Tay still remembered the first time she'd seen Escape the Fate live. What was it, 2007? Sometime around then. She'd somehow talked her parents into letting her carpool with a friend who had her license all the way to Vega City, to see Ronnie and pals in some hole in the wall venue that probably didn't exist anymore.

It was the first time she'd ever felt anything like love for a guy.

Obviously, she didn't want to have sex with him, exactly. She respected him too much for that. But he just looked so alive, so unabashedly himself, like he was having so much fun. He was just out there with his friends, singing his little songs and looking damned pretty while doing it, and Tay wanted that. The idea of living alongside them, on the tour bus, dedicating every moment of their lives to the scene, to each other, to just having a good time, that was intoxicating.

She kept following Ronnie ever after that. She saw the live news broadcasts, ported at terrible resolution to YouTube, of his refusing to get taken to prison peacefully (after having only ended up there in the first place because he refused to piss in a cup, but back in 08 no one believed Craig about that). She followed him on MySpace and was there every time he ended up ranting in all caps at his haters, Max, or whatever. (Wait, how was he getting access to the Internet in prison?) And then she was there when the Falling In Reverse MySpace page stopped being updated by him, and suddenly became much more professional and regularly updated.

She kept showing up every time FIR performed anywhere near her, although she didn't travel for it more than she could do as a day trip in her car anymore. She hadn't flown for a concert since college. No concert she'd ever attended since had quite felt the same, and every one got a little bit worse. The music was still great, of course, at least for a while. She still loved the feeling of connecting with her fellow fans. But Ronnie, over time, felt less and less like he was expressing himself and more and more like he was going through the motions to get his paycheck. He stopped descending from the stage to interact with fans, even in the form of expressing his love with 10-pound, sharpened pieces of metal. Meet and greets became scarcer, more expensive, and much briefer once you actually got in. He'd take a half assed picture with you, maybe autograph something if you were lucky, and then kind of snarl and run you off. Really, VIP was only worth it at this point for getting seats.

Tay hadn't really been involved in The Scene, as it were, in a while. She kept showing up for concerts, and still followed things going on in the Falling In Reverse-adjacent space, but the days of showing off concert outfits and swag with her girlfriends on Tumblr were gone. Half of the posts on fan spaces were the fans attacking someone, whether that was Ronnie, each other, or whoever Ronnie's latest punching bag was. Said punching bags were, of course, always women, and never had the platforms to defend themselves. And somehow, no one ever considered that anyone but Ronnie had been in the wrong.

Back in 2013, Tay didn't see anything wrong with half of her Tumblr feed being slash fic and feminism, and the other half being her scene friends gleefully self-identifying as part of the Bad Girls Club and ripping anyone who insinuated that maybe Sally's testimony was worth considering to shreds like a pack of misogynistic Maenads. In hindsight, though, seeing the current batch of fans, and the current state of concerts featuring videos of "haters", who didn't consent to be there, on the big screen, raised up a terrible thought. Part of her didn't want it to be true, since what would that say about her attachment to Ronnie going on 20 years running? But the rest of her went to college for journalism, originally, even though she somehow ended up writing technical documentation, and knew how to read sources.

Was Falling In Reverse always awful, and did I just not notice until now?

Tay flopped back onto the bed in her modest studio apartment, her overstuffed calico cat jumping up after her to investigate. She'd gotten out of work, which had ended up being a bunch of meetings, and support calls she got drafted into because the person who was handling them abruptly quit. She'd gone to college, and gotten into this job, because she wanted to write. She wanted to bring people the truth and uncover bad behavior from institutions of power. And she'd somehow ended up explaining how to operate a settings menu and that no, we don't support Windows 7 anymore, please stop asking.

Tay's cell phone started vibrating against her nightstand. It was sitting on the edge of the particle-board rectangular prism in the first place, so was dangerously close to falling off once she got over there to grab it, having to move the cat off of her legs to do so. Rather than the AI-generated spam call she was expecting, the caller was Krystal, one of the only friends from college she'd still been in contact with. They'd bonded over their mutual music interests and continued dedication to the scene even after the mainstream deemed it dead, despite having little else in common. While Tay had gravitated towards writing, with the original intent of journalism but somehow ending up as a technical writer for a manufacturer of video download software, Krystal had never given up on her scenemo fantasies. Her major was nominally in accounting, at the insistence of her parents, but Tay couldn't recall her ever actually describing anything about class, save all the music and theater electives she took. After graduating and having to persist without her generous merit scholarship, she bounced between various scene-adjacent jobs: working A/V at local event venues, working at several record and musical equipment stores, security at bars (something she was surprisingly good at despite her lack of physical intimidation), and her current gig managing finances for a mid-tier record label. Tay had no idea how she'd managed to survive this long.

