Chapter 4: A World of Our Own

December 2000, Costa Mesa, California

“Remember that whole ‘quiet and peaceful neighborhood’ pitch?” Roxy asked, already laughing. “The one under the overpass? Where the proof of silence was that you could clearly hear some guy pissing right under the window?”

Nova groaned.

“And the landlord said it like it was some kind of premium feature. ‘You see? Nobody disturbs him here.’”

“Because nobody did disturb him,” Cayde grinned. “That was the most disturbing part.”

I was still laughing about the other place.

“The shower tray in the living room. That one still wins.”

Roxy nodded.

“I still don’t get it. Who plans a space like, ‘yeah, you watch TV here… and you shower right there’?”

“Multifunctional space,” Nova shrugged. “Minimalist living.”

“Yeah, except maybe don’t put the outlet right next to it,” Roxy shot back.

The laughter slowly faded, and for a moment all that was left was the quiet noise of the room. Distant cars. The faint rattle of the window. Our breathing.

Nova leaned forward over the small garden table to point at something on the paper. I leaned in too.

Our shoulders touched.

Still, it felt like some invisible lightning hit us at the exact same time.

We both froze for a tight, stretched second.

Then we pulled away at the same moment, like we’d just been caught doing something we weren’t supposed to.

Of course Cayde noticed immediately.

“Jesus… you two literally behave like a badly grounded amps.”

Roxy snorted.

“More like two nuclear reactors just waiting for someone to hit the wrong button.”

Nova rolled her eyes, but there was still that tight, nervous half-smile at the corner of her mouth.

“Shut up.”

“Me?” Cayde grinned. “I’m just documenting the phenomenon.”

I dropped my gaze back to the papers. It was easier to focus on the letters than on whatever had just happened.

We kept talking for a while. Messing around. Bringing up more apartments. The oversized loft with the clearly unhinged guy who claimed the open space would “liberate the soul,” while keeping the bathroom door locked with a padlock.

Nova laughed and buried her face in her hands.

“The one who said the holes in the walls were ‘spatial experiences.’”

“And the one who asked if we’d mind if he sometimes… talked to the walls at night,” Roxy added.

The conversation slowly burned itself out, until we were just sitting there, somewhere between exhaustion and a quiet, strange kind of anticipation.

At the same time, our eyes drifted to the paper lying on the table.

Lease agreement.

Two names at the bottom.

Vane Vexley. Nova Wrenley.

For a moment, no one said anything.

We just looked.

Then Cayde let out a low whistle.

“Well… I guess this just became official.”

Roxy leaned back into the couch and smiled.

“I think… you’ve got a home.”

A few hours earlier:

The key was surprisingly light.

Somehow we had all expected it to be heavier. Thicker. Colder. More ceremonial.

Instead, it was just a worn piece of brass resting in Nova’s palm, with a small number written on it in black marker.

The landlady, a woman in her late fifties, was still grinning at us from the doorway. Her hair was half dyed purple, and her husband was leaning against the hallway wall in a Ramones T-shirt, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

“Listen,” the woman said. “If anyone understands big dreams, it’s us. So there’s just one rule.”

She raised a finger.

“Always make sure there are four walls, a roof… a door and windows.”

Her husband nodded.

“The rest… is up to you.”

Cayde burst out laughing.

“This is already the best contract I’ve ever seen.”

Roxy was already trying the key in the lock.

The door opened with a creak, as if protesting the arrival of new tenants, then gave in anyway.

Inside, dull, stale air greeted us. The walls were a faded yellow, with patches of wallpaper bulging away from the surface. The windowpanes rattled slightly in their frames, as if the wind somewhere far away were trying to seep in. In the middle of the room stood a rickety couch, a torn ottoman beside it, and in the corner a garden table someone must once have thought was a good idea.

For a while, we just stood there.

Not because we were disappointed.

But because suddenly it felt too real.

“Well…” Roxy finally said. “This is… fucking awesome.”

Nova slowly ran her hand along the wall, as if testing whether it actually existed.

