B-side, Part One

"Guilty," I say, holding the fry up like State's Exhibit A. "On all counts. Yes, including the vocals thing. Yes, including the bridge. Yes, especially the bridge."

Dez throws his arms wide enough to endanger the pitcher. "It's their bravest work."

"You've listened to it once."

"Once was enough."

"You've heard it once. That's a first impression, not a verdict. Come back to me after the fourth listen."

The lamp over the booth buzzes on its two-second cycle. Nobody but me hears it, which used to bother me and now doesn't, or so I tell myself every Tuesday. The Rusty Anchor at ten on a June weeknight is exactly what it is—hockey on the TV nobody watches, pool balls cracking, the door propped for the air so the whole place smells like a weird mixture of beer and low tide. The gold light over the booth turns everyone's skin the color of a good cup of tea. It also makes Bram look approximately dead, which he treats as a personal style.

This—Dez across from me, Nikki on the inside, Bram in the corner, Isolde incoming any second now—is the summer configuration. Nine months of the year they're all off at school being other people in other towns, and the booth is just me and the lamp and whoever's in from out of town. Then June washes them all back in like the tide and for one whole season the table is full and everything is exactly the size it should be. I try very hard not to think about August. It's only June. I am not thinking about August.

Nikki, on the inside of the booth, tilts her head at me.

"Okay but—genuinely—what's actually wrong with it? Like. Say the thing."

She’s sounded the call. I’m ready.

"Okay, so—" I put the fry down because I am about to need both hands. "Track four is a Nightglass demo with a new bridge welded on—it's in the credits, same topliner as the Nightglass sessions, it's not even a secret. And you can hear the seam, but not in the audio—in the writing. The pre-chorus sets up the modulation and then the bridge just—doesn't pay it off, it changes the subject. It's a different song stapled to a different song. That's one. Two, whoever mixed Micah's vocal on this record buried his low register under the synths on every single track—the pads are sitting right on his fundamentals, that's not mixing, that's hiding—which—I'm sorry, but the entire reason anyone likes Micah is that he's the only real low sub-vocal in an American group in this decade, and it's the one thing you can't fake, and they mixed it like they were scared of it. Three, and I want to be clear this is not a joke, there are three songs in a row on the back half about being perceived. Three. In a row. About being perceived. If your third release is three songs in a row about being perceived, the album isn't about anything, the album is about the album."

The booth erupts.

"Slander," Dez says.

"Documented," I say.

"Wren, respectfully—"

"Respectfully accepted—"

"—you are being a hater—"

"—I am being a scholar—"

Toby's forearm slides in from my left with a fresh water and takes the empty glass I didn't know I'd finished. I don't look up. I don't stop. I drink half of it while I'm still mid-sentence about the modulation and set it back down without breaking eye contact with Dez and I don't register that Toby was ever there. Or at least, not consciously. I guess.

"The bridge," Dez says, "is a REFERENCE. To the demo. On PURPOSE."

"Then why is it worse."

"It's not worse—"

"Dez, it's worse."

Bram, from the corner, without looking up from where he's been rotating a coaster on its edge—"I mean. Hollow Bright is objectively worse than my semester, and I got a C-minus in a class called Ways of Knowing, so."

The table laughs.

The table laughs for one beat.

The second beat is a second too long.

Dez talks straight over it, warm and quick. "See, Wren, THIS is a hater, this is what a hater sounds like, take notes—" and Nikki laughs behind her hand and I laugh too, on time, and nobody follows up. The coaster keeps rotating. Bram's other hand is flat on the table now, not moving. I go back to the bridge.

Isolde shows up to the table mid-sentence, which is the only way Isolde has ever arrived anywhere.

"—and I told him, I said, Richard, we've been through this, you are a stove, you cannot have opinions about the weather—" She slides in next to Nikki, kisses the top of her head without breaking her sentence, and lands the end of it at me. "—hi, love, what did I miss, are we destroying something?"

"Hollow Bright," Nikki says.

"Oh, good, keep going."