Tay picked up the phone, to be met with an exuberant, relatively high-pitched voice, on the other end. Krystal had the accent of a stereotypical valley girl, but the interests and aesthetic presentation of an emo kid even into her 30s. It was a strange combination, but it worked on her.

"Hey, girlfriend!"
"Oh, hey, Krystal. What's going on? Just got out of work. Got shunted into support, even though that's not my department, because the guy who was doing it quit. On one hand, I'm glad they're not outsourcing to a sweatshop or a chatbot. On the other, ugh, I just want to fucking write; why I am in software success meetings."
"Oof, yeah, I've been surprised at just how much of what I'm doing is admin and how little of it actually relates to the music. At least my dad's glad I'm actually using my accounting degree."
"Oh? I wasn't aware you went to class."
"I did. Got pretty much straight As, too. Just didn't talk about it because it was boring as shit. Always been good at math, but I can't say I find it especially fun."
"So, what did you call about? Just to chat?"
"Oh, uh, I actually got a notification just now that Ronnie's livestreaming again. It's on this new platform that does auctions on stream -- Whatever, or something like that? Anyway, uh, he said he was gonna be selling some old Falling In Reverse stuff, so I thought of you. I was thinking maybe we could watch it together, and be on a call so we can make fun of how stupid it is? Dunno if I'll buy anything, but I wouldn't mind getting a copy of his book."
"Just get the PDF from Web Archive. It's what I did."
"Yeah, I know, but I want the glossy pictures in my hands. There's just something about having a book physically that you don't get with a PDF."
"I guess I'll join for emotional support. After all, have to save you from the barbarian legions that are modern Falling In Reverse fans."

Tay and Krystal stayed on their call as they both pulled up Ronnie's Whatnot stream. When Tay set up an account, she included payment information for the auctions, even though she wasn't really sure why. She'd been going to concerts whenever FIR was in the area, about every 2 years or so, but hadn't bought merch in something like 7 years. Really, ever since Coming Home, she felt like Falling In Reverse had lost their aesthetic cohesion, and ultimately, what she admired about Ronnie. He was so unabashedly silly, and himself, that his trying to be "serious" just ended up coming off shallow and generic.

Of course, at this point, so did his attempts at "humor". Only half paying attention in favor of talking to each other, Tay and Krystal half-regarded a 41-year-old man prancing around his house, insulting anything that moved and peddling T-shirts no one bought when they debuted in 2021 to digital feeding frenzies of desperate fans. Meanwhile, other members of Falling In Reverse, Dana Dentata, etcetera, sat in the back of the room looking bored.

It had been something like 3 hours, and Tay couldn't say she was still paying much of anything like attention. She'd been describing a completely insufferable tech support caller from the previous morning who'd tried to evangelize to her about Ubuntu for 10 minutes straight before finally getting to his actual problem when from the corner of her eye, she saw something actually interesting pop up on the screen, Ronnie holding it up to the camera with disdain and at low enough resolution its design was barely visible: a plausible facsimile, at least, of a leather jacket supposedly worn during tours in 2012. There was something of an inherent contradiction in something attempting to resemble a biker or punk jacket that nonetheless was likely specifically tailored to Ronnie's proportions and commissioned to look as intentionally edgy as possible.

Several thoughts ran through Tay's head, including that it was pretty unlikely this was really the case since it had been 13 years, and how, given all his freakish bulking up over the past few years, would it even still fit Ronnie anymore?

Somehow, and she didn't understand how, Tay ended up highest bidder on the damned thing, an amount of time later that felt simultaneously agonizingly long and disturbingly abrupt. The phone call with Krystal went silent for a full 30 seconds, Tay staring at the screen processing what had just happened.

"Holy shit."
"You won. Congrats!"
"I just spent 600 fucking dollars on a jacket, that he probably hasn't even actually worn, and definitely won't fit since it was made for someone 8 inches taller than me."


