After lunch Hayley heads home for a bit, then we’re set to meet up with the rest of the band at Zac’s house in a lovely shaded suburban stretch of south Nashville for a night of takeout tacos and bowling. But there’s a pretty big detour before I arrive. I’m driving over with Paramore’s publicist, who had offered me a ride, and right before we pull up to Zac’s, she makes it clear that Hayley is not pleased with some of my lines of questioning during that afternoon’s interview. When I ask which questions bothered Hayley, I am offered few specifics.

When we walk in to hang out with Hayley and the guys, I feel the cold shoulder pretty quickly. Hayley is polite but quiet. She keeps her sunglasses on, fidgets around nervously, and we barely make eye contact. Once we sit down, I have a distinctly uncomfortable feeling of being back in the high school cafeteria, stuck at a table with a friend who is upset with me but unwilling, or unable, to explain why. Fussing with my phone, I notice on Twitter that not long after we had parted ways, she tweeted something stinging: “just enjoy the damn music.”

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A little disoriented, I ask her publicist if Hayley and I can talk about whatever went wrong, and I go perch on the front stoop of Zac’s house to collect my thoughts and wait for an answer. Hayley pops out with a noticeably sunnier burst of good energy, and we sit on the stoop as the sky turns bright gray and then, later, a deep black.

She tells me that after we spoke, she had a panic attack in her car. She apologizes profusely for how this encounter has played out, and tells me that she felt triggered when I asked about the fallout from the lawsuit with her former bandmate. She says that legal reasons make it difficult for her to know what she can and cannot say, and that it both bores her and stresses her out that every recent story about the band has focused on band drama and not on the songs. Fair enough. I keep digging, though, and eventually she admits it was more than that, but that she is having a hard time explaining, or figuring out for herself, what it is.

I offer to let her sleep on it, telling her I was now likely to write about this strange episode, and that it might be good if she provided a more fully realized account from her own perspective. This idea, to my surprise, seems to immediately pique her interest. She quickly agrees and we hug, then go bowling at a little neon spot that doesn’t seem to have changed the decor since the 1980s.

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Zac buys a pitcher of beer and Hayley goes out of her way to be sweet to me, encouraging me even when I miss the pins entirely. Someone, recognizing the band, puts a series of Paramore songs on the stereo, and Hayley jumps up and down, picks up a pink ball that matches her sunglasses — still on her face even at 9:30 p.m. — and sends it flying straight down the gutter, where it gets weirdly jammed. I send a purple ball after it to try to dislodge it, but that only compounds the problem: while Hayley’s pink ball is successfully ousted, now mine is stuck. After I come in last place in our first game, she congratulates me as though I have won, and I’m not certain if it makes me feel like the most popular kid in the gym class, or the helpless dork who got pushed into a puddle and needs cheering up.