"Also," Isolde adds, unpeeling her jacket down one arm, "I've assigned you a color. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Ethical reasons."

"Ethical," Nikki repeats.

"The colors aren't made up. They're intuited. There's a difference." She says this all very matter-of-fact. "I'll tell you when it's ready to be told."

"That's not how ethics work."

"It's how mine work."

Toby is back. He lifts my canvas bag off the floor—a beer has sweated and dripped off the table onto the strap—and hangs it on the hook on the post. He does it while I'm explaining what a countermelody is. He does not say anything. I'll think about that later.

"Fine," Dez says. He leans in on both elbows. "Fine. FINE. If you're so smart. Best LYRA song. Go. No hedging. No 'it depends.' No 'in terms of.' Best. Song."

The table turns to me.

This is the part.

This is the part where they all look, and I light up like a filament, and I do it anyway. My hands lift on their own. My spine straightens. The fry is somehow back in my fingers.

"Okay, so—I'm not going to name a single, because a single is a marketing decision, not a song—"

"Oh my GOD—"

"—and I'm going to give you a Nightglass b-side, which is Paper Boats, and before anyone yells at me, I want to credit the thread that got there first, which was a fan account called quietarchive, like the word quiet and the word archive, one word, and they wrote a piece back in February about the second vocal on Paper Boats being Micah in headphones singing to himself, and once you hear it you can't un-hear it, and the entire song reorganizes around the fact that he's the only person in the room. Which is the whole album. Which is what Hollow Bright is trying to do and can't, because you can't fake being alone in a room with a producer who mixed you afraid of you."

Silence. Then Dez, quietly—"Okay, that's a good answer."

"I know."

"I hate that it's a good answer."

"I know."

Nikki is writing on the back of her hand with a pen I didn't see her get out. She's writing @quietarchive across the tendon of her thumb, and her lips are moving, and she's saying, "hang on, hang on, I'm putting this on my hand so I don't forget."

Toby sets a basket of fries down at Bram's exact reach.

Nobody ordered fries. Bram doesn't look up until they're already touching his hand, and then he looks up like he's been caught in a room he didn't know he'd walked into, and then he takes one, and Toby is three steps away already, wiping the next table.

"Okay," Isolde says, and pushes a napkin across the sticky patch where somebody spilled cider before we got here, and swipes her sleeve over what's left, and produces—from an inside pocket of a jacket that is too big for her and possibly Vaughn's—a small deck of tarot cards wrapped in a silk square. "Three cards. For Wren. On the house."

The table is the one with the gouge down the middle deep enough to lose a straw wrapper in, and somebody has, and it's still there.

"No," I say.

"Yes."

"Isolde."

"May."

"You hate being called May."

"And you hate being read, and yet." She's already shuffling. Her hands are small and confident with the cards. "It's a three-card. Past, present, near future. It's the appetizer version."

"It's the appetizer of what."

"Don't ask questions of the cards, Wren, it's rude."

Dez is heckling in the background—"read her that she has bad taste, read her that she's wrong about the bridge"—and Isolde does not look at him and does not stop shuffling and does not react, which is a skill.

She lays the first card. "Past. Page of Cups. Which is—okay, this is a kid who is very serious about a small feeling. Which—I mean. Look at you."

"That's not a reading, that's an insult."

"Both can be true."

Nikki cackles.

Second card. Isolde flips it. "Present. Three of Pentacles. This is you at a table, doing the thing where you make the table work, which—again—hi." She smiles at me. It's a nice smile. It's the smile that is the reason I have loved Isolde since I was seventeen and she pulled me into this group by the elbow like I was a stray she'd already named.

"Okay," I say. "Fine. Two out of two. Insulting."

"Accurate."

"Accurate is insulting."

She's laughing. She turns the third card.

Her face changes.

It's a half-second. Less. Her smile drops for half a second and her whole face just—flattens—and then she picks the card up too fast, and she looks at it a beat too long, holding it close to her chest so the back is to the table, and I watch her.

