At night, between running order and lyric polishes, I steal time with Ollie. We’re getting too good at the dance: hallways nobody uses, stairwells that forget people are people, my apartment when Drew is at work and Eli’s on a date and Miles is locked up in his room, the hush that falls in the practice room right after I click the slide lock. We don’t pretend it’s platonic in private anymore. We don’t make promises in words either. We make them with hands on shoulders and foreheads pressed together and the quiet that happens after we both stop talking.
Four days later, I’m dead on my feet at the café when my phone buzzes with a text from him.
Ollie: Film room exploded. Team dinner. Won’t make it tonight.
Me: Be a hero. Eat carbs.
Ollie: Already on my plate. Knock them dead at rehearsal.
Me: We’ll miss your judging.
I mean it like a joke and don’t. He sends a photo of a sad-looking chicken breast and a mountain of rice. I send him a blurry video of Eli yelling at a hi-hat. He replies with a single laughing emoji. It looks like relief.
On day five, my mother calls. The screen flashesMamá, and my stomach does the old pinball machine thing it’s been doing since I was fifteen and started answering toRafeinstead ofRafaeloutside the house.
“¿Cómo estás, mijo?” she asks, and I can hear the sizzle of onions in a pan.
“Bien, Mamá,” I say, and mean it, and don’t. I tell her about classes in a way that would make a guidance counselor proud.What I don’t tell her is that in two days, my band’s stepping onto a stage that could change everything. Call it nerves, call it superstition, call it self-preservation—whatever it is, I can’t have her there. I can’t have any of them there. Not yet. It’s mine, and if I say it out loud, I’m afraid it might disappear.
“Tu hermana dice que vas a venir en marzo,” she says.
I wince when she tells me Rosa said I was heading home next month.
“Sí,” I lie, because March is a century away, and I will deal with March when the calendar forces me to.
She sighs happily. “Te extraño.”
“Yo también.”I miss her too.
After, I sit on the milk crates behind the café and write four lines that feel like they came from the part of me that knows how to be two things at once: son and front man, soft and sharp, quiet and too loud. I send them to him on impulse.
Me: I keep a light on in the room you don’t like / so you’ll know where to leave me when you go / it burns the color of a warning sign / and I stand in it, bright as a bruise.
Three dots appear, vanish, return.
Ollie: That’s good.
Me: That’s because I’m disgusting.
Ollie: You’re disgusting and good.
I laugh in the alley until my manager shouts through the back door to ask if I’ve finally snapped.
The eve of our debut, we do a full rehearsal in the garage. Miles brings a cheap fog machine because he has a sense ofhumor no one expects. It huffs two dragon breaths and then dies. We cheer like idiots anyway.
“Tomorrow,” he says at the end, eyes bright behind his glasses. “Tomorrow we stop pretending and do it for real.”
We stand in a useless circle like a small team figuring out whether to be sappy. Drew breaks first. He throws an arm around my shoulders, hooks the other around Eli’s neck, and drags Miles in by the hoodie. “On three,” he says. “One, two?—”
“Don’t,” Miles warns.
“—three,” Drew finishes, and we yell something incoherent and triumphant that sounds like we might be young.
After, I linger by the door with my phone in my hand until a text lands.
Ollie: Film ran long. I’m outside.
I step into the night and there he is, cap low, hoodie zipped, hands in pockets. We don’t touch. We stand shoulder to shoulder and look at the orange wash of the streetlights like we’re tourists.
