Somebody had replaced Jake’s skull with a subwoofer. That was the first thing he knew, before he knew what day it was or why his mouth tasted like a battery.
Not a good one, either. One of the cheap fifteen-inch cabinets Brad kept in the back of the trailer for emergencies, the kind that buzzed past half volume and rattled anything that wasn’t bolted down. It was thumping now, slow and heavy, somewhere behind his eyes. It took him a long and unpleasant moment to figure out that the bass line was his own pulse.
Keeping his eyes shut, he reached across the bed and felt around the nightstand for anything to drink. His fingers knocked over something plastic, found it again, and came back with a half-empty sports drink that had been sitting there since who knew when. He chugged the whole thing without opening his eyes. It was warm and flat and the best thing he had ever tasted.
He lay still for a while after that and weighed his options.
Option one was to open his eyes. Option two was to never open them again—to become one with the mattress until some future archaeologist dug him up and wrote a paper about it. Early Twenty-First-Century Male, Found Face-Down. Cause of Death: Open Bar.
Option two had a lot going for it. Unfortunately, his bladder had cast the deciding vote.
He cracked one eye. Daylight came through the gap in the blinds like it had a personal grudge, laid itself across the carpet, and found his face. He shut the eye again.
“Okay,” he told the ceiling. His voice came out like gravel shaken in a coffee can. “Okay. We’re doing this.”
The ceiling, which had seen him through more mornings like this one than his mother would ever know about, didn’t have an opinion.
✦✦✦Groaning as he pulled himself upright, Jake sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands and waited for the room to stop spinning. Nineteen years old, and he felt like somebody’s grandpa every single morning. That couldn’t be right.
He was still dressed from the night before. Black jeans, black button-down—the unofficial uniform of a guy whose job was to be in the room without anybody looking at him. He stood six feet tall in his socks, thin but built like he’d done his share of hauling speaker cabinets, which he had. His light-brown hair was cut short and sticking up on one side, and the stubble on his chin had gotten a little past the point of looking on purpose.
The shirt smelled like fog juice and spilled beer and somebody’s vanilla perfume. There was a neon-green wristband on his arm that said OPEN BAR in letters so cheerful they were practically a threat.
Something crinkled when he shifted. He dug into his back pocket and came out with a fold of bills, and on top of them a single hundred, creased into a tight little square.
Right. The father of the bride.
The night came back to him the way nights like that always did—not all at once, but in pieces, like photos somebody had thrown down a staircase. A big man in a rented vest, red-faced and teary, grabbing Jake’s hand in both of his around one in the morning and pressing the money into it. You played her mama’s song. Nobody told you, and you played her mama’s song.
Nobody had told him. That was true. But during the cake cutting, the venue’s background playlist had drifted onto an old Alan Jackson track, and Jake had watched something happen behind the bride’s eyes—quick and private and gone. He’d watched her father go still at the same second. He’d watched a gray-haired aunt reach out and touch the bride’s shoulder without a word. Three people, one song, one reaction. You didn’t need anybody to tell you. You just needed to be paying attention.
That was the thing about Jake, though he’d have bitten his own tongue off before he said it out loud: he was always paying attention. He couldn’t turn it off. Rooms came to him like books left open on a table. Who was mad at who. Who was about to leave. Which groomsman was going to throw up, and roughly when, give or take one round of Fireball. Brad called it his superpower and used it shamelessly—Jake, what’s the floor want?—and nine times out of ten Jake would glance up from the laptop, take in two hundred drunk strangers in one look, and know.
So at the end of the night, when the floor had thinned out to a few slow-swaying couples and the bride was barefoot with her heels hooked on two fingers, he’d pulled that song back up and let it close out the night. The bride had stopped dead in the middle of the floor with her hand over her mouth, and her father had crossed the room to her like a man walking into the sea.
A hundred bucks. Jake turned the bill over in his fingers. It seemed like a lot of money for paying attention. It also seemed, in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on, like not nearly enough.
“Bladder,” he reminded himself, and stood up.
✦✦✦The bathroom was a crime scene of his own making. He ran the tap cold and drank straight out of his cupped hand until his stomach told him firmly to knock it off. Then he opened the medicine cabinet and shook three ibuprofen into his palm.
Six hundred milligrams. Enough to block the enzymes that were busy manufacturing the chemicals currently screaming at his brain that it hurt. He knew that because when he was eleven, he had read the folded-up paper insert from a box of Advil front to back—every word—and then gone looking for more, and kept going until it was three in the morning and he understood more about inflammation than any sixth grader had any business understanding.
