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“Good,” she said—much too quickly. Then she realized she had and clammed up. “I mean, why wouldn’t things be good? Did he say anything?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Opened it. Then just … “Should he have?”

“No.” This time, her response was level.

She rubbed the back of her neck. “No, we just … got into an argument a few days ago. Everything’s fine now,” she added, staring straight ahead at the traffic.

The sun was just beginning to sink, though it wouldn’t for a few hours yet.

Summers on the Outer Banks sometimes felt like they lasted forever.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.” She fiddled with the air-conditioning, turning a vent toward herself. “It’s stupid. We got into a fight about whether we should get a bigger bed because Buckley sleeps between us or make Buckley sleep on the couch.”

“Bigger bed, obviously,” I replied immediately. “But really, that’s it?”

“I told you it was stupid.” And she propped her head up on her hand, elbow on the edge of the window. Her thumb tapped endlessly on the steering wheel. She fidgeted when she was thinking.

There was something else besides where Buckley would sleep, but I wasn’t going to push it.

Instead, Gigi began to update me on all the goings-on around town that I’d missed. The new art bar. A Michelin-starred chef opening a restaurant where the old Presbyterian church used to be—

“I think we went to school with his sister, Lily.”

I racked my brain. “Lily Ashton? Wait. Iwan? That Iwan?”

“Right? Went out and chased his dreams, like you.” There was an unfamiliar edge to her voice, but before I could ask about it, she told me about the Starbucks that opened up where the old butcher shop used to be, and the new ice cream shop with weird flavors and—

“Van is back.”

That felt like whiplash. “He is?”

“Oh yeah,” she confirmed. “Mitch ran into him the other night at the pool hall. Says he’s back in town dealing with some family stuff.”

“Ah.” I tried to act unmoved as I went to grab another hush puppy, but I wasn’t hungry anymore, so I set the almost-empty take-out bag on the floorboard instead.

Rubbed my greasy fingers on my joggers. Tried to act cool.

Van. I hadn’t seen him in … well, not in nine years, at least. Not since putting the ex in ex-girlfriend .

“I hope everything’s okay with his parents. ”

“Mitch didn’t say.” She eyed me. “But he did say Van asked about you.”

“Probably being nice. What’d Mitch tell him?”

She shrugged. “Get lost, basically.”

“Ah.” I fidgeted with my fingers, picking at my cuticles, trying to think of something, anything, to change the subject.

A song hummed on the radio. It sounded familiar—but I couldn’t place from where.

Hadn’t I heard it last night in the Uber?

This morning on the way to the airport? Both, if it was popular, I guessed. I frowned, reaching for the dial.

“Oh, don’t bother. The radio doesn’t work,” Gigi said with a shrug.

I paused. It didn’t? “Then where’s that music coming from?”

“What music?”

“It’s—” I paused. Listened. The song was gone. “I … nothing. It must’ve been another car. What do you listen to if the radio’s broken?”

“I listen to Spotify mostly—oh!” She motioned to the glove compartment on the passenger side. “You’re gonna get a kick out of this. I was cleaning out my old junk drawer the other day and found something cool. Check it out?”

“Knowing you? It’s probably a Renegade album.

Or NSYNC,” I joked, digging into the glove compartment—and finding an actual treasure.

One of our burned CDs from our high school days.

We used to make playlists for every occasion, every holiday, every mood.

It was an art form that I took a little too seriously, so seriously that I even made terrible album covers in a bootlegged Photoshop.

Then again, I was just trying to be like Mom, who for the last thirty years has made a mixtape every week.

On the cover was a bad photobash of Chad Kroeger from Nickelback singing seductively to Roman Fell. “No way, you kept this?”

She looked offended. “It’s our best playlist!”

“Yeah, and it’s like fifteen years old!”

She shrugged. “When something’s a keeper, you just know.”

“Mm-hmm, like my brother?”

“Nah, like you,” she replied sappily.

