Page 36 of Your Echo
“I think the paparazzi just found us,” Stéphanie says, pointing to where two girls across the street are trying and failing to hide the fact that they’re taking pictures of us right now.
I wave and they look terrified for a moment before they smile and wave back, then take off running up the street.
“Does that happen a lot?” Stéphanie asks me.
We’ve both devoured most of our ice cream already, and she takes a bite out of her cone.
“Will I sound like a douche if I say I’m used to it?”
“You always sound like a douche,” she replies around a mouthful of waffle cone.
I laugh and bite into my own cone.
“I’m not actually used to it,” I confess. “It still feels fucking weird.”
Just last night there was a girl standing in the foyer of my apartment building, pretending to look like she was waiting for someone. I saw the way her eyes lit up when I walked in, though. She had what I call the ‘Fan Face’ on. I gave her the autograph she asked for and we took a picture together as she told me how much Sherbrooke Station’s music changed her life.
“Have you had to deal with any crazy people yet?” Stéphanie asks.
“There’s been some...overeager people, but no one totally crazy yet.”
“Watch out,” she warns. “You haven’t met my roommate. She loves you guys.”
We pass by a record shop. I’m itching to stop and flip through the ‘On Sale’ bins set out on the sidewalk, but Stéphanie is already walking towards the bookstore next door.
“Do you want to go in? Oh, wait.” She glances at what’s left of her ice cream cone. “We probably can’t bring these.”
Then she swallows the whole thing in one bite, and I’m left trying not to groan again.
Inside, the store is small and overstuffed. In addition to books, they sell stationary and kitschy desk ornaments. The whole place reeks of some sort of floral perfume. I prefer the haphazard shelves and musty scent of a used book store, but I watch Stéphanie as she pokes around, picking up notebooks to read whatever motivational bullshit they have printed on their covers before setting them back down.
She disappears around a corner and then starts calling my name.
“Ace, come look at this.”
I find her leaning over a table with an ornamental sign set on it that reads, ‘La Poésie.’ There’s a display of classic poetry set up: Byron, Whitman, Keats and the like, along with some more recent stuff like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Stéphanie’s holding up a book with a drawing of a black bird on the front, its wings spread in flight.
“Like your tattoo,” she says.
I swallow. “Yeah, like my tattoo.”
“That’s not why you got it, is it? Because of the poem?”
She taps the book’s cover. It’s a volume of Poe.
“Are you saying I don’t seem like the literary type?”
“I can’t see you sitting around reading books of poetry in your spare time”—she stops and grins—“but maybe there’s more to you than meets the eye.”
I trail a finger over a hardcover collection of Byron’s letters.
“Poetry is the reason I found music,” I admit. “When I was a teenager I tried so hard to write poems, and they were all shit. They were so bad evenIknew they were shit, but when I started setting them to music they just...took off, like I’d breathed life into them.”
I hadn’t planned on telling her all that, but at the sight of the raven, with its feathers spread and it’s claws drawn up—almost exactly like my tattoo—the words just spill out.
“Poe was the first writer that really made mefeelsomething. I found a book of his stuff by accident when I was only ten. I was way too young to understand most of it, but the way he created entire worlds out of nothing...I wanted to do that too. For the first time in my life, I had this urge to create.”
I pause and shake my head. “No, urge isn’t the right word. It was thisneed—this dark, painful, beautiful and soul-splittingcompulsionto make something, to take all the things inside me and get. Them.Out.”
