Free Break It Up by E.M. Tippetts Page A

eyes search my face. “Please don’t ever lie to me.”
    My blood runs cold. “I’m...not.”
    He lets me go and backs away. I want to grab the front of his shirt and stop him, but I’m too stunned. “All right,” he says. “Fine.” He turns and exits the room.
    I open my mouth to call him back, but my voice is gone. I can barely squeak.

The next chance I have to see Zach is a couple of hours later when he, Logan, and Ben hold interviews with various news outlets. The three of them are seated in one of the hotel suites, and interviewers come through like an assembly line, each for an allotted time slot. Some get fifteen minutes while others have up to forty-five. A translator sits in a chair off to one side, though he isn’t needed for every interviewer. Quite a few speak English. Aidan sends me out to get coffee for the camera crew so they can stay awake to film, though fortunately he doesn’t bother having them record every last second of it. For one thing, several of the interviewers want their footage to be exclusive, and for another, the questions are pretty repetitive; I get the impression the band could do this in their sleep.
    Zach doesn’t even so much as glance at me, but I sense that he’s aware of my presence. The way he doesn’t look at me is almost as conspicuous as staring at me outright.
    I sip my coffee until it’s time to vacate the room, and then Aidan has me carry the spare camera in its case. My job, so far, is what I expected with one exception. I didn’t think I’d be brought along to see the band this much. Given the huge crowd of employees that comes along on a tour, I assumed I’d be just another one of the nameless masses on the outer fringes of all the action.
    The next meal is dinner and the band goes out to a swanky restaurant somewhere while the rest of us eat in the hotel restaurant. I sit wedged between Aidan and Brent, the cameraman who has kind blue eyes and always wears a dusty baseball cap that he turns around backwards whenever he’s operating the camera. Everyone’s too out of it for there to be much conversation, which is fine by me.
    Aidan quizzes me on my knowledge of Spanish. “You seem so…American,” is how he puts it.
    “I am American,” I shoot back. “And I’ve got Spanish ancestry.”
    “You look like you’ve got Indian ancestry.”
    “That too. But my ancestors chose to be Spanish. They were subjects of the Spanish monarch and lived according to Spanish law and had land given to them by the Spanish crown.” Of course, my dad and I were pretty far removed from that line of the family. His mother was Anglo, and I have spent my whole life in Albuquerque.
    “Interesting,” he says.
    I stifle the urge to roll my eyes. I never get why people with pure European heritage feel confident calling themselves American but question me calling myself Spanish. Obviously race isn’t the deciding factor there. But Spain doesn’t seem like a good place to stage a showdown. Unfortunately, modern day Spaniards would probably laugh at me too.
    Once the meal’s over, I check with Aidan, who assures me he won’t need me to do anything else tonight. “Just come by before eight tomorrow,” he says. “We want to get over to the concert venue early to set up.”
    This means I should head back to my room and get ready for bed. I should be glad for a moment’s freedom from all my confusion with Zach.
    I call him.
    “Hello?” he answers on the second ring. He sounds glum.
    “Everything all right?” I ask.
    “Oh, hey!” His voice brightens with recognition. “Yeah, I’m tired is all.”
    “I can leave you alone then.”
    “We shouldn’t have done interviews right after we landed. That’s the kind of stuff my mom would have us do, and it’s crazy.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Our new manager suggested we not do that, and I overrode him.”
    “Have I met your new manager?”
    “Rick? I don’t know. He wasn’t on the jet with us, but he was there when we did