My freshman year at Juilliard, students who majored in more than one instrument were allowed to compose a piece using any of those instruments for our fall semester final, and it counted for both majors. So I wrote a duet for piano and cello, recorded it, and played it for my professor on the last day of my first semester. It didn't even have a title - it was just Song 1. Obviously I lacked the creativity I have now.

I was so wide-eyed back then - still naive about the world from living in my Upper East Side bubble, still beaten into believing there were "good notes" and "bad notes," and still just a rigid kid who treated the piano like a tool and not an extension of myself. That's probably why I got a C+ on my composition. My feedback was "too conservative" and "not enough risk."

I never got a chance to really fix the song because I'd dropped out before I finished the next level of classes, and I'd learned to resent the piano even though I was good at it. I learned that being good at something doesn't give you a free pass on being happy or successful. Sometimes it had the opposite effect.

But for some reason, that's what I did when I got back to my studio apartment after hitting self-destruct on whatever might have almost been with Sienna. I am decidedly a glutton for punishment. 

I played Song 1 over and over again - the piano part, anyway - trying to figure out what went wrong with it the first time. As if fixing the song somehow fixed everything else going wrong. The keys were sticky and stagnant from not being used, and I figured my keyboard was resentful of me too.

"Fuck this," I groaned as threw my headphones off and pushed myself away from my keyboard.

The problem was that every melody, every chord, and every note came back to her, and I couldn't make it stop. I thought about what she'd sound like in song form. She'd be mostly good notes, but there were good notes that found ways to work with bad notes. They elevated the bad note chords to sound better than they would have.

If I was a song, I'd be bad notes only. Did that mean good notes could fix me? Well, I thought about it a lot in the last month or so. I thought about all the good notes in my life, and all the things that were supposed to elevate me into being something good.

You know the conclusion I came to that morning? Songs and real life were not interchangeable. 

"I could kill you, you know that?"

The door to my apartment swung open, and Evie came barging into it, eyes wide and hair on fire. I groaned again and put my head in my hands. Great, she'd obviously talked to Sienna. That was record time for gossip, even for them.

"I don't wanna hear it, E." I tried to situate myself back at the keyboard.

Evie was having absolutely none of it, and I couldn't even say I blamed her. She tossed her bag on my kitchen counter as she walked across the big shaggy carpet that spanned from my kitchen/living room to the raised platform my bed was on at the other side of the apartment, then dramatically flopped onto the black leather couch behind me. 

Since it was an open studio and I didn't have all that much wall space, I had my desk and all my music equipment situated under a window in the space at the foot of the platform, and the couch was there mostly for Evie so she didn't have to hover over my shoulder while we worked. I made a mental note to try and take my door keys off of her keychain when she wasn't looking.

"Oh my god I just...I have no words." Her voice was muffled as she put her hands to her face. She kicked her legs back and forth as she dangled them over the arm of the couch. "You were supposed to be asking her on a date. You know, after two people hook up, generally-"

I aggressively swiveled around in my chair, reeling and dizzy and not just from the spinning. "She told you we hooked up?"

"Well she kind of had to, since it was part of the whole equation." Evie waved her hand around. "But how you still somehow got the wrong answer is beyond me."

Evie sat up, and when she looked at me, her eyes were shrink-wrapped with hurt - one that I didn't often see from her. As if whatever hurt that Sienna felt she'd passed on to Evie so she could pass it on to me. Hurt by osmosis.

Evie was about as together as anyone I knew, but sometimes I had to remind myself that she was one of the good notes, and my bad notes affected her melody.

"I really was going to, you know. I thought about maybe...taking her to the Last Place on Earth, or Barcade or something. She likes games, so..." I spun back around towards my keyboard and dropped my gaze onto the keys, running my fingers through the chords of Song 1 without actually playing them. "Doesn't matter. I was sitting at the table waiting for her, and...I just kind of glanced out the window, and I saw this little kid fall on the sidewalk. He was really young, like maybe two or three, and he just started bawling. His dad bent down to pick him up, and he used his sleeve to dry the kid's tears, and he told him over and over again that he was fine. It was the smallest gesture, but it just sent me into a fucking spiral. All I kept thinking about was how much of that I don't have, how many problems I have that stem from my dad, and how much it all fucking weighs me down. I guess not being here for a month...it almost made me forget all that. She almost made me forget."

Evie heaved out a sigh as she sat back into the couch, absentmindedly reaching up and twirling a lock of black hair around her finger. She usually did that when we were working on new music, when she was trying to work something out in her head.

"But sitting in that coffee shop and seeing that...all it did was remind me of all the baggage I have in this fucking city," I told her with more assuredness. It was all true, even though it felt like forcing my words past the glass in my throat. "And it's not her job to carry that shit for me."

Silence hung in the air, and it was thick enough that I could hear the blood rushing through my ears.

"Okay, you know what? I'm done trying to understand you." Evie slapped her palms down on her thighs before getting up from the couch. "When someone offers to help you carry the bags, what do you think that is?"

I pressed my finger down on an F sharp. "I don't know."

She blew out a defeated sigh. "Well, when you figure it out, let me know. Until then, you're on your own."

She stormed out of my apartment, grabbing her bag from the kitchen counter before slamming the door behind her.

Me and Evie didn't fight a lot. Sure, we had disagreements on lyrics or chord progressions or something stupid like what Thai place to order dinner from, but it never ended like that. We figured it out, and the world spun on.

The world still spins on now, but it had been slowly tilting off its axis, putting me off balance and disoriented. I didn't know where I was, or what I was supposed to be feeling, and I still couldn't think of a title for Song 1.

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yes yes i know, we were all waiting to hear devon's pov on this latest fiasco.

they truly are my fav platonic soulmates even if they're fighting!

10 chapters left y'all, plenty of time for nonsense!