PRESENT DAY
Do you dare?
I slip my nails beneath the edges of the paper, exposing the corner of a pink book. The gold-embossed lettering catches the light of the star chandelier Grams designed and Nana built when I was six.
As I go to tear off the rest, a low laugh rises from down the hall, followed by a clatter, a reminder that my grandmothers are right out there with their pain and kindness and unshared stories. They’ve held my hands through scary movies, walked me to school rain or shine, hugged me goodnight and good morning, but they’re just like me—they’ve never known how to say goodbye.
This isn’t the place to open this. This isn’t how to do this.
My purse sits on the hanging chair, and I grab it, sliding the still-partially-wrapped book in and leaving my room behind. Rushing down the hall, I pop my head into the kitchen.
“I forgot a book at the inn. I’ll be back.” I force out the lie, only pausing a second as Grams and Nana study me and each other, this time waiting to see if they’ll talk about it, if they’ll want to know what the gift was, if they’ll offer to look with me. I wait to see if they’re curious at all, and when they don’t ask, I will my disappointment not to show.
“Okay, sweetie.” Grams smiles softly. “Love you. S’mores dip may have to wait. Nana dropped the chocolate. See you after your party.”
“I did not,” Nana says.
My gaze falls to the splattered tiles. I can’t help a small smile. “Is that okay? I won’t be out too late.”
“You’d better not be,” Nana adds, but she’s grinning too. “Have fun.”
They don’t say anything else even as Grams’s eyes bore into my purse and Nana carefully avoids looking at it, stooping to wipe up the mess across the floor with her long salt-and-pepper hair falling out of its clip. The usual suffocating silence closes in at even the unspoken idea of this topic, but this time I have a way to find something out for myself.
Outside, the low-hanging clouds cover the moon at a whim, hanging in the still-light sky. I make my way across the half-filled parking lot. Tourist season in Sunset Cove doesn’t start until mid-July, right around the time people will be shopping for college decorations, making final plans with high-school friends, and I’ll be manning the desk of this place and sneaking chords between taking names for room reservations—chords only to be shared with Britt and her band, Lost Girls, who are performing tonight. Or to be shared this summer, anyway. There are only two months before Britt is determined to get out of here; she always has been, and now graduation isn’t there to hold her back.
Nothing should hold her back.
I pull my purse tighter against my side.
The inn is quiet this week, and the guests are either settled in for the night or joining the party, because Sunset Cove celebrates few things quite as much as Tori Rose or graduation. The lobby sits empty as I cross it. My hand trails over the dusty fallboard of the grand piano I used to play to draw in visitors and for my grandmas every now and then before it got to be too painful, too real, too scary.
There are two halls from the main desk, one to the west and one to the east. I head west. It’s way shorter than the other—barely its own wing—and doesn’t wrap around to the pool in the middle or cherry blossoms in the back, but it holds more history. And it’s closed to guests, to the public.
Before they literally moved their lives to our house at the front of the grounds, my grandmas lived in this wing with her. They gave me a key to it a long time ago, and it sits on a silver necklace with another that Britt and I found but still haven’t discovered the door for. The key to this place is like a silent peace offering for all my grandmothers can’t say, but that doesn’t change what scratched floorboards and marker doodles on walls can’t tell me.
Mom’s bedroom sits to the immediate left: pale-pink curtains, unmade bed, vanity with lyrics scribbled across the mirror in Sharpie. There’s a secret floorboard where she stashed an extra songbook with only one page filled, a pack of cigarettes, and a photo of her utterly in love with whoever’s taking it, judging by her luminous smile.
But I don’t go in there today. I don’t go into my grandmas’ old bedroom with all its pictures of her either—the ones that never made it into the house. I stop right outside the door that makes me ache the most: the nursery where I first slept, back when she was still here.
Glancing inside, I note the rose-gold walls and the lyrics along them that this town made a train station out of—head forever to your dreams. Sometimes I climb onto the rocking chair in the corner when I can’t sleep, teetering softly, and I pretend it’s her rocking me.
