Chapter 9: A Red-haired Girl in the Room

End of June 2001, Costa Mesa, The HQ

The living room had been functioning as a rehearsal space since the afternoon, but now it felt more like a survival zone. The speakers hummed dully in the corner, someone had abandoned a chord progression halfway through, and in the air hung that tired, sticky energy that remains when too many people have been too close together for too long.

Nova stood leaning against the kitchen counter, arms folded. Her hair clung to the nape of her neck with sweat, and her gaze was sharp and overly focused, as if she were trying to zero in on some invisible target. By now she’d already had to fend off three different guys loitering around our apartment, swallow two drunken comments, and ignore half a concert’s worth of stupid remarks. The tension of the entire day still throbbed in her chest.

The door creaked open.

Vex stepped inside as though she’d arrived from another dimension. Her hood pulled over her head, her board tucked loosely under her arm. She glanced around but didn’t really look at anyone. Her gaze just swept the room, checking that everything was still where it belonged. Then she strode over to the couch and dropped herself onto it in one motion.

“So, what’s up? Is everyone still alive?” she asked with half a grin, kicking the base of the mic stand so it began to rock.

Cayde chuckled somewhere behind her. Roxy spun a drumstick between her fingers. For a moment, the room exhaled.

Nova did not.

She stared straight at Vex.

“Seriously, you doing this again?” she asked quietly.

Vex turned her head but didn’t wipe the grin off her face. “Doing what? Living. Amazing, I know.”

“Clowning around. You’re always clowning around,” Nova’s voice sharpened. “As if making a fool of yourself makes everything okay.”

Vex shrugged. “At least we don’t die of boredom.”

The sentence sounded light. Too light. Carefree, freed of all weight.

At that, Nova pushed herself off the counter and took a few steps closer. The move wasn’t dramatic, but it carried an irrevocable finality.

“Do you know what’s wrong with you?” she said. “You think every space is yours. Every mood is yours. That you can just step in and with a joke or a grimace rewrite other people’s days.”

The room fell silent. Roxy’s hand paused mid-air. Cayde’s laughter died.

“Sometimes…” Nova continued, now no longer holding back, “…you could have the decency to respect that other people have boundaries. That not everyone wants you barging into their head with your little show.”

Her words were harsher than she’d expected. She felt it. But there was no pulling them back now.

“And the worst part,” she added softly, almost angrily, “is that you enjoy it. You enjoy the fact that you have an effect. That everyone reacts to you.”

After that line, the silence felt suddenly too big.

Vex lowered her head. For a few seconds she stared at the floor. Then she slowly picked up her board from beside the couch and stood. Not hurriedly—more as if every movement had suddenly grown its own weight.

She didn’t look at Nova. Their eyes met by chance as she turned and quietly walked out the door.

Nova froze when their eyes locked.

The next days became strangely empty.

Nothing spectacular happened. No big drama, no shouting. There simply… wasn’t a reason to gather.

The living room was still littered with instruments, the cables still sprawled across the floor—but somehow every object had lost its purpose. Cayde would pick up the guitar now and then, run through a few bars, then rest it back against the wall after half a minute. Roxy drummed a few beats on the crate, then stopped. Nova once took out her bass, tuned it, then put it back in its case without a single note sounding.

No one said it out loud, but everyone knew: without a front person this wasn’t a band. It was just three people with instruments in a room.

“We could write something,” Cayde tried once.

“For what?” Roxy asked, neutrally. There was no answer.

For a while Nova leaned against the counter, watching them. Her mind automatically sought structure, the next step, a system to cling to. But there was nothing to analyze. The situation was simple: Vex hadn’t shown up. And without her, there was no motion.

On the second evening, Eli appeared in the doorway with his usual Coke bottle. “Friday park gig,” he said. “An opportunity came up.”

Silence. Cayde looked at the ground. Roxy shook her head slowly. Nova answered at last. “Not now.”

Eli frowned. “He sick?”

“No,” Nova said. “He’s just… not here.”

The guy nodded. Didn’t ask more. Somehow he understood.