A little bit less than a month later, the parcel arrived. It was very carefully addressed from a post office a good hundred miles from Ronnie's residence, probably because he didn't trust her knowing his address. (Never mind that he'd shown enough pictures of his house that anyone with enough dedication and street view could figure it out.) Tay immediately called Krystal to come over once they were both done with works, because through some miracle of fate, they'd actually stayed in the same city (Krystal was her only college friend who had) and as the reason she'd made this regrettable financial decision in the first place, Tay wanted Krystal there to see the unboxing.

The cardboard box was thoroughly nondescript, and somewhat crushed on one side. Apparently even though Ronnie was willing to go far out of his way to make sure where he lived wasn't revealed by the mailing location (or to conscript some lackey to do it), he wasn't willing to actually package the damned thing properly or get a reasonable shipping service. At least the jacket was, in fact, inside.

Getting a closer examination of the garment, it was reminiscent of the Good Girls Bad Guys or Raised By Wolves sleeveless vests, except with sleeves. It bore the same generically edgy wolf motif on the back, coupled with some strategically placed (and probably very expensive) graffiti-esque text and patches on either sleeve and a pseudo-military-esque label of "Radke" on the right side front lapel. Frankly, it looked like it was designed to be the most generic Falling In Reverse article possible.

Tay stared at it, uncertain what she'd really spent that money on. She wasn't really in any situations where wearing this thing would be appropriate, not the least of which because her last name wasn't Radke. She had never been a leather jacket kind of person (she'd always been more of the hoodie or flannel kind of emo even when she was into scene fashion). Nor could she even verify that this was ever actually worn by Ronnie live, and did it even matter, because who the hell cared about random live performances in 2012? What she was trying to buy was a memory, that wasn't hers, and maybe hadn't ever been real in the first place. A time, that maybe didn't exist and that she only thought did because she was still basically a kid, that Falling In Reverse was harmless and fun and Ronnie was laughing with the scene and not at them. A time when Ronnie cared about his fans, his bandmates, improving as a person, getting clean, never going back to prison, giving back goodwill to the world, burying the hatchet.

(If you ignore the mic stands, I See Stars, and Bad Girls Club...)

"So, are you gonna put it on?"
Tay was shocked out of her reverie by Krystal, looking wide-eyed and impressed at the jacket. "Have to say, it's in better shape than I thought it would be. And it definitely is very Drug In Me Is You."
"Yeah, I'm not convinced it isn't in this good of shape because he never actually wore it...it does smell like a mosh pit, though, which maybe points to authenticity?"

Tay held up the garment and sniffed it, then immediately recoiled. She did think it had been washed, but sweat, horrible cologne, and beer stuck to it no matter what. She suspected that it was the patches that had absorbed it; back in her patch-wearing days she noticed that they tended to stink and get dirty faster than the rest of the garments they were on. Taking a deep breath (through her mouth, of course), she slid it on over her shirt. It wasn't too bad open, although she had to roll up the sleeves a bit so her hands were visible. It didn't feel all that different on the inside from the oversized flannel she slept in; at least it had a decently soft inner lining. Now, she suspected that had she zipped it, it would end up far too loose in some places and far too tight in others -- it definitely hadn't been designed for someone with boobs, as the positioning of that "Radke" nameplate showed.

Krystal clapped and whistled. "Damn! That looks a lot better than I thought it would."
"What, did you think I'd look like a kid wearing my dad's suit?"
"...pretty much, yeah. But honestly, you pull it off. You should start coming to more concerts with me; I get cheaper tickets since I work for the label now. Think there are folks I've met who'd love that."
"Yeah, if they didn't punch me in the face for being a misogyny enabler or whatever..."

Tay tried to end that sentence with a laugh, but it ended up trailing off quickly into some dry and utterly mirthless notes.

