Chapter 5: Who Are You?

1999 summer. Costa Mesa, California.

The summer of 1999 was slowly dissolving into the evening.

Vexley’s room felt like a memory turned up too loud. Band posters were taped over each other across the cracked plaster walls. The tape had yellowed long ago, the corners curling as if the images themselves were trying to break free. A Lagwagon poster had slipped halfway over a No Use one, while part of a NOFX cut-out hung awkwardly across an old Nirvana magazine clipping.

The room wasn’t beautiful, but it was alive. Every object carried the marks of being used, and that stubborn kind of energy only those understand who were already running from something… long before they even knew what they were running from.

Cassette tapes lay scattered across the floor. An empty soda can balanced on top of a half-disassembled stereo. The window was open, letting in the dull glow of streetlights and the distant noise of a summer night. The air smelled of guitar strings, dust, and cheap deodorant.

They were laughing. Loud, unfiltered, the way only people that young can laugh. Their voices filled the room, bouncing off the poster-covered walls and blending into the distorted guitar sound leaking from the speakers. Cayde was teasing Roxy again, exaggerating the movements of a badly played drum fill.

“If you hit that tom like that one more time, we’re seriously replacing you with a drum machine,” he said, using that playfully threatening English accent he reserved just for her – the one they both knew meant more than simple teasing.

A pillow flew toward him a second later. He ducked, stumbling sideways and nearly crashing into the back of the couch.

Roxy didn’t laugh right away. Her eyes flashed darker than the light in the room. In one swift motion she grabbed his chain necklace and pulled him closer. The distance between them vanished so suddenly it felt as if it had never really existed.

“One day you’re going to regret this… you bastard,” she breathed, her eyes half-closed.

Her voice wasn’t loud, but everyone heard it. There was no real anger in it – only a raw, electric tension neither of them seemed ready to release. Cayde held her gaze, that crooked, wicked grin spreading across his face, half challenge, half confession.

For a moment, no one moved.

Then Roxy suddenly shoved him backward onto the couch. Cayde burst out laughing, the motion sending his hair falling into his eyes. The spell broke. Loud laughter rushed back into the room, as if the silent tension from a second before had only been imagined.

Vexley was sitting on the edge of the bed, a notebook resting on his knee. He had been learning to sing for a while now, and lately he treated every new line he wrote as if it were the only thing in the world keeping him afloat. He murmured the chorus under his breath, then tried it again louder, as if he were already standing on a stage somewhere.

“Live my life… my waaay,” he began, then laughed at himself when the others instantly jumped in with some stupid mock choir.

Nova lay on the rug, propped up on her elbows, watching him. She wasn’t just listening – she was truly paying attention. There was a strange seriousness in her gaze, something that sometimes felt out of place for someone her age.

At one point she simply reached out, took the worn yellow pencil with the chewed eraser from Vexley’s hand, pulled a clean sheet from the notebook and slid it back toward him.

Her voice was quiet, yet impossible to resist.

“Write down who you are. Then you too,” she added, glancing at the others.

The laughter lingered in the room for a few more seconds before slowly fading. Vexley looked at her, confused, as if he couldn’t quite understand why the moment suddenly felt heavier than it should. In the end he just shrugged and began to write.

He didn’t think about it for long. He didn’t search for big words. He simply wrote down what felt true.

“Friend and fool.”

The scratching of the pencil sounded strangely loud, as if some invisible rhythm were guiding his hand. When he finished, he slid the sheet toward Cayde.

Cayde wasn’t grinning anymore. There was a restless energy in his eyes, the kind only someone carries who knows there is more inside them than the world expects. He started writing quickly. His handwriting leaned slightly forward, impulsive and sharp, at times almost cutting into the paper.

“I guess I’m the guy who laughs even when everything is falling apart around him.

Not because I don’t care – but because I care too much.

I play loud so the silence doesn’t get a chance to win.

I run because I’m afraid life might suddenly become boring.

Maybe I’m just someone who refuses to grow up the way people expect me to.”

When he finished, he stared at the lines for a moment, as if surprised by his own honesty. Then he handed the pencil to Roxy.

At first, she didn’t write. She drew.

A quick circle. Then two long ears.

A slightly clumsy, oddly alive rabbit began to take shape on the page. The rabbit was running happily, as if chasing or being chased in a game. In front of it, a wolf glanced back with a grin, as though it were enjoying the chase just as much. There was no fear in the drawing. No sense of escape. Only the feeling that danger and joy were sometimes just two sides of the same coin.

Roxy tilted her head like she wasn’t fully satisfied. Then she bent over the paper and began to write beneath the drawing, her letters larger and stronger than the others’.

“I like that I’m small sometimes,

I like that I’m invisible sometimes,

But when you look at me, I feel like the whole world is mine –

and I don’t settle for anything less.”

She added a tiny, almost invisible dot at the end.

She didn’t look up right away. Only after a second did she slide the paper forward, as if afraid the weight of the sentence might disappear if she let go too quickly.

Nova watched the page for a long time. When the pencil finally moved in her hand, her handwriting was calm and precise, almost too careful for such a chaotic night.

“I am the girl…

who can only love unconditionally with conditions.

You don’t even know the conditions.

And yet you accepted me.

I am the girl…

who is happy like this.”

When the scratching of the pencil faded, a deep silence settled over the room for a brief moment – as if even the summer outside had paused to hold its breath.

Nova took a slow inhale and read their words aloud. Her voice was clear and steady. She didn’t comment on them, didn’t explain anything. She simply let the sentences exist in the air.

Then, with an easy motion, she crumpled the paper and tossed it into the corner of the room, turning the whole moment into something that suddenly felt like nothing more than a passing game. She looked at their blank, slightly stunned faces and burst out laughing.

The next second she was already turning back to Vexley.

“Maybe the chorus needs a shouting part at the end,” she said with a grin, completely natural again.

The night carried on. They laughed at each other’s stupidity, listened to music, and talked about the future as if it were some distant, unimportant thing they would have plenty of time to deal in the future.

Later that night, Nova stepped out of the bathroom wearing an oversized T-shirt and her underwear. Her damp hair clung to the back of her neck, tiny drops of water catching the faint light on her skin. Her room – and the whole apartment around it – was wrapped in the thick, dark silence of the night.

She walked over to the pair of jeans lying on the floor and reached into the pocket. She pulled out a crumpled ball of paper. For a moment she simply looked at it in her palm, as if weighing it, even though it hardly weighed anything at all.

She moved to her desk, sat down, and began to smooth the page out very slowly. Not impatiently, not in a rush. With careful, almost reverent precision – as if it were the Declaration of Independence itself. Her fingers traced the creases, straightening each stubborn wrinkle one by one until the sheet lay almost perfectly flat against the wood.

She reread every line with the same meticulous attention, a wide, unguarded smile spreading across her face.

Then she folded the paper with quiet ceremony, as though the act of folding could give it meaning.

She opened the drawer and took out a small, worn box. For a brief moment she pressed the paper to her chest, closed her eyes, and drew in a deep breath. There was no drama in the gesture – only a calm certainty. She placed the folded note in the box, beside a pebble that was already resting there. From the pendant hanging around her neck she pulled a tiny key and carefully locked it.

Later, when she lay down in bed and switched off the battered little bedside lamp, she was still smiling faintly in the dark.