Chapter 2: Whispers and Whiskey
The beer garden was a roar of heat and noise that Ryli felt in her teeth. She hunched forward on the picnic bench, her spine a tight curve against the laughter crashing around her. Her plastic cup was half-full of something warm and sour. She’d lost count of how many she’d had, but the familiar, cottony numbness was finally draping itself over the sharper edges of the evening. It wasn’t peace, but it was a ceasefire.
Her own friends were a blur of movement and loud jokes to her left. She nodded at the right moments, a hollow echo in the din. Her real attention, like a compass needle swinging true north, was fixed thirty feet away.
Cadence was there.
She sat with a different group, under a string bulb that cast a buttery, uneven glow. She was wearing a soft-looking sweater, the color of cream, and she was laughing at something. The sound didn’t carry to Ryli, but she saw the way Cadence’s head tipped back, the line of her throat, the way her eyes crinkled shut. It was a real laugh. Unselfconscious. Warm.
A hot spike of something—longing, jealousy, pure want—pierced the numbness in Ryli’s chest. She looked down at her cup, took another gulping swallow. The beer was tasteless.
Then she saw him. Annie Hunt. Lanky, all sharp angles and sharper opinions, sliding onto the bench next to Cadence. He leaned in, his mouth close to Cadence’s ear. His eyes, bright and malicious, cut across the crowded space and landed directly on Ryli.
A cold trickle, clear and sobering, dripped down Ryli’s spine.
She knew that look. She knew Annie. He was the town’s self-appointed historian of other people’s failures. She could see his mouth moving, see the deliberate, stage-whisper shape of his words. Cadence listened, her smile fading into something more neutral, more careful. She glanced once, briefly, in Ryli’s direction.
The distance between them might as well have been inches. Ryli could read the script on Annie’s lips. Burnout. Bad influence. Parties, drugs, you know how she is. A mess. Her family’s a gilded train wreck. The usual highlights. The catalog of her reputation, distilled into a poison meant for new ears.
Cadence’s blue eyes met Ryli’s across the chaos.
For a single, suspended second, everything else dropped away—the music, the crowd, the weight of her own body. There was just that gaze, cool and assessing. Not cruel. Not even disapproving. Just… informed. Now she knew. Laney’s headline had been corroborated by a reliable source.
Ryli didn’t flinch. She let Cadence look. She let her see the girl hunched over her drink, the defiant set of her jaw, the shadows she knew lived under her own eyes. See? she thought, the word a silent challenge. It’s all true.
Cadence looked away first. She turned back to Annie, nodding once, a small, tight movement. She didn’t smile again.
The dismissal was complete.
The noise of the garden rushed back in, louder and more abrasive than before. Ryli’s fingers tightened around the cup, the cheap plastic buckling slightly. The numbness was gone, burned away by a clean, sharp humiliation. She felt exposed. Seen and categorized, filed away under a warning label.
She needed out of the crosshairs. She needed a different kind of blur.
She fumbled in the pocket of her jacket, pulled out her cigarettes and lighter. The movements were deliberate, a performance of indifference. She shoved back from the table, the bench legs scraping harshly on the concrete.
“Smoke break,” she muttered to no one in particular, and walked away from the light and the laughter, towards the darker perimeter of the garden where the shadows pooled thick and the air smelled of damp wood and old ash.
She leaned against the rough brick of the building, the chill seeping through her jacket. She lit the cigarette, the first drag hitting her lungs with a familiar, punishing welcome. She stared at the glowing ember, willing it to calm the riot inside her head.
Footsteps approached on the gravel. Not the quick, stumbling steps of a drunk friend. These were lighter, more deliberate.
Ryli didn’t turn. She knew.
“Those things will kill you,” a voice said. It was lower than the garden’s noise, calm. Uninfected by Annie’s gossip.
Ryli finally glanced over. Cadence stood a few feet away, her arms crossed loosely over her chest. The butter-yellow light from a distant bulb caught the blonde strands of her hair, her freckles lost in the shadow. Her expression was unreadable.
