Chapter 2: Garage Kids

August 2000, Costa Mesa, California, Roxy’s Garage

By then we had already spent so many aimless afternoons around Roxy’s garage that it had started to feel almost natural to find ourselves lingering there without really noticing how we got stuck. Sometimes we would just sit on the edge of the concrete driveway or drift into the dim half-light inside, without any real reason to stay.

There were days when I sat on the floor, hunched over a torn notebook, stubbornly trying to find words for that hard-to-define tension that had been sitting in my chest for weeks, as if some invisible force kept pushing outward from somewhere deep inside. Other times Nova would stand in the corner with the dull weight of the bass resting against her stomach, repeating the same three notes again and again with patient, almost obsessive movements, as if she were trying to feel out the hidden lock of a sealed door through the vibration of the strings. Roxy would occasionally strike the snare once, then let the silence settle back in, as if that single, short sound was her way of checking whether the room was still alive, still breathing, and hadn’t finally sunk into boredom or forgetfulness.

In truth we were always making some kind of noise, always circling around music in one way or another, yet something essential was missing – that shared intention, that single heartbeat capable of pulling all the scattered sound and all our restless thoughts into the same direction. That afternoon was the first time all four of us arrived with the same purpose. Not just to kill time, not to drift for hours along the edge between nothingness and possibility, but because we wanted something real to happen – something that could no longer be shrugged off or taken lightly.

My head was still buzzing dully from the lukewarm beer the night before, and the merciless glare of the sun cut into my eyes as if it were trying to settle some old, deeply personal score. Cayde stood at the edge of the sidewalk in his sunglasses, slowly rolling his shoulders in tired circles, and from the way he moved it was obvious he hadn’t slept any better than I had. After a long yawn, Nova started nudging the gravel with the tip of her shoe, as though she were trying to wake both herself and the afternoon at the same time.

Still, we were all there. Unusually early. A little lost, yet driven by a strange kind of determination none of us would have dared to name out loud.

By around quarter to four we were already drifting restlessly around the house, as if we were afraid that even a few minutes’ delay might cause the whole idea to dissolve into the heavy heat and leave us with no way of finding our way back to it. We didn’t talk much; instead we kept watching the closed garage door from a distance, pretending it was perfectly normal to feel this nervous about a pile of uncertain noise.

When we finally started up the driveway, my watch read 4:09 PM. The air hung thick and sluggish between the houses, as if it too were nursing a hangover, and that was when we heard the first dull thud. Then another. It wasn’t loud, and it wasn’t tight or controlled either. It sounded more like someone half-asleep trying to bring order to the chaos inside their own head.

Cayde stopped beside me, staring at the garage door through the dark lenses of his sunglasses.

“Roxy…” he muttered quietly, more to himself than to us.

The next hit came faster. The rhythm fell apart for a moment, then pulled itself back together again, as if her hands had woken up before the rest of her mind. We stood there, the three of us in the middle of the driveway, in sweat-soaked shirts and foggy heads, far too early on a far too hot afternoon, and all at once we could feel that something was already happening inside. Something that wasn’t waiting for us.

There was already music in there.

—

And that realization made everything suddenly feel both frighteningly exciting and undeniably real.

The metal panel of the garage door began to move slowly under Cayde’s hand, and the long, complaining screech of the lifting mechanism cut through the thick heat of the afternoon as if the place itself were protesting against revealing everything it had been quietly holding inside. As a narrow strip of light slipped into the half-dark, the dust immediately came alive within it, drifting in small floating particles that turned lazily in the air, as though they were already preparing for the glare of some invisible stage lights.

Roxy sat in the corner behind the drum kit, turned halfway toward the door, striking the toms as if she weren’t searching for a specific rhythm at all, but rather trying to scatter the tangled noise of her own thoughts across the tight skin of the drums. There was a tired stubbornness in her movements, the kind of instinctive persistence that keeps returning to the same motion simply because it knows there is nowhere else left to go.

The heat trapped inside slapped me across the face as I crossed the threshold, like running into someone I’d been avoiding for months. Only then did I really see what had been gathering in this space all along. Nova’s amplifier squatted in the corner—the one we’d hauled over four weeks ago when she’d sold her Milo vinyl to pay for it. Nobody had cracked wise about that sacrifice. Nobody had dismissed it as another fleeting summer obsession destined to collapse when fall arrived. The amp stood there wired up and waiting, as if it had always known this garage was where it would end up, long before any of us did.