He’d been that kind of kid. If he was being honest, he was still that kind of kid. He’d just figured out that people liked you better if you kept it behind a beer.
He swallowed the pills dry, which was a mistake, then drank more water to fix it, which was a second mistake. Bracing both hands on the sink, he looked up into the mirror.
His brother’s face looked back at him.
Not really, obviously. But people had been mixing the two of them up for as long as Jake could remember—at school, at church, at the gas station, once at a funeral, which had been memorable for everybody involved. On mornings like this one, pale and puffy and squinting, the resemblance was almost spooky. Same jaw. Same eyes that went narrow when they were thinking something they shouldn’t say out loud. Same mouth, which had gotten both of them into a truly impressive amount of trouble over the years, usually at the same time and for the same reasons.
You look like hell, he could hear his brother say.
I look like you, he’d say back. So yeah.
He almost smiled. It made his head hurt, so he quit.
✦✦✦His phone was buried under a wad of sheets, face-down and dead. He plugged it in, sat on the edge of the bed, and waited for it to come back to life with the dread of a man waiting on test results he already knew were bad.
The screen lit. Logo. Lock screen. Then the notifications started dropping, one after another, the phone buzzing in his hand like something alive and upset.
Eleven missed calls. Most of them from Kenzie.
He scrolled.
Kenzie: hey
Kenzie: you get there ok?
Kenzie: jake
Kenzie: ??
Kenzie: ok
Kenzie: must be nice
Kenzie: call me when you’re up.
That last one came in at 4:52 a.m. With a period.
Jake looked at the period for a while.
In text messages, a period wasn’t punctuation. A period was a loaded gun set gently on the table between you. call me when you’re up was a request. call me when you’re up. was a summons, and maybe a sentencing.
Mixed in between Kenzie’s messages, like a guy whistling cheerfully through a minefield, were Brad’s.
Brad: BRO
Brad: the grandma asked if you were single lmao
Brad: i told her you were saving yourself for her
Brad: she tipped me 20 bucks
Brad: we made BANK tonight
Brad: trailers at my place. your cables are in it. if theyre not out by tuesday they become my cables
Brad: love u man good show
Jake huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. He thumbed back tell grandma i’ll call her, then went back to the other conversation and stared at it with his thumb hovering over it like the edge of a cold lake.
He typed: hey. sorry, phone died. wedding went super late. you ok?
He deleted super. It sounded defensive. He deleted you ok?, because the answer was pretty obviously no, and asking felt like poking a wasp nest to see if anybody was home. Then he put it back, because not asking felt worse.
Send.
The three dots popped up almost right away, which meant she’d had the phone in her hand. Which meant she’d been waiting. Which meant—
Kenzie: fine.
The dots showed up again. Disappeared. Showed up.
Kenzie: you’re still coming over tonight.
Not a question. He noticed it wasn’t a question.
yeah, he wrote. what time?
Kenzie: 6
Kenzie: we need to talk
Four words. There was no worse combination of four words in the English language, and Jake—who had once spent an entire summer reading the dictionary for fun, though he’d have died before admitting that too—would know.
He typed about what and deleted it. He typed is everything ok and deleted that too, because he’d already asked, and because he had a bad feeling he knew the answer, and because some conversations you just shouldn’t try to have with your thumbs.
ok, he wrote. i’ll be there. love you.
Delivered.
Read.
No dots.
He watched the screen until it dimmed and went dark on its own, and his own face showed up faintly in the black glass, looking back at him. Then he set the phone face-down on the nightstand, real careful, like it might go off.
He thought about calling his brothers. Just to hear somebody’s voice that wasn’t mad at him. Almost as soon as the thought showed up, he let it go. Two of them were probably working all day, and the third was probably just now getting to sleep.
Six hours until six o’clock. There was nothing he could do in six hours that he couldn’t do better unconscious.
So Jake did the most sensible thing a man in his position could possibly do. He chugged a glass of water, pulled the blanket over his head, and went back to sleep.
✦✦✦Right before he went under, he heard it.
It was faint. So faint he almost thought he was imagining it. A humming, somewhere far off, wavering back and forth between two notes. Not a song. Just two notes, going back and forth, over and over, the way somebody hums when they don’t know they’re doing it.
It should have bugged him. It was the kind of sound that, any other day, would have had him up and checking the vents. Instead it was weirdly calming. He lay there with his eyes closed and followed it, back and forth, back and forth, until it carried him under.
He dreamed he was falling.
Not the kind of falling where your stomach drops and you jerk awake. Slow falling. Through a sky that was too big and the wrong color, over a land he’d never seen—forests that went on forever, mountains with snow on them, a long river shining in the sun, and things in the sky that were definitely not birds. It looked like something off the cover of a fantasy novel. He wasn’t scared. He just watched it all come up toward him, closer and closer, until the ground was right there—
✦✦✦His alarm went off at a volume best described as nuclear.
