Page 17 of Redline Communion

“I’m very observant. It’s a professional skill.”

Zaconia, sprawled across the back seat with me, doesn’t look up from her phone. “She’s right. You do the one where you stare at a fixed point like it personally wronged you.”

“I don’t do that.”

“You’re doing it right now.”

I make myself stop, which proves their point, and Zaconia grins like she’s won something.

She and I met a little differently. Same building, different class. She spotted me after choir one afternoon and walked over with, “You sing like somebody’s paying you to feel something. Come get coffee with me.” It should have been unsettling, and instead I laughed. Her family goes to the same church my mother married into, so our first real conversation became an hour of comparing notes on which hymns Alistair’s choir director insists on butchering every Sunday, and for that one hour I got to be part of my mother’s world without performing a version of myself that didn’t exist.

I’ve been chasing that feeling back ever since.

The bar is the kind of place that doesn’t ask questions if you look confident enough asking for a drink, all sticky floors and a karaoke machine that has seen better decades. The second we walk in, my shoulders drop. Nobody here knows my last name. Nobody has an opinion about a folder on a hall table, a ritual with a dress code, or a boy named Marcus who used to exist and now mostly exists as a lesson. Here I’m just a girl with two friends and a badly printed song list, and the relief is almost dizzying.

“Okay.” Zaconia slides into the booth across from me and scans the list like a battle plan. “Rules of engagement. Kiwi gets first pick because she’s driving and deserves the dignity of choosing her own humiliation.”

“I’m doing the one about the truck,” Kiwi says immediately.

“You’re always doing the one about the truck.”

“‘Before He Cheats’ is a classic, okay.”

While Kiwi negotiates her slot with the guy running the machine, Zaconia leans across the table, close enough that I catch the drugstore vanilla of whatever she’s wearing.

“Your turn’s coming.”

“I didn’t agree to a turn.”

“It’s karaoke. Agreement is implied the second you walk through the door.”

“That’s not how consent works.”

“It’s exactly how karaoke works. Different laws entirely.” She taps the list and slides it toward me. “Pick something. I’ll do it with you.”

“Why do I need you?”

“Because you have the face of somebody who’s never done a duet, and I refuse to let that stand.”

Some reckless, off-duty part of me actually wants to say yes, so I do.

Kiwi’s truck song is, against all odds, genuinely great — off-key in exactly the way that makes the whole bar cheer louder — and she takes a bow like she’s closed a Broadway run. For three minutes, I forget I’m the kind of person people write files about.

Then it’s us.

Zaconia picks “Cool for the Summer” before I finish reading the list, which tracks. It’s been ours since the second week we knew each other, Kiwi blasting it through her car speakers on the drive to campus and Zaconia deliberately mangling the harmony until I laughed. During the first verse, she’s all performance, hand to her chest, milking every syllable for the room, and I laugh hard enough to nearly miss my cue.

The chorus is where it changes. We’re supposed to trade lines back and forth, but somewhere in the second round Zaconia stops looking at the crowd and starts looking at me, and I stop looking at the crowd too. My next line catches in my throat, and the backing track keeps going, and for one full bar neither of us looks away.

Then Zaconia laughs, big and easy and very obviously on purpose, and spins me under her arm like the moment was choreography instead of whatever it actually was. The room laughs with her, the song ends, and I tell myself I imagined it.

I don’t fully believe myself.

Later, Kiwi is arguing with the machine operator about a second truck song when Zaconia pulls me toward the side hallway by the bathrooms, supposedly for air, though the hallway doesn’t have anything the main room doesn’t.

“You’re doing the stare thing again,” she says, back against the wall.

“Maybe I like staring at you.”