Chapter 6 Evie
Evie
THE LIGHTHO—
THE LIGHTHOUSE DINER
THE LIGHTHO—
“Finally,” I mutter, flipping the lock.
The street outside is damp and fog-soft, lantern frames already hanging over the road like skeleton ribs.
Ten blocks away, the arena still throbs faintly—bass echoing through concrete, the kind of distant rumble you feel more than hear.
The show must be in the finale. Or maybe it’s already over and the crowd is just… refusing to stop existing.
I turn the sign to CLOSED and walk back behind the counter.
Gus is already there, wiping down the grill with grim determination.
Tasha stands at the register, counting the tip jar like she’s doing sacred math.
Her hoodie sleeves are pushed up, and the glitter on her cheeks has migrated into her pores.
She looks exhausted in the way only teenagers can, like they’ve been awake for thirty hours and are still somehow functioning.
She glances at her phone and makes a tiny sound. “They’re doing the encore.”
“Good for them,” I say, because it’s my favorite phrase tonight.
Tasha frowns at me like I’m a puzzle she can’t solve. “You didn’t… you didn’t watch any of it?”
“Nope.”
Her eyes narrow. “Not even a little?”
“No.”
Gus snorts. “She’s got a stubborn streak.”
“I do not,” I say automatically.
Gus gestures with the rag. “That’s it. That’s the streak.”
Tasha looks between us, her phone, then sighs dramatically. “Okay. I’m gonna go. My friend’s mom is picking me up.”
“Wear your hood,” Gus grunts.
“I always wear my hood.”
Gus slides a hand over the counter and drops something in front of her: a large cup of leftover fries. “Here, for you and your friend.”
Tasha’s face brightens. “Thanks, Gus!”
“Go on,” he says.
“Okay. Goodnight, you two.”
“Night,” I say.
She bolts for the door, yanks her hood up, then disappears into the fog.
Gus grabs his coat and keys off the hook, then pauses like he’s remembering he’s technically the owner and should probably act like one.
“You sure you’re good?” he asks, voice rough.
“I’ve closed alone a hundred times,” I say.
Gus looks at me like he wants to argue, then grunts. “Lock both bolts. Don’t leave the back door propped.”
“I know.”
He points one thick finger at me anyway. “And don’t fall asleep at the counter.”
“God forbid.”
He almost smiles. Almost. Then he shoves his hands into his pockets and heads out the back, shoulders hunched against the cold.
The bell jingles. The door shuts.
And suddenly it’s just me and the diner.
Me and the buzzing neon and the faint echo of a stadium ten blocks away.
I flip the second lock on the front door, then walk back behind the counter and finish closing out the drawer, because numbers are soothing and paper doesn’t have feelings.
I can still hear Tasha’s phone music from earlier in my head like an earworm, and I hate it. I hate that Kaia’s voice lives in my memory like she paid rent to be there.
I finish counting, jot the total, and tuck the cash into the envelope Gus keeps in the safe.
Then the jukebox clicks on. A tiny mechanical sound, like someone flicking a switch. The machine lights up. Neon strips glow. The display sputters like it’s waking from a long sleep.
And then music starts.
Not the rock I put on earlier.
Not anything I’ve ever heard from that machine.
A tinny, bright little melody spills into the diner—too cheerful, too familiar, like a commercial. Four familiar notes. Then the sing-song line that follows, warped slightly like it’s coming through an old speaker:
Come back, come back, the lanterns will light your way—
My blood goes cold and goosebumps rise on my arms.
“What the hell?” I snap.
The song keeps going.
A stupid Harbor Lights jingle. One of the old ones. The kind that used to play on the local radio every fifteen minutes during festival season until you wanted to drive into the ocean.
Except, this version is… wrong.
It’s too slow by half a beat.
And my brain does the thing it does when it wants to torture me: it plays a memory on top of the sound...
Kaia at sixteen, sitting on the pier with her knees pulled up, mocking the jingle in a ridiculous falsetto just to make me laugh. Taking the dumbest, brightest part of the town and turning it into a joke we could share.
I swallow hard.
I hate the way my chest aches at the memory.
I hate that I still remember the exact way she sang it. The stupid little flourish she added at the end to make me groan.
The way she sang it a half beat too slow too…
“Hell no,” I say out loud, as if the jukebox might respect consent.
I look around the empty diner like I’m going to catch someone crouched behind a booth, laughing into their sleeve. Like Gus is going to pop up with a camera and tell me I’ve been punked by small-town America.
But there’s nobody.
Just the neon sign’s faint buzz, the hum of the fridge, and that jingle crawling through the air like it owns the place.
The hair on the back of my neck rises.
