Chapter 5
From Northern California to Southern California.
Eve is starting to flag. So are Clay, Eliza, Nara—everyone but Stella, whose performance remains precise and unchanged.
Eve is dying for the tour to end, but she’s also aware of the gaping lack of a plan on the other side of the last show.
She doesn’t know how to capitalize on her fragile success, and ski rat isn’t big enough to protect her from a shitty third album.
LA might be Eve’s worst show yet. She’s so tired, she almost goes back to the hotel instead of helping clean up.
She doesn’t, of course. Neither does Stella.
Last one out. Stella nods at Eve before she goes.
After the Southern California shows, the Shadow Puppet Tour has a week off before their final three East Coast performances. Most everyone goes home, but Eve elects to stay with her family friend Holling in San Diego instead.
Holling lives in a bungalow in Ocean Beach. Eve lugs her suitcase over the loose gravel to his door, which is blue and surrounded by potted cacti.
Holling opens the door before Eve can knock, and he hugs her before she can set down her suitcase.
He’s the youngest in the mess of assorted cousins/children of her parents’ college friends with whom she went on forced vacations growing up.
Most of the others in their extended group, the other children of their parents’ friends, are thirty.
In the Our Parents Are Friends group text, when someone fires off a reference to a Vine she does not remember or uses too many emojis, Eve will make a joke about AARP and Holling will lend his Gen Z support.
He ushers her inside a house that is too adult and too expensive.
Once he shuts the door, he hugs her again.
He has, of course, been tall and grown for some years now, but it’s still surprising to Eve that her eyes would be level with his collarbone, that his face would be so entirely devoid of baby fat.
He’s wearing a soft linen button-down with the sleeves rolled up.
When their hug breaks, he holds her shoulders, smiling down at her from arm’s length.
His wrist has three thin hair ties around it even though his own hair is short and neatly styled and he does not currently have a girlfriend.
The kitchen is suspiciously clean, like it has recently been visited by a professional.
Holling removes pizza ingredients from the fridge—dough and mozzarella and a punnet of basil.
He pours two glasses of wine and asks Eve about the tour so far, and her parents, and Julian’s impending wedding.
She tries to ask him questions in return and he finds the quickest possible way to divert the conversation back to her.
“How’s music stuff?” he asks as they put the pizzas in the oven. “Working on anything new?”
“Just messing around.”
He waits expectantly. His eyes are very big, like a lemur’s.
“I mean, I have a few ideas, but nothing that’s coalescing into an album.”
“Uh-huh?” Holling says.
“How’s your work?”
“So boring,” he says. “Laws! Tell me more about the new songs.”
The thing about Holling as a conversationalist is that you can tell he was always the youngest one in every social setting. He’s very good at making you feel slightly heroic just for existing.
“Well, I’m writing about being back in New York. And, like—love.”
“How do you come up with your ideas?” Holling asks. “Do you use AI?”
“Everyone keeps asking that! Do my songs sound like AI?”
“No,” Holling says. “Unless that’s a good thing. In which case, sure.”
“Definitely an insult,” Eve says. “I guess I want my songs to be smarter or more sincere than AI. Like, I want them to have more to say. More feeling.”
He pours her more wine, and she lets him. “I saw the stuff with Fletcher. That’s so shitty.”
Eve had started to lift her wine, but now she sets it down again. “What?”
“Oh,” Holling says. “Did you not—” He takes out his phone. Opens Instagram.
“I blocked him,” Eve says. “I didn’t want to be tempted to see what he was up to.”
Holling winces. He navigates to Fletcher’s profile and opens the most recent Reel.
It’s an overproduced clip of Fletcher’s running shoes kicking up mud as he ascends a mountain trail.
In melodramatic voice-over, he says, “There will always be people who want to bring you down. The important thing is, keep running your own race blah blah sports cliché blah.” In the comment section, ultrarunner_fred has written: lol fuck eve Olson.
User mattypbedford has helpfully responded: Ski rat is legimate oatmeal trash.
Eve has seen her share of bad reviews but also knows that this particular opinion has already made its way into long-term memory.
She will be lying on her deathbed worrying she was legimate oatmeal trash.
