Jimmy caught me between fourth period and lunch. Not at my locker — too public, too many witnesses for whatever this was going to be. Not outside the gym — too loud. He caught me in the narrow hallway by the music room where the air always smelled faintly of brass polish and old wood and the specific dusty ambition of instruments that had been played by a thousand students and remembered none of them.
He was standing against the wall like he had been there for a while, hands in his pockets, shoulders squared in the way they squared when he had decided something and arrived at the moment of execution.
"Hey," I said. The word as a question. The word as a bridge. The word as the smallest possible offering toward whatever was about to happen.
He didn't answer immediately. His gaze went to my backpack, found what it was looking for, came back to my face.
"You got it on you?" he asked.
"What?"
"The tape." The word came out with a sharpness that was really about something else, which was how most of Jimmy's sharp words arrived. "Her tape."
My stomach contracted with the speed and precision of a body registering something it was not ready to deal with.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Jimmy's jaw worked once. He stepped closer — close enough that I could see the specific quality of his eyes, which were not quite angry and not quite hurt and were, underneath both of those, afraid.
"Don't," he said. Quietly. "Don't do that."
I swallowed. "Why do you care?"
His eyes flashed. "Because you're acting like you're in some movie," he said. "Like this is romantic. Like this is what you're supposed to do."
"It's not —"
"I'm talking about you," he cut in. "And her. And you walking around like you've got a secret that belongs to both of you. Like there's a whole other story happening that the rest of us aren't in."
"It's not like that."
Jimmy laughed — short, humorless, the laugh that covered the thing underneath it. "That's the thing. Everything's like that now."
A kid pushed past us with a trombone case, oblivious to catastrophe, which is the eternal condition of people with trombone cases. Another kid laughed too loud at something happening twenty feet away. The school continued its operations.
Jimmy lowered his voice. "Let me see it."
"What?"
"The tape." He held eye contact with the steadiness of someone who has decided not to look away from this. "If it's nothing — let me see it."
I hesitated.
That was the mistake. Not the hesitation itself — the visibility of it. Jimmy saw it the way he saw everything: completely, immediately, without the option of unseen. He nodded once, like the verdict had been handed down.
"Come on," he said. "Outside."
We ended up behind the portable classrooms — the gap between the last portable and the chain-link fence that backed the school property, a strip of dead grass and cracked asphalt that teachers avoided and students found for exactly this reason. The sun was too bright. The asphalt shimmered. A dry, hot breeze moved through the gap with the listless quality of air that has given up trying.
Jimmy leaned against the portable wall, arms crossed, staring at the fence. For a long moment he just stood there. Not performing. Not managing. Just being seventeen and afraid of time, which is its own kind of exhausting.
"You remember May?" he asked. Still looking at the fence.
"Yeah."
"When we said it was gonna be the Last Great Summer."
I didn't answer. Because of course I remembered. We'd said it with the conviction of people who believed that naming something correctly was sufficient to make it true.
Jimmy pushed off the wall. Took two steps. Stopped.
"We had rules," he said. "We had the river. We had the van. We had us." His eyes finally came to mine. "And now you've got her."
The word dropped between us like a stone.
"She's a person," I said.
Jimmy's mouth twisted. "Yeah. A person who's going to leave."
"You don't know that."
He stared at me with the specific expression of someone who knows something the other person doesn't and is deciding whether telling them is kindness or cruelty.
"I know everything leaves," he said. "That's the whole point."
There it was. The real sentence. Not the argument about Teppie, not the territorial claim on the river, not the rules of the kingdom — just that. The fear at the center of everything he'd been doing all summer.
"This isn't about her," I said.
He flinched. Small and fast and real. Then covered it with anger, which was the only armor he knew how to make quickly.
"It's about you," he snapped. "You're changing."
"What do you want me to do, Jimmy? Stay the same forever?"
He said it without thinking. Without filtering. Without the usual protective layer between the feeling and the word.
"Yes."
And then he froze. Heard what he'd said. The portable classroom AC unit labored beside us. The asphalt shimmered. A bird landed on the fence and assessed the situation and left.
Jimmy swallowed. "I didn't mean —"
"You did," I said. Quietly. Not as an accusation. As a fact.
His eyes went glassy for a fraction of a second. Then he blinked it away with the speed of someone who has decided that vulnerability is not available right now.
He reached toward me. "Let me see it."
I reached into my backpack. My fingers found the cassette case. I pulled it out and held it — the way you hold something before you hand it over, in the last moment of it being entirely yours.
Jimmy looked at it. His eyes moved over the label.
"What's it say?" he asked.
"It says... For Kevin."
Saying it out loud made the back of my neck warm.
Jimmy's face tightened in the way of someone seeing evidence that confirms what they already knew and were hoping not to have confirmed.
"Of course it does."
He reached for it. I let it go. He turned it over. Read the B side. His thumb paused on one empty space — a line left blank on the label, nothing written there. Just space.
