“He cheated on my mom and I caught him doing it.”
He sits up straight. “Jesus, Evie.”
I tell him the whole story. It’s hard to look at him and talk about it, so I look down at my plate instead. “Anyway, it’s been around six months since I last saw him.”
“Does your mom know?”
“Yeah, but my sister doesn’t.”
“Jesus,” he says again, but quietly.
“The weirdest thing is, Mom and Danica both seem fine. It’s like this big bomb went off in our lives and I’m the only one who got hurt.”
I make myself look up at him. His eyes are full of understanding. “Well,” he says, “I still think I win the sad story contest.”
At first I’m too shocked to react. That is not what I expected him to say. I expected sympathy and comforting. I didn’t expect him to judge how sad my story was against his.
He busts out laughing, and then I do too.
After a while we stop laughing, but our eyes meet and the moment lingers until I realize what’s happening and look away. “Why don’t you sing the song for me?” I ask.
He looks confused for a second but then pulls out his phone and plays the backing music track.
He starts singing. “Everything burns Everything crashes And something something some-other-thing.” He stops with a laugh. “I don’t know that third line yet,” he says.
“You’re very good at mumble-singing, though,” I say. “You just need something to rhyme with crashes.” I twirl my braids around my finger and think until a line comes to me. “And our love just turns to ashes,” I say.
“Oh, that’s good.” He types it into his phone and looks back up at me. “All right, the next line slows the tempo way down, but I only have half of it. “You’re the black box, something, some-other-thing—”
“Falling to the sea,” I say, interrupting him again.
“Good, good,” he says, typing fast. He leans forward, eyes glittering. “Let’s keep going.”
“Okay, but we need actual paper instead of just your phone.”
I ask the waitress and she brings us over a few sheets and a pen. He writes down what we have so far and then keeps singing. “A black box, preserving history.”
I shake my head. “One last history, instead of preserving history.”
He writes it down.
Both of us are grinning now, trading the pen and paper back and forth. By the time we get to the end, the sheet is a mess of crossed-out words and arrows pointing every which way.
“Wish I had my acoustic,” he says, pulling the sheet closer. On the phone, he restarts the backing music track and sings the whole thing.
I close my eyes so I can really listen and not be distracted by his face. It’s strange but nice to hear his voice singing words we just wrote together. Somehow when he sings the words they gain more weight. It makes them feel more true. When he gets to the final three lines, my eyes fly open. His voice is so raw, so filled with wishing for something he can’t have back, that I have to see his face.
“You’re great,” he says. “At writing songs, I mean.” He rubs his hand over the back of his head.
“We wrote it together.”
“I’ve never written a song with another person before,” he says. “Not even Clay.” He shakes the sheet of paper at me. “Can I use these?”
“They’re already yours. You helped write them.”
“It was mostly you,” he says.
I shrug. “I’m really good at understanding heartbreak. It’s my superpower.”
CHAPTER 22
“Black Box,” Lyrics by Evie Thomas and Xavier Woods
[Verse 1]
Everything burns
Everything crashes
And our love just turns to ashes
You’re a black box, falling to the sea
A black box, one last history
[Chorus]
Open you up
Look inside
Already know
Just what I’ll find
Nothing survives
Nothing survives
Nothing survives
[Verse 2]
The you that I knew
Sinks down out of sight
I’m left with nothing
And yeah nothing is fucking all right
Black box, at the bottom of the sea
[Chorus]
Open you up
Look inside
Already know
Just what I’ll find
Nothing survives
Nothing survives
Nothing survives
[Bridge]
It’s all in my head
Just an illusion I said
And know that you’re gone