“Your charity case is here again,” Gen muttered as I exited the storeroom, a large brown cardboard box nestled in my arms. She sat up on a high stool at the counter, her laptop computer open on the glass countertop; the screen displayed the MTV homepage. She had her long blonde hair pulled back into a messy bun, secured with an elastic band and a couple of plastic chopsticks.

“Don’t call him that,” I chided. I pulled up a stool of my own and dumped the box on the countertop, rattling the glass. It was yet another slow day at Arcana, the café and New Age bookstore that Gen and I, along with my mother and my two sisters, operate. Gen might have been quite content to sit there and lower her intelligence by about ten points – staring at MTV for a few hours will do that to you – or play Quake against the computer geeks upstairs across the LAN we’d had hooked up during the summer, but I would rather do something that is actually productive. Like go through the boxes of old Rolling Stone magazines that my mother, for some strange reason, keeps in the storeroom.

“What am I supposed to call him, then?” Gen asked, her tone laced with hints of irritation. “He comes in here at one every afternoon, right on the button, and he sits at the same table in the corner. He won’t talk to anyone.”

“He talks to me,” I said defensively as I opened the box. A couple of moths fluttered out of their dark prison, along with a cloud of fine dust. I coughed and sneezed as the dust settled over everything. Hello allergies, I thought. Gen lifted her computer out of the way.

“Nice going genius,” she barked scathingly as she wiped the dust off the counter and set her computer back down.

“Oh shut up,” I shot back, too focused on my running nose and stinging eyes to think of a better retort.

“I know he talks to you,” Gen said, continuing her previous rant. “But you’re the only one he’ll say even just a couple of words to. Anyone else, he just keeps scribbling away in that book of his.” She pushed her laptop away. “So what the hell is in there, anyway?” she asked, suddenly curious.

“Old magazines,” I answered. I lifted a stack out of the box and set it on the counter. “This one’s new though,” I said, tapping the topmost magazine. “Last month’s issue. Ma must have put it in there by mistake.”

“I doubt it,” Gen disagreed. She took the magazine and started flicking through it. “You do know what next Wednesday is, right?” she asked without looking up from an article about The Beatles.

“Aside from being my twenty-fifth birthday?” I asked dryly. “Yeah, thanks for reminding me. I’m getting old you know…”

“You? Old?” Gen snorted. “As if! I’m the one who’s turning twenty-eight in January.” She looked back down at the magazine. “No, aside from that.”

I shrugged. “No idea.”

Gen sighed a little. “Next week it’ll be twenty-five years since my brother died,” she said quietly.

“Oh…” I bit my bottom lip. “I’m sorry Gen.”

“Don’t be,” she said dismissively. “It wasn’t your fault, obviously. I don’t remember him anyway. But…” She closed the magazine and set it aside. “It does mean that I won’t be able to work next week; I’m going to Kansas City with my mother on Tuesday. You think you can get Kate to rearrange my schedule?”

“I should be able to.”

“Thanks.”

“Anytime, Gen.”

One would think that, going by the way that Gen and I act around one another, we’ve been friends all our lives. In fact, we’ve only known each other since high school, when she moved here with her mother from Missouri, just a hop, skip and a jump away from where I’ve lived all of my life, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After we’d gotten to know each other, we discovered that we had a lot in common. We both loved old music from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century – in particular Switchfoot, Linkin Park and Maroon 5 – we were both addicted to Survivor and old Charmed reruns, and we had both lost our fathers at a young age. Gen’s dad died when she was three, while mine passed away when I was six.

But there is a lot that I’ve only discovered during the past couple of years – such as Gen’s only brother dying when he was just seventeen. Gen was almost three years old when it happened, and believes that, indirectly, it may have contributed to her father’s death. It’s only a theory of course, but a sound theory in my opinion. She also can’t cook – the first time she tried making pancakes in our apartment’s kitchen, she set the stovetop on fire. I have since barred her from making anything more complicated than salad.

I slid down off of my seat and combed my hair through with my fingers. “I’m going to go over and talk to him,” I said. “I can’t sit still any longer.”