"What's this?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"Nothing," he repeated, like the word didn't mean what it used to. He snapped the case shut. "Let's hear it."
"What?"
"Press play." He held the tape toward me. "If it's nothing. If it's just music. Right now."
I looked at him. He looked at me. The dare was real. The grief underneath it was realer.
I took the tape. I sat down on the curb behind the portable. I pulled the Walkman from my bag and slid the tape in. The plastic clicked — that specific, satisfying click of something finding its place.
Jimmy stood over me. Arms crossed. Watching with the attention of someone who has decided this is important even though the importance is costing him something.
I pressed play.
The headphones filled with sound. A song — one of hers, something she had chosen and put here for reasons I was still learning how to understand. Something that started quietly and built slowly, a guitar line that moved like water finding its level, a voice that knew something about distance and the specific weight of caring for something you can't keep.
I watched Jimmy's face.
He listened. His jaw worked. He looked away once, toward the fence, toward the street beyond it, toward somewhere that wasn't here. Then back.
The song did its work. Music has a way of going around the defenses people build — not through them, not over them, just around. Taking a different route. Arriving at the same place by a door nobody was guarding.
Jimmy's face, over the course of that song, went through several things it would not have permitted itself to go through if he'd been watching his own reflection.
When it ended, the tape rolled on to the next song. Then the next. Side A in its entirety, each track doing what Teppie had chosen it to do, the whole thing a kind of argument she was making without being present to make it.
Side A ended. The mechanical pause. That small, suspended silence between sides — the Walkman holding its breath.
Jimmy's voice came out differently than before. Quieter. The armor still there but thinner.
"Is that what you do?" he asked. "You just... listen?"
"Sometimes."
He nodded. Like that was the problem and also the answer and he didn't know what to do with both of those being true simultaneously.
I flipped the tape. Side B.
The music started again — different in register, closer to the bone, the songs on this side chosen with more care or more honesty or both. And then the last track began. That opening — gentle, almost too gentle, a guitar finding its way into a melody like someone walking carefully toward a thing they're afraid to break.
And then the voice: Always something there to remind me...
My chest locked. Not because the song was sad — though it was. Not because it was beautiful — though it was that too. Because it had the entire summer inside it. Every afternoon on the rock, every shared earphone, every moment of standing at the edge of something and not quite being able to name what it was. It had Teppie's handwriting on the label and my name on the B side and a blank line that meant something I hadn't finished understanding yet.
It branded.
I did not move. I did not breathe correctly. I listened all the way through to the last note and the slow fade into tape hiss and then silence.
The Walkman clicked off.
Jimmy was staring at me. His eyes were bright and wounded and furious and something else underneath all of those that was none of them — something more fundamental and more human and more true.
"See?" he said.
"See what?"
He shook his head once — the head-shake of someone who has witnessed the exact thing they were afraid of and is now at the other side of being afraid of it.
"That," he said. "That's the thing." His voice had gone rough at the edges. "You're going to keep that tape. You're going to keep pressing play. And one day she'll be gone and you'll still be pressing play because that's what you do and it will hurt like —"
He stopped. Swallowed.
"It's just a tape," I said. And it sounded weak. It was weak. We both knew it.
Jimmy's laugh came out broken. "No," he said. "It's not."
He looked at me for one more moment. And what was in his face then was not anger. It was grief. The specific, clean grief of someone who loves you enough to be afraid for you. Who has been watching you walk toward something and could not stop you and is now standing on the other side of the attempt.
Then he turned. Walked back toward the school across the hot asphalt, hands in his pockets, no speech, no dramatic exit. Just Jimmy, moving through the world on his terms, leaving the way he always left — without looking back, because looking back was the one thing he couldn't afford.
I sat on the curb. The Walkman in my lap. The tape inside it, both sides played. The school bell rang somewhere. Life resumed.
And I understood something that had been trying to be understood for weeks: You could press play a thousand times. You could carry a soundtrack everywhere you went. You could fill every silence with something chosen and curated and yours. And it would help. It would always help. But it couldn't give back what time takes. It couldn't undo the choices you made or unmake the distance that grew between people who loved each other and ran out of the exact right words at the exact right moment.
All it could do was bear witness.
And sometimes — on the right afternoon, with the right song, on a curb behind a portable classroom in Stockton, California — that was enough. It had to be enough. It was the only thing left.
I have listened to "Always Something There to Remind Me" approximately a thousand times since that summer. Maybe more. It lives in my chest in a way that music rarely lives — not in the ears but in the body, in the specific place where the summer and Teppie and Jimmy and the river and the whole impossible weight of being seventeen all converged into one afternoon behind a portable classroom. Burt Bacharach wrote it. Dionne Warwick sang it first. Naked Eyes had the version she put on the tape. I can hear it anywhere — in a grocery store, on the radio, on someone else's playlist — and for the duration of that song I am on that curb again with the Walkman in my lap and Jimmy walking away and everything costing exactly what it cost. Some songs are like that. Some songs are branded. You don't choose them. They choose you.