When he left, the apartment felt even bigger.

By the third day they no longer even tried calling it a “rehearsal.” They just came in, sat near each other, talked about nothing, or silently listened to the fan buzzing in the corner. The band hadn’t collapsed. But it wasn’t functioning either.

That’s when Nova really began to grasp the gravity she’d only found annoying before. It wasn’t a romantic force, nor power—it was more like an invisible axis around which the whole system organized itself. And now that axis was gone.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t spectacular. There was just… no music.

That night every movement she made echoed dully against the tile. After her shower her hair was still wet, clinging to her neck in cold strips. The apartment’s silence wasn’t empty now, it was too loud. Every creak resonated: the fridge’s hum, a car’s brakes on the street, her own breathing.

Passing through the living room she glanced reflexively at the couch. Her heart stopped for a moment. No one was there. Four days now.

Her stomach twisted but she swallowed her tears. Crying would’ve been weakness. And she dared not shout either. She’d already driven away the happiest person she’d ever known with that.

In her room she flipped on the bedside lamp, then immediately turned it off as if even the light were too much. She slipped into bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and listened to the muffled sounds of the night outside. She tried not to think.

She failed.

As she closed her eyes the moment came back. Vex’s gaze. Empty. Distant. As if she meant: You’re not Nova Wrenley. You’re not the center of the world. You’re just a red-haired girl in the room.

That was Nova’s last memory before exhaustion finally stole her into shallow sleep.

Vex came home well past midnight. The city’s noises were muted by then, as if someone had turned the world down before letting her step back into it. The key turned in the lock without a sound—not because she was especially careful, but because her hand moved that way by instinct. In four days she’d learned how loudly an apartment can breathe when you’re not paying attention.

The first thing she noticed when she stepped inside was the smell: the same mixture of warmed cables, dust, cheap beer, sweaty shirts, and that strange metallic vibe the walls absorbed after every rehearsal. She didn’t switch on the lights; she knew where everything was. Darkness was no enemy.

She set her board down against the wall with a muffled thud, as if the apartment recognized her. For a moment she stood in the center of the living room. She didn’t think—she simply felt how the space settled around her again like an old coat.

The apartment was dark, lit only by the pale streetlight slipping through the slats. Not long after, Vex stood in the living room in her boxers, getting ready for bed. She tilted her head as she quietly tried to remove the crumpled blanket from the shelf. The mattress was already propped against the wall at the usual angle. Her movements were automatic, practiced—as if her body remembered this apartment more accurately than her mind.

“You don’t have to be so quiet…” came a voice from behind her.

Vex froze. Slowly she turned. Nova stood a few steps away, barefoot, wearing only a tiny pair of panties—her skin almost translucent in the night light. She clasped her hands in front of her as if using them as a shield. She didn’t look up at first, just stared at the few inches of floor between them.

“I thought… you were asleep,” Vex said quietly.

“I thought… you wouldn’t come back,” Nova replied.

After that line there was silence. A dense, slow silence, filled with unspoken things. Vex took a half-step toward her, then stopped, as if again crossing too close to a boundary she’d once breached.

It was Nova who moved at last. Not dramatically—just shifting her weight forward a little. Suddenly the gap between them vanished.

When Vex wrapped her arms around her, the gesture was instinctive yet infinitely careful. Her palms opened on Nova’s back, right over her spine, as if she feared breaking something with too firm a touch. Nova’s body tensed for a moment with that same startled reflex from the rehearsal, the first time they’d touched. Then she exhaled and hugged her back.

Their skins met and this time Nova didn’t pull away. She leaned in until there was no air left between them. Their foreheads rested on each other’s shoulders, their breaths entwined. There was no rush, no need for explanation. Just the raw, quiet realization that neither of them wanted to let go.

Finally Vex looked up. Her expression was serious, almost too clear. But in the depths of her eyes was that light Nova had thought vanished four days earlier—that strange, audacious certainty that no matter what happened, she would always be Nova Wrenley, the center of the world.

Nova said nothing. She just held her tighter.

