Chapter 6
Hannah
The pounding’s either coming from inside my head—which, fair, given what I drank last night—or from my hotel room door, in which case there’s someone I need to murder. I groan, burying my face in my pillow.
“Go away!” My mouth’s dry as the Sahara. I grope around on the bedside table and hit a half-empty bottle of beer. I briefly consider drinking it, then put it down.
“I guess your dignity hasn’t totally abandoned you,” Ginny says from the other side of the bed.
“Hilarious.” I squint against the intense sunlight coming through the blinds. “Great. Another sunny fucking day in California.”
“Not just any day.” Ginny turns on her side and props her head on her hand. Her hair’s rumpled from sleeping. “The first day of the rest of your life, snookums!”
She’s teasing, but today is the first day I’m no longer a Saint.
I’m purposeless for the first time since my dad put a guitar in my hands.
Imagine what my mother would say if she could see me now, nearing thirty and hungover in a trashed hotel room, with no plans and no future. That she was right all along, probably.
“It’s hard to read your face.” Ginny pokes my shoulder. “Give me a hint.”
I find my pack of cigarettes on the bedside table, shake one out, and light it. “Remember when I won Battle of the Bands in high school and Guppy and Keri Marisculo dumped that pitcher of Kool-Aid on me? And I had to jump into the ocean because I got swarmed by bees?”
“That’s what you’re thinking about? You know it was supposed to be Gatorade, right? Like after football games when the coaches win. But Gatorade is expensive. And none of us realized bees would be so attracted to lime.” Ginny laughs. “God, remember the name of your high school band?”
“Ugh. Riot Babies. Oh my god, remember when the Saints played that bar in Palm Springs and then the four of us and Bowie camped in Joshua Tree?”
A laugh cracks from Ginny. “And Ripper took mushrooms and thought aliens were coming to abduct him? He hid in the tent all night zipped in his sleeping bag like that would save him.”
“He said the rest of us would be safe because the aliens would find us too boring to abduct.”
Ginny wheezes. “Brutal.”
The sunlight seems to shimmer between us, a veil of light and warmth.
For a moment, as Ginny laughs, nothing seems solid—not my body or hers, not the crisp white sheets or even time itself, glitching between past and present.
I want it to stay glitched. I’m hungry for the past in a way I’m no longer hungry for the future.
“Hey,” I say softly. “We had a good run, didn’t we?”
She stops laughing and looks up, the smile still bright on her face. “The best.”
I take a deep breath. “And were you happy—”
The pounding returns at my door, making me jump.
“Are you going to get that?” Ginny asks.
“I said go away!” I yell, but an electronic clicking sound comes from the door, and before I have time to react, Theo, Kenny, and Ripper burst through it.
“You’re alive,” Theo says.
“What the fuck?” I clutch the bedsheet to my chest.
The three of them stop in their tracks, taking in the room. Kenny and Ripper gape at the mess, but Theo stares at me. “Are you smoking inside? Do you know what that fine is going to cost us?”
“When he thought you partied yourself to death, he was very concerned about the paperwork,” Kenny says.
“Yo.” Ripper crosses his arms. “This room looks like a bomb went off.”
It is a bit of a disaster. All my shoes and clothes exploded out of my suitcase at some point, and there are bottles and empty take-out boxes I haven’t felt the energy to clean scattered everywhere.
“No,” Kenny moans, rushing to where my blue guitar lies haphazardly in the corner among the trash. “Not the baby.” He picks it up and cradles it. “That’s sacrilegious.”
I sit up straighter, jabbing my cigarette into an old cup. “How’d you get a key to my room?”
Theo waves it at me. “Remember that hotel manager you tortured last night? He owed me a favor.”
“Whatever.” I make a shooing gesture. “I’m alive. Now go away.”
“For a bunch of people you quit on,” Ginny says, “they’re strangely persistent.”
As if to prove her point, Theo walks over to my bed and sits down.
I scramble back against the headboard, pulling my legs away so our bodies don’t graze.
Ripper and Kenny perch on the corners, refusing to look at me.
After the way they chewed me out last night, the fact that they’ve deigned to be in the same room with me is a miracle.
“I don’t remember inviting you to a sleepover,” I say to Theo, because he’s the safest target.
His leg bounces. “We have news.”
“Good news,” Kenny adds. His long hair is braided today, and he fiddles with the end. Playing with his hair is a nervous tic. In fact, now that I scan the three of them, I sense an anticipatory buzz in the air.
“What’s going on?”
Theo scoots until he’s sitting right beside me.
He’s wearing an olive-green hoodie that pulls taut over his shoulders. A strand of dark hair falls against his cheekbone, and as he tucks it behind his ears, I smell the hotel’s eucalyptus shampoo, clean and bright, notice his fingers are long and elegant like a piano player’s.
My muscles tense. He pulls out his phone, leaning until our shoulders touch. “Here. Take a look.”
“We’re internet stars,” Kenny crows.
“I want to see,” Ginny says, and crouches next to me on the bed. We’re a rapt audience, though Theo, Ripper, and Kenny seem more interested in watching my face than the screen.
On Theo’s phone is a TikTok video captioned “The Saddest Shit I’ve Ever Seen.” In the still, I’m standing in the middle of the stage at the Hideout.
He presses play. It’s a recording of “Six Feet Under” from last night. Whoever took it was standing near enough to the stage to get a good close-up. The version of me up there is a stranger with a good voice, good guitar work. I feel a swell of pride that’s replaced in the next second by dread.
As the song builds, Theo leans even closer.
And there I am, my voice hard and desperate, the music pounding, Kenny wailing on the drums. I drop to my knees.
Whoever’s recording says, “Oh, shit,” and the camera flickers a little, then restabilizes, zooming in on my face.