"What's with you? Like, I know you hated the new album last year, but you've been even more down about Ronnie, especially, the entire past month I've been talking to you! Like, sure, his current work sucks and he's an asshole, but that's not what matters! What matters is that it's something that you enjoy, and that brought us together as friends. He's brought a lot of people together and brought them joy like that. Sure, he's mean, but isn't that what really matters?"
"I don't really see how spending 600 dollars on a jacket on a livestream, that goes straight into his pockets, brings anyone joy, Krystal. I guess I've had the last month to...think about this, and why the fuck I did it. It's not that I can't afford it. I could get a house if I wanted; I just don't see a point since I just live by myself with Jingles." Tay gestured towards her thick-bodied cat, grooming himself in the corner and utterly oblivious to anything that was going on.
"But it's that...I think I gave into the nostalgia industrial complex, to use a term from our Tumblr days. I was thinking that buying this jacket would take me back to 2012, where the biggest thing I had to worry about was when the reconciliation tour would happen, and it really did feel like Ronnie was improving at least if you ignored how he interacted with everyone but Max. It just felt so much more innocent. But somewhere along the way, Falling In Reverse fans became awful and it's all about Ronnie attacking people, and who he's siccing them on, and I don't know if they were always like that or I just didn't notice it until now. But it's...it's making it hard for me to stomach, and hard for me to reconcile, all the joy they've brought me, as a band. I guess I was hoping that buying this jacket would bring back all that joy and I'd forget about it, but...I haven't. I just want Ronnie to be fun again."

For a moment, Tay's entire torso tensed up, and she felt something like how it feels when blood rushes back into your foot after you've been sitting on it and it fell asleep without you noticing. Or less pleasantly, like the time she'd ended up in the hospital with severe dehydration during finals and got to feel what it's like to get an IV and feel liquid being pumped straight into your bloodstream. It felt a bit like under the jacket, it was stretching out some sort of tendrils or fangs or something and injecting something into her, or releasing something which sank into her skin. She quickly shook it off, taking a deep breath through her chest and dismissing the whole thing as a jab of nervousness.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to get real with you like that. And of course, don't feel like a bad person if you still like him. This is just me. And really, I want to like him, still, or I want to just be a hater, but whether I like it or not, I can't stop caring. Ronnie's really what got me into the scene, and that's what propelled...the entire course of my life, really; I only joined MySpace and Tumblr and all that for music, but that's how I really discovered how much I liked writing and journalism. Volunteered to do guest posts on some shitty metal blog and that's when I decided I wanted to go to school for news reporting, and how I met you... I know rationally that it's got nothing to do with him, and that if it wasn't Escape the Fate back in 2007, it would have been another band, but..."

Krystal approached Tay from behind and laid a hand on her shoulder, the one over the Radke name patch. Tay turned back to her and smiled.

"Thanks."
"Hey, we've all been there. Honestly, it almost sounds like Ronnie's your shitty ex or something."
That actually got a couple of notes of legitimate laughter. "Yeah, you may have something. Anyway, I'm gonna take this thing off. Sure, it's fun, and maybe I'll take you up on going to a concert with you, but I need to shower and there's no reason to just hang around the house in this thing. Plus, it does kind of stink. Maybe if I just soak it fully in Febreze..."

Tay reached up to the collar of the jacket and casually pulled it down to either side, trying to carefully keep the sleeves from turning inside out.

It wouldn't budge.

Thinking that perhaps something had gotten caught on her shirt, she tried to reach underneath the sleeves and front and back surfaces of the jacket to dislodge wherever it had gotten snagged, but found herself unable to lift it up past her skin at all. She managed to just barely lift up the very end of one of the sleeves -- which prompted a yelp of pain, as it took all of the hair on that part of her arm with it. She abruptly put the sleeve back down and patted the spot of abrupt pain, where the seal re-established itself. Trying to reach back underneath the sleeve as an experiment, she found the same failure she had everywhere else.

"Well, this is unusual. I can't get it off. Krystal? Can you come look at it? Maybe I'm going from the wrong angle or something? Not used to this with jackets, though, especially since this one should be loose. After all, it's for someone a lot bigger than me."
Krystal dutifully approached and followed the same procedures Tay had, getting the same results. She couldn't get the jacket detached from Tay's skin, and what little success she had prompted winces and jerks back of pain as the breaking of the seal ripped off hair, and in one case, skin with it. Tay felt blood cascading down her arm, mingling with that sensation of being injected with venom, or something sinking into her skin, returning. Whatever oozed from this thing was now penetrating her bloodstream directly. Great. After several valiant attempts from several angles, Krystal ceased her efforts and returned to her previous position in front of Tay with an apologetic shrug.

"Huh. That's really weird. Maybe try rubbing alcohol or something? I don't think that would stay sticky during shipping, and don't know anything that would stick to skin that much, but maybe Ronnie thought it'd be funny to prank you by filling the thing with glue or something."
"...yeah, that would be the kind of thing he'd do."

