@tswiftallday:@lauracaty78 damn. I’m sorry. I hope you’re feeling better now.
@lauracaty78:@tswiftallday one day at a time
@mark_is_normcore:WOWWWWWW. Haven’t heard anything this good in a MINUTE. Where’d they come from?
@harrycarry:I started crying at the :30 mark. Buying this song immediately.
@harrycarry:I can’t find this to buy. Did find a song of theirs called “Head in the Sand” but it’s very different. Any leads?
@cheekydimples19:Isn’t this the band whose manager died? It was like their longtime friend or something. Sad story.
@dennis48smith:I thought it was the singer’s sister.
Chapter 6
Hannah
Sunday, April 14, 2024
The pounding’s either coming from inside my head—which, fair, given what I drank last night—or from my hotel room door, in which case there’s someone I need to murder. I groan, burying my face in my pillow.
“Go away!” My mouth’s dry as the Sahara. I grope around on the bedside table and hit a half-empty bottle of beer. I briefly consider drinking it, then put it down.
“I guess your dignity hasn’t totally abandoned you,” Ginny says from the other side of the bed.
“Hilarious.” I squint against the intense sunlight coming through the blinds. “Great. Another sunny fucking day in California.”
“Not just any day.” Ginny turns on her side and props her head on her hand. Her hair’s rumpled from sleeping. “The first day of the rest of your life, snookums!”
She’s teasing, but today is the first day I’m no longer a Saint. I’m purposeless for the first time since my dad put a guitar in my hands. Imagine what my mother would say if she could see me now, nearing thirty and hungover in a trashed hotel room, with no plans and no future. That she was right all along, probably.
“It’s hard to read your face.” Ginny pokes my shoulder. “Give me a hint.”
I find my pack of cigarettes on the bedside table, shake one out, and light it. “Remember when I won Battle of the Bands in high school and Guppy and Keri Marisculo dumped that pitcher of Kool-Aid on me? And I had to jump into the ocean because I got swarmed by bees?”
“That’s what you’re thinking about? You know it was supposed to be Gatorade, right? Like after football games when the coaches win. But Gatorade is expensive. And none of us realized bees would be so attracted to lime.” Ginny laughs. “God, remember the name of your high school band?”
“Ugh. Riot Babies. Oh my god, remember when the Saints played that bar in Palm Springs and then the four of us and Bowie camped in Joshua Tree?”
A laugh cracks from Ginny. “And Ripper took mushrooms and thought aliens were coming to abduct him? He hid in the tent all night zipped in his sleeping bag like that would save him.”
“He said the rest of us would be safe because the aliens would find us too boring to abduct.”
Ginny wheezes. “Brutal.”
The sunlight seems to shimmer between us, a veil of light and warmth. For a moment, as Ginny laughs, nothing seems solid—not my body or hers, not the crisp white sheets or even time itself, glitching between past and present. I want it to stay glitched. I’m hungry for the past in a way I’m no longer hungry for the future.
“Hey,” I say softly. “We had a good run, didn’t we?”
She stops laughing and looks up, the smile still bright on her face. “The best.”
I take a deep breath. “And were you happy—”
The pounding returns at my door, making me jump.
“Are you going to get that?” Ginny asks.
“I said goaway!” I yell, but an electronic clicking sound comes from the door, and before I have time to react, Theo, Kenny, and Ripper burst through it.
