I don’t want to know. I’m too afraid it would be me.

Flynn sags back in his chair and crosses his arms over his ancient Alice in Chains T-shirt. He scratches his upper arm. He’s missing part of one finger on his right hand—his strumming hand. It ends at the middle knuckle with a healed-over stump. I’ve never asked him how it happened. Just like he doesn’t ask me about my roughed-up knuckles or the occasional dark circles under my eyes. “You play any of your newest stuff last night?” he asks.

“Yeah. We did ‘Final Round.’ And ‘Absentminded.’ And I played ‘Deep Water’ on the acoustic. But that one’s not that new.”

“What are you working on now? Anything even newer?”

I run my hand over Yvonne’s glossy side, trying to look cool. I don’t have to wear the rock-star face with Flynn—he’s known me way too long for that—but I don’t want to seem like a psycho, either. “I wrote a few more this week.”

“A few,” Flynn echoes. “This week.”

“Yeah.”

“How many is a few?”

“Five.”

“Whoa.” Flynn tilts his head. Spirals of long gray hair swing sideways, falling over his shoulder. “Five. Are you getting even faster?” He looks at me wonderingly. “Five songs? Five finished songs?”

It’s not me that’s getting faster. It’s something else.

At least the way I play feels like part of me. It’s my own hands holding the guitar, my fingers on the strings.

But the songs—even when they take over completely, they’re not really part of me at all.

“They’re not all great,” I say dismissively. “And some are just solo pieces.”

“Anders.” Flynn shakes his head. He smiles again, teasingly this time. “I’ve never heard you play anything of your own that I’d call ‘not great.’”

Anything of my own. My stomach tightens.

Flynn must see it in my face. “You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Kind of.”

“Because it looks like you’re second-guessing yourself again.” Flynn watches me for a second. “You know how rare you are, right? You know how few high school bands aren’t just playing a set of crappy covers, plus two original songs that are such rip-offs of Metallica or Nirvana that they might as well be covers, too?”

“I don’t know.” I look at my raw knuckles. If there’s anyone in the world who I don’t want to disappoint, it’s Flynn. But that article is still echoing in my head, along with Frankie’s words about muses being real, and graduation is just a couple months away, and everything is starting to feel so huge that I need to let part of it out. Just the tiniest, most careful part. “Sometimes it feels like . . .” I start. “Like this was just given to me. You know?”

Flynn tilts his head. “You mean your talent?”

“Talent, yeah. If you want to call it that.”

“I want to call it that.” Flynn grins. “Okay. Is that a problem?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t that make it, like . . . less real?”