Eli: CARL??? HE SOUNDS LIKE A MAN WHO WEARS VESTS.
Miles: I don’t care what he wears if he pays. I’m making a checklist.
Eli: I’m at Manny’s. I’m buying new sticks. Don’t stop me.
Me: No marching sticks unless you want your wrists to die.
Eli: You never let me have joy.
I’m halfway through a victory lap around the couch when Drew’s door swings open, and I realize he can’t have picked up the texts. He’s shirtless, hair sticking up like he licked a socket. He yanks off his headphones, squints. “Why are you yelling?”
“Lantern gig,” I say. “Ten days.”
He blinks, then whoops so loud the upstairs neighbor stomps the ceiling in protest. He barrels into me, and for one horrifying second, I think he’s going to try to hug Ollie, too, but he veers, throws himself onto the couch arm, and starts smacking the cushions like they wronged him.
“Setlist,” he declares. “We need a setlist. Fast opener, hooky mid, closer that murders.”
“‘Blackout’ opens,” I say automatically. “It’s a freight train.”
“Agreed,” Miles says from the doorway—because apparently he ghosted into the apartment during the screaming. He’s got his laptop under one arm and a pen behind his ear. “We anchor center with ‘Cinder’ and close with ‘Wire.’ It’s new, it’s mean, it sticks.”
Drew points at me. “Front man, pick your poison.”
“Those three,” I say. “We need three more. Plus thirty seconds of intro noise to make the room look up, and no dead air between songs.”
Miles nods, already typing. “We’ll need a click track for transitions. And we should run it like a single piece—no chatter, minimal tuning.”
Eli bursts through the front door with a paper bag clutched like a newborn. “I heard shouting,” he pants. “Is the shouting about us being famous?”
“Work first. Famous later,” Miles says.
“Work now,” I echo, but I’m still buzzing too hard to sit. I turn back to Ollie and, without thinking, put my hand on his knee—just a quick squeeze, a silentyou saw that. His eyes flick down, then up. The corners soften.
I want to kiss him. I don’t. The room is too full of assholes who notice everything and nothing at once.
“Okay,” I say, clapping once. “Rehearsal tonight. Full run. Tomorrow we refine. We’ve got ten days to be the band they can’t forget.”
Drew salutes with a couch cushion. “Aye aye, Captain Ego.”
“Better than Rhythm Boy,” I shoot back.
He points at me like I’ve proved his argument. “Hey, rhythmmakesthe song. Try vibing without me and see how fast the whole thing falls apart.”
The rehearsal spaceis a garage with delusions of grandeur, the kind you can smell before you see: old wood, hot dust, metal that’s been hit too hard. We rent it by the hour from a jazz drummer who never asks questions as long as the cash is in his palm and we don’t blow the breaker.
We load in like we’ve done this a thousand times. Drew coils cables with the care of a man braiding hair. Eli wedges pads under his kick drum and tapes an X on the floor where his throne goes—superstition disguised as organization. Miles builds a little tech island: interface, mics, a serpent of labeled cables. I tune, then tune again, because nerves make strings lie.
When the first hit lands—Eli’s snare cracking the air like a starting pistol—I feel my whole body click into place. We tear into “Blackout,” and the garage becomes a mouth with our song in it. Drew’s riffs cut bright and mean; my bass crawls under the floorboards and shoves the walls; Miles plays like he’s trying to outrun his past life. I sing like I’m telling the room a secret it has to keep.
We finish in a clatter and stare at one another, chests heaving, grins feral.
Eli whoops. “That’s the opener.”
“Again,” Miles says. “With the click.”
We run it until our forearms burn, until the words stop feeling like ink and start feeling like blood. We stitch the transitions, shave the dead spaces, decide on where I’ll count under my breath and where Eli will tick us into the pocket with two soft cymbal taps.
Between takes, I check my phone. A text from Ollie:
