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Track 1: “Never Yours” by Tori Rose Peters
Track 2: “Wayward Lanes” by Fate’s Travelers
Track 3: “Meet Me in the Lyrics” by Tori Rose
Track 4: “Chasing Sunsets” by Tori Rose
Track 5: “What If We” by Tori Rose
Track 6: “Head Forever to Your Dreams” by Tori Rose
Track 7: “H(our)glass” by Tori Rose
Track 8: “The One Time You Regret Me” by Tori Rose
Track 9: “Forever 18” by Mia Peters
Never-released song by late
country star Tori Rose Peters
Grad gowns aren’t made for climbing out windows. I learn this quickly as I sling one leg over my boyfriend’s sill, tugging the hem of my robe, which has caught on the corner of the frame. It doesn’t budge.
“Come on.” I pull a little harder and the fabric rips, the fraying threads just tangling worse. Since I have no intention of wearing it long, I tear a large piece from the robe, the newfound freedom a sweet escape.
Clearing the window and maneuvering across chipped roof tiles, I edge toward the rain gutter. All around me, salty air slips into the spaces between blinking stars, and the breeze closes in on Jess’s seaside home. Just a little farther. Grab a branch of the leaning fir, avoid the needles, climb to the ground—clean and simple and goodbye-free.
Some days, I think I’d do anything for one less goodbye.
“Mia?” Jess’s voice—both smooth and hesitant—comes from behind me. A glass of lemonade in each pale hand, he’s out of his own cap and gown, ready for tonight in a V-neck and jeans. His dark hair is purposefully tousled, as artistically rendered as the rest of him.
“Oh, hey.” My palms scrape against the bark.
He freezes one step into the room. “What are you doing?”
Moving onto the first branch, I brace myself for a second escape. “I don’t think this is working out.”
“What?” He’s at the window in two quick strides, and his hands fall to the same sill I left behind, fresh drinks sloshing over the cups’ rims. Hurt coats his tone, and everything around us orbits the gravity he holds. “Just like that? You’re leaving?”
Stray needles dig into my bare legs as I let the silence settle. After jumping the last couple feet to the ground, I press a hand to my chest, feeling the way my traitorous heart beats—the only part of me I can’t control. I think my eyes apologize as I back away. Maybe some part of me hopes they do as a barely audible “sorry” sneaks past my lips.
For a second, everything falls from Jess’s features—the anger, the hurt—and there’s a steady resolve replacing it all in his gaze, like he expected this. As he should have.
Go. Now. Let him go. I wave to where he stands next to the da Vinci knockoffs that line his walls. My bike is only a foot away. I can make it. I have to.
“You’re fooling yourself, Mia.” His tone softens.
“Why? Because I’ll never find someone like you?” I grip the handlebars a little too tightly and move the kickstand from the cement.
I’ve heard that before.
“No, because you’re not willing to fall.” Lips twisting, he pushes back—from the window and from me.
“I just jumped off a roof, Jess.” If I don’t acknowledge what he really means, I don’t have to face that either.
He’s not having it. “In love. You’re not willing to fall in love.” The poison abandons him, replaced with hope, and I freeze this time.
Those three words hung in his eyes when we gathered at the base of the stage just an hour ago with our screaming, cheering grad class. They were there when he hugged me, when he kissed me, when we pulled away from each other and he said We’re getting out of here, like he didn’t know I’m not. Like he didn’t know I can’t. Like he didn’t know our little town of Sunset Cove is the only forever I’ve known and me staying here is as inevitable as the sun waking and setting each day. I tried to disappear before he could do this.
If I stay, he’ll just end up leaving instead.
Sitting atop my bike and ringing the bell to the last beat I wrote for my best friend’s band, I shake my head. My feet rise to the pedals. “I’m sorry.” I don’t look back again.
My cap soars off, caught in the Oregon coast’s chilling wind. The phantom feeling of our principal placing my tassel from one side to the other—some sign I’m growing up and growing away—still plays before me. I’m better off without it, without another memory.
The uneven hem of my gown billows around me, and I pedal faster. A rainbow of beach cottages with verandas strung in glittering fairy lights blur in my periphery. The street is silent, the town is silent, the cars are gone—most to the beach where I’m heading later, where Jess is heading now, where we were supposed to go together.
I push that thought aside. There are more important things to do, answers I desperately need waiting for me at home. And he’s as saved without me as I am without that cap and the missing piece of my gown. It doesn’t matter
if I’ll miss his perpetually smiling lips or awful pickup lines. He’s going to get out of here, go to art school, become the curator of some fancy museum. He’s going to have an adventure, like the rest of our grad class.
He’ll be fine.
And I’ll be here.
