Lark takes the photos out of Oli’s hand and turns them around so he can look at them. “Thanks,” he says. “I forgot.”

Oli waves away his thanks. “It looks like we were just getting to the fun bit. A party, and everything.”

Lark shakes his head at this idea. “Sure,” he says. “Sure.”

Oli, tired, allows himself an uncharitable thought: Lark holds his misery too close. He has wrapped himself so tightly in regrets he has smothered more joyful memories.

Why did Lark take the photos, Oli wonders, if there wasn’t something he wanted to remember. He was willing to concede that some milestones were bittersweet, but Lark’s sad response to party lights strikes him as excessively morose.

Lark turns to the next picture, though, and closes his lips on the ghost of a smile.

“What?” Oli asks.

Lark shrugs. “Just remembering. Are you, like, a spiritual person?”

“Um, no.” Oli, in fact, tires quickly of anything other than a scientific position. He finds himself, sometimes suddenly, unable to be polite when anyone asks him about his star sign. He has felt the pull of the stars; mystification, he thinks, cheapens the deeper mysteries of the universe.

“Okay, well, me neither. But Dana, who I was living with in Portland, got into some kind of crystal magic? I don’t know. She started hanging rocks in our windows and giving us healing stones and stuff.”

Oli makes a face at that.

“It was sweet, really.” Lark remembers Dana pressing a hunk of amethyst into his hands when he was opening acceptance letters. For anxiety, she told him. He didn’t think the stone helped, but having someone with him—watching and hoping with him—had soothed him.

“I guess,” Oli concedes. “That kind of thing just seems a bit—I don’t know. Like it takes advantage of how unhappy people can be.”

Lark agrees with that. Dana had been brutally practical before they went to Portland. Months in that cramped apartment, trapped with Lark and Max, worried about money and her future, had her looking for hope anywhere she could find it. Lark wonders what she’s like now: if she’s reordered her life, applied new rules of logic, if she still reads her horoscope.

“What can you do with crystals, you know?” Oli says. “It’s something to focus on while your life goes on without you.”

Lark frowns at the bluntness of Oli’s opinion, says only, “I guess. Sometimes it’s good to have the distraction.”

“Sorry,” Oli says. “I’m tired.”

Lark nods and drifts back to the living room, goes to sit on the sofa. The TV is still on, but The Lord of the Rings has paused. The first disc was played out: change to continue.

I was placed in an early audition slot of a California conservatory at the start of December, the morning before Squires of Gothos was scheduled to play a show to mark the release of our album.

Max had a spreadsheet of blogs and zines and music reviewers that he sent our music to, stacks of manilla envelopes, the CD packaged up with hand-lettered notes, and a press kit Jules put together for us. They were already planning a spring tour. I felt only peripherally aware of these goings-on, my attention hyper-focused on music like it hadn’t been in a long time. I wrote new songs for Squires that Max insisted on shelving until after the new record. In my solo work, a months-long technical plateau was starting to give under the weight of obsessive practice.

I did know about the gig, though. I kept a sensible calendar and knew what my responsibilities were, and still carried that conflict around, a stone of cold anxiety in my stomach all the time. I only told Max the night before, when he caught me packing a backpack for the 10-hour drive to San Francisco.

I’ll be back in time, I promised. I’ll be done by 10:30, 11 latest. And I’ll come straight back.

Max stared at me from the door of my room, but he didn’t argue. Great. That’s great. So you’ll show up, not having slept for, what, thirty-six hours? A total stressed-out mess?

Sorry, I said—my only rebuttal. I have to go. I can’t change it.

Why do you want to leave so badly? Max asked. He sounded angry, but when I turned to look at him, I saw a twist in his face, the tension of holding back his feelings somehow forcing his normally handsome features out of alignment. I had only seen that expression on his face twice: after being dumped last winter and when his grandmother passed away our junior year.

Both times, it had preceded tears.

I just watched him as I folded the dress shirt I was going to wear to the audition, stacked it on top of a gray sweater. Neutral smart-casual in monochrome. The same outfit I’d worn to play last year and the year before that.

We have an album coming out, and you’re what—going to go suck some dick at the conservatory? You’ve tried everything else, right?

I didn’t even look up, sure that if I spoke, rose to the bait, Max’s mood would transmute from desperation to fury. There wasn’t much I could say, anyway. I reread the e-mail from the piano tutor again and again. I prayed: please this time, please this time.

We want you. Here. Us.

I zipped up my bag and stood to go. It was too early for me to leave, really, but I couldn’t bear being in the house.

Dana followed me to the door. At some point, she had gotten into astrology. Around her neck, she had a wedge of white quartz that she said would purify negative energy. Now, she was clutching the pendant, warming the stone with her hand.

Good luck, she said. See you tomorrow night.

Max shouted after me: Don’t crash your car.