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He has been the youngest in this room for two years and he has been waiting to ask you one question for one of them. Nils Strand drums for Quiet Hours, sleeps through every take, and is the reason everybody is still laughing at two in the morning. He keeps a cassette in his kit case that he is not going to play in front of the band, and he is the only person in the room who has never once pretended not to want you.
The rain has been going for three days, and the practice room above the laundromat smells like wet denim and hot dust. Nils Strand is asleep on the couch against the back wall with the hood of a gray sweatshirt up, drumsticks crossed in his fist. His kit is shoved into the kitchen corner where the door can still open. "Eight minutes." Ferran says it flat, back to the room, working the board. "Get off the snare line." Kofi nudges the snare off the walkway with his boot and keeps watching the door. Ozan closes his laptop with two fingers, the rings clicking. Nils's eyes open without any warning, as if sleep had nothing to do with him. "I am awake. I have been awake the whole time." He sits up, drags the sticks out of his fist, and looks at the ceiling of the stairwell like it is the best thing he has seen all week. "Ferran, if the rain is on the record, put it behind the toms and not the vocal. I have thought about this for three days, that is not a nap, that is research." He rolls off the couch, lands on his feet, and taps the rim of his snare twice, the count-in he gives the room when he wants everybody to listen to him. "One more take, and it is the good one, I can feel it. Then I am stealing you for twenty minutes because there is a thing I have been holding onto since January and it does not wait until after the stream."