“A lot of things. But mostly my pops. We used to be close, but things have been messed up with us since Clay died. I don’t see the world the same way I used to, and now it’s like we can’t understand each other anymore.” His voice is a mixture of regret and confusion and anger.

“What happened?”

“We don’t agree on the direction of my future,” he says, using a deep, imperious voice, like a judge pronouncing a verdict.

I take a guess. “He doesn’t want you to be a musician.”

“He says it’s fine for a hobby.” He picks up his fork, drags it across his plate and then puts it back down. “The messed-up thing is, he’s the one who got me my first guitar. He gave me my first lessons. We even had our own band when I was little.”

“You did?” I picture a younger version of X, which is basically the same as this version of X except shorter and rounder and with smaller hands.

“We called ourselves the WoodsMen. Get it? Because my last name is—”

I interrupt him. “Xavier Woods, I’m not an idiot.”

“My middle name is Darius,” he says, grinning. “I’m telling you so you can yell my full name when you’re yelling at me.”

“Thanks, that’s very thoughtful of you, Xavier Darius Woods,” I say, laughing.

“Anyway, me and Pops would do these little concerts for the rest of the family at Thanksgiving and Christmas and stuff.”

“What kind of music?”

“I like to think we defied genre labels,” he says.

“That means you were terrible, doesn’t it?”

He laughs. “Worse than terrible.”

A waitress comes over and refills our water glasses.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to bring us down with all that about my pops,” he says after she leaves.

“No, it’s okay. I know how you feel. I used to be close to my dad too.”

“Yeah? What happened with you guys?”

I hesitate. The only other people who know about this are Martin, Sophie and Cassidy.

“No worries if you don’t want to get into it with me,” he says. But I do want to talk about it with him. He knows what it’s like to miss the way things used to be.

“He cheated on my mom and I caught him doing it.”

He sits up straight. “Jesus, Evie.”

I tell him the whole story. It’s hard to look at him and talk about it, so I look down at my plate instead. “Anyway, it’s been around six months since I last saw him.”

“Does your mom know?”

“Yeah, but my sister doesn’t.”

“Jesus,” he says again, but quietly.

“The weirdest thing is, Mom and Danica both seem fine. It’s like this big bomb went off in our lives and I’m the only one who got hurt.”

I make myself look up at him. His eyes are full of understanding. “Well,” he says, “I still think I win the sad story contest.”

At first I’m too shocked to react. That is not what I expected him to say. I expected sympathy and comforting. I didn’t expect him to judge how sad my story was against his.

He busts out laughing, and then I do too.

After a while we stop laughing, but our eyes meet and the moment lingers until I realize what’s happening and look away. “Why don’t you sing the song for me?” I ask.

He looks confused for a second but then pulls out his phone and plays the backing music track.

He starts singing. “Everything burns / Everything crashes / And some-thing some-thing some-other-thing.” He stops with a laugh. “I don’t know that third line yet,” he says.

“You’re very good at mumble-singing, though,” I say. “You just need something to rhyme with crashes.” I twirl my braids around my finger and think until a line comes to me. “And our love just turns to ashes,” I say.

“Oh, that’s good.” He types it into his phone and looks back up at me. “All right, the next line slows the tempo way down, but I only have half of it. “You’re the black box, some-thing, some-other-thing—”

“Falling to the sea,” I say, interrupting him again.

“Good, good,” he says, typing fast. He leans forward, eyes glittering. “Let’s keep going.”

“Okay, but we need actual paper instead of just your phone.”

I ask the waitress and she brings us over a few sheets and a pen. He writes down what we have so far and then keeps singing. “A black box, preserving history.”

I shake my head. “One last history, instead of preserving history.”

He writes it down.

Both of us are grinning now, trading the pen and paper back and forth. By the time we get to the end, the sheet is a mess of crossed-out words and arrows pointing every which way.

“Wish I had my acoustic,” he says, pulling the sheet closer. On the phone, he restarts the backing music track and sings the whole thing.

I close my eyes so I can really listen and not be distracted by his face. It’s strange but nice to hear his voice singing words we just wrote together. Somehow when he sings the words they gain more weight. It makes them feel more true. When he gets to the final three lines, my eyes fly open. His voice is so raw, so filled with wishing for something he can’t have back, that I have to see his face.

“You’re great,” he says. “At writing songs, I mean.” He rubs his hand over the back of his head.

“We wrote it together.”

“I’ve never written a song with another person before,” he says. “Not even Clay.” He shakes the sheet of paper at me. “Can I use these?”

“They’re already yours. You helped write them.”

“It was mostly you,” he says.

I shrug. “I’m really good at understanding heartbreak. It’s my superpower.”

CHAPTER 22

“Black Box,” Lyrics by Evie Thomas and Xavier Woods

[Verse 1]

 Everything burns

 Everything crashes

 And our love just turns to ashes

 You’re a black box, falling to the sea

 A black box, one last history