Another week gone wasted. Another month spent on alcohol. Life as High School sweethearts was much easier for Tony and Olive than it was a few months ago. With the band’s big move to a major record label in around the corner, they were living it up as loud and as hard as they could.
It all began when he proposed a week before graduation, to everyone’s surprise there was no baby compelling him to take this course of action: There was only love. She was aiming for med school while he enrolled in an Art History program. Things rolled nicely even after they married: She had a part time job in a retail shop in the outskirts of town while he spent afternoons with his band Mannequin Voice. The band used to play a few gigs every couple of months whenever a band member or a friend of his needed someone to liven up a party a little. They were proud of what they were doing back then.
Back then, when they still had an ounce of pride.
Things went completely FUBAR (or maybe really good) when a local promoter saw they had something to offer and booked them as the opening act for a relatively large and popular band in the scene.
They destroyed the stage and conquered the crowd.
Even the headliner didn’t see it coming.
From that point on they were booked in almost every local show, and soon they found themselves playing in neighbouring cities every weekend. Things were going great for the band, but not so much for the band members. With loans piling up and no jobs to get rid of them, things were going not so good… especially for frontman Tony, who was always the one to place money in dangerous spots first, and the one who had to endure the hardest parts of parties and public attention.
But this is a story about Olive, so let’s go back to her.
After the initial success of the band Olive decided to drop out in order to manage the band and make sure whatever money they were going to get was not going to the wrong places, and for a while it worked, but someone can only avoid certain vices for so long. Soon the happy couple were the official partying members of the band. The madness never seemed to stop.
I can still remember the looks on their faces when the band’s first country-wide tour became a reality.
Playing gigs near home now seemed relatively cheap compared to what they were spending in this so-called tour. The expenses got to their point where red numbers was all the band came up with… and still, the happiest people in the van were Olive and Tony… always Olive and Tony.
The band got nation-wide attention with the small tour they pulled off, and it was not long before some corporate incubi set eyes on them. A contract was signed, a new tour was booked, and everything was great for the band, except the part where their manager was spending all of their new money for herself and her junkie, but indispensable, husband.
Something needed to be done.
I was the one who came up with the idea.
Luring a perpetually drunk person out of her safety zone isn’t exactly the most difficult thing to do, but it took all other three members of the band to entertain our dearest Tony (I am in the band by the way). The original plan was to make her drink beyond her own limits and then leave her to drown in her own vomit, but we thought that the sight alone would make Tony walk away from us, so we had to go for something a lot less dramatic and a thousand times more discrete.
I had gone through it a thousand times in my head and the execution of the plan was easier than I imagined it would be. A couple of drinks and a little push was all it took to make her fall to unconsciousness: down some stairs and into sleep. She was still knocked out when I was done with the hole… so down she went, and on top of her went five feet of dirt.
So it was easy.
She had spent and stored most of the money we were given in who-knows-what, who-knows-where; for everyone it was fairly obvious that she had run off with the money, which was a relief because I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
Tony grieved her for about half a year, and he wrote our label’s current best-selling album of all time in his grief. He was mostly sad for a long time, but as soon as I saw him flirt with a random girl at a show, I picked my laptop up and searched for a new manager.
Let’s hope this one doesn’t take the money.
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