Shame floods me. I look wrecked. What was I thinking, letting everyone see me like that?
I glance down again at the title of the video—“Saddest Shit”—and punch pause on Theo’s phone. He looks at me, surprised.
“How is this good news? It’s humiliating.”
“Wait,” he says hurriedly, and, in a total rookie move, scrolls to the comments.
“I don’t want to see that,” I start, but he says, “They love you. Look.”
Against my better judgment, I glance where he’s pointing.
The first comment, with seventeen hundred likes, says, “Gave me chills, can’t stop watching.
” Theo keeps scrolling, to “Next level emotions, bruh”; “Damn, this gutted me”; “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt any emotion this intensely.
Does that make me a robot?” There are comments about me: “Hannah Cortland is a legend”; “This chick’s voice is insane.
” Ripper snorts at the next and reads it out loud: “That girl looks good on her knees,” then the next: “Women in rock are whiny.”
“It’s funny because you’re the lead singer in a rock band and he’s just an internet troll,” Ripper explains.
“Love Rip mansplaining misogyny to you,” says Ginny. “Classic.”
Theo scrolls back to the top. “This video went up last night and already has over ten million views. We’re thinking it’ll hit fifteen before tomorrow.”
It’s a shocking number, almost too big to process.
Ten million people watching me? Just a year ago, this would’ve been transformative.
But now, there’s no spark of excitement in my chest, no buzz of nerves.
My capacity for joy has flatlined. I suck in a breath.
“I don’t know why you’re showing me this. The band no longer exists.”
Ripper and Kenny shift uncomfortably, and I immediately regret my harshness. Ginny’s the one who’s always been good at dealing with people, not me. “But,” I attempt, “if you’d let me explain why I quit—”
“Hannah,” Theo interrupts. “Over ten million people. Do you understand? My phone’s been blowing up all day.”
All day? I glance at the bright windows. “What time is it?”
“Three in the afternoon,” Ripper says dryly.
“The point is,” Theo says quickly. “The Future Saints are going massively viral. Manifest wants to seize the moment.”
“Meaning?”
Kenny finally meets my eyes. “They want to extend our tour.”
I can’t help it—I laugh. And then turn to Theo. “Putting aside the apparently unimportant fact that I quit yesterday, what about our album? I thought you were sent here to make us buckle down and work hard.”
Theo clears his throat. “The owner of the Sunset Theater in LA saw the TikTok and reached out to see if he could book you.”
I blink. The Sunset is an iconic venue. Part of rock history. We’ve never been on their radar before. “So I was hoping we could do both. A couple more shows and the new album.”
I fold my arms over my chest. “How delusional of you.”
He tips his head back and groans. “Jesus, Hannah. This is your big break, okay? That lightning-bolt moment you’ve been waiting for.
It’s here. It’s happening. You have to decide what you’re going to do about it.
” Theo’s chest rises and falls. “And you, all of you, would be cowards if you give up and let this chance go.”
The room is silent. Something about Theo’s intensity is contagious. Or maybe it’s the magic of the words big break. The mythical moment we’ve been chasing since college, if not earlier. I glance at Kenny and Ripper. “What are you thinking?”
“That we hope you quitting was a mistake,” Kenny says.
“Or a joke,” Ripper adds. “Although a really messed-up one.”
Kenny nods. “But one that Ripper and I would forgive . . . in light of everything.”
Theo’s eyes ping-pong between us, trying to read between the lines. “We want to do this,” Ripper says bluntly. “I know it feels like a chapter of our lives is over—”
My throat seizes. A chapter? It’s so much more than that.
“But breaking out with the Saints is our dream,” Ripper says. “We promised we’d stick it out together.”
“I still need the Saints,” Kenny says. “And the dream.” He rests a warm hand on my arm. Kenny always runs warm. On tour, sometimes I used to fall asleep with my leg pressed against his for comfort.
Silence reigns once more. Suddenly the hotel room feels too crowded, the sunlight too glaring, Kenny’s hand too hot. He’s completely wrong about why I quit. “For argument’s sake,” I say, “what exactly is Manifest proposing?”
Kenny squeezes my arm.
“I know it’s unusual to tour and record at the same time,” Theo says.
“But it’s also unusual to have a viral moment like this.
According to our analytics department, people are searching Spotify for ‘Six Feet Under,’ posting TikToks begging to buy it, googling to see if you have tour dates.
If we play a few more shows while you’re hot, and release the single, we can stoke excitement for the next album.
And in between the shows, we can write new songs.
Forget eking out an album just to satisfy your contract—we’ll have something people will be lining up to buy. Roger called about it himself.”
“Oh. Well, in that case.”
“Please, Hannah.” Shockingly, Ripper falls to a knee beside the bed. “Just a few more shows. After that, if you still want to quit, we’ll bury the Saints together. No hard feelings.”
Ripper looks so much like I did onstage last night—on his knees, begging—that it burns to see. I jerk my gaze away.
“Just give the Saints one last chance.” Kenny’s voice is so earnest.
I look past them to Ginny. The sunlight halos her blond hair, making it dazzle.
I hadn’t noticed until now that she’s wearing the pajamas I gave her for Christmas a few years ago, the ones with the fuzzy peaches all over.
That year she had the annoying habit of answering all my texts with the peach emoji as a running joke.
Now, the bright fruit makes her look like a kid. I like remembering her that way.
“Hannah,” Ginny says softly. “I’m the one whose life is over. Not you.”
I close my eyes.
“Fine.” My voice is tired. “I’ll do it.”
I’ve never been able to say no to Ginny. Not when she was alive, and especially not since she became the girl who haunts me, my own personal ghost.