The Quiet Part Out Loud

Track One

I keep a room inside me where the lights stay low —

The record light came up like a small red sun over the back room of Salvage & Sound, and I was the only weather in the world.

That's the part nobody tells you about being loud. It's easiest in an empty building. Ozzie had flipped the sign and rattled out the front around nine, calling that the alarm was mine to set and the kettle was mine to unplug, and the second the bell stopped swinging on the door I felt the shop exhale around me — the wall of guitars going still on their hooks, the bins of vinyl settling, the ceiling fan ticking down to nothing. Quiet is not the same as empty. Empty is permission.

The four-track sat where it always sat, on the workbench between a disemboweled amp and a coffee can of orphan capos. It was older than me by a decade, a fat gray Tascam that smelled like warm dust when it ran, and it recorded onto actual cassette tape, which Ozzie said made it honest and the internet said made it vintage and I said made it mine, because nobody my age wanted it and nobody could borrow it without me knowing. Four channels. A meter that bounced when you sang true and pinned red when you got greedy. A single round button the color of a stoplight that did exactly one thing.

I tuned the shop's beat-up Yamaha by ear, low E flat to the radiator pipe that hummed a perfect-ish G when the heat kicked on. I set the can of capos out of the way. I pulled the headphones down over my ears, the foam cracked and taped, and the room went underwater in the good way, the way I chose.

Then I pressed record alone, and I sang.

Here's the thing I have never once said in daylight: I'm good. Not good-for-a-shy-kid, not good-if-you-squint. The voice that came out of me in that back room was not a small voice. It filled the space between the rafters and the floorboards and leaned on the windows. It did things I never planned, bent notes I'd been too scared to bend in my own head, found the ache under a word and pressed on it until it gave. The meter danced. I sang the first verse of the song I'd been carrying around for two years, the one I called "Out Loud" in my notebook because I am not above a private joke at my own expense —

There's a room in me where the lights stay low, and everybody loves the show they'll never get to know —

— and then the pre-chorus, and then the empty place where the bridge should be, which I sang past the way you step over a missing stair. I'd had that song almost finished for two years. Everything except the bridge. Everything except the last line. I'd written four hundred other lines easy and could not find those two, and at some point I stopped trying to force them and just left the hole there, a little open grave in the middle of the best thing I'd ever made, and sang around it like it wasn't there.

I did three takes. The third one cracked on the word show in exactly the way that makes strangers believe you. I kept that one.

While it bounced down I sat on the amp and did the thing I'm not proud of, which is read the comments under the last one.

The account was called the Wren. Lowercase. A profile picture of a brown bird on a wire, drawn by an eleven-year-old who is also me. Four hundred and twelve followers, which is nothing, which is everything, which is four hundred and twelve more people than have ever heard me sing on purpose where they could see my face. They didn't know my name. They didn't know I was sixteen, or that I shelved strings for minimum wage, or that I'd ridden my bike past three FOR LEASE signs to get to work that morning. They knew the songs. They left things like this got me through finals and played the new one at my grandpa's thing, thank you and who ARE you, and I read every word the way some people pray, fast and silent and a little ashamed of how much I needed it.

I uploaded the new take. Two minutes forty. No face, no name, just the bird on the wire and a title in lowercase: out loud (rough).

Then I watched the number under it tick — two plays, nine, twenty — strangers in towns I'd never see finding a voice that lived three feet from where I was sitting, loving it, and not one of them able to pick me out of a lunch line. I want to tell you that felt like loneliness. Mostly it felt like the safest I get.

I unplugged the kettle. I set the alarm. I rode home through the cold with the river smell coming up off the Sable, past the dark windows where WREN-FM used to broadcast, past the long brick coffin of the Meridian plant that pressed records before I was born and now pressed nothing, past the whole town slowly turning its lights off one storefront at a time, and the whole way I sang — but only under my breath, only the size of a person who has learned exactly how big she's allowed to be in public, which is not at all.

—

Our house at night is a recording I know by heart.

You learn a place by its sounds when you grow up trying not to add to them. The Larkin house had a vocabulary: the third stair that popped like a snare, the kitchen tap that knocked twice when you shut it, the furnace in the basement that my father was, at that moment, half inside of, swearing softly at a part.

