Page 15

I SLOUCHED INTO the farthest picnic table at Cool Beans. Vacationers had confiscated all the tables with shade, so I sat unhappily in the sun in my bathing suit and sunglasses, trying to find a smidge of inspiration. But all I had managed to do was doodle a hole into my tattered journal.

Despite my recent … issue , I’d written songs for the better half of twenty years—I’d written my first one on the back of construction paper in Ms. Gamble’s third-grade class. And now I couldn’t even scratch out a top-line melody. Or lyrics. Or instrumentals. Or verses. A bridge, a pre-chorus—

Hell, I didn’t even have a key signature.

I’d done this for years, I knew how.

And yet all I’d gotten down today were a few flowers in the margins.

The café radio drifted from Five for Fighting to top-of-the-hour hits. A familiar beat thumped over the speakers. Then Willa Grey’s crystal-bright voice sang the lyrics I’d written down on a napkin in a sangria bar, reminiscing about a time and place I still ached for.

I had always written to my emotions, putting my vivid feelings into the stanzas of a song.

It was always so easy for me. It was part of how I created, how I saw the world.

But how did I put feelings into words, into melodies, into songs?

It felt like turning glass to gold—impossible. I couldn’t remember how I did it.

The song mocked me as I stared at my blank page.

And all I could think was—

That familiar gravelly voice said, “I’m so sick of this song.”

I glanced over my shoulder because he sounded like he was right there , but of course there was no one. “What song are you listening to?”

Willa Grey’s vocals crescendoed until the song hit the bridge. It was my favorite part, once upon a time.

“It’s Roman Fell’s ‘Wherever.’ The driver’s got the radio on top hits,” he added, as if he needed to excuse why he was listening to it at all.

“Ooh, a driver . That’s fancy.”

“I don’t drive,” he replied. I wondered if he lived in Santa Ana like his area code suggested. Not exactly a walkable place—those Ubers and Lyfts added up. “What song are you listening to?”

I twirled my pen around on my finger. “The big Willa Grey one.”

The teens at a nearby table bent their heads together and began to whisper, cutting their eyes over at me, and I realized suddenly that it looked like I was talking to myself. I guess technically I was.

Well, that was embarrassing.

I closed my notebook, shoved it in my purse, and made my exit before I couldn’t show myself in Cool Beans ever again.

Besides, the wind had picked up, beginning to blow in a summer thunderstorm from the south.

Large purple clouds buckled in the distance, approaching with steady determination.

I followed the crowd toward the beach, then up the boardwalk to the pier.

Families on bikes zoomed around me, dodging the kids who raced each other to the snow cone man, boogie boards under their arms and sand stuck to their legs.

In the distance, the Marge bobbed along back to its dock, ahead of the storm.

I sat down on a bench at the edge of the pier, picking at a string on the frayed end of my shorts. “Why do you hate ‘Wherever’?”

“I don’t hate it,” he defended. “I’m just tired of it. It’s everywhere and I can’t escape it no matter what I do.”

“Oooh, did you get your heart broken to it? Was it on a mixtape an ex-girlfriend gave you? Danced to it with your date at prom? Walked down the aisle to an instrumental of it?” Really, the more I guessed, the more I wondered about him.

Was he married? How old was he? Did he have a partner? Kids? A dog?

Why did I want to know, all of a sudden?

He snorted. “Nothing so dramatic, I promise.”

But he didn’t elaborate.

I sat there on the bench, my knees bumping up and down. “Do you think ‘If You Stayed’ is a love song?” I asked.

“Sure it is.”

I deflated a little. “Ah.”

He tsked. “Every song is a love song, Jo.”

I … had never thought of it that way. But it was true that most of the emotions I drew on when writing stemmed from some sort of love.

Even the songs I grew up listening to, when Mom put me on her toes and spun me around to “Tiny Dancer” in the quiet of the Revelry, or when Dad strummed his ukulele in the garden while singing “Brown Eyed Girl,” or when Mitch drowned out his feelings as he turned “All the Small Things” up so loud it vibrated all the portraits in the house crooked.

Love in a kaleidoscope of colors.

In the distance, lightning struck the ocean.

There was a thin gray line between the clouds and the sea.

Rain. A tourist asked his partner if it was a hurricane, but hurricanes looked different coming in.

They felt different, too. There was no reasoning with those sorts of storms. This one was just an angry cloud.

It’d pass, like all the others.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Sasha and I were opposites on a lot of things, but the one thing that we agreed on was music.

I guessed there could have been worse things to agree on.

The first big droplet of rain splattered on my forehead, and I decided I probably needed to get to the Revelry before the bottom dropped out.