“Lots of things will,” Ryli replied, her voice rough from smoke and something else. She took another drag, exhaling slowly to the side. “What do you care?”
Cadence considered the question. She didn’t answer it. “Annie talks a lot.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“I didn’t say he was wrong. I said he talks a lot.” Cadence shifted her weight. “He enjoys the narration.”
Ryli barked a short, joyless laugh. “Yeah. He’s got a real talent for it.” She flicked ash. The silence between them wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t hostile either. It was full, charged with everything that had been said and everything that hadn’t. “So. You got the full briefing. ‘Crazy Ryli.’ The warning label.”
“I got a perspective,” Cadence corrected softly. Her blue eyes were on Ryli now, not judging, just… observing. Taking in the tense line of her shoulders, the defensive hunch. “It was pretty one-sided.”
“It’s the only side there is.” The words came out flatter than she intended. A statement of fact.
“I doubt that.” Cadence said it simply, as if it were obvious. As if Ryli were a puzzle with a missing piece, not a closed book.
The unexpectedness of it stole Ryli’s next breath. She stared at Cadence, the cigarette forgotten between her fingers. No one doubted the narrative. They affirmed it, they reveled in it, they used it as a reason to either flock to her or avoid her. They never questioned its completeness.
“Why?” The word was out before Ryli could stop it, raw and too honest.
Cadence’s gaze drifted past her, toward the noisy garden, then back. “Because people are more than the worst thing someone says about them at a beer garden.” She paused. “And because you look at people like you’re trying to solve them. That doesn’t track with someone who’s just… a burnout.”
Ryli’s heart was doing something strange and painful against her ribs. This was worse than the dismissal. This was recognition of a kind she had no defense against. It felt like being seen through a crack in a door she’d believed was sealed shut.
She didn’t know what to say. Every glib, defensive retort dried up in her throat.
Cadence nodded at the cigarette. “You got another one of those?”
Ryli blinked. “You smoke?”
“No.” A faint, almost-smile touched Cadence’s lips. It was the first one Ryli had seen directed at her. It changed her whole face, made the sharp lines gentle. “But I’m standing out here in the cold talking to you. Seems like the thing to do.”
A laugh, real and startled, choked out of Ryli. It felt alien in her chest. She fumbled for her pack, her fingers oddly clumsy. She tapped one out and offered it. Cadence took it, their fingers brushing for a millisecond. Ryli’s skin tingled.
She held her lighter out. Cadence leaned in, the cigarette between her lips. The flame leapt, illuminating the constellations of freckles across her nose and cheeks, the serious curve of her mouth. She inhaled, immediately coughed, a small, graceful sputter, and waved the smoke away with a grimace.
“Yeah,” Ryli said, the ghost of her laugh still in her voice. “It’s an acquired taste.”
Cadence held the cigarette away from her body like it might bite. “It’s awful.” She looked at Ryli, and her eyes held a quiet, shared amusement. “So why do you do it?”
The question hung in the cold air. It wasn’t about the cigarette.
Ryli took a last drag of her own and crushed it under her boot. She watched the ember die. “It gives me something to do with my hands,” she said finally, which was both true and the biggest lie she’d told all night.
Cadence just nodded, as if that made perfect sense. She didn’t press. She didn’t walk away. She just stood there, holding the awful, smoldering thing, sharing the dark, quiet space at the edge of the world.
Inside, the party roared on. But out here, the only momentum was the slow, uncertain beat of Ryli’s heart, and the strange, fragile sense that for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t entirely alone in the dark.
But out here, the only momentum was the slow, uncertain beat of Ryli’s heart, and the strange, fragile sense that for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t entirely alone in the dark.
Cadence finally stubbed the cigarette out against the brick, a look of mild disgust on her face. “That was genuinely terrible.”
“Told you,” Ryli said, her voice quieter now. The noise from the garden felt muffled, like they were inside a bubble.
“So what do you do,” Cadence asked, not looking at her, “when you’re not subjecting your lungs to chemical warfare or being narrated by Annie Hunt?”