***
Across from the little house my grandmothers built for us sixteen years ago, there’s an inn we own and manage—Roses & Thorns. Beneath the neon red sign and the glowing rose that hangs over it—if I look close enough—I can still make out where it once said Peters, our last name.
Parking my bike outside the front door, I clasp the rose charm I’ve hung from the handlebars to remember Tori Rose: Sunset Cove’s brightest star, and my mother.
One deep breath in, one quick breath out, and I force myself forward.
“I’m home,” I say, sliding the door shut behind me, nerves settling at the vanilla candles Grams constantly burns. They fill the air down the hall that’s lined with pictures of us through the years—but never ones of Mom.
“In the kitchen!” Nana calls from the other side of the wall.
Kicking off my boots and heading to the adjoined living room and kitchen, I trail my fingers over the peeling floral wallpaper. My footsteps slow and my shoulders unclench at the sight of two of the three people who hold together my entire world. They stand at the stove, stirring a pot of something that smells suspiciously like chocolate. Grams, laughing in the glow of the half-burnt-out lightbulb, holds the wooden spoon to Nana’s lips for her to try. They’re so in love, sometimes it hurts. That openness with each other hides all the things they won’t share.
I know a few things for certain in our carefully constructed life together: they love me endlessly, they were broken by my mother’s death, talking about her childhood hurts them, and they’re all I’ve got.
“Hey, Mi Mi.” Nana pulls me in fondly. The blue eyes she passed on to Mom and then to me are dancing.
“Sweetheart, try this.” Grams takes another spoon from the pink, rose-shaped bowl, scuffed
and treasured but with origins untold.
I do as she says, and its sweetness fills me with the sense of home they create.
“What is it?” I cover my mouth and swallow.
“Ganache.” Grams takes the spoon Nana tasted from and tries it for herself. “Thought we’d make s’mores dip and sit out on the deck to celebrate. You’ve graduated, baby.” It sounds like a congratulatory thing, but there’s a sadness beneath it.
“Do you have time for that before the performance?” Nana asks, the last word broken.
“Yeah, of course.” I shift from foot to foot, waiting for them to say something. I wait for them to tell me more—finally—about the elusive graduation gift my mother left me, the one I’ve anticipated in the void of every curbed question and answer this town didn’t care to give.
All my life I’ve collected pieces of Tori Rose like breadcrumbs, lyrics like talismans, stories like safety nets. When I was eight years old, back from a school trip to her museum at the mouth of Sunset Cove, I sat at the dinner table between Grams and Nana, and I asked, “Who was Mom?”
They said what everyone said, practiced and hollow.
“A superstar.”
“A wonder.”
Never just a girl.
“No,” I’d fidgeted. “Who was she really?”
And that was when, instead of detailing her, they told me she’d left me something. Something beyond college funds and a legacy I’d never amount to. Something concrete, something real, something I’d get the day I graduated.
A little piece of her that might answer everything I ached to know.
Here and now, Nana opens and closes her mouth, and I can count a million times like this that the story has almost slipped through. They constantly walk a tightrope between sharing her or protecting me. “Dessert will be ready soon.” She lands on this. Conversation over.
The silence twists me up inside. They promised today. They’ve promised for years that I'd
get this today. As much as her tragedy is the perpetual weight, the permanent elephant in each room we enter and exit, my grandmothers have not once in my life broken a promise to me.
“I’m going to get ready,” I whisper, and they nod, turning back to the stove, exchanging a glance I can’t translate into truths. Later. They’ll tell me later.
Hopefully.
The aged hardwood creaks beneath my feet, and I slip into my room, casting one more look down the hall. There are no photos at this end of our home, only abandoned hooks, like they initially tried to decorate with her memories but couldn’t keep them up. In those empty places, a collage of my own life plays before my eyes—hearts left half-opened, songs left unspoken, my love forever unsaid. All of those things were present even in Jess’s wide brown eyes just a quarter of an hour ago.
Closing the hall off behind me, I fall back against my bedroom door. My closet is covered in concert posters my best friend, Britt, ripped out of magazines and lyrics Britt has scrawled and left for me to pen the melodies. My pink walls are at as much of a standstill as everything else here. A brown guitar hangs in the corner, something that Grams gave me when she couldn’t bear to have it in her room anymore. I taught myself to play it with YouTube videos and insomnia. It’s not Tori Rose’s guitar—lost somewhere to the open road and her unfinished history—but it’s a way to let out the music that haunts me. It sits right next to the hanging chair where I write chords after my grandmothers fall asleep.
My gaze falls upon my heart-patterned comforter, and my breath catches. There’s a carefully wrapped package propped against my pillow, a curling ribbon tied around it.
With one more glance over my shoulder, I move so I’m standing in front of the rectangular gift. The wrapping paper is worn and creased, ...
