The drive from Louisville to Columbus was less then four hours. They had left early in the morning in order to have the stage set up in time for that night's show.

Gabe was exhausted. After last night's situation with Jordan, he had barely gotten three hours of sleep and was running on caffeine and pure loathing of external stimuli. He scowled so hard that Ryan joked it would break his face. Ryan now had a bruised arm.

They arrived in Columbus before noon. Drew had been strangely quiet and Ryan had informed Gabe that their arrival in Ohio dug up some sensitive memories for the older roadie.

There wasn't much about each other's backstories that they knew. If you were a roadie, you were automatically assumed to have a fucked-up past that you had tried to escape from. It was the type of people Mark recruited.

Gabe had known that Drew was from Ohio and once set to attend The Ohio State University, but he just didn't care. It bared no relevance to his life and Drew had never offered up any further information. At least not to Gabe.

There was often a common trait between all the roadies - one Gabe had picked up on within only weeks of first starting the job. Mark hired fuck-ups. Pathetic lowlifes who had no future and didn't necessarily want one. The band were far from saints, but Mark liked to use the job of a roadie as one's second chance. To him, it was redemption. To Gabe, it was paid entertainment.

Gabe had learnt bits and pieces of the boys' backstories slowly over time. He didn't care, but was usually around when the topic was brought up.

Both Drew and Jordan had been in the road to college before something happened that threw them off the path. For Drew, it had to do with drugs. For Jordan, Gabe could vaguely remember overhearing something about Jordan funding his tuition through prostitution and getting promptly kicked out.

Gabe knew Drew had parents that had high expectations of him. The drugs had only made them realize he would never be the golden son they'd primed for years and a falling out was the result of such a tragic epiphany.

As Gabe could recall, Jordan didn't have parents but he'd never learnt the full story. Whilst Drew was ashamed of his past, Jordan simply liked to mock his with "fuck college" speeches and "what the fuck do parents know anyway? I'm fucking doing this on my own and I'm fine."

Ryan was a different story altogether. His parents were devout Christians and pushed Ryan to follow a path of religious loyalty. Long story short, he'd tripped along that path and had been thrown off it altogether.

Drew, Ryan, Jordan and Gabe were all over twenty years of age. They'd had time to fuck up college and parental relationships and develop addictions and drown sorrows in liquor bottles, but the junior roadies hadn't.

About six months ago, Gabe had noticed that Mark had been hiring a lot more younger blood. He was starting them earlier. Or rather, they were messing up younger.

The youngest roadie, Jacob, was only sixteen years old and Mark moved him around like a chess piece. Jacob hadn't yet been on an international tour so the States were all he had to worry about in terms of consent. Mark was smart. He played dirty but cleaned up after himself. Nothing he was doing would ever be caught out. Not when the roadies had been made to sign non-disclosure agreements upon starting.

From Gabe's brief observation, and the fact that the junior roadies had fucking loud mouths that never shut up, most of them were escapees from their childhood homes.

Riddled with young mistakes that couldn't be fixed, many had left their families and run away to join the circus. At least, that's how Mark heartily told the story. The real version was much more gruesome but Gabe didn't care enough to hear it.

The roadies were a group of misfits and fuck-ups that society had rejected long ago. The band, however, couldn't be crowned in any more golden lights then they already were.

The Seventh Affliction were rockstars rightfully in the title, including everything that came with such a lifestyle. Money, drugs and alcohol were abundant and readily-attainable and they lead a luxurious lifestyle both on the road and in their shared villa back in Los Angeles.

The sheer number of professional accomplishments the band retained was enough to scream their name from every major city on the planet. They were world-wide celebrities and partied with the best of the upper class association. However, they still liked to ride out in the slums for a good time.

Award shows, television and radio interviews, celebrity after-parties and sold-out world tours were only a glimpse at the felicitous lives the band lead. Tyler and Nate had no shame in boasting such assets whilst Austin was more humble in their fortunes. Harley had never been recorded to speak out about such things publically and Gabe knew there would be no record of his opinion from within the stage either.

It was a charmed life indeed, though none of the band members had been born with silver spoons in their mouths. From what Gabe had managed to catch in his two years as a roadie, the band's stories were just as messed up as theirs.

The group had assembled in California where they all attended the same high school. However, Nate was the only band member who was actually from there. Tyler was from Colorado, Austin was born in Illinois and Harley grew up in Maine. The story went that the three of them had moved to California as teens to pursue better music opportunities but Gabe suspected it ran deeper than that.

After all, California and Maine were on opposite sides of the country. Was music really worth going bicoastal for, or was there a different motivation behind it?

***

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