I came in the back. Mom was at the hospital — night shift, three-elevens, the steady 4/4 our whole family kept time to without admitting it. Wally was supposed to be asleep and was instead sitting on the kitchen floor in dinosaur pajamas with a pot between his knees and the lid in one hand, conducting an orchestra only he could see. He hit the lid. It rang like a cracked cymbal, enormous, awful, and he grinned up at me with no fear in him anywhere, none, a kid who had never once wondered whether the room wanted to hear him.

"Pen," he announced. "I made a song. It's called Loud Dinosaur."

"Bold title," I said. "How's it go?"

He hit the lid again. That was the whole song. Loud Dinosaur. I stood in the doorway with my coat still on and watched my eight-year-old brother be the thing I used to be, before, and something behind my ribs went tight and warm and unbearable all at once. I have never envied anyone the way I envy Wally with a pot lid. He's got the gift I traded away and he doesn't even know it's worth anything.

Under the floor, from the basement, came a sound that did not belong to the house's vocabulary.

My father was humming.

It was low, barely there, riding under the clank of his wrench and the rush of the furnace coming back to life — a melody, a real one, four or five notes that climbed and turned and hung, an actual tune that I had heard come out of him my whole life and never once heard him admit to. I knew it the way you know a smell from when you were small. It had no words. It had never had words, far as I could tell. He hummed it changing the oil and he hummed it raking leaves and he hummed it now, fixing the heat, the prettiest thing in our house and the one nobody was allowed to mention.

I stood very still at the top of the basement stairs so the third one wouldn't pop.

The hum climbed. Turned. Reached for the note it always reached for —

— and stopped. Cut clean, mid-phrase, the way you'd slam a hand over your own mouth. The wrench kept going. He'd caught himself. He always caught himself. There's a particular silence that comes right after my dad notices he's making music, and it is the loudest thing in our family, louder than any pot lid, a silence with a shape, a silence that's been sitting in the middle of us for five years and that no one — not him, not Mom, not me — has ever walked up to and named.

We used to be a music house. There are pictures. There's a guitar in the hall closet behind the winter coats that nobody opens. There was a band, before me, a thing called the Sable Sons that the town apparently loved, and then there was a season when all of that ended at once, the band and the singing and something else, and after that my father fixed furnaces and hummed a song he'd cut his own throat to keep from finishing, and I learned that this is what music does to a Larkin. It gets into you and then it leaves and takes the good part of you with it.

That's not the reason I don't sing where people can see me.

The reason is the last time I tried.

But I wasn't going to think about that. I'm very good at not thinking about that. I'd had years of practice and a whole technique built around it, four steady counts and a held breath, and I used them right there on the stairs and they worked, mostly, the way they always almost work.

"Hey, kiddo." Dad's voice floated up, careful, casual, scrubbed of whatever the hum had been. "There's pasta. Get your brother off the floor."

"He's composing," I said.

"Tell him the orchestra's union and they want their beds."

I got Wally up. I ate cold pasta over the sink. The house went back to its known sounds, tap, stair, furnace, and somewhere under all of it the absence of the thing my father wouldn't hum, and I told myself, the way I tell myself most nights, that quiet was just quiet and didn't mean anything, and I almost believed it.

Then my phone buzzed, and the night changed key.

—

It was the family chat first, which meant Mom had seen it on break and forwarded it before she could stop herself. A screenshot of an email. Harlow High letterhead, that maroon crest, the principal's signature font.

…with regret… budget shortfall… effective at the end of this term… the music program, visual arts, and the spring showcase will be suspended. Ms. Reyes's position will be reduced to part-time…

I read it twice. The words rearranged themselves and meant the same thing both times.

They were turning off the band room.

It's a small thing, I know. It's a budget line in a town full of budget lines, one more light going out on a street where the lights had been going out my whole life. But that band room was the one room in that whole brick building where I had ever felt like the air was on my side. It was where Ms. Reyes had handed me back a song I'd left on her desk and looked at me — not kindly, which I could've dismissed, but factually, like she was reporting the weather — and said, "Penny. This is good. Not for your age. Good." It was the one place my songs had a roof, even the ones I'd never sing.

And the showcase. The thing I'd been telling myself for two years I might, someday, possibly, write something for and let somebody braver sing. Gone, before I'd ever had to find out if I was lying.