The differently colored screws and freshly replaced parts of the drum kit, the new skins stretched tight across the frames, spoke of the stubborn persistence in Roxy’s hands. The discarded strings lying on the floor told the story of Cayde’s endless search for the right sound, while the microphone cable coiling along the wall seemed to hold the memory of my own unfinished sentences – the ones I had crushed into paper balls and thrown aside because they had never felt true enough. Every single object carried a decision within it, a half-spoken line, an unacknowledged promise we might not even have realized we were making at the time.

And as I stood there in the middle of the garage, caught in the slow swirl of dust and heat, it suddenly became clear to me that everything I had once dismissed as a loose chain of coincidences had, in truth, been carrying us in the same direction for a long time. The question was no longer whether we would one day become a band, but when we would finally dare to name what was already beating between us – silently, yet with an unstoppable force.

Roxy stopped then, one drumstick still in her hand, her half-turned glance brushing over me for a brief moment as if she understood that quiet realization taking shape inside my head. The garage suddenly felt too small for everything I was feeling. For the first time I truly understood that maybe we weren’t hesitating on the threshold of a new story at all, but had already been living inside something for a long time – something none of us had yet had the courage to call by its real name.

For a while we simply stood there facing each other in the thick, heavy air of the garage, as if we were all waiting for the same unspoken signal that would finally force us to move. In the end, Roxy twirled the drumstick between her fingers, tilted her head to the side, and broke the silence with a sudden, slightly hoarse but unmistakably liberated laugh.

“Alright… so what do we do now? Are we a band or what the hell?”

Cayde leaned against the neck of his guitar and grinned.

“Well… technically, yeah. At least last night we had some pretty damn big plans.”

Nova shrugged, already pulling the bass strap over her shoulder.

“Then let’s stop talking. Let’s just start.”

Roxy clicked the drumsticks together as if she were slipping into the role of some imaginary conductor.

“Okay. One… two… three…”

—

In the very next second a mess of completely disjointed noise exploded around us, the kind that, in retrospect, makes it a miracle the garage door didn’t just fall off its hinges. Cayde came in half a beat late, Nova somehow locked into a totally different tempo, and I instinctively started singing over them, so painfully off-key and uncertain it felt like I didn’t even recognize my own voice.

Roxy suddenly stopped and burst out laughing.

“What the fuck was that?!”

“No idea,” I panted. “But I’m pretty sure no one needs to hear that again.”

“The neighbors are going to love us,” Cayde smirked. “We’re legends already.”

Nova leaned back against the wall, shaking her head, still laughing.

“Wait… wait… one more time. Now let’s actually listen to each other.”

We tried again.

It fell apart again.

And we ended up laughing even harder.

Somewhere along the way, time slipped quietly out of our hands. The pauses between our attempts slowly turned into longer and longer conversations, the conversations into scattered bursts of brainstorming, and before we even realized what was happening, we found ourselves picking up the crumpled paper balls from the floor – the ones we had thrown aside earlier in fits of frustration or disappointment.

“Hey…” Nova said suddenly. “Let’s go somewhere instead. Down to the beach. Or just skate a few laps or something. We’re going to suffocate in here.”

Cayde nodded.

“Yeah. We need to clear our heads a bit.”

By the time we rolled through the slowly emptying streets of the city, the sun had long since dropped behind the houses. Eventually we reached the halfpipe at the skatepark, which at that hour – deep into the night – was always wrapped in a strange, almost dreamlike silence. The concrete still held onto the leftover warmth of the day, but the air had begun to cool, and the glow of the streetlights stretched long, blurred shadows across the curved surfaces of the ramps.

The first few runs were more about bleeding off tension than any kind of conscious attempt to move together. Each of us carved our own path along the cracked surface of the park, letting the steady, monotonous hum of the wheels slowly wash the overcrowded noise of the garage out of our heads.

As time passed, and the wheels began to follow each other’s lines with growing confidence, something nevertheless started to fall into place between us. We were no longer circling the space separately. Instinctively, we began to watch one another’s movements, adjusting to the other’s momentum as if some invisible rhythm were beginning to unfold above the concrete.

Two hours later we dropped down onto the edge of the halfpipe, breathless, tossing our boards beside us, and for a while we did nothing but listen to the uneven rhythm of our own breathing.

