She stormed out the front door, and Kyle raced after her. Jared started to follow, but Hector held him back and they started arguing in low voices. Kyle had been right about Becca being a mess, and I knew they’d been through a few other bassists before, too. Hopefully he could get her straightened out before their audition.

Conversation around the room picked up again, but I slipped down the hallway and found the door Kyle had mentioned. It clicked shut and locked behind me, and the noise of the party faded to a dull thrum. The studio seemed to be a soundproofed garage with cheap carpeting that peeled up in the corners. The far wall had the Villain Complex logo and a bunch of quotes painted in black, including: “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side,” from Return of the Jedi; “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” from The Dark Knight; and “One lab accident away from being a supervillain,” from The Big Bang Theory. Under the quotes was a couch with an acoustic guitar flung across it and a small table covered in empty soda and beer cans. The rest of the studio was filled with microphones, headphones, pedals, amps, and cords crisscrossing the floor to connect it all.

I stepped carefully through the room, like I was walking on hallowed ground, and inspected the instruments on display. Kyle had a top-of-the-line keyboard that I wanted to run my fingers across, but I held back. I didn’t see the bass Becca had used earlier—maybe she’d taken it before her dramatic exit. The drums were here, though, in pieces, waiting to be set up again.

Jared’s black Fender sat in the middle of the room, propped up on a stand instead of in its case. It was already plugged into a small amp, like it was just waiting for someone, anyone, to play it. I glanced around the room—stupid, since I was obviously the only one in it—and took a step closer. I just wanted to look at his guitar, to figure out why it was plugged in when no one was here. Maybe Jared had been checking it after the show and had been interrupted. Or maybe he’d planned to sneak away from the party to be alone, just him and his music behind the soundproofed walls. If so, I could relate to that. Music had always been my way to escape and deal with the world on my own terms. I just didn’t think of Jared as the kind of guy who needed to escape, too.