven’t stopped thinking about you since last night

  Oh. I hadn’t stopped thinking about him either. Did he have banjo toes like me? Did he grind his teeth in his sleep?

  Stop, I chided myself. This was going to be great. Jeremy was great. There was absolutely nothing to worry about.

  Again, repeat after me: Jeremy is not your brother.