“It’s not like you used his name,” Holling says. “You could’ve been singing about anyone.”
“Yeah. But I was singing about him.”
Holling kills the app and puts his phone back in his pocket. He nudges Eve’s wine closer to her. “Is it weird?” he asks. “Knowing that people will go looking for themselves in your songs?”
“I try not to think about it. If I could ban my family and friends from ever hearing my music, I would. I think I’d be a better songwriter if I were only talking to strangers.”
“Have you written any songs about Danny?”
“ ‘HONEY LOCUST’ is about Danny.” She has never said this out loud before.
“But that’s from your first album,” Holling says.
“I know.”
“That was, like, five years ago.”
“I know.”
“You’ve liked Danny since then?”
“I’ve liked Danny since always.”
“I didn’t realize,” Holling says. “You two really have, like, an actual love story.”
Eve finishes the glass. The song goes:
Sweeten my lips, let me stay here warm
Hiding inside from the locust swarm
I’ll taste the fruit from any devil’s tree
If you breathe my soul back into me.
Which makes it seem like it’s about the Garden of Eden! When it’s actually just about being horny for Danny in a flannel.
“It was easy to sing about him when he didn’t know,” Eve says. “But how do you write a song about love when everyone is like, ‘Hey, I know who this was inspired by’?”
“Have you considered a career in contract law instead?” Holling asks.
“Alas.”
The window is open, and the breeze through the gauzy curtains smells like sea. Eve is so happy in New York—finally, after so long in her Colorado haze—that she resents San Diego for being tempting.
“Stella wants me to play one of my new songs,” Eve says.
“Really? Eve, that’s awesome.”
“But I can’t decide which one to play. I have one that’s sappy but fun and one that’s clever but depressing.”
“Which one do you want to play?” Holling asks.
“The sappy one feels cliché. The clever one feels honest.”
“And you want your music to be honest?”
“Of course,” Eve says. “If it’s not coming from a place of real feeling, it might as well have been written by AI.”
“What are the songs about? The smart one and the sappy one.”
“The smart one is called ‘Settle Down.’ The sappy one is ‘Sunbeam, Baby.’ ”
“Because Danny is a sunbeam, baby, and you’re a happy little plant?”
Eve makes an aggrieved noise. Holling pats her cheek, and the ensuing flour makes her sneeze.
It occurs to Eve that there is another version of the story, perhaps not all that different, where she’s dating Holling instead.
There’s another one where she never broke up with Fletcher.
There’s another where she dates no one at all.
How is she, the Eve of these other stories? Is she happy? Does she long for more?
“If you had a hundred lives,” Eve says, “a hundred random dice rolls from your birth to now, what percentile do you think this one would be?”
Holling frowns. “I don’t know. Sixty?”
“Are you unhappy?”
“No. Sixty seems good, right? Better than average.”
“But you have—” Eve gestures around the bungalow “—so much.”
“I was born with so much. I’ve made medium hay of it. Why? What would you be?”
“Ninety-five?” Eve says. “I hadn’t thought about it until just now. But yeah, maybe ninety-five.”
Eve is surprised but pleased. She’s been too busy to stop and think about how many lucky things have befallen her lately.
There was no reason her album broke out instead of someone else’s.
No reason she should have bumped into Danny exactly when she did.
She tells this to Holling, who says, “You could also complain that your first album wasn’t bigger.
Or that it took so long for you and Danny to find each other. ”
“I guess,” Eve says. “Shitty way to live, though.”
“Do you believe in soulmates?” Holling asks.
“Of course not,” she says. But then she thinks about how she felt the first time she saw Danny, like she had just met the love of her life.
And the way she felt when she saw him again this summer, like a key had just tumbled a lock.
And the way they make the same jokes and like the same songs and look at a skyline and pick the same favorite building.
The way it feels simple. The way it feels obvious.
She thinks of her ninety-five. “Oh no,” she says. “I fear I do.”
“Well, then there’s your answer,” Holling says.
“My answer?”
“About what song to play.”
“You think I should play the sappy one.”
“I think you should play the honest one,” Holling says. “Because you are honestly so sappy.”