I made a face. “Ugh, gross again.” I opened the case and popped the CD into the player. “Tell me that when we’re both retired and sharing a goat farm in thirty years.”

“I’ve already got the names picked out for those goats. You know, I’ve forgotten what song is first on that thing.”

“You’ll know in a sec.” The player whined as it ate the CD, and then the first track came to life.

The sweet, sweet notes of “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls flooded the car.

Gigi cackled, and cranked up the volume, and for three minutes it felt like we were teenagers again, shout-singing on the way home from school.

Gigi’s voice was bright and warm as she sang the chorus, and I harmonized with her.

She had the kind of tone that made you stop and want to listen, her pitch near perfect.

I tried to imagine how she would have sounded after four years at Berklee, but I couldn’t.

Maybe her breathing would be better, maybe her enunciations crisper, but maybe she’d also forget the lessons her grams taught her, maybe she wouldn’t sound so warm.

The car was newer, and we were fifteen years older, but the song still sounded the same.

It always would.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Gigi finally said as the song ended and moved into Bruce Springsteen. “I’ve missed you, Jo.”

I took out the last hush puppy from the greasy bag. “I’ve missed you, too, Gi.”

VIENNA SHORES, NORTH Carolina, was a blip on the map—and most of the time not even that.

I’d lived my entire life in this beach town surrounded on all sides by water on the Outer Banks.

In the winter it emptied of everyone but the locals, businesses went dark, and coffee shops closed early, and in the summer, tourists migrated from all ends of the earth to walk the beaches and dip into the different art bars and local restaurants, and watch the wild horses gallop through the streets.

We hit beach traffic the second we got into Vienna, alongside cars with license plates from Maine to Idaho, so when we finally saw the sign for Main Street, it was a relief.

That was my hometown in a nutshell. It was a place you loved and a place where you built your life and a place you could never escape, even when you did.

Main Street was crowded tonight, as it was every night in the summer, the Ferris wheel spinning colors all across the boardwalk, the merry-go-round playing a sweet rendition of “I’ve Got Sand in My Shoes” by the Drifters.

The CD faded to the last song—

“Wherever” by Roman Fell and the Boulevard.

The opening drum solo, the piano melody, the crash of guitars—there was nothing in the world like it. But when I closed my eyes to enjoy it, the face of Sebastian Fell flashed into my mind, his stormy gaze, his mouth half-open, dark hair falling gently into his face as he bent toward me to—

I opened my eyes again. My heart hammered in my throat.

“Perfect timing,” Gigi said and turned up the volume, and with the windows rolled down, the music swirled around us in the humid, salty wind.

Roman Fell and the Boulevard were icons in Vienna Shores in the way that Bruce Springsteen haunted New Jersey.

It was where biographies said Roman Fell really got his start.

After years of touring, he stepped onto the stage at the Revelry and sang a song that changed his life forever.

This song.

My entire childhood was filled with it. The lyrics, the melodies, it all took me back to when Gigi and I were both seventeen, drinking Cheerwine out of glass bottles, sand and sunscreen crusted to our skin, singing at the top of our lungs.

There were some songs you made special—songs for first dances, songs for funerals, songs for heartbreak and forgetting.

And then there were the songs that made you.

“Wherever” came to a close as Gigi pulled into a dirt lot a block and a half away from the Revelry, behind a laundromat.

I couldn’t imagine someone like Sebastian Fell coming to Vienna Shores, much less the Revelry.

It wasn’t his vibe. He was made of Hollywood nights, he’d evaporate in the sun here.

Then again, if Mom had stuck with the band, maybe I’d be just like him.

No, she’d never have married Dad, never have had me or Mitch.

I wouldn’t exist. Maybe, in that universe, neither did Sebastian.

“You’ve got a look on your face,” Gigi said as we got out of the car.

“A look?”

“Yeah, a look.” And she scrunched her eyebrows together and frowned, as if mimicking my own face. “I know I don’t sing that badly.”

