Chapter 27
twenty-seven
CASS
My dorm room has crossed the threshold from “creative chaos” to “crime scene under investigation.”
It’s dark, the air tastes stale, and three takeout containers form a sad little Stonehenge on my floor, their contents fossilizing into archaeological evidence of my spiral. Future anthropologists will write papers: The Vance Depression Diet: A Study in General Tso’s and Self-Destruction.
But it’s not just the room that’s a mess.
I haven’t showered in two days. My mascara has migrated from my lashes to somewhere in the general vicinity of my cheekbones, giving me the haunted look of a raccoon who’s seen some shit. And I’m sprawled across my unmade bed in yesterday’s clothes.
It’s so bad, people who are used to my spirals have noticed.
Milo texted earlier:
Joel says you’re wallowing. You OK?
I’d been offended for exactly three seconds before my mind helpfully confirmed that Milo was annoyingly, completely right. I’m wallowing like a pig in mud, except the mud is self-pity. But even though he’s right, I didn’t respond, because what was I supposed to say?
I’m great! Just lying here replaying the exact moment the only decent guy I’ve ever dated publicly disowned me in a hallway. Living the dream!
Besides, if I text back, Milo will tell Joel, and Joel will come over with his I-told-you-so face to add to his twice-a-week lecture about sabotaging the band. And then I’ll have to shower and put on fresh clothes and go sort it out, and honestly, that feels like too much right now.
The rage from two days ago has burned itself out. It was spectacular while it lasted—I cleaned my room in a fury, organizing my records alphabetically and scrubbing the bathroom sink like I was trying to erase Ben Kellerman from existence through sheer domestic violence.
Then I realized I was tidying up for a ghost, so I immediately trashed everything again. And now there’s just this cold space behind my sternum where something warm used to live, like someone scraped out all the soft, hopeful parts, leaving nothing but the hollow body.
I roll onto my side, clutching my phone like it might tell me what to do. It lights up, the background photo staring back at me, a candid I took of Ben in the engineering lab two weeks ago. He’s mid-laugh, responding to something I said like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
I remember thinking he looked beautiful.
I remember thinking this one’s different.
I’m a grown ass woman who has survived worse than some gangly hockey player with issues. I’ve been rejected by men who were actively cruel—who told me my music was garbage, who looked at my fear like it was a disease they might catch. Ben wasn’t like that. He wasn’t cruel. He was just…
Cowardly.
I press my palms against my eyes until I see stars, but yet again the scene plays in my head, like it seems to do on repeat whether I want it to or not.
Ben standing in the hallway, my amp—my amp—heavy in his hands, and the words coming out of his mouth like he was reading from a script he’d memorized years ago.
And then, the killing blow.
It’s not that serious between us anyway.
I’d been standing right there, right fucking there, with a stupid container of takeout and a goofy smile because I’d heard his voice. And then he’d dropped the bomb, and I’d dropped the food a moment later, as everything I thought I knew about him was rewritten.
But, if nothing else, at least I got to see his true colors.
God. The ache sharpens into something jagged. You let yourself hope. That was the mistake. You forgot the first rule: don’t let them see you bleed.
My laptop sits on the floor beside my bed, half-buried under a rejected setlist from last month.
I reach for it without thinking, some masochistic impulse overriding my better judgment.
I tell myself I just want to check if the team is suffering, and if he’s suffering, because misery loves company, right?
That’s healthy. Very mature. Stalking your ex for evidence of mutual destruction.
Ignoring my brain, I drag the laptop onto my crossed legs, load the PBU athletics website, and navigate to the hockey section with the grim determination of someone picking at a wound. When I see there’s a highlight reel from last night’s home game, my finger hovers over the play button.
Don’t do this.
I click.
The video plays, arena noise crackling through my crappy laptop speakers. The Devils are down by two. The camera pans across the ice, and there he is, tall and familiar, moving like he’s skating through wet concrete and looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.
My stomach clenches.
He’s clearly off. Everything about him looks wrong—the timing, the rhythm, the way he hesitates half a beat too long before every movement, but it’s still like watching someone try to play guitar with numb fingers.
I watch as he fumbles a pass at the blue line, and it leads directly to an opposition goal.
The camera cuts to his face as he skates back to the bench.
Oh.
My fingers tighten on the laptop.
His head is down and his shoulders are slumped. I recognize that posture—I’ve been wearing it for two days—and know down to my marrow that this isn’t the normal on-ice Ben. Usually, he’s confident and composed, moving like a gazelle. But this is scared Ben, the one who runs.
The coach gets in his face, and then Ben is pulled from the game entirely.
The camera lingers on him sitting there, isolated at the end of the bench, separated from his teammates by a canyon of empty space.
His gloves come off, his head goes into his hand, and he looks like a condemned man waiting for the axe to fall.
Good, I think viciously. He should suffer. He chose them over you, and now he gets to sit in his little corner and think about what he did.
But the thought rings hollow.
Because watching him suffer doesn’t feel like victory.
