Page 3 of First Verse

We both lied that day.

It wasn’t the first time. Or the last.

Maybe the lies started earlier that summer, when we accidentally brushed against each other in the pool, then jerked away like we’d been electrocuted.

Or maybe they started six years before, when he held my hand as my dad dug a grave in our backyard for our family cat, Pickle. As I soaked Wilder’s shoulder with my tears, I asked him to swear he’d never leave me.

Maybe it’s my fault for setting the precedent for impossible promises. Or his fault for believing we could fight gravity by pretending it didn’t exist.

Wilder was right about one thing, though. We weren’t a love story. We were something better and immeasurably worse.

A perfect song.

- Journal of Eva Sullivan

CHAPTERONE

evangeline

EVA 20 | WILDER 22

The voices around me melt together, pooling into a backdrop of discordant static. Words drift like debris through my exhausted mind, knocking together, drifting apart. Shapes and sounds. Rhythms and melodies. I can’t hold any of them for more than a second before they, too, fade into obscurity.

I don’t want to be here. I should be in my backyard, relaxing in my hot tub. Cocooned by silence and reveling in solitude. Instead, the very people I’m most sick of surround me: musicians, the people who work with them, make money off them, and drool over them.

A familiar laugh pulls my gaze across the crowded living room to Wilder, who towers over a cluster of sycophants. Four out of five are displaying too much cleavage; the one man in the bunch has the same look on his face as the women, though. They all want a shot at being the lucky one tonight.

The giant potted plant I’m tucked behind partially obscures Wilder’s face, but I can see half of his smile. Straight white teeth. A dimple made more pronounced by the scruff on his face. Dark hair that’s too long after the last leg of our tour—so long it skims his broad shoulders and frames his poster-worthy face with haphazard waves.

Eddie offered to buzz it for him a few weeks ago, but Wilder declined and instead started using one of my hair ties to make a ridiculous, tiny topknot to keep it out of his eyes onstage. His flippant excuse was he didn’t trust our drummer not to make him bleed. An obvious lie; no one has steadier hands than Eddie.

The real reason is that our fanbase is obsessed with his hair. It has its own hashtag: #wildmane. And after the explosion of concert photos on Instagram in the last few weeks, his topknot has a hashtag, too: #knotmewilder.

Cue eye roll.

“What or who are we hiding from?” asks Rye, sidling up beside me. My best friend’s blue eyes sparkle at me from his handsome, freckled face, and for the first time in weeks, my smile is genuine.

“The blob mind,” I whisper.

He laughs, clinking his half-empty beer bottle to my full one. We’re both underage, but no one here cares. I don’t even know whose house this is, only that it belongs to someone from our record label.

“It’s good to have you guys home,” Rye says, hooking a muscled arm around my neck and smacking a loud kiss on the top of my head. “Life is boring without you.”

“It’s good to be home, Riley Piley.”

He pretends to gag. “You don’t call Wilder Why-Why anymore. Stop torturing me. It’s not my fault my parents gave me a girl’s name.”

I smirk. “It was your grandfather’s name.”

“That was like a hundred years ago.”

I concede with a laugh. “Fine. I’ll give it a rest.”

“Thank fuck.”

He rubs his bearded cheek over the top of my head. He may only be nineteen, but he’s built like a tank and has been growing beards since puberty. Probably why no one has blinked an eye at the fact he’s drinking.

“Did you stop by your parents’?” he asks.

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