Ryli shrugged, the gesture tight. “Not much. Work. Sleep.” She hesitated, the words sticking. She never said this part. “I work at the Taco Bell on Route 9. The one with the busted drive-thru speaker.”
Cadence glanced over, her expression unreadable. “Yeah? I know that one. The crunchy tacos are always somehow soggy.”
“That’s my fault, probably,” Ryli said, and it was almost a joke. “I’m on the midnight shift. I don’t care enough to keep them crisp.”
“Midnight?” Cadence’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “What do you do after?”
“Go home. Feed the dogs.” It was out before she could cage it. A simple, true fact from her life, offered without armor.
“You have dogs?”
“Puppies, yeah. A stray lab mix had them under our deck last spring.” Ryli looked at the ground, scuffing her boot on the gravel. “We were supposed to find them homes. Never did. Now they’re just… my dogs. I take care of them.” She felt exposed, talking about this. It was too gentle a thing.
“What are their names?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Ryli deflected, but her tone was soft. “They don’t come when I call anyway.”
A small smile touched Cadence’s lips again. She didn’t push. “I get it. I paint. Badly. And I read too much. And I have this curated playlist of devastating songs that I listen to on repeat when I’m pretending to study.” She said it like it was a secret, just for the two of them in the shadows. “It’s mostly just acoustic guys sounding mournful.”
Ryli looked up, met those blue eyes. “I listen to that stuff too. The sad music. And poetry, sometimes. The angry, confused kind. It just… it matches the static.” She hadn’t meant to say that either. The static. She’d never named it aloud.
Cadence nodded, as if she understood exactly what that meant. “The static. Yeah.” She was quiet for a moment. “I play tennis. Or I used to. It’s just hitting a ball really hard. It helps with the quiet.”
Ryli almost laughed. The quiet. They were talking in opposites—static and quiet—but it was the same thing. The same enemy.
“You drive that pretty Ford,” Ryli said suddenly, recalling the clean sedan in the Miller driveway. “The one with the cream-colored seats. They look… impractical.”
Cadence’s laugh was a real one, a soft puff of air in the cold. “They’re a nightmare. A single blueberry is a crisis. What about you? Let me guess. Something loud and fast that pisses off the neighbors.”
“It’s a Charger. An R/T.” Ryli felt a stupid, defensive pride. “The seats are red. Like, obnoxiously red. You’d hate them.”
“I kinda do,” Cadence admitted, her smile widening. “But it suits you. The obnoxious red seats.”
They fell into another silence, but this one was different. It wasn’t empty. It was full of the things they’d just laid between them: puppies and poetry, sad playlists and impractical car interiors. It was a map of mundane details that, to Ryli, felt more intimate than anything else that had ever happened to her in a darkened corner.
From inside, a loud burst of shouts and crashing music erupted. The spell, fragile as it was, strained.
Cadence shifted, pulling her sweater tighter. “I should probably… they’ll wonder where I vanished to.”
“Yeah.” Ryli’s voice was rough. She didn’t want her to go. The thought was so sharp it scared her. “Your public awaits.”
“And your fans,” Cadence countered gently, nodding toward Ryli’s table.
“They won’t notice.”
Cadence studied her for a long moment. The assessment was back, but it was warmer now. It had data. “That Taco Bell,” she said finally. “The one with the sad tacos. You work Friday nights?”
“Every Friday night.”
“Maybe I’ll get a craving.” Cadence gave a faint, almost imperceptible shrug, as if it were nothing. “A Crunchwrap or something. See if you can make one that isn’t a tragedy.”
Then she turned and walked back toward the light and the noise, her cream sweater swallowed by the crowd.
Ryli stood frozen against the brick, the cold finally seeping into her bones. Her heart wasn’t beating slow anymore. It was a frantic, hammering thing against her ribs. Maybe I’ll get a craving.
It wasn’t a promise. It was a hypothetical. A casual, almost throwaway line.
