Yuna's POV
It started, as most of my problems did, with me losing Erika.
One second she was right there, two steps ahead of me in the hallway, her notebook tucked under her arm like always.
The next, the crowd swallowed her whole.
I don't know how it happened.
One moment I was following the back of her head, weaving through the between-period rush, and the next a solid wall of students coming from the opposite direction hit me like a current, and I was being pushed sideways, then backward, then spun around entirely until I had absolutely no idea which direction I had been going.
"Wait—" I tried pushing forward. "I need to go that way—"
Nobody cared.
I was a single person swimming against the entire student body of San Esteban High, and the student body was winning.
By the time the crowd thinned enough for me to breathe, Erika was gone.
I stood in the middle of the hallway, looked left, looked right, and performed the familiar ritual of Yuna trying to figure out where she was.
The results were not promising.
The hallway stretched in both directions, lined with identical doors and identical bulletin boards with identical-looking notices pinned to them.
The fluorescent lights hummed above me with the specific energy of lights that were doing the bare minimum.
There were fewer students here, which meant I had drifted somewhere less populated, which meant I had drifted somewhere I was not supposed to be.
This was fine.
I just needed to find something I recognized.
I started walking, taking a turn that felt right, then another, then a third one that absolutely did not feel right but I committed to anyway.
The hallway got quieter.
The lights got dimmer.
The doors on either side looked older, less used, the kind of doors that didn't get opened very often and were maybe keeping something inside that preferred it that way.
I stopped.
Looked around.
Okay, so I was completely, genuinely, thoroughly lost.
I stood there for a second weighing my options, which were: keep wandering and hope something familiar appeared, or pick a door and see what was on the other side.
I picked a door.
I pushed it open.
The sound hit me before anything else did.
It was not music.
I want to be very clear about that.
What I walked into was not music.
It was something that had the general shape of music — instruments were involved, sounds were being produced, rhythm was being attempted — but the overall effect was something that belonged in a completely different category.
The category of things that should not exist.
A guy was attacking a guitar that was not in tune with anything in the known universe, his strumming arm moving with tremendous confidence and zero accuracy.
Behind him, someone was behind a drum kit, and he was hitting things, but the things he was hitting seemed to have been chosen at random, in an order that followed no discernible pattern, with the enthusiasm of someone who had been told that volume and effort were the same thing.
To the left, a girl at a keyboard was pressing keys.
Just pressing them.
One after another.
With genuine focus, like she was composing something very important.
She was not composing something very important.
And at the front, holding a microphone, a girl with flaming red hair and the posture of someone who had been told she was destined for greatness — was screaming.
Not singing.
Not performing.
Screaming into the microphone with her whole chest, like she was trying to communicate with something on the other side of a mountain.
I stood in the doorway and felt my soul briefly consider leaving my body as a form of self-preservation.
Then everything stopped.
All four of them turned to look at me at the same time.
The drummer still had his sticks raised mid-air.
The guitarist's strumming arm froze halfway through a motion.
The keyboardist's hand hovered above the keys like she had been paused by a remote control.
The vocalist stared at me with wide, bright eyes that had gone from the intensity of a person mid-scream to the blankness of someone suddenly aware they had an audience.
Silence.
Deep, ringing silence, the kind that followed sounds that probably shouldn't have been made.
"Uh," I said.
The drummer lowered his sticks about an inch.
"Who are you?"
"An innocent bystander," I said, gripping the door handle behind me like it was the last solid thing in my life.
They looked at each other.
The guitarist — still holding his instrument the way you hold something that might explode — scratched the back of his head.
The vocalist, who had recovered faster than the others, straightened up and ran a hand through her red hair with the composure of someone returning to a role.
"Are you a fan?" she asked.
"No," I said, and immediately regretted how fast that came out.
She blinked.
I cleared my throat.
"I mean — I just — is this the music club?"
The question bought me maybe ten seconds while they processed it.
The drummer, who looked like he had been carrying the weight of several ongoing personal crises simultaneously, perked up slightly.
"Are you a musician?"
I hesitated.
The correct answer was: sort of, in a way that I am absolutely not going to tell you about.
The answer I gave was: "Not really."
The guitarist pointed at me with genuine excitement, like I had said something revelatory instead of the bare minimum.
"She's gotta hear the solos."
"Please don't," I said.
The keyboardist turned to me with the earnest expression of someone asking a question they had clearly been wondering about for a while.
"Does the piano add a touch of class, do you think?"
I looked at the keyboard.
I looked at her.
"Sure," I said, because what else was I supposed to say.
She nodded, satisfied, and turned back to her instrument.
The vocalist was watching me with an expression that had shifted from pop-diva energy to something slightly more uncertain, like she could read on my face that my assessment of their performance was not going to be a glowing one.
"We're a work in progress," she said.
"Absolutely," I agreed, in a tone that I tried to keep neutral.
The bassist, who had been sitting quietly on a stool in the corner this entire time and had not moved or said a single word since I walked in, turned to look at me.
It was a long, slow, evaluating look.
Then he turned back to face the wall.
The drummer set his sticks down on his knees and looked at me with the specific expression of a person who has just had an idea that they believe is brilliant.
"You could be our producer."
I blinked.
"Producer," I repeated.
"Yeah." He leaned forward slightly, warming to the idea.
"Like, you listen, and you tell us what sounds good and what doesn't."
I looked at the guitar.
The drum kit.
The keyboard.
The microphone that had just been screamed into.
"I appreciate the offer," I said.
"But I think what you need is practice.
A lot of it.
From the beginning.
Possibly with a tuner involved."
Before any of them could respond to that, I stepped back through the doorway, pulled the door shut behind me, and stood in the hallway breathing normally for a few seconds.
Then I walked away at a pace that was not quite a run but definitely had urgency behind it.
"Yuna!"
I turned.
Erika was coming down the hallway toward me, slightly out of breath, her glasses pushed slightly sideways on her face the way they got when she had been moving fast.
Her notebook was still perfectly under her arm though.
Some things were constants.
"I've been looking everywhere for you," she said, adjusting her glasses back into place as she reached me.
"I almost had to organize a search party."
"I got lost," I said.
"I know you got lost." She looked at the door I had just come from, then back at me.
"Why do you look like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you just witnessed something."
I considered how to summarize what I had just experienced.
"I walked into a practice room," I said.
"There was a band.
They were..."
I searched for the right word.
"Enthusiastic," I settled on.
Erika's expression shifted into something that was trying very hard not to be amusement.
"Was it Leo's band?"
"The drummer is named Leo?"
"Leo Ramirez." She fell into step beside me as we started walking back toward the main hallways.
"He's the one holding the whole thing together.
Which, from what I understand, is a significant challenge because the thing he is holding together is barely a thing."
"He asked me to be their producer."
Erika pressed her lips together.
"Did he."
"I told them they needed practice and left."
She made a sound that was definitely a suppressed laugh.
"He asks everyone.
Apparently he's been looking for new members since the club fair, but every time someone gives them a listen—"
"They run," I finished.
"They walk away quickly," she corrected, with dignity.
"Same thing."
We turned back into the main corridor, the familiar noise of the school resuming around us, and I let the sound of it settle over me like I was returning to something normal after a brief trip somewhere very strange.
"I'm going to end up back in that room, aren't I," I said.
It was not really a question.
Erika considered it for a moment with the seriousness of someone weighing actual odds.
"Probably," she said.
I sighed.
"Great."
To be continued.