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THE CURTAINS ONSTAGE opened, and the Bushels walked out to the applause of the crowd and launched into a ghostly wail of “Wuthering Heights.” The synths were so loud, they rattled my beer bottle.

I grabbed it and planted it firmly on the counter, but my head was spinning.

All of a sudden it was too loud to say anything in reply, which, knowing my parents, was surely by design.

The last summer of the Revelry?

The last summer that we would all be—

Be here .

Gigi rubbed her face with her hands and muttered, “ Fuck .”

I barely heard her over the music.

My chest began to constrict, and I rubbed at it absently, taking a deep breath.

It’s fine , I told myself, because I wasn’t going to have a panic attack here at the bar in front of all these people.

I’d never even had a panic attack before, but I heard they felt like this.

Like a heart attack. Like something invisible is squeezing you tighter and tighter and all you can do is try to breathe as you tell yourself, It’s fine, it’s fine—

Mom’s hands came forward and enveloped mine. My gaze shot up to her. She said, “It will be okay, heart.” Then she reached over to Mitch’s forearm and squeezed it tightly, too. She looked between the two of us. “Sometimes change is good.”

But all Mitch could say was, “They’re playing the song you hate.”

She smiled. “We endure the things we must, jackrabbit.”

“Are you sure about this?” I asked, and my voice was too loud in my ears. More angry than upset. It was in sharp dissonance to the Bushels’ howling encore. My mouth felt dry, the taste of metallic dread coating my tongue. “Can’t we talk about it?”

Mom and Dad exchanged a quiet look.

Then Dad said, “This is our decision. We want to concentrate on other things after this summer.”

I slipped off the barstool, feeling my chest tighten. I rubbed at it, but it didn’t help. “I need some air,” I said, pushing myself away from the bar, and fled toward the emergency exit.

AFTER THE BUSHELS played their encore, my parents went home.

I sat out on the loading dock in the back, bumping my heels against the cement ledge, staring out toward the ocean. After a while, the Bushels came out the back, their instruments in tow, and said their goodbyes as they loaded their things into the Revelry’s van, and Mitch drove them away.

“Mitch already gone?” Gigi asked, poking her head out of the door to the loading dock, and I nodded.

She sank down onto the ledge beside me. “I’ve closed out and everything.

Lockbox is in the office. I’ll run the cash by the bank tomorrow before we open,” she supplied, talking aloud more to herself than to me.

I stared straight ahead. “You didn’t know, did you? About …”

“No, Jo. But I had a feeling.”

“Oh.” We sat quietly for a minute, and then she hopped off the ledge. “Well, I’m heading home. Gotta move my car before the laundromat opens in the morning and calls the tow on me again. I can drive you home.”

The thought of going home now, having to face my parents after I fled from the bar …

No, I didn’t want to go home quite yet, but I couldn’t stay here, either, unless … I motioned to the keys in Gigi’s hand. “Can I borrow them?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, and tossed them to me. I caught them in one hand. “I already locked up, so you gotta go around the front.”

“That’s fine.” I twirled them around my finger. They were heavy, since there was a bear claw attached to them, and an AirTag because my parents lost anything that wasn’t nailed down.

“Wanna … chat about all this tomorrow?” she asked unsurely. “I think I need to sleep on it.”

“Yeah,” I replied thickly. “Me, too.”

She hugged me tightly and left for her car with an echo of “good night.”

I HAD TO jiggle the key a little before the door would unlock, and pushed it open with my shoulder.

Moonlight spilled into the foyer, before the door swung shut again.

It smelled the way it always did—of stale beer and musty cigarettes and old metal.

Music venues didn’t have a lot of windows; they were bad for acoustics.

But I didn’t need light to know my way around the Revelry.

Even though I lived thousands of miles away, I could still walk it with my eyes closed.

I drifted through the lobby and into the main hall, sliding my hand along the cement walls until I found the light switches, and flicked them on. The halogen houselights blinked on with a pop , paling out the colorful murals on the walls and the red-rusted steel beams overhead.

If I closed my eyes, I could still hear the squeal of sound checks and the riff of a guitar, the tap of a drum, the screams of the crowd.

The light riggings always let off this warm buzz that sounded like honeybees.

I missed the way my ears rang with all the music, the way the Revelry howled with life.

I know it sounds silly, because how could a stagnant place, a pile of bricks and a few rusted steel beams and scuffed cherrywood floors be more than just walls and a roof?

But when there was music in this place, it felt alive.

Those bricks hummed, those steel beams swayed, the floorboards creaked like a heartbeat.

If this place didn’t have some sort of soul, then it had mine.

I’d forgotten what it felt like to belong somewhere, but there it was—that warm and soft feeling of home .

And soon it wouldn’t be.

I grabbed a bottle of Maker’s Mark from the bar, and a glass, and poured myself a drink. I drained it, the whiskey burning all the way down, and then poured another as I made my way up onto the stage to the closed curtain.

When I was little, I used to jump off it so Dad would catch me, and he’d swing me around and tell me I was so good at crowd diving. That I was born for it.

The thick black curtains were heavier than I remembered as I drew them back to reveal the stage. Mitch—or Gigi—had already pulled the Steinway piano, beat-up and scuffed and loved, out for tomorrow night’s Elton John impersonator.