I stalk to the jukebox and jab at the buttons. Nothing happens. I hit STOP. I hit POWER. I hit the side of it with the flat of my hand like it’s an old TV that needs intimidation.
The song doesn’t even hiccup.
“Of course,” I mutter, because why would anything in my life ever be normal?
I crouch and find the power cord. My fingers close around it. Then I rip it out of the wall.
The jukebox dies instantly—lights out, screen dark, the whole thing finally shutting up.
Silence drops so hard it feels like pressure in my ears. My heart pounds and the air in the diner doesn’t relax with the silence.
It gets thicker.
Like fog inside a building.
Like the diner is holding its breath.
I stand and step back slowly.
“Okay,” I say, voice low. “Cool. Great. Awesome.”
I glance at the windows. Dark glass. My reflection. Empty street beyond. Except my reflection looks… smeared. Like the glass is damp from the inside. I blink hard. It clears.
Probably just fatigue.
Probably just festival weirdness.
Probably—
I stop. Breathe. Re-center before I lose my shit entirely.
This is a diner. Jukeboxes glitch. Neon signs buzz. Everything is fine.
I need noise that’s neutral, that isn’t lanterns and longing and Kaia Rhee worming her way into my skull through a commercial. I turn away from the jukebox and head for the TV behind the counter. My hand finds the remote like it’s a lifeline.
“Fine,” I tell the room. “We’re doing normal television.”
I click it on.
The screen flares to life.
A cooking show. Some man smiling too hard while he whisks eggs. Bless him.
I exhale. “Thank you.”
For half a second, it works. The bright, stupid normalcy fills the diner. The cooking host says something about perfectly fluffy like he’s never suffered a day in his life.
Then the TV glitches too.
The picture tears—horizontal lines rolling, the image bending like wet paper.
The cooking show stutters, freezes, and the audio warps into—
—into a roar.
A crowd.
My stomach drops.
The TV snaps into a shaky fan-cam video, vertical, pixelated, overexposed. The arena. The stage. The lights.
Midnight Halo in full glittered perfection.
Kaia at the center.
Her face is huge on-screen, not the polished local-news clip but raw footage—eyes bright, mouth open in song like the world is pouring out of her.
The sound that hits me isn’t just audio.
It’s pressure.
It’s like someone opened a door and shoved the stadium into my skull.
I gasp, sharp, and my hands fly up instinctively, palms pressing hard against my temples like I can physically hold my brain in place.
“What—” My voice comes out thin.
My stomach flips. My vision swims for half a second, the edges of the diner going a little too soft. The crowd’s screams flood the diner, too loud for the little speakers, distorting into something that feels… infinitely wrong.
And underneath it, twined into the noise like a second melody—the jingle.
Not from the jukebox now.
From everywhere.
The windows smear again, and this time they don’t clear when I blink. The glass reflects the diner, yes, but the reflections multiply.
Too many shapes.
Too many silhouettes.
A crowd where there shouldn’t be one.
Open mouths. Heads thrown back. Singing.
Off-key. Hungry.
My breath catches.
“Oh shit,” I whisper, and my body moves on instinct—back, away, like distance will fix it. Like I can just step out of the range of whatever this is the way you step away from a spill.
My heel hits the edge of a floor mat. I stumble.
The air shifts.
Something moves through it, something I can’t see but can feel as cold air wafts towards me.
And it finds me.
Invisible pressure slams down on my shoulders, my spine, my chest—pinning me in place like I’m suddenly under a car. My knees buckle and I grab the counter, fingers scrabbling on laminate.
The sound surges.
The fan-cam Kaia sings on the TV, her voice distorted, looping, layered with the jingle until it becomes something else entirely: a chorus of echoes trying to crawl into my throat.
My ears ring. My vision blurs. Something claws at my neck—not nails, not hands—sound. A vibrating chokehold.
I try to scream.
Nothing comes out.
My mouth opens, my throat strains, but the noise jams there, stuffing me full of someone else’s song.
Tears sting my eyes from the pressure. My fingers slip on the counter edge.
Come back, come back—
The jukebox. The TV. The windows. The air.
Everything is singing at me.
And the memories start to rise, dragged up like bodies from deep water.
The pier. Lanterns swaying. Kaia’s laugh. Kaia’s hand in mine. Her mouth close… And my heart pounding because I have never loved someone like I love Kaia—
Then the memory twists.
I’m sixteen again and furious, standing on wet boards with lantern smoke in my hair, trying to make words out of a thing that’s bigger than my chest.
“Are you going to pretend it didn’t happen?” I snap. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life acting like you’re just my—my friend who accidentally kissed me!”
Kaia’s face looks panicked.