Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Kit
I alphabetize when I need control.
Most people drink coffee. Or wine. Or sweat it out at the gym. I rearrange entire sections of my shop.
Jazz when I’m anxious. Broadway cast recordings when I’m angry.
Today? It’s soundtracks.
Which says absolutely everything about my state of mind.
I’ve just slipped Dirty Dancing back into D—one of those compulsive motions I don’t even register anymore—when I spot it.
A vinyl that’s definitely out of place. Simple Minds’ EP—Don’t You (Forget About Me).
It’s an original pressing from 1985. One corner bent, like it got caught in the wrong memory.
Price tag has faded into a pale orange curl that’s barely hanging on.
The cover doesn’t even try to impress—washed-out faces, fonts fat with attitude.
But the moment I touch it, the opening synth hits me right in the ribs.
That slow, moody rise, all nerves and anticipation.
Then the drums—perfectly timed—like a heartbeat pretending to be fine.
Just like that, Judd Nelson’s fist is in the air. Victory without certainty.
The Breakfast Club.
I must’ve watched the movie twenty times on VHS. Maybe more, especially when I couldn’t sleep and popcorn was my dinner during late-night replays.
I didn’t get it when I was ten, but I loved the music. I loved it at thirteen because Jude was my awakening to liking boys. I judged it at sixteen.
And now? Now I think I understand it in a way I wish I didn’t.
It’s not a movie about teenagers. It’s about silence. About how none of us truly say what we mean—until the credits roll and we’re out of time.
And the score? It made the entire movie. Just like it always does. Honestly, I think music carries ninety percent of the film—maybe more. At least for me it does.
Everyone talks about lighting—those soft-focus scenes where someone’s face glows as if they hold a secret the camera’s in on. The moody shadows. The warm hues that make heartbreak look cinematic. But no one ever gives enough credit to the music.
The music is the soul.
You walk out of a theater, and maybe you forget the dialogue.
Maybe the plot unravels a little by morning.
But that one chord progression? That swelling note when they kissed or walked away or just looked at each other across a crowded room—that stays.
You’ll be brushing your teeth three months later, humming it, not even realizing you are.
And it’ll hit you all over again. That feeling.
Then we rush to the store to buy the soundtrack—cassette if that’s what your stereo still prefers, CD if you’re feeling fancy.
Not vinyl, though. Almost no one buys vinyl anymore—not unless you’re a collector, a DJ, or raiding your dad’s collection.
But the music? It’s everything. We let it loop while working, or lying on the floor with headphones on, staring at the ceiling and wondering how a song can make you ache in places you don’t even have words for.
Because that’s the thing. Lighting shows you what to feel. Music? It makes you feel it.
I’ve scored moments of my life without meaning to.
My mother’s funeral was Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G minor—played by a twelve-year-old prodigy who picked the wrong tempo and still broke everyone’s heart.
My first kiss? “More Than This” by Roxy Music on a bootleg mix tape in Roderick’s bedroom. The first time we made love, ‘“More Than Words”’ by Extreme. Just voice and strings because that was it, us bare as we were learning how to surrender to each other without saying anything at all.
The day Roderick fucked everything up? Nothing. Not even silence. Just air that didn’t know what to hold.
I run my fingers along the edge of the Simple Minds sleeve.
The cardboard has softened over time. In the corner, someone scrawled a name in green ink: Eliot.
The handwriting is crooked, almost urgent—like a message left too late or too soon.
Still, there’s a pulse of hope in it. As if Eliot believed that maybe, just maybe, this record could hold someone’s hand long enough to make them stay.
Technically, it should go under S. But I don’t move.
There’s a pull—not to the song exactly, but to what the lyrics carry:
Moments that almost meant something. Looks that lingered a second too long. The suspended ache of everything left unsaid.
I have this quiet, irrational thought:
If you linger in the right record shop, surrounded by the right scratches and static, maybe the past will circle back around. Maybe someone who never found the words will finally walk through the door, find this sleeve, and say them.
“Kit?”
Lola’s voice breaks through the haze.
I blink. “Yeah?”
“There’s a call for you. Line two.”
Line two is never good. It’s the designated line for friends and family. Or bad news. Or both.
Dad set it up, and he even pays for it since I told him I couldn’t afford to use the shop’s line for his calls.
My mind is scrambling to guess what he wants this time.
I hope he doesn’t revisit the same conversation as last time: I should sell my store.
He wants me to work for him. Music runs through my veins.
I could spot a hit from a miss—and he needs the hits desperately.
Since the internet became a thing, the music industry has changed.
He’s not afraid of technology; he’s afraid of being left behind, just like what happened with his old band. One moment, they were on top, and the next, the lead singer/his best friend, was leaving them and going solo. Dad . . . he couldn’t keep up with Caleb Wilder.
My father could bang drums, but he didn’t have the voice. It was best for him to retire and start a new career. Mom had a knack for recognizing talent, but then she passed away. He was left with a difficult daughter to raise and a wife to mourn.
As I walk, the floorboards creak in a way I’ve stopped noticing unless someone new walks in.
It’s part of the place’s charm—or so I tell customers as they sidestep the warped plank near the poetry bin.
I could probably fix it. Like I could fix the lighting in the back corner.
Or the heater that rattles in early spring. Or my life.
But part of me loves that it’s imperfect, plus I don’t have the money for that.
My mother’s old cello rests in the front window, its strings long since loosened, its frame catching the afternoon light in a way that still feels like a memory in motion.
It hasn’t been played in over twenty years, not since the winter everything changed, but I dust it weekly with a tenderness I don’t extend to much else.
It isn’t about preservation or presentation.
It’s not a shrine, no matter how many times I catch myself hovering too long in front of it. It’s just one of those things I do without thinking—like locking the door twice or listening for her footsteps that haven’t echoed through in decades.
Part of me believes that if I keep it clean and ready, it will mean something. That it won’t just be a prop in the backdrop of my denial.
There’s a hand-lettered sign hanging above the register that reads MUSIC IS MEMORY WITH A MELODY.
It sounds deep if you say it out loud slowly, like something meant to be stitched onto a quilt or carved in wood.
Maybe it came from a fridge magnet, or a forgotten seminar handout Aunt Tilly picked up in the ‘70s when she still wore patchouli and believed in the healing power of wind chimes. I haven’t bothered to trace the quote.
I left it standing because it fits—because everything here is stitched together by memory and melody, by things left behind and the people who once believed music could express what words never could.
The walls are cluttered with framed playbills, faded concert posters, and letters from semi-famous people whose names mean nothing to anyone outside a very specific circle.
There’s a signed program from a 1976 Leonard Bernstein recital that hangs beside a bootleg Nirvana setlist I bought at a flea market for ten bucks a year ago.
I hung them next to each other on purpose—classical meets grunge, symphony meets scream, the polished ache of old-world strings colliding with the raw throat of Seattle’s dirtiest era.
Lola’s footsteps tap cautiously across the wood floor as I approach her.
When she hands me the receiver, it’s with a hesitation that says more than words—like the phone might scorch her skin or carry something volatile.
Her lips pull tight, her expression drawn in that quiet, unmistakable way people look when they already know what they’re handing you will rearrange your afternoon, maybe your entire existence.
“It’s Bernice,” she says, her voice nearly as soft as the music playing in the background. She hesitates, then adds with that familiar, bracing wince, “She’s at the hospital.”
“Dad . . .” I close my eyes, bracing for the worst.