Nobody else sees it. Dez is still heckling. Nikki is still writing on her hand. Bram is eating a fry.

I see it.

"That one's mine," Isolde says, light, easy, already sliding the card into her left jacket pocket. "Not yours. Sorry, love, misdeal. The universe got its wires crossed." And she is already turning to Dez. "You. You I'm going to read next and it is going to be devastating."

Under the table her knee is doing the small fast bounce.

"Please," Dez says. "Devastate me."

And she does, and it's funny, and everyone laughs.

I almost ask.

I open my mouth and I think about the question—hey, what was that, what did you see—and it sits on the back of my tongue and I know I don't want the answer, and I say instead, "If it said I have bad taste in men, I already know," and Isolde laughs the exact right amount and pats my hand and moves on.

My other hand goes into my jacket pocket. My fingers find the hole. I worry it a little wider.

Later—I don't know how much later—Isolde says, into the middle of a story that isn't about Vaughn, "Oh, Vaughn's coming up next weekend. Probably."

Probably.

Nikki brightens. "Oh! That's—that's good, right? That's a good thing?"

"Mm-hm," Isolde says, warmly, to a point in the air three feet to the left of anyone at the table. "Yeah. It'll be lovely."

Bram meets my eye for exactly one second and then looks at his fries.

Cindy rings the bell behind the bar, one clean clang. Last call—chairs going up on tables, somebody at the pool table saying “oh come ON,” the sound of the door dragging when someone leaves it and the June air changes pressure in the room. Dez stands up and stretches until something pops and says, into the ceiling, "Fine. FINE. Paper Boats. I concede. Under protest. On the record. With a footnote that says Wren is still wrong about the bridge."

"Noted," I say.

"Loved," Isolde says.

"Wren." Nikki grabs my wrist across the booth. She's got half a sentence on the back of her hand and pen on her chin. "Text me the Nightglass listening order. Like, tonight. Or tomorrow. Whenever. But—tonight."

"I'll text you the listening order."

"With, like, notes?"

"With notes."

"You're the best."

I glow. I glow in a way I would be embarrassed to be caught glowing. My whole chest is warm from it. Nikki is going to listen to Nightglass in the order I tell her to, in the order that is correct, and she is going to text me about track seven, and I am going to be ready.

Hugs happen. Dez lifts me off the floor. Isolde kisses my cheek and says something about the color she assigned me that I can't hear over Bram asking Cindy if the fries are complimentary at last call and Cindy saying absolutely not, sweetheart. They spill out toward the door in a knot, Isolde's arm through Nikki's, Dez already holding the door with his hip. Bram is last through and doesn't turn around.

I stay a second. I always stay a second. I like the booth with nobody in it.

My jacket is at the hook. I get up and pull it on—one arm, then the other—and I'm standing there with my arms in my sleeves and the zipper half up and my hand in the pocket with the hole, and I realize I don't know what I was about to say. I was about to say something. To somebody. About the third card, maybe. About the probably. About the beat that was a second too long after Bram's joke. About Nikki grabbing my wrist and how fast I stopped being glad.

I don't know.

Toby is one table over. He's wiping in slow circles, the rag going around and around a ring that isn't coming up, and he's not looking at me.

"You even like them?" he says. Not stopping the rag.

"Okay, so—LYRA is doing a thing where—"

"I didn't ask what it means." Still circling. Still not looking. "I asked if you like it."

My mouth is open.

"Toby!" Cindy calls, from the bar. "Kegs."

"Yep," he says, and drops the rag in the bus tub, and goes.

I stand there.

The bar is emptying around me—the scrape of a stool, somebody laughing outside on the gravel, the door thudding shut, then thudding shut again. My arms are in my sleeves. The zipper is halfway. My hand is in the pocket with the hole and my fingers are through it, worrying at the seam, and I don't know what I was about to say, I don't know who I was going to say it to, I don't know what the answer was.

Overhead, on its two-second cycle, the lamp I have never mentioned to anyone buzzes, and buzzes, and buzzes.