His eyes light up. “Yes! Such a great show.”
And though we’ve been at the same school for four years, there’s something strange about this: McNair and I having been at the same concert, clapping for the same band in a sea of sweaty Seattle hipsters.
He finds the N section first, flips through it as I open my group chat with Kirby and Mara. It’s not impossible Savannah’s recruited more people since Hilltop Bowl, and even if we’re on shaky ground, I don’t want to be scared of my own friends.
I’m sure the answer is no, but you guys didn’t by any chance team up with savannah bell to kill mcnair and me, did you?
MARA
We definitely did not.
KIRBY
WTF???
overheard her organizing an army at the safe zone
KIRBY
I repeat: WTF???
yeah
so I may have kind of joined forces with mcnair
I slip my phone into my pocket, not quite ready for their responses yet.
“They don’t have it,” McNair says, and I nudge him out of the way to take a look for myself.
“Can I help you find anything?” asks a woman with a Doo Woop lanyard around her neck. She’s probably midtwenties, with a platinum-blond pixie cut, wearing long overalls and combat boots. Her name tag reads VIOLET.
“We’re looking for Nirvana’s first album,” I say, and because I looked it up earlier: “I think it’s Bleach?”
“It is indeed!” Violet chirps. “Old-school Nirvana. I love it. You’re actually not the first people who’ve asked about it today. Are you playing some kind of game?”
“Sort of like a scavenger hunt,” McNair says.
“Hmm, I know we have it. It should be right here.” We shift out of the way so she can take a look at the N section.
Whoever came here before us—what if they hid it? There are thousands of records in here. They could have slipped it in anywhere.
McNair must come to the same conclusion, because he says, “Would you guys have a copy of it anywhere else?”
“We have Nevermind—overrated, in my opinion—In Utero, and MTV Unplugged in New York. Now, that’s a good album.” She pulls it out, strokes it fondly. “Best live album I’ve ever heard.”
Violet’s gaze lingers on McNair, and at first I assume it’s because he has something on his face. I let myself stare for a moment too, but there’s nothing there. I—I think she might be flirting with him.
I am so embarrassed for her.
“Definitely,” McNair agrees. Is he flirting back?
Violet beams at him. “Unfortunately, I don’t see Bleach here. Someone might have misplaced it, or taken it back to a listening booth.”
“Or bought it,” I put in. There are other record stores in Seattle, but we’d lose time getting there, and they may not have the album either.
“Let me take a look in the back, okay?” Violet slides MTV Unplugged back into the N section. “It’s always possible someone brought in a copy to sell.”
“Thank you so much.” McNair’s politeness is at an eleven. When Violet clomps away in her boots, I lift my eyebrows at him. “What?” he asks.
“ ‘Definitely. Best live album ever recorded in the history of mankind.’ ”
He stares. “Is that… supposed to be an imitation of me?”
“Depends. Were you flirting with Violet?” I won’t give him the satisfaction of my assumption that Violet was flirting with him first. Maybe she was trying to count his freckles too.
“She was deep in some kind of Nirvana reverie. I didn’t want to completely lose her to it.”
“You’ve never listened to Nirvana, have you?”
“Not a single song. While we’re waiting”—McNair jerks his head toward the listening booths in the back—“I’ve always kind of wanted to listen to something back there.”
“You really think we can agree on something to listen to?” I ask, though I’ve been gazing longingly at the listening booths since we walked in.
He taps his chin. “What if we each pick one album, and the other person has to listen to one song in its entirety before passing judgment?”
I can’t deny it sounds fun. “Fine, but make it quick.”
KIRBY
oh DID YOU NOW??
you teamed up with the guy you’re definitely not obsessed with?
MARA
Be nice.
But actually:
I roll my own eyes, though I’m relieved our friendship hasn’t been strained past the point of conversations like this.
I think you’re a little obsessed with him.
Obsessed with winning, yes. And he happens to be the only person who can help me get there.
I make it back to the listening booth a moment before McNair, and my heart leaps into my throat as I hide my phone, though of course he can’t see our group chat. He’s clutching an album so close to his chest, he might as well be hugging it. On the small table are a record player and twin pairs of headphones, with two chairs tucked in. McNair snaps the curtain shut, closing us inside the tiny space.
“You can go first,” I say as we pull out the chairs and reach for the headphones.
I used to imagine coming here with someone I liked, spending hours browsing records, bumping knees as we listened to them in a booth like this one. It’s where the perfect high school boyfriend and I would have hung out. I’d lie awake at night, marking a mental map of Seattle for me and this mystery guy, and listening to records together was one of the most romantic things I could imagine. I dreamed up entire playlists for us. The Cure’s “Close to Me,” with those breathy pauses and suggestive lyrics, was the sexiest song I’d ever heard. The universe must find it hilarious that the first time I’m in here, it’s with McNair.
McNair’s song is upbeat, bouncy, with high-pitched male vocals. Fifteen seconds in, he pulls the headphones off one ear and asks, “What do you think?” He’s bouncing his leg up and down, impatient for my response.
“It’s… fun,” I admit, but I don’t want him to get an ego about choosing something not-terrible, so I add: “It’s almost in your face about how fun it is.”
