Day 2, continued

Day 2: working on the bus, continued

My work-writing done for the moment, I switched gears to compose a post for my online personal journal, the locked page that only friends with permission could read. The first couple paragraphs came easily: my harried journey to Atlanta, the sensory overload of the first concert, the computer security incidents.

But then I bogged down. I wanted to speculate about who set off the alarm and why I suspected who I did, but I couldn't. Part of my contract was an agreement not to cast any member of the caravan in a bad light, and I'd be violating it if I wrote that Raleigh La Pierre struck me as a weasel and Nancy Wainwright as a sneaky bitch — even on an allegedly secure site. I couldn't send that sort of talk out in e-mail, either, certainly not from the company computer nor even from my personal one. Nor would it be all right to writer about personal conversations I'd had with any of the Caravaners, even the pleasant ones.

Basically, I couldn't write about work. And that sucked. So I shrugged and wrote about the gag order and my dislike of it. This was going to bug me, though. If I was living and breathing work every moment I was on tour, what was I supposed to talk about with my friends? I already felt geographically disconnected from my real life. Not being able to share much of my day-to-day life was going to make the isolation worse. And I didn't want to be that person who only listened (or read) and didn't contribute to the conversation.

Well, perhaps I was forecasting doom prematurely. I'd just have to wait and see.

My eyes were ready for a break by then, so I locked the computer and stood up to stretch. I ran through the loosening-up routine that was practically hardwired into my system from years of T'ai Chi classes. Working from the top down, I limbered neck, shoulders, hips and legs in turn. Then I moved to the common area to get down on the floor and do a better job on my back, which kinks up if I sit too long, especially slouched over a keyboard. I ended in yoga's prayer position on my knees, head to the floor, arms stretched before me, allowing my lumbar muscles to release.

"Excuse me." I heard Nancy's voice above me. She sounded exasperated. I concentrated on relaxing.

"Excuse me," she said again impatient now. Suspecting I knew what was coming, I breathed deeper into my stretch.

"Kielle! Excuse me!" Third time's a charm. I turned my head enough for one eye to peer up at her.

Imperiously she said, "You're blocking the cupboard. You're going to have to move."

Have to? No. I did not have to. Nor did I want to now, even though I'd been just about to get up anyway. The quickest way to get me to not do something is to tell me I have to do it. I don't wear pink. I don't play dumb to attract boys. And I don't interrupt a good stretch just because some screechy bleached blonde tells me I have to.

Sink the chi, Kielle, sink the chi, I counseled myself. There was no sense getting worked up over our first chat of the day. Also, it was very un-Taoist of me to be bothered by Nancy at all. One of my favorite lines from the good book, the Tao Te Ching, says that if you don't put yourself in a position of contention, no one will contend with you. I wanted to be uncontentious even more than I wanted to be stubborn. This time, anyway.

I turned over, lengthened my spine one last time, and tucked my knees up over my right shoulder in an easy backward roll.

"No problem," I said, rising smoothly to my feet. I stepped around her and back to my seat.

After a few moments of rummaging, Nancy walked past me again, empty-handed. Though I recognized the thought as ungenerous, I wondered whether she had really needed something from that cabinet or had just wanted to make me move.

Logging back on, I went to the Praise Caravan bulletin board, the Church Basement, to find out what the fans were saying. I'd been hanging around the Basement since I got the job, browsing the archives and getting to know the terrain. This was a huge task, as there were a couple years' worth of stored material covering numerous topics. There was a forum dedicated to each act, one for music and lyrics, a couple for religious topics, one for stories about traveling to concerts, and a couple for general chitchat unrelated to the Caravan.

The boards were busy, boasting a hundred or more posts a day when the buses were idle and more when the Caravan was on the road. It was a lot to keep up with; I could see why Raleigh had become swamped and given up. Fortunately, I can speed-read like nobody's business, and of course I remember it all.

Through my reading I'd gotten to know who the regulars were and could tell you without checking the stats who had written the most posts on particular topics and the most overall. I'd learned who was acquainted with whom, both online and off, which Basement dwellers were friends and which didn't get along.

I'd also followed them outside the Basement to their fan sites and the vast web of interconnected journals and blogs. That was where the real action was. Away from the watchful eyes of the larger community, praise and bile flowed freely and in roughly equal amounts. Scanning the journals was how I'd learned that certain diehard fans claimed to have done everything from exchange e-mail to the horizontal mambo with various Caravaners, and who was sure who was lying about it. Thanks to the terabytes of photos the fans posted, I'd been able to put quite a few names and faces together. I was looking forward to meeting some of these people in person at concerts. They were interesting for their own sakes, of course, but also because I was a writer on the lookout for good material.

And then (speaking of writing) there was the fanfic. Oh my giggling goddess, the fanfic. Fiction written by fans. They wrote poems and stories, long and short, featuring their favorite Caravaners and, almost always, themselves in one guise or another. I read fantasies about meeting the performers, becoming friends with them, being asked to join the company and — I suppose this should not have shocked me so much — getting the musicians into bed. Women wrote most of the sexy stuff, so the handsome Kelly brothers starred in a lot of it.

I mostly avoided the subgenre of slashfic: romantic and erotic stories centering on unorthodox pairings like Quill/Shyrene or Bill/Nancy, or same-sex match-ups like Quentin/Phillip or even a Sarah/Shyrene/Tiffany three-way. I wondered whether the Caravaners knew this stuff existed. If they didn't, I wasn't going to be the one to tell them.

Today, however, I wasn’t interested in fanfic. I was curious to see what people were saying about me following my debut. It wasn't hard to find the discussion; someone had started a new topic labeled "Kyle Hughes?!!" at 10:07 the previous night, before the echoes of the final encore had even faded away. She's spelled my name wrong.

I took a deep breath and plunged in.

The reactions were generally positive, though tentatively so. I was being given the benefit of the doubt for now. There was wide-ranging speculation about what I would be doing as blogger and webmaster and what changes I would make. A few people either didn't realize or didn't care that I could and would read the boards; some unkind remarks were made about my appearance and my qualifications for the job. A few fans even felt that, given their seniority as frequent contributors, they should have been offered the webmaster position themselves. Hmph.

Quentin cast his gaze across the aisle to see what was on my screen.

"Reading your reviews?" he asked.

Well, that answered one question: Quentin had recognized the Church Basement at a glance.

"Of course," I replied, a little embarrassed at having my vanity so quickly exposed.

"I'd tell you to remember the good ones and forget the bad ones, but I guess you can't do that."

So, he'd heard me explaining my memory to Bill. I had a feeling Quentin Kelly didn't forget much, either.

"No," I agreed, "but I can be selective about what I choose to dwell on>"

"That'll have to do." With a nod he turned back to his own computer, which was displaying a CAD drawing. His bio said Quentin was an architect. Apparently I wasn't the only one working on the road.