“We?” I asked.

“Yeah, Daniel plays the drums; Chris plays the bass; and I play the keys,” he said. “We get together every once in a while, but our singer’s always been a floater. None of us can sing.”

He laughed and handed me a screwdriver. I cautiously took it, as I judged his face.

“Listen, I know you’re new to the station and St. Louis and all, so if you don’t want to, that’s okay too,” he added. “We’re getting together to run through some songs tomorrow night at eight at my house. If you’re there, great. If not, I’ve gotta a guy who I know will do it.”

I watched him cup his hand around his mouth.

“He’s just, you know, a filler — not the best songbird in the cage,” he said.

He dropped his hand then and picked up a wrench.

“Just think about it, and let me know,” he said, ambling back toward the door again.

“I’ve heard you’ve got some talent, Will,” he called out over his shoulder. “You’ll be doing us a big favor, and who knows, maybe you’ll have some fun.”

He smiled a wide grin and then disappeared into the breakroom.

I kept my eyes on the breakroom door, just in case he reappeared again to tell me that he was pulling my leg or something. Seconds drew on, though, and he never returned.

“Where’d he hear that?” I whispered to myself, as I went back to screwing on the nozzle.

It was Friday night, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I had already found her number ten times in my contacts only to set the phone down onto the TV dinner table and stare at it for another twenty minutes.

I finally snapped out of my latest trance and spotted the remote balancing on the edge of the couch. I quickly snatched it up and powered the television to life.

The next thing I knew, I was flipping through each channel, only stopping briefly on each one and then flipping to the next. And within seconds, I was already back to the beginning of the order. I let out a sigh and then hit the power button on the remote, causing the screen to go black again.

What was she doing now?

I stared at the black screen for a couple of minutes, lost in my thought, until my eyes eventually landed on my phone again. Something told me not to reach for it, but my hand went for it anyway. And just before I could touch it, its display lit up.

My heart instantly started a fast, rhythmic pounding against the walls of my chest, as I quickly snatched up the phone and peered into its glowing screen. Next, I forced my eyes into a frantic search for the sender of the message, until they eventually stumbled upon a name and stopped cold.

It wasn’t her.

I let out an exhausted and heavy sigh. Then, I took a second before picking my heart up off of the floor and following over the words in the message: You comin’, buddy?

I took a deep breath in and then forced my eyes shut and let out a frustrated groan. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was going crazy in this little apartment.

When I opened my eyes again, my guitar was staring at me from the corner of the room. I cocked my head then and narrowed my eyes, focusing all of my attention on the six-string.

Moments passed. Then, I glanced up at the clock on the wall.

“What the hell,” I said out loud, before standing up and shoving my phone into my jeans pocket.

I made my way over to the corner and snatched up the guitar. Then, I grabbed my coat from a chair and my keys from the kitchen counter. And within seconds, I was out the door and heading for Matt’s.

“Will, you made it,” Matt cheerfully shouted, as he swung open his door. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

“Waiting?” I asked.

I watched his eyes fall to the guitar in my hands.

“You can play too? Great,” he said.

He pulled me inside by my coat’s sleeve.

“Guys, look who’s here,” Matt shouted into the garage.

I shyly entered the doorway and stood stiffly inside its frame.

“Will,” Chris yelled out first.

“Hey, does this mean we don’t have to call Jim?” Daniel asked no one in particular.

Chris burst into laughter.

“Okay, okay, let’s get going,” Matt said, raising his voice over Chris’s laughter.

Then, Matt shuffled over to a keyboard and took his place behind it.

“Will, we play a lot of covers — all sorts of stuff,” Matt said. “Do you know ‘Brown Eyed Girl’?”

“Yeah, the girls love it,” Chris shouted.

I lowered my head and smiled.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding my head. “I do.”

“Okay, we’ll start with that, and if you got any, you let us know,” he said to me.

I nodded my head again, then looked around.

“Is that where I go?” I asked seconds later, eyeing the microphone in its stand.

Matt and Chris laughed.

“That would be where you go,” Matt said.

I awkwardly grinned and took my place behind the stand. My guitar was now swung across my body, sheltering me, as I played with its strings and tuning pegs.

“All right, here we go,” Matt said.

The melody filled the room a short count later. I was a little nervous, but if I knew a song, I knew this one — thanks to Jules.

The part where I was supposed to come in came quickly, and my first words came out timid, but it didn’t take long for it to feel as if she were the only one in the room again.

After several minutes, I sang the last words of the song and took a step back from the mic, still strumming my guitar. Then, eventually, the music stopped and the garage was silent again. I turned around and faced the guys behind me. I noticed first the goofy grin on Daniel’s face.

“We’ve finally got a band,” Daniel yelled.

A wide, toothy smile soon lit up Chris’s and Matt’s faces as well. And only then did I feel a grin start to edge up my face too. I quickly lowered my eyes and tried to calm my excited breaths. It was as if there were some kind of weird adrenaline rushing through my veins all of a sudden; it was strange. But at the same time, I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t strange in a fun way because that would mean that she had been right all along.

“Oh, but Will,” Chris said, interrupting my thoughts.

I looked up at him.

“You do know that it’s brown-eyed girl, not green-eyed girl, right?” he asked.

I froze, as if I had been caught naked or something, then chuckled to myself.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, lowering my eyes again and shaking my head.

“Okay,” Matt said. “It doesn’t matter what he sings. They’ll love it anyway. Let’s just keep it going.”

When I looked back up, Chris was staring at me, and he had a mischievous look glued to his face. I furrowed my eyebrows at him, then brushed off his look and returned my attention to Matt, as he rattled off a list of songs.

We played through the rest of the songs. They were mostly classics and country — oddly enough, the songs I used to sing to Julia — so I knew them well. Every so often, though, my heart would stab at my chest when a particular lyric sent me back to a summer afternoon with her in my arms. But then, not too long after, a slight smile would find my face when I realized that I couldn’t escape her no matter what I did. It was like her to always find a way to win. At least now, however, I would be a little distracted. Here, the music forced me on to the next moment without too much thought. And really, these guys weren’t bad.

“So, what do we call ourselves?” Chris asked, when the music stopped for the last time.

“I thought we had a name,” Daniel said.

The men froze — Daniel where he sat and Chris and Matt where they stood. I watched each one’s face twist and turn into a puzzled mess.

“What was it?” Matt asked, finally.

A moment of silence passed again.

“Whatever it was, it mustn’t have been that good,” Chris said. “Let’s come up with a new one. I feel like we’re a real band now.”