“Hey, Mom,” I whisper, tracing a framed tour poster on the wall across from the room. My reflection catches in the glass, and there’s the same pale skin, blue eyes, wild blond hair. Enough for this town to know who I am, but with nothing truly shared between us. It’s like a game of Spot the Difference. The smug lilt of her lips and the slight downturn of mine. The spark in her eyes and the hurt in my own. The freckles on my shoulders and the hint of a tattoo carrying off her collarbone. Bravery in her gaze and cowardice in mine.
This time, I make sure to be careful with the paper despite the part of me that wants to rip it open. I peel it back slowly, keeping it intact, and I let the sheet fall to the dark hardwood floor as the book is fully revealed. Journal is printed in bold across the cracking pink-leather cover, tied together by a ribbon with roses on it. The pages are slightly yellowed and only the first ten are there.
Flipping through, I note the seven envelopes tucked inside. Their hues form a rainbow, and they’re stacked where the rest of the paper should be but was ripped out. Each envelope says Open Here and verses from her songs are scrawled across them, moving through the albums of her career. Above that, there’s my name.
I return to the front of the book where looping handwriting graces the spaces between the lines, the same as on the gift tag. My hands are as unsteady as my pulse when I go to read.
Mia,
There’s so much I want to say to you. And I thought to myself of how to tell you these things. How to be here, in your life, without really being here. So I compiled this for you. Call it a hunt, if you will. It’ll take you around Sunset Cove, to the spots where I found the most hidden magic.
Each envelope has a hint on the outside in the lyrics from one of my songs. When you think you’ve found the place to match, open it. Do this seven times and find the pattern. The clue inside each one will lead you to the missing pages of my diary.
I’m sure there’s an urge to open it all now. But I promise it’ll make so much more sense if you do it one by one before putting it together.
I hope we’ll know each other by the end of this. I hope that soon you’ll know me, and I can tell you my story one day.
Love,
Mom
My next inhale is sharp, and I’m unable to let go of the leather cover and those ripped pages and the seven multicolored envelopes that make a rainbow of everything I’ve ever needed. It’s a hunt, a journey, an entire diary’s worth of stories to find out about her life.
She wants me to know her. My mother did this for me. She left me something the rest of this town can’t own or hide. She’s here, in these pages.
This really is my way of finding out everything: who she was, who my father was, why she fell from stardom, and whatever message she had. This is the advice I’ve longed to hear from her. I can recognize her voice from a thousand interviews I watch late at night, but I have never heard it as clearly as in this note on the first page—the one addressed to me.
I turn to the next page in the handful of those that remain before the rest are gone and the envelopes take their place. There’s what looks like a sample, a first entry, but my phone buzzes in the pocket of the lavender dress Britt and I picked out earlier this week. Britt’s name appears on my screen, along with the contact photo I took the year we rode the tilt-a-whirl at the summer festival after having two bags of cotton candy.
I tap out a quick text, and after holding on a second longer, put the diary back in my purse. Promises aren’t something I’m willing to break either. Not when they’re to Britt; never when they’re to Britt.
The shouting reaches me before the glow of the bonfire and before the swaying blur of dresses and ripped jeans. Leaving my bike in an empty parking spot, I toss what remains of my grad gown into the trash at the edge of the lot and tuck my key necklace back into my dress. Spotlights beckon across the shore, shifting from pink to gold. Somewhere backstage, Britt’s waiting for me, and my pace quickens. I’m flying to reach her.
As I weave through my classmates, a guy I recognize from Lit gestures wildly with a red cup, and I dodge the splash zone. Relieved, I run up the steps to where Britt stands, laughing and chatting with the other Lost Girls: drummer Amy Li and pianist Sophie Jordain. The three of them have been playing together since the ninth-grade talent show, and I’ve been writing the tracks to accompany Britt’s lyrics for about that long, coming to watch every show and practice but never getting up onstage.
It’s better for everyone that way.
Britt’s eyes flit over my expression, and her brows arch slowly as she peels away from the group. Amy and Sophie wave, swaying into one another in giggles.
