Chapter 18: Will You Pay?
Galveston County High School
"We're famous! We are absolutely famous!"
Emmett materialized out of nowhere, practically vibrating.
"Is that right," Adam said mildly.
"Why aren't you losing your mind right now?" Emmett stared at him. "You're making me look bad just standing next to you."
"What's there to lose my mind about?" Adam kept walking toward the classroom. "We beat Cash. That was the point. Everything else is just extra."
"Are you serious right now?" Emmett fell into step beside him, gesturing at the hallway around them. "Did you see the girls today? Did you actually see them? We could just—"
He caught Adam's expression and stopped himself.
"Don't do that," Emmett said irritably. "Don't give me that look. I know you've always had girls around, but this is different. This is a different level and you know it."
"I'm not denying that," Adam said. "I just don't particularly need to celebrate it."
Emmett gave him a long, deeply offended look and then gave him the finger.
They walked in silence for a moment.
"You know what's actually a shame?" Emmett said. "If that song had been completely original, you could have done something real with it. Released it. Made actual money. That quality, with proper distribution — you'd be set."
Adam sighed genuinely at that.
He wasn't a music person by nature. He'd spent most of the week reconstructing that song from fragments, and the honest truth was it wasn't his to commercialize. American copyright law was serious and thorough — it existed specifically to protect original creators, and small artists had won significant cases against people who'd done far less than a full commercial release of someone else's work. Using it for a school performance was one thing. Trying to make money off it was a completely different situation.
He let it go. At some point down the road, when his intelligence had climbed high enough that his memory sharpened into something more reliable, he might be able to access material that was genuinely his own to work with. For now, it was just a good night.
"Hey. Adam."
Someone stepped into his path.
Adam looked up. A girl — probably a junior, mixed heritage, striking, curly hair, the kind of confident posture that came from never having had a reason to be anything else. She met his eyes without any hesitation.
"I'm Gretchen," she said. "Are you free tonight?"
Adam blinked.
Girls had asked him out before — his predecessor had that kind of social gravity — but usually with more preamble than this.
"It's my birthday," Gretchen continued. "My family's throwing a party. I'd like to invite—" she glanced at Emmett, who had materialized one step behind Adam with an extremely attentive expression "—your band. Could you come play?"
"Will you pay us?" Adam asked.
Emmett's head turned slowly toward him.
"Of course," Gretchen said, after a half-second of surprise. Her smile widened slightly. "I'll make sure you're satisfied."
She held his gaze for a beat longer than necessary, then turned and walked away.
Emmett watched her go. Then he turned back to Adam.
"I will absolutely be there," Emmett said immediately.
"Good," Adam said.
A moment passed.
"How did you ask her for money?" Emmett said, in the tone of a man genuinely trying to understand a foreign language. "A girl like that just invited you to her birthday party and your first instinct was to negotiate a fee?"
"We're providing a service," Adam said. "Services cost money."
"You are so—" Emmett stopped. "Wait, does that mean we split it?"
"Equally, yeah."
Emmett's outrage evaporated completely. "Okay. That's fair. That's actually very fair."
Adam shook his head.
The financial reality of his situation was something he'd been thinking about more seriously lately. The Duncan family was solidly working class — Bob's pest control business kept things stable, Amy's nursing salary helped, but four kids in the house meant the math was always a little tight. Under normal circumstances it would balance out fine.
But Adam's circumstances weren't normal. Ivy League tuition was significant even with financial aid. Medical school after that was in a category of its own — expensive enough that many qualified applicants spent years working first just to build up enough savings to survive the application process, let alone the program itself.
He wasn't going to put all of that on his parents. He'd known for a while that he needed to start building something, even if it was small. A paid performance here and there wasn't going to solve the problem, but it was a start. Gas money when he got his license next year. A small cushion. Something.
Whether it made him look less impressive to a wealthy girl at a birthday party was genuinely the last thing on his mind.
When Juno and Sheldon arrived, Adam explained the situation.
"Gretchen Venus?" Juno's mouth curved into a smile that Adam couldn't quite read. "Sure. Let's do it."
There was something in her tone that he filed away as worth paying attention to later.
"Sheldon?"
"A party?" Sheldon shook his head firmly. "No. Absolutely not."
This was not a surprise. Sheldon wore latex gloves to hold his own family's hands at dinner. A birthday party with a crowd of teenagers was not happening.
"That's fine," Adam said.
He didn't push it. Sheldon's daily 0.005 wasn't going anywhere, and trying to change Sheldon Cooper's fundamental relationship with other human beings was not a project Adam had the bandwidth for. Besides — would a significantly changed Sheldon even be Sheldon anymore?
Probably not. And somehow that felt like it would be a loss.
End of Chapter 18
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