Sam left his bike in the Magic Grooves parking lot and helped me decipher Leonard’s directions as Abe and Em carried on a loud, heated conversation in the backseat about what would have happened if John Bonham hadn’t died all those years ago.
“The entire trajectory of music history would have been changed,” Abe said.
“You cannot possibly maintain such a high level of substance abuse and still remain productive,” Em argued. “They would have broken up anyway. Maybe they would have released one more album, but . . .”
“Even one more album and the entire trajectory of music history would have been changed!” Abe said.
“You just keep saying the same thing over and over,” Em pointed out.
“It’s a pretty good thing. I’m sticking with it for now.”
After just a few minutes of driving, Sam motioned me over to the side of the road and I parked. We must have gone closer to the ocean; I could hear the crashing of waves even though I couldn’t see the shore. It took me a minute to see the little store, which was nestled against a thin wooded area. A sign out front said Thrift Sto. The last two letters were faded and unreadable. It was one of the tiniest buildings I’d ever seen, and it was completely surrounded by things for sale: picnic tables and washing machines and doghouses and tool chests and road signs and water-damaged dollhouses. We filed out of the car, and I picked my way between a plastic rocking horse and an oversized garden gnome and slipped through the front doors.
The building was almost certainly bigger on the inside.
“TARDIS,” Abe whispered, nudging me excitedly in the side. The building stretched on for an impossible amount of space, and it was filled with more junk than I’d ever seen in one place.
“What’s a TARDIS?” Em asked.
“The Police Box,” I said.
“Oh. Good reference.”
She and Abe drifted away, and Sam asked me what I was looking for.
“A record player.”
“Another letter?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
He seemed to know his way around. He led me to a display of vintage record players, all with a tiny white price sticker on one corner.
“Have you been here before?” I asked, looking at the different models.
“It’s a small town,” he said in way of an answer. “I’ve been to most places.”
“Do you know anything about record players?”
He bent down to examine the options, then pointed to a little suitcase player with built-in speakers. He rattled off some specs (that I didn’t understand at all, all about something called RPMs and platter weight), the conclusion being: get this, it’s a good one.
“Are you kind of a genius?” I asked as he handed it to me.
“What do you mean?”
“All these college courses, all this random knowledge. Like, who knows this much about record players?”
“I guess I read a lot,” he said.
“About record players?”
“About lots of stuff.”
“Do you ever sleep?”
“Once a week I try to take a little nap,” he said, smiling, sliding past me to the checkout. Em was already there, talking to a very bored-looking twentysomething proprietor about the records she’d just bought. The shopkeeper’s features were androgynous, and they wore a small pin on their lapel that listed their preferred pronouns “they/them/theirs.”
“Do you like vinyl? Did you go to school around here? Do you like working in a thrift store?” Em asked rapid-fire.
“Yes I do,” the shopkeeper responded to Em’s questions in order. “Yes I do. No I don’t.”
I put the record player on the counter.
“Forty dollars!” Em said, reading the price. “That’s a steal. Seriously. It’s like you’re stealing from this store, Lottie!”
Abe dragged Em away from the register as I paid. Sam came up beside me; the shopkeeper smiled when they saw him.
“Hi, Sam.”
“Hi, Zen.”
“Is your name really Zen?” Em called as Abe all but pushed her out of the store.
“Sorry about her. She can get a little enthusiastic,” I said.
“Actually, I’m used to it. Thrift stores make people oddly energized,” Zen said.
“Zen, this is my friend Lottie,” Sam said. “Lottie, Zen.”
Zen extended a hand over the counter and smiled at me, and I got the feeling that any friend of Sam’s was vouched for.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise. This is a good little machine you picked out,” they said, tapping the record player. “Forty even. No tax for Sam’s friends.” I handed them two twenties. “You guys should go down to the beach. Mikaela built another driftwood sculpture.”
“Really? Oh, we definitely have to check it out,” Sam said. “Mikaela is Zen’s partner, and she’s an absolutely amazing artist.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Thanks for this,” Sam said.
“Anytime,” Zen promised.