Then Britt’s nudging my arm, smiling my way, making my head this mix of light and racing and dizzy that she always seems to manage. Her dark curls are pinned up with Saturn-shaped bobby pins, and her light-brown skin is freckled with gold sparkles that match the stitches on her dress.
“How was the breakup? Did it make the top three?” she asks first, but I can see in the slight pursing of her lips that it isn’t the real question on her mind. The diary seems to burn through my bag, begging me to share with her what my mother did for me.
“Very funny. Way to make me sound superficial.” I lean up against the large speaker next to her, smoothing the lacy folds of my skirt. I don’t know what I’m trying to prove to myself, what Aza, Mason, Jenna, and Jess couldn’t tell me. All this time chasing something and not one of them made me feel the way that—
Maybe love isn’t something I’m meant for just like music isn’t. Britt’s the only person, besides my grandmas, I ever thought I could say those words to—the ones Jess tried to tell me and I ran from—but it’s not a feeling the two of us are meant to have together. We learned that the hard way.
“You know that’s not what I meant.” She nudges my arm again, a silent check-in, and it’s all I can take.
I lean my head softly on her shoulder, careful not to put too much of my weight on her, and Britt squeezes my hand. Her clothes are scented with lavender and the ocean breeze, and I once threw out a whole song because the scents wove their way into the verse. Now, I stick to chords, not lyrics.
“You excited?” I whisper into her shoulder.
“For this? Always,” she says, her voice shifting, a far-off quality seeping into it the closer she gets to stepping out beneath the lights. She shifts so her head rests on mine. “Why don’t you join us? It’s the last high-school show. Come on, Mia.” There’s something else in her tone now, too, something urgent.
But the last time she and I were on a stage together, the spotlights weren’t the only flashing lights we saw. She’s better off without me.
“Next time,” I say because that’s what I always say—not a promise since we both know it can’t happen.
She stiffens as the pep band finishes their set and our vice principal heads onstage to introduce Lost Girls, telling a bad knock-knock joke to the crowd. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
“What?” I tilt my chin up, meet her eyes, and her breath fans my lips in the way it always does before something happens. We always let something happen.
Her frown brings back everything we can’t have, all the reasons I run to hearts like Jess’s only to disappear and break them. Britt and me? We’re the kind of could-have-been love story even I don’t understand.
We’ve slipped up a few too many times—seven to be exact—looking at each other just like this, pushing forward past this. Every beginning of us is foggier than the last, but between each other’s breakups, we fall into something of our own. It never lasts long, and it never gets serious. It fades when life gets in the way, then we dance around it. We’ve always known she was leaving and I was staying, that she needed something outside this town and I could only be here—that the music called her and trapped me.
Us being more than whatever we are was never possible. After all, how would we ever work if her eyes are set on the road and my feet are planted here, gaze still sifting through the past?
The last thing I need is to let myself get entirely wrapped up in someone else who’s sure to leave me behind.
The vice principal’s voice breaks through memories, rising as she says, “ . . . introducing Lost Girls!”
When I turn back to Britt, shaking myself free of everything we were, her gaze is wide, mouth set in that determined way it does when she’s steeling her resolve. “We’ll talk after the show?”
“Yeah, of course,” I say, and I watch her shoulder her sky-blue guitar and go to huddle with Amy and Sophie.
They’ve played football games and dances and birthday parties, and at the end of this summer, they’re going to play for the world—not just our little corner of it.
The beat starts, one I know like every freckle on the back of Britt’s hand. It’s one of the first ones we wrote together for Lost Girls.
“Loveless Stars.”
Over the years, every time I’ve played this song to myself, I’ve just broken up with someone or been about to. Now, Britt’s voice, low and powerful, spreads over the beach, and the tears burn, but I refuse to let them fall.
This evening, sitting in the wings and watching her assured walk from one side of the stage to the next, I know the only way I’m going to get a piece of that, a piece of who I was born to be, is to turn the pages my mother penned. Pulling out the diary and flipping to where I left off, I settle against the makeshift stage and I start on the trail Tori Rose left for me.