I sat down at the bench, putting my glass and bottle on the corner, and opened the lid to reveal yellowing ivory keys.

Mom taught Mitch and me everything from “Chopsticks” to Chopin to Cher on this piano. I studied arpeggios and accidentals, chords and codas. When I didn’t have words, there was always a melody that explained my feelings.

I slid my fingers along the keys, fingertips touching the cool notes, brushing across sharps and flats, feeling all the nicks and indentions made by rough hands and too much time.

Mitch had always been better at piano. He showed me up so often, too.

He was always a bit of a brat that way. Music was my passion, but he was just so naturally good at it, it made me want to scream—and he didn’t even want to do it.

He did everything else under the sun instead, and deep down I sort of envied that.

This was all I knew.

I pressed middle C, and the soft, warm note filled the building.

Slightly flat, but the baby grand at the Revelry always was.

It felt like my childhood, and my teenage years, and my young adulthood.

It felt like my first kiss, and my first heartbreak, and the nights Dad pulled me onto the dance floor and spun me around to someone’s cover of “Tiny Dancer” and “Piano Man” and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. ”

There was something beautiful and quiet about the Revelry after midnight, silvery moonlight pouring through the two skylights in the ceiling and spreading long rectangular bars across the scuffed hardwood floor.

Motes of dust drifted in the light, sparkling like stars suspended.

It was so quiet that when I closed my eyes, I swear I could hear the old building breathe.

Its heartbeat was the songs that still echoed.

I was losing my mom. Bit by bit, day by day, her memories eaten by some parasite of time.

But to lose the Revelry, too? My memories of her were alive within these walls.

She was so much a part of this place, she gave up so much to be a part of this place.

When I first told her I wanted to be a songwriter, that I wanted to move to LA, she had this far-off look in her eyes like it was a song she’d heard before.

She’d told me bits and pieces of her life, but when I finally asked why she never pursued it herself, she had shrugged and replied, “Life got in the way.”

Life— this life.

As I thought, my fingers fell onto the piano keys, but every note sounded wrong. They sounded bitter, burnt, sour— curdled .

When I was younger, I saw the world through music. I could bring everything I felt to life in a series of notes, chords strung together like daisy chains. Pain, joy, loss, triumph, love —and I could always bring them to life with song.

I should be able to now. I should be able to take my heartache and fold it into a melody. I should be able to rip out my jagged pain and set it into staccato notes, my sadness into minor notes, my frustration into forte—

But my head was so deafeningly quiet.

In frustration, I slammed my fists against the keys. A loud, dissonant chord replied. Jarring. Ugly.

I pressed my palms against my closed eyes hard enough that color bloomed in the darkness. I opened my mouth—but the knot in my chest was so tight it caught my voice. My chest shuddered.

I couldn’t even scream .

I couldn’t save my home, and the knot hurt, oh it hurt , cutting off the circulation to all the things that once brought me joy, and it wasn’t fair—it wasn’t fair that Mom was losing her memories. It wasn’t fair that my days with her were finite. That this would be her last good summer.

That someday—someday sooner than I wanted to admit—I would have to say goodbye.

There were no melodies for that. No love songs to tell me how.

I was broken. My heart, my head—all of it.

My eyes burned, and my jaw clenched, and I felt that knot in my chest pulling, pulling, picking at itself, itching to unravel, and I just wanted—

I wanted someone to show me how to get through this, how to survive, how to go on. I just needed someone, anyone, to—

Listen —

A sob caught in my throat.

“I can hear you.”

I froze. The voice was gravelly and deep—and not mine. I jumped to my feet, the piano bench’s legs scraping against the floor. The redness in my eyes felt heavy. I wiped them quickly with the back of my hand. My head felt full of sand. “Who said that?”

My voice echoed in the empty music hall.

“Hello?” I called, louder.

“Who’s there?” the voice replied.

I spun around the stage, but there was no one. “What the …”

“Hello?”

“We’re closed,” I informed. I rubbed my nose with my hand and steeled myself. Get it together, Jo. “You can’t be here, you know.”

“I’m not—I don’t think you understand. You can hear me?”

My head was swimming, because that was such a strange question.

Of course I could hear him? Logically I knew that my parents had run-ins with trespassers, but they were usually teenagers who dared each other to break in, and they hadn’t in years.

“We’ve been closed for an hour, dude. Lemme show you to the door. ”

“I don’t think that’ll help.”

“Why … ?”

“Because I—I think you’re in my head.”

That made me pause. Really take it in. Then a laugh bubbled up in my throat.

“Oh my god, I’m way too drunk. I’ve cracked.

I’m so stressed I’m hearing voices. That’s how you know you’re done for the night.

” I grabbed my bottle of whiskey and glass, and sloughed back to the bar.

This was ridiculous. I was talking to myself—I knew I was.

My voice echoed but his didn’t. I placed the bottle back on the shelf and made sure the label faced out like Dad always did. “I’m too old for imaginary friends.”

“I’m not imaginary,” he said, sounding more than a little offended. “ You’re imaginary.”

I finished off the last bit of drink I had and abandoned the glass on the bar counter.

“I’d have better hair if I was,”

I replied. It was time to go home.