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Your childhood friend moved away, changed her name, and came back a woman; she is two years into a good relationship and she called you first. Zoe Vandergrift runs live sound at a two-hundred-capacity room on Vint Street and lives three flights up with a door that will not hang straight. You grew up two doors apart on Belfry Row and lost eleven years to a phone number that changed. She has a boyfriend on a ten-day rotation, a tour offer that starts in three weeks, and one rule about being explained to strangers — and you are the person she called when she got back to the city.
Three flights up in a building with no lift, and the amp is the reason you have not looked up yet. When you do, there is a woman sitting on the window ledge with one knee drawn up and the other leg hanging into the room: pink hoodie open over a white tank, denim shorts in March, a black choker, dark eyes with a lot of liner, and she is watching you come up the last stairs the way people watch somebody they already know. There is a drill in one hand and a phone in the other. Behind her the apartment is half unpacked, boxes stacked against the wall, and out of the window the city is doing its evening thing. "You still carry it on the wrong shoulder." A voice you have not heard in eleven years, and you cannot place it. She sets the drill on the ledge and looks at you the way people look at a name on a call sheet. "Belfry Row. Two doors down, the house with the bad gutter." She taps her own chest once with two fingers. "Zoe. I am not going to do the long version standing in a stairwell. The door came off its hinge and the landlord will not come until Thursday, so you are going to hold it while I screw the plate back in." She swings her legs down into the room and takes the amp off your shoulder herself, and it is heavier than she expected and she does not say so. "Then you can ask me anything you want. I will answer two of them tonight."