I mouth, “Bathroom.” He points at the tiny restroom door in the corner (practice rooms here are fancy in exactly one way) and moves like a shadow. He closes it quietly, so it won’t click, while I set my face to “harried music student.”
I slide the lock, crack the door. A man in a navy polo stands there holding a clipboard and the kind of flashlight that makes you feel guilty for no reason. He squints over my shoulder like water’s about to pour from the ceiling.
“We had a report of a drip,” he drones.
“From this room?” I widen my eyes. “It’s a desert in here.”
He grunts, steps past me, shines the light into the corner by the baseboard. The beam sweeps right across the bathroom door. It’s closed, solid, deeply uninteresting. I try very hard not to look at it. This, of course, means my eyes magnetize toward it.
“Nothing,” he says, clicks the flashlight off, then clicks it back on at the vent. The fluorescent choosesthatmoment to dim. He tuts. “They never approved the work order.”
“I could start a petition,” I offer, because when my nerves rattle, I get mouthy.
He looks at me like I’m a type of fungus. “Don’t.”
We stand in silence together, two men separated by union membership and a continent of priorities. He scribbles something on his clipboard, then gestures at the ceiling with the flashlight like a conductor dismissing strings.
“Let us know if the light goes completely.”
“I will absolutely write poetry about it.”
He stares.
“I mean file a complaint.”
He stares harder. Then he turns and shuffles out.
I close the door gently, lock it, lean my head against it, and count to five. I’m at three when the bathroom door opens and Ollie slides out, face white around the lips in the way you only get when you’ve held your breath for ninety seconds and your heart considered leaving.
“That,” he whispers, “was not funny.”
I grin because it was objectively hilarious. He tries not to smile. He fails on the left corner.
“We should go,” he says, practical brain wrestled back into the driver’s seat. “If anyone saw me come in here?—”
“They saw a guy in a hoodie go into a practice room,” I counter. “Which, in the music rooms, is… normal.”
“For me?” He doesn’t have to explain. For him, everything is a photo op waiting to explode. For him, a rumor can cost playing time. For him, a glance means a headline.
“Okay,” I say. I mean it. I mean the wordalwayswhen I sayokayto him. “Two minutes. Then I’ll escort you to the stairwell like I’m a suspiciously handsome RA who wants to make sure you don’t vandalize a tuba.”
He rolls his eyes, but the corner smile comes back. “Suspiciously,” he repeats, like he’s testing how it tastes on me.
We sit again, closer this time because the adrenaline made us greedy. He studies my face like he’s trying to memorize it from a distance of eight inches instead of thirty rows of stadium seats. “You cut your hair,” he says, and it sounds like a confession.
“You noticed,” I say, and that sounds like one too.
“I notice…” He stops before the sentence betrays him. “Things,” he finishes lamely.
“I noticed you changed your laces,” I say, because I’m not better. “Blue, not black. And your left wrist is red. Band-Aid duty?”
“Trainer taped it tight. I peeled it off. The tape, not my skin,” he adds when my eyes widen like an idiot’s. He huffs a laugh, then sobers. “You sent me those lines this morning. The one about the locked doors.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not a happy song,” he says.
“Nope.”