Mom typed I'm so sorry baby and then we'll figure it out which is what she types when there is nothing to figure out. Downstairs the furnace ticked over and held its tongue. I did not go tell my father. I already knew the shape of the silence that would make.

I sat on my bed in the dark and opened the other app instead, the one with the bird on the wire, because that was the only place left where any of it had ever gone right.

The new take had a hundred and six plays. There was a fresh comment at the top, posted four minutes ago by a stranger with a username made of numbers, somebody out there in the same cold town under the same dead radio tower, and it said:

the wren is the only thing that gets me through this town

I read it until the letters stopped being letters.

They love me most when they can't see me, I thought. That's the deal. That's the whole deal, and it's a good deal, and I would be an idiot to want a different one.

Tomorrow I had to walk into a building that had just deleted the only room I'd ever belonged in, and smile, and shelve myself the way I shelve strings, and say nothing, and be no one.

I turned the red light off in my head. I counted to four.

I did not sleep.

Dead Air

They tore the wires from the walls and left the echo where it stood— a room can hold a sound for years after it stops being good.

The carpet remembered the amps even after the amps were gone.

That was the first thing the band room told me, and it told me before I was all the way through the door — four pale rectangles in the gray industrial weave, set in a loose half-circle where the cabinets used to stand. Somebody had hauled the amps out and the carpet underneath had kept its color, because for nine years nothing had moved them and the light hadn't touched the floor they stood on. So now there were these clean bright shapes on a dirty dark room, and they looked exactly like the outlines they draw around a body. Like a crime scene that had already been cleaned up except for where it mattered.

I'd walked the whole school to get here, and the whole school had been doing this all morning. Telling me. Half the hallway fluorescents were dark, every other tube, so the corridor came at you in stripes — light, dim, light, dim — a stutter you could almost set a tempo to. The good vending machine by the gym had a sheet of paper taped over the card reader: CASH ONLY, then under it, smaller, SORRY. The trophy case still had the 2009 marching-band plaque in it, but the case was unlit now, and the brass had gone the brown of an old penny, and you had to lean in and let your own reflection do the work of seeing it. There were three different flyers stapled to the same corkboard begging for the same thing in three different fonts. BOOSTERS. SPRING DRIVE. HELP US KEEP. The sentence ran out of board before it ran out of need.

A school is just a building until the money leaves it. Then it's a building doing an impression of one.

I almost didn't go into the band room. I'd been telling myself I had a reason to — my hoodie, left on the back rack last Friday, the gray one with the cuff I'd worried into a soft frayed mouth — but the reason was thin and I knew it was thin. The truth was the room had a pull, even gutted. Especially gutted. You don't stop loving a place because it stopped loving you back.

Ms. Reyes was inside, and she was on her knees in front of the open instrument lockers, packing a cello into a hard case like she was setting a bone.

"Larkin," she said, without turning around. She knew my footsteps. Most people don't have footsteps quiet enough to be known by; mine are the kind you have to study. "Mind the floor. There's screws everywhere."

There were. Little drywall screws scattered across the rectangles, where they'd taken the wall brackets down. I picked my way in, four steps, and stood with my hands in my sleeves.

She had three cases done and lined up by the door and maybe nine more to go. Two trombones, the cello, the school's one half-decent acoustic with the cracked heel, a milk crate of music stands folded flat as deck chairs. She was moving them out into the hall — the actual hall, the corridor — to be carried wherever instruments go when a town decides it's done making the sound of itself.

"Where do they—" I started, and stopped, because where do they go was a question I didn't actually want the answer to.

"District storage, for now. Climate-controlled, which is a joke, because nothing in this building has been climate-controlled since the Clinton administration." She thumbed the latches shut on the cello. Click. Click. Two clean downbeats. "Some of it gets sold. The good clarinet's already spoken for." She finally looked up at me. Ms. Reyes had the kind of face that didn't perform anything; whatever she felt, she felt at you straight, no reverb. "You came back for your hoodie."

"I—" My ears went hot. "Sorry. Yeah."

"Don't apologize for owning a hoodie." She nodded at the rack, which was still bolted to the wall, the one fixture they'd left. My gray sleeve hung off it like a flag for a country that had folded. "Get it before it goes to storage and becomes the property of the State of nowhere."

