Without music playing, the room fades into painfully sharp focus: Flashes of light from a dozen phones taking selfies in the dark. Scratches across the stage as stagehands dressed in as much black as I reorganize the setup. The clatter of glasses from people ordering at the bar, and voices shouting for friends or laughing. Hands, everywhere, reaching.
The space inside my head that the music filled up with warmth moments earlier overflows with something icy. It sends all the messed-up, mixed-up signals to the rest of me.
My stomach and chest flood with the hot, bad kind of butterflies. My palms get slick, and I instantly wish I had my sister’s cool fingers to grab—she was always my safety net when the world got to be too much. Her hospital bracelet, the one I haven’t taken off since the night she died, suddenly feels too tight on my wrist. I look at the glowing emergency exit sign, and I make my way toward it before the alarms sounding in my body get any louder.
* * *
—
When I come back inside, Rohan is onstage with Marc and Jo and Pooja. They’re playing a song I don’t recognize, but the melody is catchy as hell. I say hi to a few kids as I make my way through the crowd, trying to lie kinda low, so Ro doesn’t notice me walking back in during his set, but kids keep shouting my name from almost every direction. It’s hard not to know everyone in this scene if you go to enough shows, and I go to more than enough shows. I have to for the fan site I started with my sister: Badass Music Fanatics.
I holler a few more hellos, but I want to find the rest of the BAMF contingent (aka my real friends), like, now. I’m not sure how much of Rohan’s set I’ve missed, so I pull out my phone to text Deedee. I’ll never find her in a crowd like this, in spite of her hair, which is almost as big as mine, and that in a sea of white faces, she and I are the only two black girls here.
Deedee texts and says she’s only a few feet from the stage and that she’s found Callie, but before I can text back, Jerome is beside me with his lips against my ear.
“Shay,” he says, and I can tell by his voice that he’s been smoking.
I turn around and look at Jerome’s lips, mostly to make sure I hear whatever he says next, but then I can’t look away. They’re heart-shaped and pretty, and he licks them, like he’s going to start talking again, but I stop him by pressing my finger against his mouth. I close my eyes, and I kiss Jerome’s pretty lips because I’ve been kissing them (him?) all month. I don’t want Jerome to say anything because I have a feeling I know what he wants to tell me: something about how he likes me; something about how we should be more than the occasional kiss. But I can barely stay in a room, so I don’t even want to think about trying to stay in a relationship. I’ve never had a boyfriend, and I can’t even imagine it.
I slip my hands into the pockets of his oversize cardigan and grab his lighter at the same time. Then my hands are in the back pockets of his saggy-bottomed corduroys, looking for what’s left of his joint. “Aha!” I say, pulling my clenched fist from his pocket. He smiles, but he doesn’t laugh.
“I saw you run outta here,” he says. “You cool?”
I pull away and look up (because his lips aren’t the only pretty parts of him), but his light brown eyes are searching mine for something I don’t want to share. So I look back down at the things in my hands. He’s one of the few people who understands that when I fly from a room, I need space to catch my breath. It’s one of the many reasons I like kissing him. I nod.
“Cool,” he says.
I give him a quick peck on the cheek before I flick open his lighter and hit his joint. The tiny flame illuminates the ripped band T-shirt I’m wearing, my arm full of bangles, how little space there is between the two of us. Jerome tucks one finger into the stretched out neck of my shirt and another through a loop in my jeans. I inhale smoke, and calm, and him.
This venue is teens only, which means no drinking and definitely no smoking, but I’ve never really let those rules stop me before. I feel my tense muscles relax the tiniest bit as I blow a thin ribbon of smoke into the barely-there space between us where no one will notice it.
He tips his head in my direction like I’m royalty, and the weathered metal of the vintage rings he’s always wearing glint dully under the stage lights. He slips the joint from my fingers and puts it out between two of his own. As he moves away from me, I can see longing in his bloodshot eyes. I wonder if he can see the same thing in mine.
A minute later, I find Deedee. She’s pressed against the wall on the far side of the stage with Callie and a few other people we know from school and shows like this one.
“Hey,” I say. I wedge my shoulder between two guys I know from cross-country and nod at them. My heart revs up from their closeness, but I hook my arm through Deedee’s, and I feel a little better.
“ ‘Hey’?” Callie says, looking annoyed. Her thin, dark T-shirt has holes in it, and her pale skin is almost glowing from beneath it, like pinholes of light.
“Yeah,” Deedee agrees. “Where the heck have you been?” She slaps at my arm. She’s pulled all her super-thick hair away from her eyes into a loose ponytail she probably can’t get any tighter. Her glasses are fogged up, so I pull them off her face and wipe them with the hem of my shirt.
“You almost missed his whole set, and they’re sooo damn good.”
“Unraveling Lovely good?” I ask. (They’re my gold standard for everything.) I place her glasses back on her nose.
“Close,” she says. Then I look at Callie. Her hazel eyes and pursed, glossy lips seem to add, But not quite.
Deedee shows me a few pictures she took of Rohan when he got down on his knees during a guitar solo, and I post the best one to the BAMF account with just the name of his band: Our Numbered Days. I tag my location, and I add a rating: five shooting star emojis in a row. But I want to do a little extra since this is Rohan’s new band. I add a trio of heart-eyed smileys, like I’ve fallen in love with music I’ve barely heard.
“Them likes, though,” Callie says as she looks over my shoulder. She’s a nerd for numbers, and my post has twenty-two likes and eight comments almost immediately.
“Pays to be a little bit Internet famous,” I say, and Deedee adds, “At least on Long Island.”
I silently wish Sasha could see how much our followers love that Ro is in a new band. BAMF was her idea.
The two of us have been obsessed with pop-punk and indie rock since our babysitter introduced us to some of her favorite bands when we were nine, the year before Sasha was diagnosed, so as I listen to Rohan’s next song, I think about what Sasha might have said about it. She’d point out the lyrics of the bridge (something I never notice) or that the bass line is subtle but necessary. And I think that maybe that’s why I love this music so much. Every piece of it—from the distortion on Rohan’s guitar, to the way I can’t help but nod my head to the beat—reminds me of her.