“Your favorite band is called Free Puppies!?” I give the exclamation mark as much emphasis as I can, and he shakes his head at me.
“One day you’ll go to a Free Puppies! show and see the magic for yourself.”
It’s gotten too warm in my cardigan, probably because it’s still sunny outside. Or maybe the thermostat in here is set too high. Regardless, I take it off, accidentally whacking him with an empty sleeve in the process.
“Sorry,” I say as I drape it across the back of the chair.
“Kind of cramped in here,” he says with an apologetic shrug, as though it’s his fault.
“You’re in luck!” Violet’s voice. McNair pulls back the curtain, revealing Violet waving a black album with a negative photo graphic on the front. “We had a copy in a stack of donated records waiting to be processed.”
“Thank you,” I say as McNair accepts the record from her.
“No problem.” She sort of lingers for a while, bouncing on her toes, and for a horrifying moment I wonder if she really was flirting. Then she blurts: “Track three. ‘About a Girl.’ That was the first sign that maybe Nirvana was going to be more than grunge. Even if you’re not buying it, you gotta listen to it on vinyl. That’s the way it was always meant to be heard.”
“Will do,” Neil says, and Violet gives us one more smile before closing the curtain.
McNair turns over the album.
“Did she write her number on the back?” I ask. “I hope she’s ready for a lot of texts with proper punctuation and capitalization.”
“Artoo. I was checking the track listing. And I think she just really loves Nirvana.”
He lays the record on the table, and we each snap a photo.
“I guess we’re good, then,” I say, but he frowns.
“We still have to listen to your song.”
“Not Nirvana?”
He shakes his head. “I might get kicked out of Seattle for saying this, but I’ve never been a big fan.”
I present my record of choice: The Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs. “Is It Really So Strange?” is the first track, and Neil is annoyingly silent the entire three minutes it’s playing.
“It’s catchy, but… it seems melancholy, too,” he says.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“There’s too much bad shit in the world to listen to depressing music all the time.” He taps the FP album. “Hence, Free Puppies!”
When we fling back the curtain to leave, it’s almost too perfect: Madison Winters, she of the seven shape-shifting foxes, is browsing records with a couple other Westview kids. She doesn’t see me until after I’ve sneaked up behind her, swiping the blue bandanna from her arm.
“That was stealthy,” her friend Pranav Acharya says to me, holding out his hand for a high five. “I respect that.”
“Wow, where’s your loyalty?” Madison asks, mock-offended, and she’s so good-natured about the whole thing that I feel a little bad about making fun of her shape-shifting foxes. I mean, she has a brand at least.
McNair and I linger in front of the store while I pull out my phone to log the kill. Strangely, this has been fun. Maybe I romanticized coming here with a boyfriend, but it wasn’t actually that bad with McNair.
“You killed someone!” McNair is practically giddy. He says this in such a jovial way, his eyes bright behind his glasses—like he’s proud, which I guess makes sense since we’re technically on the same team. For now.
Instead of my messaging app, a helpful blue bubble pops up:
Installing software update 1 of 312…
Sure, now’s a great time to do that.
“One second. My phone decided to install an update.”
Installing software update 2 of 312…
Suddenly, the screen goes black. I hold down the power button—nothing.
“Shit,” I mutter. “Now it won’t turn on.”
“Let me see it.”
I glare at him. “I don’t think you pressing the button is going to do anything different from me pressing the button.” And I don’t want him to accidentally see my group chat with Kirby and Mara and somehow get the wrong idea. Still, I hand it over. I’ll just grab it back really fast if it turns on.
“It won’t turn on,” he agrees after holding down every button for a more-than-acceptable length of time and thoroughly aggravating me in the process. “Did you charge it?”
“It’s been plugged into my car.” I hold out my palm, since there’s something very strange about my phone, with the geometric patterned case Mara gave me for Hanukkah last year, in Neil’s hands. I try the power button yet again. “I can’t exactly play without my phone.”
“Wait. Wait. We can fix this.” McNair swipes around on his own phone, tapping Sean Yee’s contact photo. “Sean can fix anything. He brought a twelve-year-old MacBook back to life last year.”
“And why would he help me?”
“He’d be helping both of us.” He types out a message I can’t see. “And he got killed pretty quickly earlier, so he doesn’t have skin in the game.” His phone pings. “Sean’s free, and he’s at home. He lives right off I-5, Forty-Third and Latona. It’ll only take us ten minutes to get there.”
“Wasn’t he at the safe zone? With you and Adrian and Cyrus?” This is too weird. McNair’s friend helping me, out of the goodness of his heart?
A smile curves one side of his mouth. “He just came to hang out. Were you… looking out for me?”
“I’m just perceptive.”
“You were looking out for me,” he concludes. “I’m touched.”
HOWL CLUES
A place you can buy Nirvana’s first album
A place that’s red from floor to ceiling
A place you can find Chiroptera
A rainbow crosswalk
Ice cream fit for Sasquatch
The big guy at the center of the universe
Something local, organic, and sustainable
A floppy disk
A coffee cup with someone else’s name (or your own name, wildly misspelled)
A car with a parking ticket
A view from up high
The best pizza in the city (your choice)
A tourist doing something a local would be ashamed of doing
An umbrella (we all know real Seattleites don’t use them)
A tribute to the mysterious Mr. Cooper
4:15 p.m.
“WELCOME TO MY laboratory,” Sean says in a voice that makes him sound like a villain in a spy movie that definitely doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test. He ushers us into the tiny basement of his Wallingford bungalow. And wow, it really does look like a laboratory down here. There’s a worktable with four monitors, a rack of tools, and countless wires and electronic gadgets strewn about. The lighting gives everything a vaguely greenish tint.
It’s cold in the basement, and when I rub my bare arms, I remember where I left my sweater: on a chair in the listening booth.
“I hope we’re not interrupting,” I say. “Seriously, thank you so much for doing this. Or for trying to.”