“This is ours,” she said quietly.

Not romantically. Not dramatically.

More like someone saying a number out loud just to make sure they counted right.

The key made its rounds. We didn’t talk about it separately — it was simply natural that we would all get a copy. The four of us had pooled the deposit. The four of us had stood on the rooftop when the decision was made. This place didn’t belong to just two people.

The first evening somehow started on its own.

In the bedroom, a double mattress lay on the floor with a folded blanket on top. In the living room, Cayde spread out a sleeping bag as if he had done it a hundred times before. Roxy tossed her jacket onto the couch, and Nova set down the beers we had bought on the way on the garden table.

“This is literally like a rehearsal space,” she noted.

“Except our gear isn’t here,” I said.

Cayde waved it off, leaning against the wall.

“Minor detail.”

Two wooden spoons appeared from somewhere.

Roxy sat on the edge of the ottoman and started tapping a rhythm on her knee. Not seriously. Just like that. Nova clapped along, I drummed the heel of my shoe against the floor, and Cayde quietly began humming a half-finished melody we had come up with in the park.

There was no amplifier.

No drums.

No microphone.

Yet it still felt like music.

The sounds bounced off the bare walls, slightly falling apart, slightly distorted, as if the room itself couldn’t decide what to do with us. Sometimes we all burst out laughing because we were taking it too seriously. Other times a beat, a line, a mood suddenly came together, and then everyone automatically grew quieter.

Sometime toward dawn, we weren’t talking as much anymore. The beers were empty. Our rhythm slowed down.

Nova sat slumped against the wall, asleep with her eyes closed. Roxy lay sprawled across the mattress, her hair spread out like after a concert, breathing softly in a deep, endless calm. Cayde stared up at the ceiling from his sleeping bag, as if searching for an answer to something he couldn’t yet put into words — already just barely skimming the edge of sleep himself.

I got up to get a drink.

In the nook we called the kitchen, the tap dripped loudly, each drop echoing separately in the silence. When I looked back into the room, I could only make out outlines in the half-dark. Scattered bodies. Shoes. An overturned empty box. The tape player Cayde had dug up from somewhere was still humming softly. A faint greyish light was seeping in through the window.

Our first morning.

I stood there for a moment and suddenly understood that this was no longer a game. Not a rooftop night. Not a temporary shelter.

This was our world. Our new life.

Then I sat back down by the wall, closed my eyes, and let the exhaustion finally catch up with me.

A week or two passed, and the apartment was no longer that uncertain, empty place we had stepped into on the first evening. The fate of the living room was sealed for good — it became a rehearsal space. Not temporarily, not as a compromise, but for real. The drum kit stood set up against the wall, the amplifiers gathered around the outlets, and the microphone stand remained in the middle of the room as if it had always been there. Cables ran crisscross across the floor, but by then everyone knew exactly where they could step without knocking over half the room.

My mattress stayed in the corner. It fit just right. It wasn’t comfortable, it wasn’t elegant, but it counted as my own place. Nova got the bedroom with the big bed. Somehow it simply turned out that way, and none of us felt the need to say it out loud. One rule was born, quietly, almost unnoticed: if someone had a short-term guest, they got the bedroom. The others slept in the living room that night. We didn’t argue about it. We didn’t overexplain it. It just worked.

We were undeniably broke.

Shopping was never a smooth routine for us — it was more like some strange strategic game. We stood under the neon lights of the stores, leaning over the basket, counting, putting things back on the shelves, then picking them up again as if their price might change the second time we looked at them. Sometimes we went to bed at night with a full fridge. The next morning we would just stare at the empty shelves as if someone had secretly robbed us during the night. Then we realized it had been us.

“Are you serious right now?” I asked once, leaning against the doorframe.

Cayde shrugged.

“We joined forces for survival.”

“More like we lost the fight against hunger,” Roxy noted.

Nova just closed the fridge and sighed.

“Fine. Then today we improvise.”

The next day, though, was completely different. The same door, the same creak — only this time Cayde was standing on the threshold with two huge shopping bags, Roxy right behind him with another one. They dumped everything onto the counter like it was war loot.