Jake bolted upright and slapped at the phone until it shut up. He sat there for a second with his heart going, trying to remember where he was. The dream was already sliding away from him, the way dreams do. Something about the sky. Something about falling.
5:21 p.m.
“Oh, come on,” he told nobody, and moved.
He showered in four minutes. Brushed his teeth twice, because once didn’t seem to be accomplishing anything. Clean jeans, a gray T-shirt, the flannel his mom kept trying to throw away. On his way out he sent Kenzie a text—getting ready to head over—and his phone dinged back while he was still tying his shoes.
Kenzie: ok
No period this time. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.
Brad had sent a picture of the bride’s grandmother holding up a twenty and blowing a kiss at the camera. Jake decided that was going to be the best thing that happened to him all day. He was right.
His truck was waiting at the curb right where he’d left it, which on at least one previous morning had not been the case. It was an old red pickup that used to be his dad’s, faded to the color of a brick that had been left out in the rain for twenty years. It was hard on the eyes. The passenger door only opened from the inside, and the radio had worked exactly twice since Easter. But the engine turned over on the first try every single time, because Jake had rebuilt half of it himself in his parents’ driveway the summer he was sixteen, with a library book, a borrowed socket set, and a level of stubbornness his father described as medically significant.
He pulled out and headed for the edge of town.
✦✦✦It was a fifteen-minute drive to Kenzie’s. He took the long way without really deciding to.
The town slid by in the last of the light. The Sonic with its buzzing sign. The high school, the stadium lights already on for some JV game, the noise from the stands like waves a long way off. The bank with the clock that had been four minutes fast his whole life. The church where he’d been baptized and sat through about five thousand sermons, most of which he’d spent doing math on the hymn numbers, hunting for a pattern that wasn’t there.
The sky had cleared off. You could already see the first stars coming out, and the moon was coming up full over the trees—big and white and so bright it was throwing shadows across the road. He caught himself staring at it at a red light. He couldn’t remember ever seeing it that bright. It looked almost close enough to hit with a rock.
He thought about his brothers.
He didn’t decide to. It was just where his head went when the road was long and the radio was dead. His brothers had always been the fixed points of his life—the stars he steered by, if he was being dramatic about it, and he was hungover and alone in a truck, so he let himself be dramatic about it. Two of them were older, and louder, for a while, until he caught up. The fourth came along after him, which meant Jake had spent half his life being taught and the other half passing it down. The older two had taught him everything worth knowing and most of what wasn’t: how to throw a spiral, how to throw a punch, how to talk your way out of whatever came after the punch. How to laugh at the worst possible moment and get everybody else laughing too. He’d handed every bit of it straight down to the little one, usually the wrong way around.
One of them in particular. The one with his face. The one who answered the phone at two in the morning and said what’d you do in a voice that really meant I’m already putting my shoes on. The two of them had a way of finishing each other’s jokes that drove the rest of the family nuts. Their mom used to look across the dinner table at the two of them—sharing some private, wordless thing, both trying not to laugh at something nobody else had noticed—and she’d shake her head and say, Lord help me. There’s two of you.
Jake was the third of four boys. He’d been born on Easter Sunday, and she had called him her Easter baby ever since. She called him that at six years old with grass stains on his church pants, and at sixteen when he came home at two in the morning, and at six feet tall when he ducked under the kitchen doorway to steal food off the stove. He’d pretended to hate it every single time. He never once asked her to stop.
Jake smiled at the road.
Then, because his mind never went one place when it could go six, he thought about Kenzie. About we need to talk. About whether he loved her—he thought he did—and whether that was the same thing as being good for her, which he was a lot less sure about. He thought about how many weekends in a row he’d been gone. About the way she’d looked at him at her cousin’s birthday dinner, when he’d had the whole table cracking up and she was the only one not laughing. Like she was watching him through a window.
He thought about Brad wanting to buy a second rig. About the college he hadn’t gone to, and the acceptance letter he’d read three times and then stuck in a drawer. About how everybody—teachers, coaches, a guidance counselor with a cat calendar and a scary amount of faith in him—had always told him the same thing in the same tone of voice, like they were handing him something heavy. You could do anything, Jake.
The problem was, he believed them. That was exactly the problem. When you could do anything, how did you pick? How did you look at all those doors and choose one and let the rest of them close for good? It was easier to stand in the hallway. Easier to run the board at somebody else’s wedding, read the room, give everybody exactly what they needed, and go home with a hundred bucks and a headache and the feeling—like music playing in another room—that his real life hadn’t started yet.