Nova was the first to break the silence, nudging her board with the tip of her shoe.

“Damn… have you guys realized what this is for us?”

Cayde let out a breathless laugh.

“What, that we’re idiots who spin around way too much?”

Roxy shook her head and leaned forward onto the concrete, her tone suddenly more serious.

“No. I mean that this… this is our home. We always come back here.”

The sentence seemed to linger in the air, and it felt as if the same realization sparked in all of us at once. The boards beneath our feet weren’t just tools anymore; they were a shared language, an escape route, a meeting point, and freedom all at the same time.

“Yeah,” I said slowly at last, running my hand across the rough, worn surface of the grip tape. “It’s the only thing that always works the same way. No matter what happens.”

Cayde nodded and stared out at the darkened park for a while.

“Then maybe the garage isn’t even our center… maybe it’s all of this.”

Roxy lifted her head.

“The board. Our whole life spins around it.”

The words slipped almost unnoticed to the tip of my tongue, as if they had been waiting there for a moment like this for a long time. When I finally said,

“My board is my world,”

I felt at once that I hadn’t just found a line – I had touched on a shared truth that was pulsing in all of us the exact same way.

For a second there was silence. Then Cayde grinned.

“Okay… that actually sounds fucking good.”

Nova laughed and pulled her board back under herself.

“Then remember that, Vex. That’s going to turn into a song.”

—

And when we dropped back into the curve of the halfpipe again, it was no longer just momentum carrying us forward, but that faint yet steadily growing feeling that some kind of shared voice was beginning to take shape between us – a voice none of us had known before, and yet all of us recognized instantly.

After the words had been spoken, we sat in silence on the edge of the ramp for a while, as if we were all afraid that moving too quickly might cause the realization to dissolve in the yellowish glow of the streetlights. The coolness of the concrete slowly seeped through our clothes, and every now and then the wheels of our boards let out a quiet creak when one of us shifted instinctively, as though they couldn’t bear the stillness either.

“Say it again,” Nova finally said in a low voice, her gaze both curious and determined.

“Say what?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what she meant.

“That line. The board one.”

I repeated it, this time more slowly, tasting the sound of it, almost afraid that if I spoke too loudly it would lose the raw force with which it had surfaced just moments earlier. Meanwhile Cayde leaned forward, tapping the edge of the concrete rhythmically with the tip of his shoe.

“Listen…” he said. “If we stretch it out like this… and put a simple open chord progression under it… it could work really damn well.”

Roxy didn’t say anything. She picked up two loose sticks from the ground and drummed a firm, pulsing tempo on the rim of the halfpipe. It wasn’t loud – more like a steady, enduring heartbeat that everything else slowly began to gather around. Nova drummed imaginary bass strings against her knee, instinctively searching for a deep, rolling tone that slipped into the rhythm as if it had always been there.

“Wait, wait…” she suddenly laughed. “This is almost a song.”

Of course it wasn’t – not yet. But that wasn’t the point.

I started digging for my notebook in the bottom of my backpack, and as I pulled out the crumpled pages it hit me that, for the first time, I wasn’t trying to piece the words together on my own. Cayde leaned over my shoulder, reading into the half-finished lines, while Nova kept throwing in new ideas, and Roxy went on tapping the tempo with her stick as if she were afraid that the whole thing would fall apart the second she stopped.

“It needs something else…” I muttered, letting the tip of the pen hover above the paper.

“Freedom,” Nova said immediately. “It has to be about that.”

“And about doing it together,” Cayde added.

“But it still has to feel like it’s everyone’s own world at the same time,” I said.

I nodded and kept writing. The words were coming more easily now, as if something inside me had finally loosened the knot that had always held them back. Roxy’s rhythm grew steadier with every passing moment, the drumsticks tracing small arcs in the glow of the streetlights, and somehow the whole scene felt far too real to remain just another spontaneous night.

For a moment I leaned back and let the sound of the others’ voices, their laughter, and the slowly forming mood of the song settle around me. I sat there on the cold concrete with my friends, with our band, with our boards and scattered notes, and with that strange, overwhelming excitement that was both terrifying and beautiful at the same time. For the first time I was truly seeing from the outside what I had only ever imagined before – the way our ideas were beginning to take shape, the way something tangible was starting to emerge from the noise, the half-spoken lines, and all those uncertain fragments.

It wasn’t a finished song yet.

But we already had a shared story for it.