“Didn’t realize you were so offended by fun.” He holds out the album cover, which features the five band members dressed in bright colors and playing Twister.
“Free Puppies?” I say. “That’s seriously the name of the band?”
“No. It’s Free Puppies! Exclamation point!” He taps the pin on his backpack. “You can’t talk about Free Puppies! without an exclamation point. They’re local, and I’ve seen them a few times. They’re starting to get national airplay, but I don’t think they’ll sell out.”
“Your favorite band is called Free Puppies!?” I give the exclamation mark as much emphasis as I can, and he shakes his head at me.
“One day you’ll go to a Free Puppies! show and see the magic for yourself.”
It’s gotten too warm in my cardigan, probably because it’s still sunny outside. Or maybe the thermostat in here is set too high. Regardless, I take it off, accidentally whacking him with an empty sleeve in the process.
“Sorry,” I say as I drape it across the back of the chair.
“Kind of cramped in here,” he says with an apologetic shrug, as though it’s his fault.
“You’re in luck!” Violet’s voice. McNair pulls back the curtain, revealing Violet waving a black album with a negative photo graphic on the front. “We had a copy in a stack of donated records waiting to be processed.”
“Thank you,” I say as McNair accepts the record from her.
“No problem.” She sort of lingers for a while, bouncing on her toes, and for a horrifying moment I wonder if she really was flirting. Then she blurts: “Track three. ‘About a Girl.’ That was the first sign that maybe Nirvana was going to be more than grunge. Even if you’re not buying it, you gotta listen to it on vinyl. That’s the way it was always meant to be heard.”
“Will do,” Neil says, a
nd Violet gives us one more smile before closing the curtain.
McNair turns over the album.
“Did she write her number on the back?” I ask. “I hope she’s ready for a lot of texts with proper punctuation and capitalization.”
“Artoo. I was checking the track listing. And I think she just really loves Nirvana.”
He lays the record on the table, and we each snap a photo.
“I guess we’re good, then,” I say, but he frowns.
“We still have to listen to your song.”
“Not Nirvana?”
He shakes his head. “I might get kicked out of Seattle for saying this, but I’ve never been a big fan.”
I present my record of choice: The Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs. “Is It Really So Strange?” is the first track, and Neil is annoyingly silent the entire three minutes it’s playing.
“It’s catchy, but… it seems melancholy, too,” he says.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“There’s too much bad shit in the world to listen to depressing music all the time.” He taps the FP album. “Hence, Free Puppies!”
When we fling back the curtain to leave, it’s almost too perfect: Madison Winters, she of the seven shape-shifting foxes, is browsing records with a couple other Westview kids. She doesn’t see me until after I’ve sneaked up behind her, swiping the blue bandanna from her arm.
“That was stealthy,” her friend Pranav Acharya says to me, holding out his hand for a high five. “I respect that.”
“Wow, where’s your loyalty?” Madison asks, mock-offended, and she’s so good-natured about the whole thing that I feel a little bad about making fun of her shape-shifting foxes. I mean, she has a brand at least.
McNair and I linger in front of the store while I pull out my phone to log the kill. Strangely, this has been fun. Maybe I romanticized coming here with a boyfriend, but it wasn’t actually that bad with McNair.
“You killed someone!” McNair is practically giddy. He says this in such a jovial way, his eyes bright behind his glasses—like he’s proud, which I guess makes sense since we’re technically on the same team. For now.
Instead of my messaging app, a helpful blue bubble pops up:
Installing software update 1 of 312…
Sure, now’s a great time to do that.
“One second. My phone decided to install an update.”
Installing software update 2 of 312…
Suddenly, the screen goes black. I hold down the power button—nothing.
“Shit,” I mutter. “Now it won’t turn on.”
“Let me see it.”
I glare at him. “I don’t think you pressing the button is going to do anything different from me pressing the button.” And I don’t want him to accidentally see my group chat with Kirby and Mara and somehow get the wrong idea. Still, I hand it over. I’ll just grab it back really fast if it turns on.
“It won’t turn on,” he agrees after holding down every button for a more-than-acceptable length of time and thoroughly aggravating me in the process. “Did you charge it?”
“It’s been plugged into my car.” I hold out my palm, since there’s something very strange about my phone, with the geometric patterned case Mara gave me for Hanukkah last year, in Neil’s hands. I try the power button yet again. “I can’t exactly play without my phone.”
“Wait. Wait. We can fix this.” McNair swipes around on his own phone, tapping Sean Yee’s contact photo. “Sean can fix anything. He brought a twelve-year-old MacBook back to life last year.”
“And why would he help me?”
“He’d be helping both of us.” He types out a message I can’t see. “And he got killed pretty quickly earlier, so he doesn’t have skin in the game.” His phone pings. “Sean’s free, and he’s at home. He lives right off I-5, Forty-Third and Latona. It’ll only take us ten minutes to get there.”
“Wasn’t he at the safe zone? With you and Adrian and Cyrus?” This is too weird. McNair’s friend helping me, out of the goodness of his heart?
A smile curves one side of his mouth. “He just came to hang out. Were you… looking out for me?”
