I blink and lick my lips. I smile again. I nod. I need to stop thinking about Bram when I’m supposed to be working on this song. Jesus.
“I know you’re trying to write,” he says. He tosses me the beer. “But we need to find a drummer. That’s a little more pressing than you finishing a song.”
I nod again as I drain the beer like it’s a glass of water. He doesn’t get it. Not being able to finish this song is stressing me out.
“We need a band name, too,” he adds. “Want to brainstorm that?”
Aden looks over at where I’m sitting on the floor after opening a beer for himself. I shrug and reach for another can.
“Or…we could make some audition flyers,” he suggests next, completely undeterred by my silence. “We can take some to The 715—UL used to play there, right? And put them up online. We can say something like ‘Former lead singer of Unraveling Lovely seeks badass drummer,’ maybe,” he says, and I roll my eyes so hard, they hurt a little. “What do you think?”
“I don’t want to use my old band’s name anywhere. You’re new here, but last summer, we were kind of a big deal,” I tell him, because he doesn’t know any of our history. Last summer we also bombed at Battle of the Bands big-time. He doesn’t know that, either, but it’s a detail I decide to keep to myself.
Aden nods and sips his beer. “That’s my point. We can use that. We can attract a drummer with the name Unraveling Lovely alone.”
“We’re not using UL’s name,” I say again.
He sits down across from me on the floor, and his dark eyes sparkle. I can see his expression softening, that he’s morphing into flirty-Aden, but I did not come over for this. You’re not supposed to date your only other band member, so on a good day, I try to pretend I don’t notice when he flirts with me. On bad days, I flirt back.
He touches my knee. “Sorry, L,” he says. He only calls me L when he’s hitting on me. “I can respect that. And I know the music is important to you. It matters to me too. But there will be time later to write the perfect song.” He reaches for my phone because I always write in my notes app. But the song is still shit, and I don’t want him to see.
I put my phone facedown on the floor before he touches it, and I sigh. “It’s fine. You’re right.”
The thing is, I know exactly what’s broken about this song: it’s the first one I’ve tried to write that isn’t about Bram.
Aden nods, bats his dark eyelashes, and smiles. But when I lean forward for beer number three, he says, “Whoa. Trying for a record?” He reaches for the can sitting on the floor in front of me and shakes it to confirm it’s empty. It is.
I shrug and say, “I guess not,” but my head is screaming Hell yes as he turns the music off and the TV back on.
Aden pulls his laptop onto the floor, and we design some calls for drummers that he says he’ll hang up around campus and I say that I’ll post online. Then we make out a little, because we do that sometimes, and I can almost forget about everything for the first few minutes when Aden’s lips are pressed against mine; when hands are impossibly everywhere at once. But when he laughs and breaks contact and then says, “Jeez, L, let me catch my breath,” I can’t help but remember how Bram and I wouldn’t stop kissing until we were both gasping for air.
I’m a little buzzed—the promise of oblivion almost close enough to touch—so when Aden goes down the hall to use the bathroom, I root around under his bed for the whiskey I know he has stashed.
I tip the bottle into the Cherry Coke I brought with me, and when Aden comes back, I’m sipping it. I’m the most innocent, not-trying-to-get-drunk kid in the world, and I’m staring at my song again.
Some dumb reality show comes on, so Aden changes the channel, and there Bram is again—his name, his face, and one of his videos frozen behind the newscaster’s head—just when I thought I was rid of him.
“You knew that kid, right? He went to your school?” Aden asks, as if proximity is all it takes. As if closeness is what makes people close.
This isn’t the first time he’s asked me about Bram, so it’s not the first time I’ve lied about him.
“You’re from a tiny town, where everyone knows everyone else,” I say, because he is, and high school in Queens is different. “There are thousands of kids in my high school, hundreds in my graduating class. I didn’t know him,” I lie. Again. “But yeah, I knew of him because of football and his dumbass videos. Everyone knew Bram Lassiter.”
I kinda want to say his name again, but I know I shouldn’t, so I try to act like I don’t notice Bram’s face on TV anymore. I ignore the news the way I’ve been trying my hardest to ignore the conspiracy theories that have been all over school and the Internet. There are a million rumors about what really happened to Bram, and suicide has always been one of them.
But when we were together, Bram was a fucking ray of sunshine most of the time. I don’t get how he could go from the happy-go-lucky goofball who loved sports and doing dumb things on camera for laughs to a guy who’d off himself the way they say he did: in a locker room, with pills, all alone.
Aden asks me to sleep over. “Just sleep,” he insists, and I agree because I don’t want to go home, so I text my mom to tell her. We order pizza and watch more TV with the lights out, and I forget about Bram for a while until Aden passes out. Thanks to my spiked Coke, I’m left lying there, wide-awake, tipsy and alone in the dark.
I slide my phone out of the pocket of my discarded jeans. I go to Bram’s profile without really deciding to. I start looking for the photos of us together that I untagged months ago.
My phone is like a time machine. My thumb is the key. I travel back through the last six months with a flick of my finger, and I’m not there, not there, not there.
Until I am.
Thumbnails of Bram and me fill the screen, more than three hundred altogether. I can’t believe they’re all still here. I look over at Aden to make sure he’s still asleep, then back at the pictures on my phone, wondering why (how?) Bram never had the heart (or the balls) to erase them.
In the photos, we’re at my apartment scarfing down takeout. We’re high off our asses on my stoop, red-eyed and laughing. We’re on the subway and then the Long Island Rail Road. We’re on his fire escape and at the beach tanning on matching bright green towels. In one blurry selfie, we’re in his bed, sheets of paper covered in math equations scattered all around us.
Bram sucked at algebra. It’s the only reason we met. Freshman year, he went out for football and made second-string varsity while I was writing sad songs and experimenting with liquid eyeliner. By sophomore year, he’d become the starting quarterback, and I’d joined a pretty crappy band. So the odds were against us. We were on opposite ends of the popularity spectrum. But he was shit at math, and even though I kind of hate school, math’s the one thing I’m good at. Last year, I was already in calc, but he was struggling through algebra 2. I was assigned to be his tutor.