All around them the apartment fell completely silent.

Morning arrived before the flat had decided whether to wake up or not. The slats let in dull shafts of light across the floor, and the fan spun with the same patient hum as in the past days.

I was already sitting on the couch, sprawled half-sideways, eating a ridiculously oversized, meaty sandwich as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Roxy was the first to enter. The drumsticks were still in her hand, and her hair was held up in a half-failed bun. She was about to say something when she caught sight of me.

She froze in the doorway. A few seconds she just stared.

“You seriously came back for breakfast?” she finally asked.

I looked up, mayonnaise at the corner of my mouth, and the same old cheeky vibe in my head. “Good morning, Sunshine.”

She said nothing. Then she lunged.

With one leap she was on the couch, swinging drumsticks at me—on my shoulder, back, thigh, wherever she could reach. “Four days! Four damn days, you asshole! The band died, get it?!”

I tried to shield my sandwich as if it were the only survivor. “Hey! That’s artistic assault! I’ll sue you!”

At that moment Cayde appeared in the doorway. He paused, looked us over, then looked at me. “Tesa…” he said slowly, seriously, “we don’t treat each other like this.”

A beat. “You little shit.”

There was already a grin tugging at his lips as he stepped forward and gave my leg a playful kick, as though checking that I’d truly returned.

The living room filled with noise. With motion. With life.

In the kitchen Nova leaned over the coffee maker. I heard the percolator—a strangely comforting sound. For a moment she just listened to our racket, then I saw her smile.

There was no effort to it. No explanation. As if the world had simply clicked back into place.

“Want some?” she called across.

I turned to her immediately. “Always.”

A few minutes later she came over with a mug. Her hair was still damp, and she’d nervously rolled her shirt sleeve up to her elbow. She handed me the coffee. I took it.

“You know… maids get perks,” I winked.

Silence for half a second. She looked at me, then without thinking stuck out her tongue. “Earn it, rock star.”

On the other side of the room Cayde and Roxy locked eyes at the same time. The air felt lighter. The noise made sense again. And the living room finally felt like a rehearsal space once more.

Behind the fan’s hum there was now something else: a strange, alert focus. Roxy leaned against the counter, drumsticks in hand, but she wasn’t hitting anything. Cayde held his guitar, but he wasn’t playing.

They were just waiting. As if all at once we were trying to figure out exactly what had changed—and what had stayed the same.

Then Cayde softly strummed a note. Not an entire chord—more like a direction. “We need… something bright,” he said with a half-smile. “Not happy. More… dangerously beautiful.”

Roxy nodded. “Like when you know trouble’s coming…and you go anyway.”

Nova set her mug down. “Like when someone’s both your doom and your home.”

After that line came a brief silence. Not uncomfortable—more like concentrated. I felt the verses already forming in my mind. I just didn’t dare say them out loud.

Then they slipped out. “I’m sitting in the darkness…staring at the shadows…”

Cayde immediately built a fragile chord progression underneath. Roxy drummed a slow, pulsing rhythm on her thigh. Nova stepped closer to us.

“You’re my nemesis…but I love you hopeless…” she continued.

The words weren’t romantic, more honest—too honest. When the first draft of the chorus was born, we all sang together at once. Not as a rehearsal. From reflex.

“Hunt me…chase me…bring me home tonight…”

The voices blended. There was no leader, no backing. Just a collective force drawing us through the moment. And somewhere in the second repetition Nova quietly said, “This… it’s like it’s about an angel.”

Cayde chuckled under his breath. “More like a dangerous angel.”

The word hung in the air. Angel.

Something clicked in me. “Angel of divinity,” I said slowly.

Nobody replied at first. They just looked at me. Then Cayde smiled and tilted his head to one side.

“Do you remember when this idiot was laughing at himself at the bar during the concert, bowing all the way down with his arms spread wide… what did I tell you?”

I saw Nova’s eyes go wide. For a moment we were really back there.

“Only a blind and half-sighted person wouldn’t move towards you. You’re as beautiful as an angel of divinity.”