Most of her records look secondhand and well-loved with no discernible organization. It’s a level of comfortable chaos that has Myla written all over it.
“The collection,” she says, “used to belong to my parents—they KonMari’d all their vinyl a few years ago, but I saved them.”
“I have, like, the most boring taste in music,” August tells her. “All I listen to are podcasts about murder. I don’t know who half these people are.”
“We can change that,” Myla says. “What’re you in the mood for? Funk? Punk? Post-punk? Pop punk? Pop? Old-school pop? New-school pop? New-school old-school—”
August thinks about yesterday, about Jane sliding into the subway seat next to her, talking breathlessly about the Clash and holding out her headphones. She’d seemed so disappointed when August awkwardly confessed she didn’t know the band.
“Do you have any ’70s punk?”
“Ooh, yes,” Myla says. She whips a record out and rolls onto her back like a lizard sunning itself. “This is an easy one. You probably already know it.”
She flashes the cover, black and covered in jagged, thin white lines. August thinks she recognizes it from a T-shirt but can’t place it.
“Come on,” Myla says. “Joy Division? Everyone who’s ever been within sniffing distance of a clove cigarette knows Joy Division.”
“I told you,” August says. “You’re gonna have to remediate me.”
“Okay, well.” Myla sets the record on the turntable in the corner. “We’ll start here. Come on.” She fluffs a pillow beside her.
August stares. She’s adjusting to having friends like Winfield adjusts to days when he has to pick up a breakfast shift: cranky and bewildered. But she sinks down onto the bed anyway.
They stay there for hours, flipping the record over and over as Myla explains how Joy Division is technically not punk but post-punk, and what the difference between the two is, and how it’s possible for there to have been post-punk in the ’70s when there was also punk in the ’80s and ’90s. Myla pulls up the Wikipedia page on her phone and starts reading it out loud, which is new to August: someone else doing the research for her.
She listens to the bass lines spilling over one another, and it starts to make sense. The music, and why it might mean so much to someone.
She can picture Jane somewhere in the city, kicked back in her bed, listening to this too. Maybe she puts on “She’s Lost Control” while she drifts around the kitchen making dinner, doing the easy waltz of routine, touching pans and knives she’s moved from one apartment to another, a whole life full of things. August bets she has way more than five boxes. She’s probably fully realized. She’s probably got a daisy chain of past loves, and kisses aren’t a big deal to her anymore because she’s got socks from an old girlfriend mixed up in her laundry and another one’s earring lost beneath her dresser.
Crazy how August can imagine a whole life for this girl she doesn’t even know, but she can’t begin to picture what her own is supposed to look like.
At some point, Myla rolls over and looks at her as the music plays on.
“We’ll figure it out, right?” she says.
August snorts. “Why are you asking me?”
“Because you have, like, the energy of someone who knows things.”
“You’re thinking of your boyfriend.”
“Nah,” she says. “You know stuff.”
“I don’t even know how to, like, make human connections.”
“That’s not true. Niko and I love you.”
August blinks up at the ceiling, trying to absorb her words. “That’s—that’s nice and all, but you two are … you know. Different.”
“Different how?”
“Like, you’re both your own planets. You have gravitational fields. You pull people into them and that’s it. It’s, like, inevitable. I’m not half as warm or hospitable. No support for life.”
Myla groans. “Jesus, I didn’t know you could be so fucking dire.” August scowls and Myla laughs. “Do you ever hear yourself talk, though? You’re cool. You’re smart. Maybe people at your stupid Catholic school were just dicks, man. You’ve got a brighter glow than you realize.”
“I—I mean, I guess. That’s nice of you to say.”
“It’s not nice, it’s true.”
They’re both quiet, the record spinning on.
“You do too,” August says to the ceiling at last. It’s hard for her to say stuff like this straight-on. “Glow.”
“Oh, I know.”
* * *
Classes exit the drop period, and it’s August and her packs of scantrons and lecture after lecture five days a week. This lands her with the latest shifts, and she finds herself audience to the weirdest characters