I got it. I held it against my stomach with both arms, which gave my hands something to do, which they always wanted.

She didn't go back to packing right away. She sat back on her heels and looked at me the way she'd looked at me once before, in the fall, after I'd turned in the songwriting unit. We'd had a songwriting unit, two weeks of it, and I'd done the assignment the way I did everything for school — quietly, completely, hoping to be graded and forgotten. I'd handed her a single page from the notebook, copied out clean. Not a Wren song. Nothing the Wren had ever touched. Just a small true thing about my grandmother's hands and a kitchen radio, eight lines, no chorus. I'd watched her read it at her desk while the rest of the class murdered a unit on key signatures, and I'd watched her read it twice.

"You still writing?" she said now.

"A little." The understatement of my entire life. "Here and there."

"Good." She let it sit. Then: "Your songs are good, Penny."

People say that. People say that's so good about a sandwich. But she didn't say it like that. She said it flat, like a measurement, like reading a number off a tuner. You're four cents sharp. Your songs are good. No smile attached to soften it into a kindness, which is how I knew it wasn't one.

"They're better than good, and I've been doing this fourteen years, so I'd know, and I'm telling you because nobody else in this building is going to and somebody should before they turn the lights off." She stood up, knees popping, and brushed carpet lint off her jeans. "And I'll tell you the other part too, because you're old enough. Good is rare. It almost never shows up. And when it shows up here—" she tipped her chin at the dark stripes of the hallway, the BOOSTERS, the brown trophies, the screws on the floor "—it gets wasted. Wrung out. Most of the time it never even finds out what it was."

I didn't say anything. There wasn't a polite-sized thing to say.

"I'm not trying to put it on you." She picked up the cello case, hefted it, found the balance. "I'm just not going to be one more person who watched and stayed quiet. You can do whatever you want with that. Now move, you're standing on a trombone."

I moved. I was, in fact, standing on a trombone.

She went out into the corridor with the cello, sideways through the door, and the room exhaled into me — that flat, dead, carpeted nothing where the carpet used to drink the cymbals and hand you back something warm. I stood in the middle of the chalk-outline amps with my dead hoodie in my arms, and I counted to four, and I left.

I made it about thirty feet.

The drumming started before I saw who was making it.

It came up through the floor first, honestly — a low repeating figure I felt in the soles of my sneakers a half second before my ears caught up — and then I came around the corner by the science wing lockers and there they were, the two loudest people in a school that had just had its volume cut.

Tully Brooks had both palms flat against the locker bank. Flat, fingers spread, like she was holding the metal down so it couldn't get away, and she was playing it — a full pattern, kick and snare and a little ghosted thing in between, except there was no kit, just her hands going pap-pap-PAP, pap-PAP against the painted steel, and the whole row of lockers ringing it back. She wasn't watching her hands. She was watching the metal, or watching nothing, her head tipped a little to one side, and I understood without being told that she was feeling for it — that the lockers were telling her hands what they were doing the way the floor had just told my feet. She had her shoes off. They were sitting neat by the wall, toes lined up, and she was playing the school in her socks.

And Reece Donnelly was conducting her like a one-man stadium.

I knew Reece the way you know weather. He'd been in my grade since the fourth grade and he'd been loud in all of them. Lead guitar, or at least lead-guitar-shaped — he had the jacket and the stance and the way of holding an invisible neck even when there wasn't one around, and right now he had his arms thrown wide and his head back and he was singing, sort of, over Tully's locker groove, just vowels, just a melody with the words sanded off, and it was — I'll be fair — it was a little flat. Not by a lot. By the amount that makes a thing human instead of fixed. A few cents north of true and not coming down.

"That's the one," he was telling her, or telling the hallway, or telling God. "You feel that? That's the one, Tully, that's the whole — that's the song, that right there, that's better than anything that ever happened in that dead—" He flung an arm back toward the band room, toward Ms. Reyes carrying cellos out of the world. "They cut it. They cut music. You can't cut music, it's not a — it's not an elective, it's a organ, it's load-bearing—"

"It's an elective," Tully said, not stopping her hands. She read his face when he talked, I noticed; she'd glance up, catch the shape of the words, glance back to the steel. "It says elective right on the sheet."

"It's load-bearing," Reece said again, like volume was an argument.