“The world order has been restored,” Cayde declared.

Nova peeked into one of the bags and laughed in disbelief.

“This is almost luxury.”

Cooked meals rarely made it to our table. Whenever our parents sent something, the whole atmosphere of the apartment changed instantly. Everyone moved faster, spoke louder, as if a completely different life had stepped into ours for a few hours.

“Are you serious right now?” Cayde asked once, staring at the plate as if afraid it might disappear if he leaned in too close.

“Don’t philosophize about it — just eat,” I said.

Nova was already pulling out plates.

“Today we’re going Lux-mode!”

On other days we ate at the food truck, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk, food wrapped in greasy paper. The concrete was cold, but the meal was hot, and somehow it always tasted better like that than at any proper table. Once the idea of cooking even came up, but Roxy just said:

“I think we could mess up even a kettle!”

Most of the time, though, nothing special happened. We were simply together. The four of us in one space that was at once a rehearsal room, a living room, and a bedroom. Someone would quietly pick at a new riff, Roxy would tap out a rhythm on something, Nova would lean against the wall and listen, and I would try to find words in my head for a melody that didn’t fully exist yet.

The state of our fridge almost had a life of its own. Sometimes it was crammed to the brim, other times it echoed with emptiness. There were moments when we just stood in front of it for minutes, laughing at the whole situation — and somehow it still worked.

In some strange, noisy, slightly falling-apart order that only we understood.

On paper, only two of us lived there.

In reality, the place became home to all four of us.

During rehearsals, the whole thing slowly began to take shape. It was no longer just scattered riffs and half-sentences, but recurring motifs, choruses we kept bringing back, polishing, tearing apart, then putting together again. We had a few song ideas that made all four of us lift our heads at the same moment, and from then on we worked on them almost obsessively, for hours, until even the walls started throwing their mood back at us.

Nova stood in front of the couch, the bass hanging from her shoulder, trying to piece together some new run.

Meanwhile I was waving around in front of her with the microphone in my hand, too close, too enthusiastic.

“No, listen… it’s not enough to just hit it there. Let it ‘slide’ a little, like you’re late to your own rhythm,” I explained, instinctively stepping closer.

She looked up at me. That half-annoyed — how do you imagine this kind of closeness — but half-amused expression.

I even grinned at her. Winked.

Nova instinctively stepped back. Then another step.

Her heel caught in a messy cable.

The next moment was pure reflex. I reached after her and caught her by the waist before she could fall back onto the edge of the couch.

My palm on her waist, skin against skin.

The air stopped. The bass bumped dully against the wall.

She tensed in my hands, and for a single second it felt like we were both stuck in the same point.

Not pain. Not fear. Something sharper. Like when the ends of two cables touch and for a moment current runs through them.

Then Nova literally sprang out of my touch as if I had burned her.

Roxy began speaking in a deep, serious, nature-documentary Attenborough voice, using a wooden spoon as a microphone:

“Observe the red-haired bass player in her natural habitat. The curly-haired vocalist approaches her, his intentions… still unclear.”

Cayde stifled a laugh.

Roxy continued:

“The bass player instinctively retreats. This is a defensive reaction. But… the cable prevents escape. The vocalist catches her by reflex. Momentary contact. Both individuals freeze. The bass player jumps back, the vocalist lets go and also steps away…”

Nova shot Roxy a look — the kind that meant if you don’t shut up right now.

But Roxy didn’t stop:

“And now… one of nature’s greatest mysteries unfolds: both of them pretend as if nothing has happened. Science still cannot explain this behavior.”

Cayde added, in the same serious tone:

“We observers can only watch in awe as this ritual repeats itself weekly, on a regular basis.”

Nova threw the pick at them.

“You’re both dead.”

I stepped back, raising my hands.

“Hey, I’m just working against gravity.”

Nova looked at me for another second.

That typical, tensely shimmering glance.

Then she shrugged.

Put her fingers back on the strings.

“Fine. Show me that part again.”