“Suit yourself,” Gen said absently; she had since returned to scanning the MTV website, her glasses sliding down her nose.

I crossed over to the sole occupied table and pulled the unoccupied chair out. “Hey, mind if I join you?” I asked.

He looked up then, looking a little shocked that I’d come over to talk to him. “Uh, yeah, sure,” he said.

I smiled and sat down facing him. “You know, we’ve never been formally introduced,” I said idly. “I’m Rosaria.”

He smiled a little. “I’m Taylor.”

“That’s a…unusual name,” I commented. “No offence, but I’ve just never heard it used as a first name before.”

“None taken.” He looked over at where Gen sat at the counter. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s just one of my co-workers, Gen Walker.”

“Oh.” He looked down at his notebook. “She reminds me of someone I used to know a long time ago.”

“Who’s that?”

“My sister.” He glanced at his watch. “I better go; my mom’ll be wondering where I am.” He closed his notebook and stood up, pushing his chair out behind him and walking away. Left on the table was what looked like an article from a newspaper. I reached across the table and picked it up, deciding I would keep it for the next time he came in, when the date written across the top caught my eye: 23 October 2000. I frowned; I didn’t know how old Taylor was, but I assumed that he couldn’t be older than eighteen. Why then would he be carrying around an article that was nearly twenty-five years old?

“What’s that?” Gen asked as she came up alongside me.

“Just something that kid left behind; his name’s Taylor, by the way. So now that we know his name, you can’t go around calling him a ‘charity case’ anymore. All right?”

“Fine, fine. Can I have a look?” I wordlessly handed her the piece of newsprint, and she scanned it. “Oh my goodness…” she whispered.

“What?”

“I…I can’t say it. It’s just too awful…” She pushed the article back at me and headed off toward the café entrance.

“Where’re you going?”

“Outside. I need some fresh air.”

I watched her go, then walked to my post behind the counter and laid the newsprint out on the countertop. What I read then chilled me to my very core.

The American music community is in shock this morning after the sudden death overnight of teen musician Taylor Hanson, lead singer of sibling trio Hanson, during a concert in Kansas City, Missouri. The seventeen-year-old collapsed onstage halfway through last night’s performance at the Crown Center and could not be revived, and was pronounced dead on arrival at Truman Medical Center at nine-forty-five pm. A post-mortem will be conducted today to determine the cause of death.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. No wonder Gen had been shocked – reading about something like that would frighten anyone.

I looked at the date that had been written at the top of the article again. October 23 2000…I had been born the day before. That in itself creeped me out. While one life had ended, mine had only just begun.

I shook my head. It was just so wrong. He had had his entire life ahead of him, and to have it cut short literally in the blink of an eye…it was just unthinkable.

I heard the door open mere minutes later, looking up from surfing the MTV archives on Gen’s laptop – Gen was still more or less missing-in-action – to see my mother walk into the café, followed by my sister Mahalia. “Hey Ma,” I said by way of a greeting. “Hey Lia.”

“Hey Ria,” Mahalia replied.

I hopped down off of my stool and crossed around to the other side of the counter, the article in my hand. “Ma, can I talk to you?” I asked. It wasn’t a request so much as a thinly veiled demand – I knew that my mother had been quite the Hanson fan back in the day, so it was safe to assume that she might have been at that concert.

“Sure, what about?”

We sat down at one of the tables, and I took a deep breath. “Did you go to a concert the day I was born?” I asked. “A Hanson concert, to be specific?”

An expression of deep sadness painted itself on my mother’s face, and I knew – she had been there that night. “Yes,” she said finally. “I was in the third row from the stage. Why do you ask?”

“What happened that night?”

“Rosaria, please…it was hard enough being there when it happened. Please don’t make me relive it.”

“Ma, please, I want to know.”