“Mr. Popular,” I said, nudging Sam with my elbow when we were out of earshot.
“I told you—it’s a small town!”
We met Abe and Em in the parking lot.
“This way,” Sam said, pointing around the back of the shop. “Bring the record player.”
I grabbed the Jim Croce record out of the car, and then we followed Sam around the back of the shop to a skinny trailhead that opened up in the woods that bordered the property.
We went single file because that was the only way we could fit. Sam was first, then me, then Abe, then Em. It wasn’t long until the sounds of the ocean grew louder and the path beneath our feet turned sandy and opened up onto a small, secluded beach. We walked toward the water, and I spotted Mikaela’s sculpture immediately. It was hard to miss; it looked like a fully formed tree house in the middle of the sand. It was built close to the water and the tide had risen since its completion; the bottom two feet were underwater. And it was functional—there was a girl sitting on its small raised platform. Mikaela, I assumed. She’d made a torch out of driftwood. The fire was burning thin but bright.
“Wow,” Em said.
“This is amazing,” Abe added.
“You should have seen her last one. A giant hummingbird. I swore I saw its wings move,” Sam said. He caught Mikaela’s eye and waved to her. She climbed down a rickety ladder to greet him.
“Sam! I was hoping you’d get to see this one. It’ll be swallowed up pretty soon. I’ve already taken my pictures,” she said. Mikaela was a few years older than us and pretty. She had long hair she wore in two braids and there was dirt smudged on her face. Her hands were rough and calloused. “And you brought friends! I guess you’re not such a loner after all,” she said, winking and smiling warmly at us.
“This is Lottie, Em, and Abe. Do you have power?” Sam asked.
“Over there,” Mikaela responded, pointing. Sam took the record player from me and plugged it into a long orange extension cord. I couldn’t see where it originated.
“This is beautiful,” I said. “You made this?”
“Thank you! Yeah, it’s just something I do for fun,” Mikaela said.
“What do you mean, swallowed up?”
“The tide’s coming in, and it will get washed away. Pretty soon, actually. But I don’t use anything that didn’t come from the ocean to begin with, so it’s all just returning.”
“Isn’t that frustrating?”
“Not really. I don’t think everything has to be so permanent. There are plenty of museums. This is just for me, just for now,” she said.
“But isn’t that like creating something for the sole purpose of seeing it destroyed?” I asked. “Sorry, that sounded a little harsh—no offense.”
“None taken!” Mikaela said, laughing. “I like people who ask questions. And I don’t think that’s the sole purpose here at all. It’s just one of the inevitable outcomes of art: eventually, it will all be destroyed. Even the Mona Lisa will one day turn to dust; it will just take a little longer than my structure’s destruction. But in the grand scheme of things, in the whole bulk of time, they both exist for just tiny little blips.”
“Harsh,” Sam said.
“Structure’s Destruction! Another excellent name for a band,” Abe said.
Mikaela laughed and walked back toward the structure as the record started playing.
“Your aunt’s favorite song is on this record,” Sam said.
“Did she play it for your class too?”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “That’s where I heard it.”
The music carried surprisingly well over the water as we walked over to Mikaela’s structure.
“Will it hold us all?” Sam asked, putting his hand on a beam.
“Only one way to find out,” Mikaela said.
We left the record player and our shoes and our phones well away from the water and then, one by one, we climbed the ladder to the shelter Mikaela had made. The five of us crowded together and tried to be as light as possible, and though it swayed a little bit as we settled on it, the tower held. The platform was only ten or so feet high, but it felt significant—the breeze was stronger and the salt air was more noticeable and the music floated through the air and swirled around our heads, blending with the breeze.
I thought about what Mikaela had said and wondered whether the permanence of an object affected its worth.
“Lottie, it’s your turn,” Em said, shoving something into my hand. A small, sharp pocketknife.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“We’re carving the wood. Anything you want to write. Something important or something you want to leave behind,” Mikaela said. “I wrote destruction.”
“I wrote Led Zeppelin,” Abe said. Then, when Em gave him a look: “What? They’re very important.”
“What did you write?” I asked Sam.
