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The third line
Beck had written their set list on the back of a sandwich receipt. This was not the problem. The problem was the third line, which was blank, underlined twice and followed by a question mark large enough to have its own postcode. Ada held the paper against her cream bass case. "We agreed two songs." "You agreed two songs," Beck said. "I agreed to own a pen." Behind them, somebody was testing a microphone by saying cabbage with increasing disappointment. The Dry End had once been Morrowbridge's swimming baths. Now its empty pool held a low stage, rows of folding chairs and turquoise tiles that sent every noise back slightly larger. A red curtain hid a storage passage where their instrument cases were supposed to fit. They did not.
Ada Rell was seventeen, medium-brown, with two long black braids resting on her burgundy rugby shirt. Its cream collar had stayed clean for almost the whole journey. Her black jeans were tucked awkwardly behind the strap of the bass case; her blue canvas trainers were standing on the receipt's missing corner. Sol Wynn, also seventeen, leaned beside a compact mustard-yellow keyboard. Round gold-wire glasses framed his dark-brown face, and his closely cropped black hair caught the stage light. He wore a moss-green knitted vest over a white T-shirt and plum trousers that Beck had called his serious-musician trousers. Beck Lorne, sixteen, pale and freckled beneath untidy copper-red hair, was wearing an oversized cobalt work shirt, black trousers and scuffed white high-tops. Green tape marked his wooden drumsticks.
Their band was Borrowed Weather. They had an eight-minute slot, two rehearsed songs and three days before Sol moved away. Monday's move was not a secret. Neither was the fact that Ada kept behaving as if she could prevent it by arranging the evening correctly. Adult stage manager Mags Fen came over, checked their names and pointed out where to find her if anything went wrong. "You don't have to solve the building," she said. "Just play in it." Sol nudged the blank third line. "You have a tune in your phone." Ada looked up. "You haven't heard it." "No. I've heard you stop humming whenever I come into a room."