Someday, he thought to himself. I’ll figure it out someday.
He had a lot of somedays. Everybody said so.
✦✦✦His phone lit up in the cup holder.
He glanced down. It was his oldest brother.
He reached for it. His hand was halfway there when he stopped.
He was already on his way to one hard conversation. Did he really need two? Whatever it was could wait an hour. His brother would understand. His brother always understood.
He let it ring. He watched it ring, and ring, and then the screen went dark, and a second later the little voicemail icon popped up in the corner.
He’d call him back after. He’d call him back tonight.
He turned onto Kenzie’s road.
✦✦✦Kenzie’s house sat at the end of a gravel drive: a little white rental with a porch swing and a mailbox shaped like a largemouth bass, which had come with the place, which she hated, and which he loved beyond all reason. Her car was in the drive. The porch light was on. The front curtains were open, and he thought he saw a shape move behind them and then go still.
He parked. Killed the engine. Sat.
The truck ticked as it cooled. Down the road somewhere a screen door banged. The moon was all the way up over the trees now, so bright it washed out the porch light, so bright he could see every piece of gravel in the drive.
He checked his phone. 5:58. No new messages. The voicemail icon was still sitting there in the corner.
“Okay,” Jake said, the same way he’d said it to the ceiling that morning. “Okay. We’re doing this.”
He thought about what he’d say. Talking was the one thing nobody ever had to encourage him to do. He could talk to anybody. In a single hour he could get a drunk groomsman to hand over his keys, make a crying flower girl laugh, and charm a furious venue manager into buying him a drink. But looking at those porch steps, he had the uncomfortable feeling none of that was going to help him tonight. That whatever was waiting in that house couldn’t be talked around. That for once in his life, he was going to have to stand there and just hear it.
He opened the door.
He put his foot down on the gravel.
And he heard it.
At first it was almost nothing. A thin, high whine, so faint he thought it was the truck—a belt, a bearing, one more thing he’d have to fix. But it wasn’t coming from the truck. It wasn’t coming from anywhere. It was inside him, behind his eyes, in the bones of his skull, and it was climbing.
He knew that sound. Every DJ alive knew that sound. It was feedback—the shriek you got when a mic wandered too close to the speaker it was feeding, when the sound went in and came out and went back in again, around and around, louder every time. A machine hearing itself, and hearing itself, and hearing itself, until it screamed.
He put a hand on the truck door. The metal was still warm. He felt that clear as anything—the warmth of it, the flaking red paint rough under his palm—and he thought, pretty calmly all things considered, Huh. That’s not good.
The whine became a ringing. The ringing became a roar. The edges of everything went white, and then the white folded in on itself, the porch light and the bass-shaped mailbox and that huge white moon all collapsing toward a single bright point, like water spiraling down a drain—
He thought of his brothers.
He thought of the voicemail.
He thought, I didn’t get to—
And then everything went black.
✦✦✦There was no pain. That was the first thing.
There was no truck. No gravel. No warm door under his hand. There was no hand. Jake reached for it the way you’d reach for a stair in the dark, and found nothing. No arm. No body. He couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t feel anything. He couldn’t hear his own heartbeat or his own breathing, because there wasn’t any heartbeat or breathing to hear. There was only black—total, silent, complete—a black so total it didn’t feel like the lights were off so much as like something else was there instead.
He tried to scream. Nothing came out. He tried to thrash, to kick, to do anything at all, and he couldn’t even tell if he was moving.
And then the dark in front of him—though there was no in front, and there was no him—moved.
It pulled itself together. That was the only way he could think of it. Pieces of the black drew in, the way smoke pulls into a shape for a second before the wind takes it—except no wind took this. It held. It got thicker. It turned into a figure, tall, way too tall, its edges coiling and uncoiling like ink dropped in water. It didn’t have a face that he could see. It didn’t need one. He could feel it looking at him, the way you can feel the sun on your back with your eyes closed.
Then it spoke.
Not out loud. There was no out loud. The voice opened up inside him, in the place where his thoughts lived, and it wasn’t one voice. It was a lot of them. A man’s and a woman’s. A kid’s. An old, old voice, dry as dead leaves. All of them talking at once, perfectly together, stacked one on top of another until they made a single sound—a choir that had agreed to share one throat.
Jake.
Every one of those voices knew his name.
Be calm. You are not dreaming. And this is not the morning after.
A pause. And somewhere in that stacked-up sound, impossibly, he thought he heard something almost like gentleness.
We need to talk about how you died.