I should have kept walking. I am very, very good at keeping walking. It's my best instrument. But I'd slowed without deciding to, because the groove was genuinely good, Tully's groove, it had a pocket you could've fallen asleep in, and Reece's voice on top of it was so wrong and so happy that the two things together did something to my chest I didn't have a name for and didn't want one.

He clocked me. Of course he clocked me. People like Reece have radar for an audience of one.

"Shop girl!" Half-warm, half-show. "Salvage and Sound, right? You're the one shelves the strings."

"Penny," I said. It came out about as loud as a held note dying.

"Penny. Right. Penny." He said it three times like he was tuning to it. "Okay, Penny, settle something. They killed the showcase, they killed the room, fine, fine." He wasn't fine. "So I do it myself. I start a band, a real one, we play the Wren, the upstairs, the actual stage, and we do real songs. Not the — " he made a face like he'd bitten foil — "not the pop-machine garbage, not the four-chords-and-a-haircut stuff. Real ones. Songs that are about something. You know who gets it? You know who actually—"

"Don't," Tully said, deadpan, eyes on the metal. "He's gonna do the thing."

"—you know who actually still makes a real song in this whole streaming wasteland? That account. The Wren." He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum like he was checking it was still working. "You heard the Wren? Tell me you've heard the Wren."

The hallway went underwater.

It happens like this, the thing I don't talk about. My hands first — they were already gripping the hoodie and now they gripped it harder, knuckles, the cuff with its frayed mouth crushed in my fist. Then a count starts somewhere I can't reach, one, two, the floor at a slight tilt. The fluorescents stuttered light-dim-light. Somewhere far off, behind glass, a boy I'd known since the fourth grade was telling me — me, the gray smudge by the lockers, the smallest sound in the building — that the realest voice in town belonged to a stranger called the Wren. He had no idea. He had absolutely no idea that he was standing in the same six feet of cinderblock as the thing he loved, that the secret he was praising was holding a frayed hoodie and forgetting how to breathe in fours.

They love me most when they can't see me. I'd thought that last night, in the dark, after a stranger told me I got him through this town. I'd thought it was a sad thing. Standing in that hallway I found out it was also a true thing, and a heavy one, and that it could be said to my face by someone who meant it as the highest praise he had, and I would have to stand there and let it be said and not make a single sound.

"...the four-track ones," Reece was saying, surfacing back through the water. "The ones that sound like they're recorded in a — a closet, like one mic and a prayer, and it's still better than anything with a label behind it. That. That's what I want to do."

"Yeah," I said. My voice found the smallest possible door and went through it sideways. "I've heard them."

"Right?" His whole face opened. For one second Reece Donnelly wasn't loud, he was just glad, glad the way an empty house makes a person glad to find anyone home. "Right. See, she gets it. Tully, she gets it." He swung back to me, and the swagger came down over the gladness like a garage door, and he pointed at me — actually pointed, finger out, frontman to crowd. "That's what I need. Somebody who actually understands songs. Not just plays — understands. And you're always around it, you basically live in that shop, you've got the ear, I can tell, you got the quiet-kid-who-actually-knows-everything thing going—"

Tully's hands stopped on the lockers. The ring hung in the air and died. She looked at me, full on, the first time, and she didn't look at me like I was brave or sad or small. She just looked, the way you look at a piece of gear you're deciding whether to buy.

"You," Reece said. "Shop girl. You're always around music. You in?"

The honest answer was a wall. The honest answer was a funeral and a green light and five years of keeping a voice in a box where it couldn't get out and get me killed. The honest answer was no in every key it comes in.

So that's what I said. "No."

But here's the thing about a no, and I would know, I make my living on the difference between the note you mean and the note you land: it came out a half-step flat. Just enough. Just the amount that makes a thing human instead of fixed. And Reece — flat his whole life, tuned to the smallest wrongness in a sound — Reece heard it.

I watched him hear it.

"Huh," he said, and he smiled, and he did not say anything else, which for Reece Donnelly was the loudest thing he'd done all day.

I walked. I was good at it. I went down the striped hall, past the dark trophies and the begging corkboard, my dead hoodie against my stomach, and behind me Tully put her palms back on the lockers and found the one again, pap-pap-PAP, and I felt it follow me through the floor for as far as the floor would carry it, which was further than I wanted it to go.