She sighed. “All right. But it happened almost twenty-five years ago, so you will have to excuse me if I leave out some of the details.” When next she spoke, her voice was sadder than I had ever heard it. “There was absolutely no warning – one second he was acting completely normal, and the next…he was lying on the stage, completely still; we all thought it was a practical joke, and a couple of the girls around me started laughing. When one of their backup musicians bolted to the front of the stage and started CPR, that was when we realised that it was serious. It wasn’t a joke.” She drew in a shaky breath. “I think I speak for everyone who was there when I say that it was the worst night of our lives. And when the news broke the next morning that he had died…I think a little part of all of us died too.”

“I’m sorry Ma,” I said. “Did they ever find out how he died?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

I nodded, deciding to leave it be. It was more than obvious by this point that she was most certainly not ready to deal with her memories of that long-ago night. Not that I could really blame her, to be honest. I’d be feeling the same way if I had witnessed the death of someone I respected and admired.

Business picked up not five minutes later; Gen wandered back inside right after the afternoon rush commenced, smelling faintly of smoke and wearing a rather vacant expression. I put two and two together and surmised that Gen had fallen back on her old habit of chain smoking joint after joint until she was sufficiently numb to the world around her. I only hoped that she remembered that I wasn’t going to let her into the apartment until she had come down off of her high; to further facilitate this, I fished around in her handbag until I found her keys. I slipped her copies of the keys to our apartment off of her key ring and dropped them into my pocket, making a mental note to tell Gen that I was locking her out. The reason for this was that while Gen wasn’t violent when she was stoned, she did tend to eat everything in sight.

After my shift ended at five, I headed home and up to the apartment, shoving my key into the lock and jiggling it around. The building that Gen and I lived in was old, and the locks were extremely temperamental. It annoyed the shit out of both of us, particularly since the building superintendent didn’t view lock-smithing as a high priority. I only hoped that he was willing to deal with two very irate twentysomethings if someone broke in and made off with some of our gear. The lock clicked, and I turned the doorknob and let myself inside, closing the door behind me.

It didn’t take me long to realise that something was up. I don’t know exactly what it was, but something just felt…off. There was someone or something in here, and I intended to find out who or what they were, and how in the world they had found their way into my apartment.

The smart thing to do in this situation would have been to call the police, but I didn’t exactly have the time or patience for that. Instead, I grabbed Gen’s battered hockey stick from beside the door and started searching the apartment. I checked the kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, Gen’s room and our poky little study, before slowly approaching my bedroom door, brandishing the hockey stick in both hands. I didn’t care who or what was in my bedroom, they were trespassing. I grabbed hold of the doorknob and slowly turned it, pushing the door inward.

On first glance, there wasn’t anything particularly amiss. My bed was neatly made, my desk was neat and tidy, the books on my bookshelf were lined up in orderly rows, and all of my CDs sat in their tower between the head of my bed and my desk. Even the row of shoes – two pairs of sneakers, my black Doc Martens, three pairs of high heels, one pair of ankle boots and one pair of ratty bunny slippers – lined up in front of my armoire was neat. It wasn’t until my gaze swept the room a second time that I realised that my bedroom window was wide open – a window that opened onto the fire escape outside. In the rush to get to work that morning, I had forgotten to close my bedroom window.

“You, Rosaria Hill, are an idiot,” I said to myself. I shook my head at my own stupidity and went to close it. I climbed up on my bed, wincing at the creak the iron frame gave as I placed all of my weight on it, and reached over to pull the window shut. And in the process I felt my bare right arm brush across what felt like someone’s shoulder. I fell back onto my bed and stared up into a pair of wide blue eyes.

“Who the fuck are you, and what the hell are you doing in my bedroom?” I asked after I had gotten over the shock of seeing someone other than myself in my bedroom. “No, never mind that. If you aren’t out of here before I count to ten, I’m calling the police and having you arrested for trespassing.”

“Please don’t.” I blinked – that voice was strangely familiar. Where had I heard it before? “It’s not like they’d be able to see me, anyway.”

“And why shouldn’t I? You broke into my apartment.”

“The window was open.”

“Makes no difference. You still broke in. And I am well within my rights to call the cops on you.” I sized them up. “You’re young, you could probably get away with a warning. Now get out. I’m giving you ten seconds.”