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I SCRATCHED A deep indent into the corner of my notebook with my pen, trying to come up with something that rhymed with geyser.

Not that the lyric was particularly good—how good could “my feelings for you are like a geyser” be?

—but it was all I had, and if that wasn’t disheartening enough, I didn’t know what those feelings were. Hatred? Love? A fire hose of regret?

It sounded more and more like a depressing porno.

And it didn’t help that I had a song stuck in my head. Not even a song—a mention of a song, a sliver of one. A few melody lines on repeat. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where it came from.

Rooney had texted me earlier today, asking how my vacation was going, but I knew she was fishing for an update on my writer’s block. I just sent her another margarita emoji and hoped she didn’t prod.

Dad came into the kitchen and called to me, “Look sharp!” He tossed me the keys to the Revelry.

They bounced off my hand and landed with a clatter on top of my notebook.

Well, that wasn’t ominous at all. “Why don’t you go open up while your mom finishes up with her rummy tournament?

She’s down in the rankings, so it’ll be a while,” he said, from the other side of the kitchen. “You know how she is.”

I looked back at the notebook, and I couldn’t remember a time when a half-scrawled page ever looked so imposing. I frowned at the keys.

“Make sure the Steinway’s set up for tonight and the shelves are stocked, I have a feeling we’ll need ’em. The Rocket Men always manage to attract the bingo parlor gals on their nights,” he added with a wink. “And besides, you look like you’re stuck.”

I closed my fingers around the keys and held them tightly. I wanted to ask him about the Revelry, about when they decided, what date it would happen, whom they’d sell it to—but all I could think was … “I’m not stuck,” I said a little too defensively. I felt jittery. “How do I look stuck?”

He rolled his eyes, and my anxiety numbed. Because he couldn’t know. I hadn’t told anyone about my writer’s block. “Okay, you’re not stuck , but you don’t look like you’re having fun, either.”

“Work isn’t always fun, Dad.”

“Especially when you work too hard,” he replied. “It does no one good to keep going all the time. You’ll burn yourself slap up. Whenever I need a break, I do something unexpected. Take a walk. Chase some seagulls. Shove firecrackers into anthills …”

“You do not .”

“I used to!”

“What, a thousand years ago?”

“Back in an age before dinosaurs. Did you know they probably had feathers ?” he added, taking a box that read Tobacco from the drawer, and his old pipe out of his shirt pocket. “Wild stuff, daughter, wild stuff.”

I jammed my notepad back into my purse. “You always said seagulls were like pterodactyls.”

“It’s their squawks, I swear. Incites the fight-or-flight response in me. So? Care to do this old man a favor?”

Not like I had much else to do. I swung the keys around my finger and hopped off the stool. “Well then someone has to open, I guess. AC still needs to be kicked to turn on?”

“Like God intended.”

It never changed. “You’re agnostic.”

“Praise be to our spaghetti overlords,” he intoned, shooing me out of the kitchen. Then he popped open the box, and the smell was so strong it alone almost knocked me out of the room. There wasn’t tobacco in there, not by a long shot.

Then again, as long as I’d known my father, there never had been.

I BOOTED UP the register behind the bar and checked the thermostat because it felt hotter than hell in the Rev, but the AC was already cranking— after I’d kicked it a few times—so I hoped that the Rocket Men wouldn’t melt onstage. It was always so much hotter with the stage lights on you.

Every once in a while, I heard the flutter of wings, but when I squinted up into the rafters, there was nothing there. Dad swore he had gotten rid of that errant seagull months ago.

The afternoon sunlight and the bright halogens overhead were not very forgiving to the Revelry in the daylight.

Shadows easily concealed the scuff marks and discolorations on the wooden floors, the nicks in the pillars, the names scratched into the bar and the tables.

Everything was outdated and faded—even the neon lights above the liquor shelves.

At night, I could convince myself that the Revelry was timeless, but in the light of day, all I could see was time.

Even the photographs pinned to the walls in the foyer were faded and yellowed.

In the box office, I found the photo Dad had taken of the Bushels to put up on the wall. So I took the step stool out of the office and carried it with me into the lobby.

There were so many photos on the walls now, it was hard to find space for more. My parents refused to take any of them down, so who knew how many layers there were. I guessed we’d find out soon when they sold the place.

I was so distracted that I didn’t notice the music until I accidentally slammed my toe into the step stool. But there it was— again . The song that was in my head. That damn earworm. Was there a radio on in here?

“You hear it, too?”

I shrieked, throwing my arm wide as I swung around to hit whoever had snuck up behind me—

And remembered the voice in my head.

“You!” I accused, my heart beating a mile a minute. I leaned against the wall, dizzy with the sudden rush of adrenaline. “Don’t do that!”

“Sorry, I just—I keep hearing that song.”

“What song?”

He hummed the melody that I’d just heard, too, and my stomach twisted.

Of course. It must be coming from his head, and now it was in mine. “I can’t get it out of my head no matter what I do. What’s it from?”

