Patrick sets his sticks on the head of a drum. They make a papery thud. “Why are we doing this, Thorson?” he asks. “Why are we practicing every single day? Why are you staying up all night writing songs and losing your mind when we can’t instantly learn them? Why are we doing two goddamn shows a week for free?” His voice is getting stronger. “Why are we even a band? If you’re not all in, why don’t we just shut the garage doors and play some Mastodon songs? Hell, why don’t we just play some Halo? Why are we doing any of this?”

I stare back at Patrick. I’m breathing hard. Words boil inside me.

If I’m all in? He has no idea.

He has no idea how much I want this. The music. The shows. The fans. I want the people in the blur beyond the edge of the stage screaming the words along with me. I want the weight of this guitar in my hands, the strap on my shoulder, Jezz to my left, Patrick behind me, both of them building the layers of sound that I can stand on and sing. I want bigger things than S&A. Bigger things than Minnesota. I want the world to know who we are. I want to be the best. I want to know I’m the best. I want it so much that it scares me.

So much that it’s dangerous.

“I am all in,” I say, in a voice that barely sounds like mine. “I’m . . .”

And then, instead of even trying to finish the sentence, I’m storming out of the Murrays’ garage. I’m stuffing Yvonne into the passenger seat of the battered white car. I’m gunning the motor, and I’m screaming off down the street, toward the only place I can think of to go.

Thea

The house at 751 Franconia Street is empty.

It’s beige and sealed and silent. The For Sale sign is coated with a light layer of dirt, picked up by the wind and pasted in place by months of drying rain and dew. The doors, front and back, are padlocked with clunky gray key boxes, and curtains are pulled over the empty rooms.

But the fence is easy to climb.

It’s a wood-slat fence, about six feet high. It encloses the entire backyard. The gaps between its planks release shredded flashes of Patrick’s backyard, next door at 749 Franconia.

Last Things is practicing.

A few kids from the high school are lounging in the yard, dangling off the lawn chairs, skateboarding slowly up and down the paved walk. Their Converse shoes smack the ground after each sloppy flip. Their voices crumble over the music that pounds out of the garage like an aluminum-sided heart.

Behind the empty house at 751, at the edge of the overgrown yard, there’s a sagging wooden playhouse. Scraps of linoleum on the packed dirt floor. Water-stiffened magazine pictures taped to the walls. Horses. Roses. Wedding dresses. There’s one small, paneless window at the back. Every afternoon after school I sit on an overturned bucket inside the playhouse, beside this window. I can see past the window box full of long-dead and dry geraniums to the fence, through a knothole in the boards, straight into a shady patch of the Murrays’ yard, just beside the garage’s open back door. No one can see me.