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“And one hell of a hothead you got yourself. He canceled your song!” The words came out of her and she shoved one palm over her mouth. Charlotte gave us all a look of disgust.
    “I wasn’t supposed to say that.”
    “A lot of things weren’t supposed to happen that did,” I muttered. The amps and speakers destroyed our ability to talk. So did my heart. It exploded into a thousand drops of nothing and I sprinted for the nearest door I could find, blindly running up three sets of metal stairs to find a giant metal threshold marked ROOFTOP ACCESS.  
    I pushed the metal bar and found myself in darkness, a handful of stars peeking out from the night sky, the city lights making it admirable that they could even be seen. The pinpricks of light were so ancient, billions of years old, that it seemed like folly.
    A pair of chaise lounges were arranged by a wrought-iron table and I stretched out on one, my chest seized with a sob, my body doing its best not to fall apart.
    The heavy bass from the second song in the set vibrated the building so well that terra cotta planters rattled on the brick edges of the roof. Boom boom boom boom .
    A soundtrack for the end of everything.

Sam
    Ninety minutes can feel like a decade in hell.
    Liam managed to play and sing back up for Trevor, and I had to give it to him—he was good. Wound. Supercharged, like me, but in a different way. By the end of the performance I was a rag doll. My heart had been wrung out and used to mop the bathrooms. My hands were raw strings of flesh jelly, useless and spent.
    But the crowd loved us.
    And here came the words.
    Darla marched backstage after the encore, dragging a pissed off Liam. he had a right to be angry.
    So did I.
    “You were all over my girlfriend, you fucking ass—”
    “I thought she was Charlotte, so I—”
    We said the same things at the same time, all the words sounding like noise salad to me.
    “Hold on,” Darla insisted. “Sam,” she said with eyes that begged me to be reasonable. “Liam came up behind Amy and did that because Amy’s wearing Charlotte’s clothes.”
    “Yeah. Right.” That was some bullshit. “Nice excuse.”
    Charlotte appeared, red-faced and angry. Her finger got in my face and she too my hand, making me hold the rim of her shirt. “Look at me,” she said. Pointed to her shirt. “Amy’s.” pointed to her skirt. “Amy’s.” Pointed to her shoes. ‘Amy’s.”
    Chuck Taylors.
    Oh, shit.
    “Why?” I barked. A techie wordlessly handed me my ukelele. I held it in my hand like it was a cocktail at a garden party.
    “She wanted to look nice,” Darla explained.
    “She already looked nice,” I answered.
    “For...you know. The song.”
    “The song? She knew about the song?” I thundered.
    “And the ring,” Charlotte added.
    My front pocket was the size of a football field. “THE RING? She knew about the ring?”
    No one answered, but it was obvious.
    “ Fuck.” Somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind I heard a tiny pop! , like someone had pulled the drain plug on my life. All my anger, rage, worry, fear, hope, anxiety—everything—circled in a watery whirlwind, disappearing with a gurgle.  
    I was empty.
    Hollow.
    Nothing.
    “Where is she?” I whispered, assuming no one would hear me.
    “On the roof,” Charlotte said.
    Pulling my rag-doll body up to full height, I did the honorable thing.
    Three things, actually.
    First, I apologized to Liam, who just snor ted and touched his face gingerly, lightly pressing a small bag with ice in it to the swollen spot that taunted me, a crystal-clear relic of my stupidity .
    Second, I apologized to Darla, who mimicked Liam.
    And third, I hauled my sorry ass toward the door to the roof, chagrined to find three sets of stairs to reach the top. If I could make it that far, maybe Amy and I had a chance.

Amy
    If you stare at the stars long enough, you see that you’re really nothing in the grand scheme of the universe and the multiverse and all the