“I’m just perceptive.”
“You were looking out for me,” he concludes. “I’m touched.”
HOWL CLUES
A place you can buy Nirvana’s first album
A place that’s red from floor to ceiling
A place you can find Chiroptera
A rainbow crosswalk
Ice cream fit for Sasquatch
The big guy at the center of the universe
Something local, organic, and sustainable
A floppy disk
A coffee cup with someone else’s name (or your own name, wildly misspelled)
A car with a parking ticket
A view from up high
The best pizza in the city (your choice)
A tourist doing something a local would be ashamed of doing
An umbrella (we all know real Seattleites don’t use them)
A tribute to the mysterious Mr. Cooper
4:15 p.m.
“WELCOME TO MY laboratory,” Sean says in a voice that makes him sound like a villain in a spy movie that definitely doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test. He ushers us into the tiny basement of his Wallingford bungalow. And wow, it really does look like a laboratory down here. There’s a worktable with four monitors, a rack of tools, and countless wires and electronic gadgets strewn about. The lighting gives everything a vaguely greenish tint.
It’s cold in the basement, and when I rub my bare arms, I remember where I left my sweater: on a chair in the listening booth.
“I hope we’re not interrupting,” I say. “Seriously, thank you so much for doing this. Or for trying to.”
Sean and I have never had a reason to talk much. Frankly, he has no reason to be this nice to me. Savannah has me suspicious of everyone who used to seem harmless.
“Trying,” Sean says under his breath with a glance at McNair, and the two of them snicker, as though the idea of Sean not succeeding is ludicrous. “Nah, I was just playing the new Assassin’s Creed.”
“Why would you put yourself through that after getting killed so early in Howl?” McNair asks innocently.
“Thanks so much for the emotional support.”
I tap my dead phone. “I can Venmo you some—”
Sean’s eyebrows shoot up. “What? No, no, you definitely don’t have to do that. I’d have failed my French final without Neil. I owe him one. Or seven.” I don’t have a chance to point out that him helping me isn’t the same thing as helping McNair before Sean swipes a pair of thick glasses from the worktable and puts them on. “May I see the patient?”
Biting back a laugh, I surrender my phone. Neil said he explained the whole situation when we were driving over, but if it’s odd for Sean to see the two of us together, he doesn’t say anything.
“So what exactly happened?” Sean asks, gently placing my phone on the table and rummaging through a drawer before extracting a cable and plugging it in. He plugs the other end into his main computer.
“It died while installing an update. And then it wouldn’t turn on.”
“Hmm.” Sean hits a few keys, and the phone’s screen turns blue. “This shouldn’t be too hard.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “Great.”
“Thank you,” Neil says, and flashes me an encouraging smile.
My fingers are twitchy. I kind of hate that I’m so married to my phone that even ten minutes without it sends me into withdrawal. Madison’s target, though—I have that. Brady Becker. Guess he’s still alive.
“I can’t imagine what all of this is worth,” I say, gazing around the lab.
“Most of the tech, I found used and restored it.” Sean hunches over my phone, black hair falling into his face. “I made Neil a new computer for his birthday last year.”
I gape at him. “That’s… incredible.”
Neil makes a vaguely nonhuman
sound next to me. “You should probably let him work.”
“I can multitask.”
“Actually,” Neil says, “multitasking is a myth. Our brains can only focus on one high-level task at a time. It’s why you can drive and listen to music at the same time but you couldn’t take a test and listen to a podcast simultaneously.”
“No mansplaining in my lab, please,” Sean says.
“I wasn’t—” Neil starts, but then he goes silent, as though realizing that’s exactly what he was doing. When I peek at him, he’s staring at his shoes.
After that, we let Sean work in silence. Every so often, he mutters a curse or takes a swig from an energy drink on his table.
“I think I’ve got it,” Sean says fifteen minutes later, unplugging my phone and swiping through a couple more settings. “None of your data should have been impacted. Now we cross our fingers, and…” All three of us peer at it, waiting for the home screen to appear. And there it is, the photo of Kirby, Mara, and me and the pattern of familiar icons. “Voilà! Good as new.”
“You’re a genius,” I say. “Thank you, thank you!”
“I also changed the settings so it won’t continue the update until next week, so you can finish the game without it interrupting you.”
“Oh my God, I love you,” I say, and Sean blushes. “Thank you so much. Again. You know Two Birds One Scone? Come in next week and I’ll give you a free cinnamon roll.”
Sean takes off his glasses. “She isn’t that bad,” he stage-whispers to McNair.
“Not all the time,” he admits.
I clasp my heart. “I’m touched,” I say, imitating McNair.
Neil places a hand on Sean’s shoulder. My kingdom for more guys who can express physical affection without needing to justify their masculinity afterward. “Still on for Beth’s Café before graduation?”
“Absolutely. I never miss Beth’s,” he says. “Godspeed to you both.”
“Quad life,” Neil says.
“Quad life!” Sean replies with a whoop, and I experience such extreme secondhand embarrassment that I might burst into flames. Then the two of them exchange a brief but complex handshake before Sean leads us out into the daylight.
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