Despite the quality of Krystal's idea, every bathroom and kitchen cleaner Tay could think of that wasn't explicitly labeled as poisonous had no effect on the strange adhesive. If anything, it felt even tighter. Or rather, at the ends of her arms, Tay had stopped feeling it at all, like it had fused with her skin itself. Also, the sleeves had stopped being rolled up, nor did they cover her hands anymore. The tightness continued to travel upwards through her torso. With desperation, she reached into the kitchen junk drawer and produced a craft knife, which she knew could cut leather and denim because she'd used it for modifying clothing before. Krystal looked shocked.

"Woah, are you sure? I mean, that's, like, super expensive!"
"I need to get the damned thing off so I can shower, and it's cheaper to get a cut stitched up at a leather mending place than to unfuse it from my skin or whatever."
"I guess I can't argue with that..."

Valiantly attacking the jacket from several angles, Tay found no results with the knife. Not only did it not cut into the material she was beginning to suspect wasn't actually leather, by the time she'd tried every logical seam, the knife was dull, tarnished, and looked almost like it had rusted or corroded. Whatever this was, it wasn't leather, and a wave of dread moved from the center of her body outwards. There was only one comparable situation Tay could think of.

"You remember those Goosebumps books, from when we were kids? Or Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark or whatever? And how it felt like every other chapter was about a mask that turned into your face when you put it on, or getting an organ transplant from somebody making you act like them, or something like that?"
"You're not suggesting that --"
"Well, do you have a logical explanation for a jacket that should be too big for me, but I can't get off, and seems to be getting tighter or fusing with my skin or something?"
Krystal looked contemplative for a moment. "I guess that is kind of part of Falling In Reverse lore...it wasn't in 2012, but maybe it'll turn you into a werewolf or give you laser eyes or something. That'd be cool."
"I guess. Just hoping I don't end up with the fucking forehead tattoo. Always thought that thing was kind of stupid, and the crown of thorns is even worse."
"How do you feel about horns? If I'm remembering right, he talks about getting them cut off in Fuck The Rest, and the new God Is A Weapon pic has them."
"Why are you so accepting of this. Like, I know we both know that shapeshifting isn't real, and clothes that make you act or look like the person they belong to are a cliche."
"Well, it's Ronnie. Really, the only thing he could do that would be surprising at this point is honestly apologizing. Plus, if you think about it, all the guys in his band do end up looking like him if they stay around long enough...maybe this is why? Honestly, you kinda look like him, save the tits, even now, and definitely when you were younger. You've got the same kind of face outlines, and you were always great at hitting his vocals."
"The perks of being an alto. Well, I guess we'll see if I have to shave tomorrow morning. But, uh, before you leave -- I never figured out how to take off my bra from under a shirt, but I know you can. I've seen you do it. Can you get mine off? If I'm gonna be sleeping in this thing for the foreseeable future, I'm gonna do it unrestrained."

While the awkward adjustments and her friend managing to reach under her shirt despite the unwielding jacket took place, Tay continued thinking about the possibility of a Goosebumps scenario. Surely that wasn't the case -- it didn't make any damned sense in any capacity. After all, Ronnie hated folks imitating him, so there's no way he'd try to turn people into him. But at the same time, everyone in his band did end up looking an awful lot like him -- hell, by the time Tyler left, all he needed was the face tattoo.

What would happen to her relationship with Krystal, and with everyone, really, if she ended up turning into a clone of Ronnie, though? She'd thought sometimes about the idea of if she woke up and found herself to have changed sex during the night (blame it on reading too much fanfic) and had decided for a while now that she'd just go on with her life as normal because it didn't really matter. But who was to say that anyone else in her life would see it that way? The whole thing made her glad that she didn't have a boyfriend, and hadn't since college -- she had better things to do, after all. That would have been hella awkward to explain. Tay didn't feel like a man in a woman's body or anything, but it did piss her off when she was praised for her bravery and ingenuity as a woman in her field or whatever. What mattered wasn't what was in her pants; it was being a damned good writer.

And at least she could be sure that even if she ended up with that stupid fucking face tattoo, nothing could take that away from her. She was less sure about if she could still type if she turned into a werewolf, though, so she was hoping it'd not be that specific version of Ronnie.

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Pub: 10 Oct 2025 03:22 UTC

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