Below the rock and behind our circle of production trailers, that cool, old stone abbey stood in the middle of a cow pasture. I hiked down to it, wondering if someone would appear and shout at me. They didn’t; I was alone.
Inside the ruin, the lack of a roof meant my view of the sky was framed by ancient stonework. I turned in circles to take it all in, pulling Annie under my shoulder and securing my left hand to the frets.
No notes came.
I sat on the stone window seat and waited, holding myself right there. Right at the edge of this wretched moment.
“What would you have done, Grandma Mae?” I asked.
She didn’t respond. She wasn’t in my head like my dad. Like my doubts.
“This blows,” I said, echoing Julian. That feeling was definitely a minor chord. D minor. The one that sounds as sour as if it’s bitten its own tongue. I struck it, and the reverberation off the stone walls caused a magpie to take flight with an angry squawk. “You better run!” I yelled.
The next chords came easier. They started out agitated with a swift rhythm and then slammed into a looping progression. Suddenly I was all over the neck, not caring if it sounded good or not. I let my fingers spread into bar chords while my right hand did its best impression of a furious Ani DiFranco.
The anger shot out like Sevyn’s lightning. Why had I been against this movie for so long? If I hadn’t been an idiot, I could have been flirting with Eamon from the first day. I could have given an awesome interview instead of that stilted one, then maybe the boycott wouldn’t have started and the studio execs would have stayed in Lotus Land where they belonged.
Flying home tomorrow was a sudden, sharp grief, and my chords turned pretty. Sadness, after all, was rather beautiful. Especially when Grandma Mae wrote it. The pain swelled into mountains like two continental plates shoved together, reaching for the sky with desperate peaks. Everyone else got to read Elementia and discover something about the world or themselves. Not me. I’d read her story and began drowning in a loss I’d never known was mine.
My grandmother was a brilliant author—and I’d never read her books because of my dad.
My grandmother was a great woman—and I’d never get to know her.
Tears fell on my hands and strings. None of this was fair. Not to me. To Cate. To Ryder, Eamon, Shoshanna. None of it to anyone.
Fair is fantasy, Cate’s voice slipped in.
Then what’s real? I asked—but I knew the answer. Reality came with a bite, a pinch, a kiss. Longing, loss, resentment, and the most impossible of all, passion. Passion was real. It wasn’t an obsession with the thing you couldn’t get better at, like my dad had coldly told me long ago. It was the only thing you could get better at.
Without passion, there could be no growth.
I threw my head back while the stone abbey wrapped my song around me, surrendering to all the ragged notes inside that wanted to turn into one strong melody. Maybe that’s what Elementia was for Grandma Mae—an abandoned, dying continent she created to house her grief for her daughter, an entire fictional world to make sense of her broken one.
The words came in a rush. I took out my notebook and scribbled. I gave each feeling a bittersweet chord, each line its own heartache, and I let the rhythm build like sadness, reaching a whole mountain range of empty hands toward the untouchable sky.
I played forever, the sunset turning the roofless place into a spread of orange. My eyes mostly closed, my heart as wide open as a well-loved book.
When I finished writing the last verse, I looked up to find Shoshanna sitting on the stone altar. I had no idea how long she’d been watching.
“There were feelings in that,” she said. “Strong ones.”
I nodded, wanting to put away my notebook and guitar in a rush, but she stopped me.
“You feel naked?”
I glanced around. “Yeah.”
“I always feel like someone stole my clothes when I give myself to a scene.” She jumped down and stepped closer. “You’ll get used to feeling like you’re on display. Somewhat.”
“I don’t think I want to get used to it.” I was shaking hard enough to prove my point.
She shrugged. “That’s what it means to be an artist. You’ve got to be courageous to snag the high of creation, but if you want to make this world a little more decent, you’ve got to turn around and give it away. That’s where the bravery comes in. And the nudity.”
I stared at my notebook, the words I’d blindly written. “This is about my grandmother.”
“I picked up on that.”
“But I never knew her. How can you miss someone you never even knew? How can I want to be like her when I can’t even know her?”
“You read her book, Iris,” Eamon said from the crumbling doorway, startling me.
“How long have you been there?” I asked. Shoshanna was not lying about that naked business. I had the sudden urge to cover myself.
“We heard you playing from all the way up at the trailers,” Shoshanna volunteered. “Your boyfriend was afraid if you saw him you’d stop, so he hid.”
“He’s right,” I admitted.
His smile only lifted one side of his face. “That song had lightning in it, Iris.”
“Maybe.” I stood, resting Annie against the wall. The sadness inside that had shifted into sharp mountains was suddenly less like stone, more like water—and I wanted to pour it out. “You guys are saying you…liked that song.”
“Yes,” Eamon said, while Shoshanna added an eloquent, “Duh.”
“What if we recorded it?” I faced Eamon. “Do you have your camera?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled it out.
“What are you thinking?” Shoshanna’s expression had gone fiery. “You saying you’d let the world have