But it was a thread, thin and bright, thrown across the dark space between their two separate worlds. Ryli stood there in the cold, clutching it, terrified to pull.
Ryli stood there in the cold, clutching it, terrified to pull.
The rest of the night was a smear of noise and false smiles. She drove home with the Charger’s heater blasting, the obnoxious red seats empty beside her. Her head throbbed with a cheap-beer headache, but underneath it was a clearer, sharper hum. Maybe I’ll get a craving. The words looped, a taunt and a promise. She pictured Cadence’s careful expression in the shadows, the way she’d held that cigarette like an alien artifact. She thought of the static, and the quiet, and how they’d named them.
Her apartment was dark, save for the blue-grey light from the fishtank in the corner. The two lab-mix puppies, Buster and Bean, scrambled off the couch, nails clicking on the hardwood. Their whines were happy, oblivious. She fed them, the ritual mechanical, her mind elsewhere.
She showered, the water scalding her skin until it turned pink. She lay in bed. The ceiling stared back. The static in her head had morphed into a single, repeating frequency: find her, find her, find her.
It was stupid. Reckless. The kind of impulsive grab for connection that always ended with her feeling gutted. Cadence was a glimpse of solid ground in a constant slide. Of course she wanted to anchor herself to it. It was the oldest, dumbest instinct.
Her phone glowed on the nightstand. 2:47 AM.
The beer garden felt like a week ago. The memory of their conversation, though, was crystal, preserved in the strange quiet of the hour. She’d gotten Cadence’s full name from Laney days ago, a casual theft she’d committed without examining the motive. Cadence Stover. It had sat in her phone’s notes app, a dormant piece of information.
Now it pulsed.
She opened Snapchat. Her hands felt clumsy. The search bar was a precipice. She typed the name.
There she was. A bitmoji with blonde hair and a subtle smile. The username was simple. Nothing clever.
Ryli’s thumb hovered over the ‘Add’ button. Her heart beat a frantic rhythm against her sternum. This was the line. The real one. Sending a friend request in the dead of night was a confession of need. It was pathetic. It was a map directly to her own loneliness.
She added her.
The action was a drop into a void. She threw her phone onto the other pillow like it was burning her and turned over, pressing her face into the mattress. Idiot. Now Cadence would wake up to a notification from the town burnout, the girl with the bad reputation and the red car seats, screaming I’m thinking about you in the middle of the night.
The phone buzzed.
Ryli froze. She counted to five in the dark, then slowly rolled over.
A notification glowed on the screen. ✨ Cadence Stover added you back.
Her breath left her in a rush. Then, a new chat screen appeared. Three grey dots pulsed. They disappeared. Pulsed again.
Cadence (3:02 AM): Can’t sleep either?
The simplicity of it disarmed her. Ryli typed, deleted, typed again.
Ryli (3:03 AM): Static’s too loud.
The dots pulsed immediately.
Cadence (3:03 AM): The quiet here is really fucking noisy tonight.
A faint, disbelieving laugh escaped Ryli’s lips. She pulled her knees up, making a tent of the covers, the phone’s glow lighting her face.
Ryli (3:04 AM): I almost didn’t add you. Felt too desperate.
Cadence (3:05 AM): It’s 3 am. Everyone’s desperate at 3 am. What’s your flavor of desperation? Mine is existential dread about a poli-sci paper.
Ryli (3:06 AM): Mine is the crushing realization that I talked to a person who didn’t make me feel tired.
The dots stayed still for a long moment. Ryli’s stomach tightened. Too much.
Cadence (3:08 AM): Yeah. I know that one.
They talked. The conversation slipped into a deep, easy channel, flowing around the rocks of their separate lives. Ryli confessed the Taco Bell grease felt like a second skin by Saturday morning. Cadence described the particular agony of library fluorescents. It was light, it was silly. Then it wasn’t.
Cadence (3:22 AM): Annie really enjoys his role as town crier. He said you totaled your dad’s BMW drunk sophomore year.