“Wait—so it’s not coming from you?” He sounded confused. “I thought you’d know.”

Well, that complicated things. “I’ve never heard it before in my life,” I admitted. “Well, I don’t think so anyway, but I don’t even know the entire song. Just that part.”

“Me, too,” he replied troubledly. “It’s an earworm.”

“Great. So not only do I have you in my head,” I said, climbing the stool and pinning the Bushels to the wall, “but also a melody to a song neither of us knows.”

“I’m not sure which is worse.”

“You, probably.” I sighed then, and climbed back down again, inspecting my handiwork. “Maybe I can start singing ‘The Song That Doesn’t End’—that always kills my earworms. Maybe it’ll expel you, too.”

“I’ll just raise you ‘99 Bottles’ and we’ll see who leaves first.”

“Wow, those are fighting words,” I warned, and left for the theater again. I still had to prep the bar, stock the bathrooms, disassociate into the distance … “I have a brother—I’m a master at ignoring annoying people.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

“Only if you like losing.”

He barked a laugh. “I decided to play music for a living. I live for disappointment.”

I cocked my head. A musician? That explained his earlier curiosity about whether I was one.

“Not a fan of musicians?” he asked hesitantly, having heard my worried thought.

“Sorry, no. It’s not that. It’s just …”

An image flickered in my head: Sebastian Fell’s smarmy smirk. The way he leaned against the railing toward me. The condescending note in his voice as he asked if he’d be my muse.

Turns out, I didn’t even have to think up a lie when I said, “I had a bad experience with a musician.”

“A bad date?”

Sebastian Fell’s kiss came to mind. The softness of it. The way it felt so different from the man who spoke to me a few moments later. “Something like that,” I admitted. “He didn’t seem to really respect me.”

“He sounds like an ass.”

I felt my ears go red. “That’s nice of you.”

“I only say it because it’s true,” he replied.

“Thank you, then.” I grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator under the bar top and headed for the loading dock in the back, pulling up the aluminum door, and stepping out into the late afternoon.

It was strange how comfortable I was getting with talking to the guy in my head—and how easy it was.

Almost like I could tell him anything, and he wouldn’t judge.

Maybe that was just because he wasn’t really here, and anonymity made secrets easier to tell.

Though, with all the thoughts he’d heard from me, my head had been mostly silent for the better half of the day. “Hey, how come I can’t hear you more?”

“You can’t?” He seemed surprised. “I guess I just don’t have a lot going on. Your mind seems … busy, to say the least.”

Was it that simple? My brain was just too loud? Because it was loud—so very loud all the time. Full of anxieties and what-ifs and reminders of things I needed to do and hadn’t done and wanted to, haunted by the ever-nearing deadline of whatever I had to write next.

“I envy you, then,” I admitted quietly, sitting down on the edge of the loading dock to wait for the Rocket Men. A truck went by blaring country music.

“I was about to say the same—I can’t stand it when my head is empty. The silence feels crushing.”

“So does all the noise,” I whispered. “Wanna trade lives?”

“I don’t think you’d want mine.”

I stared out toward the ocean, where a flock of seagulls circled, diving and coming back up, probably after some poor tourist with a bag of fries from the corn dog stand.

In a month I would leave Vienna Shores and say goodbye to everything I remembered, everything I loved, because time was swiftly washing it all away like sand back out into the sea.

The next time I came back, the Revelry wouldn’t exist, and Mom would be a little less than who she was before, and I would be …

I didn’t know. Thinking that far ahead felt terrifying, like facing a monstrous hurricane as it neared land.

“I don’t think you’d want my life, either,” I replied.

“I guess we’re stuck, then. Do you—would you want to talk about it?”

“No. Having you in my head is intimate enough. It feels less weird if I don’t know you. If you’re just a stranger. But …” I thought for a moment. “I don’t want to keep calling you ‘that voice in my head.’ Do you have a nickname?”

I could hear him shuffling through a Rolodex of names, all too fast to catch completely. What kind of life did he have, to have so many of them? Finally he settled on “Sasha.”

Sasha. I didn’t know anyone named Sasha, famous or otherwise. What was Sasha short for—Alexander, I think? I didn’t know anyone named that, either. My anxiety eased a little bit. “Friends call me Jo. It’s nice to meet you, Sasha.”

“It’s nice to meet you, too, Jo,” he greeted me, his voice warm like fresh cinnamon rolls. I liked it—the way he said my name, kind of like he had a honeyed piece of candy tucked under his tongue.

A minivan pulled off the main road and up to the loading dock ramp, blaring Celine Dion. The license plate read crocrok . This had to be tonight’s cover band. The driver kicked the minivan door open, and five middle-aged men with receding hairlines spilled out in football jerseys and swim trunks.

It was go time.

I popped to my feet and gave them a winning smile. “Y’all must be the Rocket Men. Need help carrying anything inside?”