The first photo is of a cluttered keyboard, then a shot of cassettes. These are things Oli doesn’t have anything to say about, at first. He squints at the unreadable tape covers, and Lark’s hands hover and hesitate, almost ready to take back the pictures. “You don’t have to—“ he starts to say.

“I can’t read it,” Oli says and looks up at Lark, who gets a hectic flush over his neck and cheeks. Splotchy, furious embarrassment.

“It was my old band. We were called Squires of Gothos.” He realizes he hasn’t talked about that in years, and the name feels weird, unfamiliar.

“What kind of music did you make?” Oli asks. Reed told him once that Lark went to conservatory, loved classical music, went on non-stop about composers and soloists in high school. The glitchy cassette art in the photo doesn’t look like a Bach sampler to Oli, but then, Lark doesn’t look like his idea of a serious pianist, either. Oli feels bad about it, but Lark makes him think about hospitals and thrift bins. Bad posture and castoffs, poor color, spidery fingers as brittle as the rest of him.

Lark thinks for a minute, assembles his features to reflect a more self-aware shame. “Nerdcore chiptune? Kind of a pop sound, but it was all video game samples, and the lyrics were mostly 90s nostalgia. It was just me and my friend Max. When we started, I was real into circuit bending. He was into Star Trek. We got better after high school, but it was pretty uncool.”

“Oh,” Oli says. “I thought you were…more classically oriented.”

“I was. Definitely. But I needed something to do, you know?” Lark shrugs. “I was at kind of a loose end after school, I guess.”

Oli assumes he’s remembered what Reed said wrong, thinks the idea of conservatory must have been a mistake. He doesn’t say anything about studying, aware of the weight of his own Ph.D. and his years filled up with datasets and maths and stories about the universe.

Oli wants to leave space for Lark to share the details of his world, the orbits that he was pulled into. Making music, recording a demo: Oli can’t imagine it. He’s not sure what it would entail, but he says, “It sounds fun.”

“It probably was,” Lark answers. “I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.”

Max wrapped up our cassette demos with hand-written notes, sent them to indie labels, and traded them for zines. I made the tapes, recording from FLAC files in real-time while I practiced. What happened to them afterward was his business.

I refused to help with the artwork or cover any costs. That reluctance turned into our first serious fight. Mics kicked over and feeding back. Max cursing over the squeal. Blank cassettes thrown into my car afterward.

I drove home feeling chilled. I didn’t have enough to spare, not enough money or time. Already I was on edge, my heartbeat oppressive when I checked for my mail, frantic to see conservatory stationery. Expecting any day the news about a scholarship, losing the battle in my e-mails with financial aid departments who couldn’t excuse my parents’ refusal to fill out a FAFSA. Thinking about what Max called my hopeless hope.

Squires of Gothos was fun when we were in high school. I wrote songs for Max’s lyrics, hung out away from my house every weekend, got into synthesizers, built a sample library. It was the gateway to my first friends when I was gawking my way out of puberty, the only guy with long hair, and an MP3 player full up with three interpretations of Chopin’s Preludes.

It wasn’t fun, later. It wasn’t important. But I hated endings. I still hate endings.

I was going to quit. I told myself every weekend, after every rehearsal, that I had outgrown our little outfit. But I programmed increasingly baroque sequences and kept my mouth shut.

And then the final decisions came through, one school after another. Little grants, loans that needed my parents’ withheld signature. The last scholarship letter arrived, a congratulatory message about a half-ride that did me no good.

I can’t go, I told Max when he came for the tapes. I found out today. I didn’t get enough to make the money work.

Max made a face like he was grieving, too. I hadn’t felt anything yet, was bracing myself for the tidal pull of my disappointment, but I could imagine it on Max’s face. He clapped me on the arm, said just shit. Turned away from me, hands pulling at his hair.

Eventually he told me I got a letter from Portland. A label out there wants to hear us, said we could play a gig.

Yeah, I said. I wanted to ask why he was saying this, why he was talking to me at all, talking while I was falling apart.

I thought you’d be gone in September, so there was no point. But we could go now. It’s a good break. You want to get out of here, right? Summer on the west coast?

There was nothing he could say that didn’t sound like pity. An international arena tour would have been a consolation prize. I had no dreams for our band; I wanted something else. I wanted to be someone else.

My vision was so clear, so narrow that it excluded me entirely.

We’ll have fun, he promised. He hugged me, then, not minding that I couldn’t return it, that all I could do was lean my head into his shoulder. I couldn’t move or even breathe. I didn’t have anywhere else I could go.