Ryli stared at the text. The old shame, worn smooth by time, rubbed raw again.
Ryli (3:23 AM): It was my mom’s Mercedes. And I wasn’t drunk. I’d taken two of her Xanax because I couldn’t feel my face from panicking. Missed a stop sign. Wrote it off.
She’d never corrected the story before. Letting people believe the drunk version was easier, somehow. More relatable, less pitiable. A chemical fuck-up was a party story. A panic attack so severe you stole medication to make it stop was a crack in your foundation everyone wanted to gawk at.
Cadence (3:24 AM): That sounds worse.
Ryli (3:24 AM): It was. I don’t do benzos. Not after that. Too quiet. Like being buried alive.
Cadence (3:26 AM): What do you do?
The question, again. Direct. Unflinching.
Ryli closed her eyes. The truth felt like lifting a heavy, rusted box she’d sealed shut.
Ryli (3:27 AM): I drink. Sometimes I do lines off sticky bathroom counters at parties because for ten minutes my brain shuts up and feels brilliant instead of broken. I hook up with people whose names I forget because their hands on me is a feeling I can focus on. It’s all just… noise to drown out the signal. Or the lack of one. I don’t know.
She sent it. There it was. The unvarnished, ugly machinery of her survival. This was what Annie Hunt’s gossip skimmed over. The why.
The dots pulsed. For a full minute.
Cadence (3:28 AM): The signal’s the hard part. I read once that depression isn’t sadness. It’s the absence of a feeling tone altogether. Like a radio tuned to dead air. The static is just you trying to find the station.
Ryli read the words. Then read them again. Her eyes burned. No one had ever put it that way. No therapist with their gentle nods, no parent with their baffled frustration. A radio tuned to dead air.
Ryli (3:29 AM): Yeah. That’s it exactly. How did you…
Cadence (3:30 AM): My mom’s radio is tuned to dead air a lot of the time. Has been since my dad left. She sits in the quiet. I play tennis to get out of the house. I guess we all find our versions of the static.
The confession was quiet, offered not as a comparison, but as a key. This was Cadence’s map. The quiet house, the mournful playlists, the focus on a ball flying back and forth in a predictable arc. Control. A different kind of noise.
They weren’t the same. But they were standing in the same kind of weather.
Ryli (3:32 AM): I take the puppies for walks at like 4 am sometimes. When it’s so dark and quiet it feels like the whole world has stopped. It’s the only time the station comes in clear for a minute. Just me and them and the streetlights.
Cadence (3:33 AM): What does it play? When it comes in clear.
Ryli thought. The truth was messy.
Ryli (3:34 AM): That I love these dumb dogs more than anything. That the engine of my car is a perfect sound. That I want to be someone, but I have no idea who. That I’m so angry all the time and I don’t even know who to be angry at. It’s just… fragments. But they’re mine.
Cadence (3:36 AM): They’re good fragments.
The comfort that flowed through Ryli’s screen then was a tangible, warm thing. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t solutions. It was recognition, deep and cellular. Cadence was assembling her from pieces, and she wasn’t flinching at the sharp edges. She was saying, I see this one, and it’s interesting.
The persona Annie had narrated, the caricature Laney had announced, it began to dissolve in the blue light of their phones. Here, in raw text at 3:30 in the morning, she was just a person. A scared, angry, loving, confused person trying to tune a broken radio.
And Cadence was listening to the signal.
Cadence (3:41 AM): I think I believe in your crunchy tacos now.
Ryli (3:42 AM): Don’t. It’s a disaster zone. I’ll make you a quesadilla. I don’t fuck up quesadillas.
Cadence (3:43 AM): Is that a promise?
Ryli (3:43 AM): Yeah. It is.
The momentum carried them, soft and sure, until the sky outside Ryli’s window bled from black to deep indigo. The world beyond their phones was about to reassert itself, with all its labels and expectations. But something had shifted. A new frequency, fragile but clear, was now broadcasting between them, and for the first time in years, the static in Ryli’s mind didn’t feel like the only sound in the room.