Chapter 47

Corey was in a flow state.

With Reveille complete and the Running Light in her hand, the dam burst. Songs, and sketches of songs, and snippets of sketches poured forth. There was a military theme to all of it, but the language was just an extended metaphor for what had been on her mind the past month, the past year, her whole life. It was everything: Kyle, her financial woes, her mounting frustrations with the industry, and just navigating the 21st century world, a place hostile to women in general, and with a cruel indifference to middle-aged women in particular. Now she had a brand new vocabulary to describe her feelings.

The more she wrote, the more ideas came to her. It felt like climbing up above the canopy—doing the hard, honest work of scaling new heights—where the lightning could reach her, and the universe met her halfway. She lost a week to the writing, though when she finally looked up from her journal, she didn’t consider it a loss at all. She ate only when her hunger pains were undeniably sharp. She slept only when the pages blurred before her. She showered only when she needed a break, and even then, the song cycle ran like a background program in her head, making connections and sparking new revelations until she darted out of the shower, still dripping with a towel wrapped around her, to find her journal again to pull down what was floating in the ether before it fluttered away.

Few things felt as satisfying to her as writing like this. It was less like writing than transcribing. Receiving. Channeling. It was why she did what she did. The world receded, the shitty reviews fell away, and she was working with genuine purpose. She felt as if she held a divine secret from the rest of the world. With the exception of a few songs, rare gems that had washed up on shore over the years, she hadn’t had such a prolonged period of productivity since the Damsel days, when she was writing songs fast and furious in the final days of The Toddlers’ implosion, when everything was going to hell and she was writing out of desperation, wanting everything to return to normal, wanting to right the ship, but knowing it was all doomed and not just wondering what came next, but secretly exhilarated by it. When she was writing songs just for her, and in their specificity, they became universal to a generation of women.

When the flow finally slowed to a trickle, there was just one thing left to do: get good and drunk. She realized she hadn’t had a drink since the night of the ball, and the accompanying pang of sadness only made her crave a bender that much harder. She looked at her phone and realized with some surprise that it was a Friday night. Perfect, she thought. More than a drink, she craved some conversation. She called Josh and Kincaid and commandeered their night, a quiet one at home. After her month, that was more than good enough for her. She was buzzing with energy, but she knew it would be short-lived, not enough for a night at a bar or even to see live music.

Josh made an outstanding meal of portabella mushrooms and gemelli pasta with some good wine, which went down way too easy. They spent the night discussing her freak-out at the ball, which she tried to brush over, but they wouldn’t let her. They wanted her to call him, call him right there in front of them, but she said no and they feigned to grab her phone until she finally stuck it down her pants. They all laughed, but it stung a bit. She hadn’t called him, and with the fever and her time with Vargas at the Academy and finally coming back home and falling down the rabbit hole of writing, it had been nearly a month since the night of the ball. And he hadn’t called her either, though she could hardly blame him for that.

She told them all about her time back at the Academy, the sights, the customs, and the long, lyrical responses to bizarre questions the cadets called spewage, which she had now memorized. Rather than saying “I Do Not Understand,” she spewed the proper cadet response:

“Sir/Ma’am, my cranium consisting of Vermont marble, volcanic lava, and African ivory, covered with a thick layer of case hardened steel, forms an impenetrable barrier to all that seeks to impress itself upon the ashen tissues of my brain. Hence the effulgent and ostentatious effervescent phrases just directed and reiterated for my comprehension have failed to penetrate and permeate the somniferous forces of my atrocious intelligence, sir/ma’am.”

Kincaid looked at Josh. “I think that means her head is fucking hard.”

“Call him,” said Josh.   

Belly full and head pleasantly numb, she departed, walking back down the hall toward her own condo, having dodged Josh’s earnest appeals and Kincaid’s withering commands to call Kyle. She let herself into her condo and Iggy trotted over. She picked him up and nuzzled him, and to his credit, he allowed it.

She did want to call. Badly. She had convinced herself she couldn’t, but her friends constantly invoking the idea made it seem not just plausible, but advisable, yet she knew she shouldn’t.

She was very drunk. Exhibit A: she removed her phone from her underwear. Getting a call from a sobbing woman on a cracked phone on a Friday night who was slurring her words wasn’t a good look for a woman half her age, she thought, and she was supposed to be an adult. She thought of Vargas and her bottomless reservoir of willpower. Corey didn’t quite have that, but she was crafty. She swayed over to the kitchen and put her phone in the back of a high cabinet.

“There,” she said, pleased with herself. “Outta sight, outta mind.”

That was the easy reason, the one closest to the surface and easiest to grab. The deeper reason was too long, too complicated, and she couldn’t have explained it to Josh and Kincaid without sounding crazy, but like everything else that week, the answer came from the Running Light, specifically the answer to the question What is a head on-situation?

She turned to Iggy, who had followed her into the kitchen, and was now sat staring at her.

“Sir, when two power driven vessels are moving on reciprocal or nearly reciprocal courses so as to involve the risk of collision, each shall alter her course to starboard so that each shall pass on the port side of the other.”

“Meow,” said the cat.

She and Kyle had been on reciprocal courses, barreling toward a collision. Even if he didn’t know, she did, so she turned the wheel hard to starboard, saving them both.

It never would have worked out in the long run.

Wouldn’t it have? came a small voice from somewhere deep inside her, somewhere the wine hadn’t yet drowned.

No, she thought, firmly. She had spun the wheel and that was that. And in so doing, she found herself in open ocean again, and that was where the songs were. Hadn’t this past week proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt? And the songs were what mattered above all else. People let her down, people left, but music was always there.

Iggy meowed again.

“And you,” she said, making a pistol motion with her fingers.

She glanced to her side and noticed she was standing next to his plastic container of cat treats.

“You just want a fucking treat.”

She grabbed the box, then spied a bottle of wine next to it.

“Mama too,” she said, and grabbed a glass.