“It’s silly,” I admitted, but she pulled her arm through mine as we got onto the sidewalk.

“I love silly.”

I debated. “I guess you’d appreciate this, actually. So you know how I went to Willa Grey’s concert last night? I saw Roman Fell’s son there.”

Her eyes widened. “No shit—really?” She stopped in her tracks. “Like, you aren’t pulling my leg. You saw Sebastian. Sebastian Fell? From Renegade?”

“That’s the one.”

“And you’re just telling me now ?” she cried, earning looks from a few tourists driving by in a golf cart.

I turned to her, pulling my arm out of hers. “It wasn’t that big of a deal—”

“Why was he there? Was he with anyone? How close did you get? Did you talk? How does he smell ?” The last question was, regrettably, the loudest.

“I don’t know why, but I thought you’d be normal about this.”

“Normal? I’m so normal. Do you see me? Here?” And she motioned to herself, and struck a crossed-arm pose, hip cocked, leaning back, the caricature of cool. “ So normal. Seriously, though, how does he smell?”

I rolled my eyes. “Like—I dunno—bergamot and oakwood.”

She put her hands to her mouth in a gasp. “You got close enough to smell him.”

And that was the exact moment I decided not to tell her that I’d also kissed him.

No, she would never let me live that down.

She most certainly wouldn’t be cool about it.

Though, Renegade was a decent chunk of her life, so I understood it.

I wasn’t sure I would be normal if I met Roman Fell, either, honestly.

“Willa invited me to a private balcony at the theater and he was there,” I said instead.

“You live such a storied life,” she moaned. “The coolest person I’ve ever met was an Elvis impersonator named Elvistoo.”

“He was kinda an asshole, really,” I admitted.

She rolled her eyes. “You think that every guy is an asshole.”

I gasped. “That’s not true!”

She pulled her arm through mine again and tugged me along toward the Revelry. “I love you, but you’re just a little prickly.”

I could see the glow of the marquee over the buildings, like a beacon calling me. And then when I turned the corner—there it was.

The Revelry.

It sat like a husk of itself, squeezed between a new jewelry store and a dry cleaner. It had weathered more hurricanes than years I’d been alive, and it was finally showing its age, like vinyl spun on a player for a little too long.

The building used to be an auto parts warehouse once upon a time, before my grandparents bought it in the fifties and turned it into a music hall.

The exterior was this old orangish-red brick, with a sign out front that stated the name in big, looping neon-blue letters, and just underneath it a marquee with the night’s entertainment.

It was a landmark in Vienna Shores, and one of the last remaining concert halls where legends once dropped by for impromptu performances and a free beer.

They hadn’t in years, though.

Times changed, musicians retired.

The marquee spelled out the show tonight, though I couldn’t make out who it was.

A few of the letters had blown away in the wind, so the sign looked a little like an afterthought.

Dad was usually very on top of the marquee, so it was a little surprising.

I guessed they were understaffed tonight, if Dad let the sign fall by the wayside.

But still it was good to be home.

Just as I got to the edge of the sidewalk, about to cross the road, a familiar figure came to the front door.

Gigi must’ve texted her that we’d arrived.

She popped up and down on her toes excitedly, her hands clasped together.

Her hair was a little shorter, a little grayer, but she still wore her tried-and-true black T-shirt, worn stretchy jeans, and crocs.

There were sunspots on her tanned white skin, from years of baking in baby oil in the eighties, and her nails were pristine French tips.

She caught sight of us as we crossed the street, and her brown eyes met mine.

They were the same color, same soft round shape.

Then she smiled. There was a gap between her front teeth that, if her life had been different, would have been called en vogue .

As she stepped out onto the sidewalk, the light turned red at the intersection, and I ran across, dodging between tourists heading to dinner and surf shops and the beach. I stumbled on the curb, and she opened her arms, and I fell into my mom’s hug.