It feels like looking in a mirror, and the reflection is just as shattered.
Frustrated, I slam the laptop shut, but his hunched form stays with me, playing on repeat behind my closed eyes like a song I can’t get out of my head. That posture. That isolation. That look on his face like the world had ended and he was the one who’d detonated the bomb.
It’s clear he’s failing because of this—because of us—and for a long moment, I just sit there. My eyes burn. My throat is tight. I feel like I’m going to cry, or scream, or both, and I hate it. Hate that he can still do this to me, hate that I let him get close enough to leave these kinds of marks.
Stop it. Stop feeling sorry for him. He made his choice.
Then the rage boils up.
It erupts from somewhere deep in my gut, the same place where I find my voice on stage, the part of me that screams instead of cries.
Rage at Ben for being a coward. Rage at myself for believing in happy endings.
Rage at the entire universe for dangling something good in front of me and then snatching it away.
This I can use.
Grief makes you collapse.
Rage makes you move.
I stand abruptly, my body moving before my brain catches up.
The rage feels good.
Fuck him. Fuck this. Fuck everything.
Burning with the need to do something, I start shoving aside the debris on my desk—crumpled setlists, empty Red Bull cans, a failed assignment covered in red writing, but I pause when my fingers brush against something half-buried, dog-eared and forgotten.
A flyer.
I pull it out from behind a photo of Pinebox from our first gig—me and Joel and Milo, sweaty and grinning, looking like little kids who’d just gotten away with something their parents would be deeply ashamed of. The paper is creased and coffee-stained, but the words are clear:
Battle of the Bands at The Firehouse.
All genres welcome.
Winner takes $500 and a guaranteed monthly slot.
The Firehouse.
Everyone in the local scene knows that venue. It’s a legendary shithole—faulty wiring that makes amps hum like angry bees, a sound system held together with duct tape and prayers, a stage so small you’re basically performing in the audience’s lap, and a crowd of drunk college kids.
But fucking epic if you get it right.
Some of Jersey’s best rock and punk acts started out at the Firehouse, and even for those who flame out, it’s a memory to last a lifetime. And, right now, the difference between being the best and flaming out seems immaterial, because I’m looking up from rock bottom.
And, hey, if nothing else, I’ll know.
I already know I suck at academic music study.
I know Ben and I are toast, and that I was an idiot for trusting him.
So I may as well find out whether my band has a future or not.
Perfect.
This is it. This is what I need. This is what we need. Not some thumb-up-his-own-ass record label guy or a polished showcase where I have to pretend to be something I’m not. The Firehouse is raw, unforgiving, authentic—a bet on pure, unvarnished sound.
It’s also a declaration.
I will be myself, even if it costs me everything, and even if it’s a disaster.
Especially if it’s disaster.
I grab a thick black marker from my desk and circle the date with vicious precision.
Saturday. One week. Seven days to pull myself together, to channel all this pain and rage and heartbreak into something that actually matters, and get to a point where we can nuke the joint and make everyone cheer in thanks.
I take a photo of the circled flyer, the black ink stark against the cheap paper. Then I open my phone and head back to the text from Joel I’ve been avoiding, sitting in our group chat like unexploded ordnance, while Milo tries to keep the peace between the warring factions.
Joel: We need to talk about the band.
I can practically hear his voice—frustrated, impatient, probably already drafting his resignation message. He wants to know why we’re still playing for beer money when we should be booking real venues and “finding our sound,” which is industry-speak for “make you sound like everyone else.”
Maybe I’ve been holding us back with my stubborn insistence on authenticity.
But authenticity is all I have left.
It’s the only thing that’s actually mine.
So it’s time to push the chips all in.
I open the group chat, attach the photo, and type:
I’ll be here if you want to talk. If you guys don’t show, or we bomb it, then we have our answer. But if we make it, we do it the right way.
I hit send before I can second-guess myself, then my gaze drifts to my messy desk. Buried under setlists and failed theory assignments is my planner, open to this week. I’d written something there days ago, back when things were good. Back when I was stupid enough to believe.
Saturday 7 p.m. – PBU home game.
God. The sight of it makes my stomach turn.
I’d circled it in purple pen. Drawn a little heart next to it like a lovesick teenager, like someone who’d never been burned before. I grab the black marker and slash through the entry. One violent stroke, then another, obliterating the words until they’re nothing but a dark smear on the page.
Gone.
He chose his teammates over me. He can have them.
He can sit in that locker room surrounded by the brotherhood he values so much, the men he sold us out to impress for a split-second.
I hope each one of them asks where his girlfriend is, and I hope the silence when he can’t answer gives him heartburn.
I toss the marker aside and stare at the crossed-out entry, my jaw tight. The hurt is still there, somewhere underneath. But something harder is forming over it. Like calluses on guitar-playing fingers—the skin that forms to protect you from what you love.
I will fight my own battle at The Firehouse.
He can fight his on the ice.
Both of us alone.
The way it should be.