He pointed to a piece of wood, and I leaned closer to read what he’d carved there.
Time.
“It’s important, but it’s not everything,” he said quietly.
I picked my own piece of wood and started carving. It was harder than I thought it would be. My letters came out crooked and hesitant, but each one was better than the last. When I was done, I leaned back and looked at what I’d written.
“Listen,” Sam read.
“It’s what she wanted me to do,” I explained. “But it’s hard.”
Abe and Em had sucked Mikaela into their John Bonham discussion. I listened as she laid out a very detailed, highly thought-out timeline of what would have happened if he hadn’t died.
“In one of her classes, your aunt said they send kids to school to learn math and grammar and history, but they never teach them about their own minds,” Sam said, leaning closer to me.
“She told me that too. That we spend so much time on addition and subtraction but no time at all on how to control anxiety, how to manage anger, how to understand our emotions.”
“It seems like a pretty big miss, right?”
“Yeah, it does.”
I closed my eyes and tried to block out all distractions. But even the act of trying to block out distractions was a distraction, and I found myself irritated and angry.
“Try this,” Sam said. “Sometimes it helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Close your eyes and follow the music. Not the words, but the music. Think about the notes in your head and make yourself tune everything else out. Don’t try to concentrate so much as let yourself drift into it.”
Drift into it. Okay. I closed my eyes again, and this time I thought of the music like a physical thing, like something manifesting inside my head. One song ended, and “Time in a Bottle” began—I hadn’t heard the song before, but he said the title early on. I gave the notes a shape and let them move and act of their own accord. And it worked—suddenly my whole universe was Jim Croce singing about time and love and the fleeting nature of both. The sounds of the beach, the sounds of Abe and Em and Mikaela arguing . . . everything faded away until it was just me. Just me and a guitar and a voice.
When the song ended, I opened my eyes. Sam was staring at me so intently, I started laughing.
“What?” he said, self-conscious. “What did I do?”
“Nothing. It worked! It really worked.”
We stayed there long after the record had run out, and the water now was four or five feet high around the base of the tower. We would get soaked on our way down; we’d have to swim to shore. But that was okay because I had towels in my car and none of us minded a little water.
Em went first, whooping as she flew through the air, tucking her legs into her chest in order to create as big a splash as possible. Then Abe went, more gracefully, and Mikaela, the most graceful of all. It was just Sam and me on the platform and the three of them on the narrow sliver of beach, laughing and shaking water from their hair.
“There won’t be long for it,” Sam said, and he meant the tower but it felt like he also meant something else, and I didn’t know what it was. I was about to ask him, but he took my hand and we jumped together. I didn’t even bother trying to keep my head above water. I let the ocean rush over me. I took my time standing up, and the salt water ran into my eyes and my mouth, and, completely soaked and shivering, we walked back to my car. I turned the heat up while we stood around and toweled off.
Zen came out of the store and watched us, and Mikaela danced around, refusing a towel, already rattling off plans for what she wanted to make next.
We said good-bye to them and drove Sam back to Magic Grooves to get his bike.
I left the car running and walked Sam to his bike, which was chained up at the side of the building.
“Thanks for meeting us,” I said.
“Anytime,” he replied. He unlocked his chain and wound it around the middle bar of the bike, then straightened up. “I hope your aunt’s letters keep bringing us together.”
“I’m sure they will. She loved it down here.”
In the car I watched him bike away down the road, and Abe and Em made kissing noises and hummed the old song about love and marriage in trees.
“Lottie loves someone,” Em said in a singsongy, incredibly annoying voice.
“I don’t love anyone. I’ve known him for a week,” I said.
“Lottie has a crush on someone,” Abe amended.
But that didn’t feel right either. That was too glib a word to describe it. Everything was too complicated to accurately explain. Did I have feelings for Sam? I didn’t know. It was all jumbled in my head, like there was too much information to process and not enough room to properly sort it out.
I ignored Em and Abe until they got the hint and left me alone.
That night I hooked the record player up in my room and listened to “Time in a Bottle” on repeat, feeling like it was trying to tell me something I didn’t yet have the capability to understand.