If there’s no space for me, I’m carving it out
If you won’t listen I can turn up the sound
Raise your hands, take a stand
Got the world at my command
Reach the sky, watch me jump, watch me fly
Welcome to my world

Elise stared at the lyrics she had typed up in a hurry in the notes app on her phone. While writing them down they had seemed like the best thing to ever pop into her mind; but the more she thought about them, the less she liked them. Rhyming was hard. Rhyming while trying to fit a rhythm and melody in a way that wasn't painfully blunt or hopelessly stilted had quickly turned into a mission impossible.

"Something's wrong with you," she muttered at the six lines that looked innocently back at her. "I don't know what it is, but it's something for sure."

But Jen was also waiting, and she had no idea how to improve these lyrics any further, and some lyrics were better than no lyrics at all, so she sighed, gathered her courage and hit send on them at last.

And immediately put her phone into the furthest corner of her room, screen facing down, silently resolving not to look at it for the next business day or five.

Unfortunately, in her hasty fidgeting, she must accidentally have switched off the silent mode, because it had barely been a few minutes before her phone resounded with a loud, cheerful ping.

Panic jitters flared up in Elise's stomach. Her already unstable concentration, forcibly pushed onto a YouTube video to escape from her own thoughts, took a great leap across the room to where her phone lay on the nightstand. For a moment she was torn between reading the message at once and pretending she had never heard anything. Maybe it hadn't been Jen responding, she told herself, and if she went over to check she would only meet with that weird mixture of disappointment and relief. Or maybe it had been Jen responding, and she hated the lyrics, and in that case Elise was better off pretending she hadn't replied for another few hours.

Except, staying focused on other things was proving even more than impossible than before, and another few minutes later she let out a frustrated sigh, stood up, braced herself, and flipped over her phone.

The bad news—good news, whichever way she put it—was that the one who had texted her was indeed Jen. The good news was that her message was as simple as it was straightforward:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA ITS PERFECT

All tension left Elise's body at once. Her face lit up, and the jitters in her stomach transformed into a relieved laugh. You think so? she wrote back. I'm so glad you like it! I was worried it might be a bit…on the nose?

Barely thirty seconds had passed when her phone was flooded by a quick string of reply messages.

MABYE IT IS

BUT ALSO CONSIDER

*IM* ON THE NOSE TOO

I LOVE IT SO MUCJ AAAAAAAAAAAAAA TYSM

Elise laughed to herself. Are you so excited that you can only talk in all caps? she replied.

YES, Jen wrote back. And then, ICAN FINALYL SING MY SONGS!!! WITH *WORDS*!!! IM SO HAPPS

HAPPY*

OMG

Elise's chest was warm. She was giggling and grinning from ear to ear, excitedly flapping her hands to stop herself from squealing. She couldn't believe she had ever worried about Jen not liking her lyrics at all. This was one of the best, not to mention most excited pieces of feedback she had received on her writing in weeks, if not longer. No, scratch that. Months for sure.

You're most welcome, she replied. I'm happy to make you happy!

Jen didn't write anything back for a while, and Elise didn't expect her to. Putting down her phone, she returned to her laptop, finishing the YouTube video and going back to her writing at last. For a moment she considered telling her online friends the whole story, just to get the excited happiness off her chest; but in the end she figured it took too much explaining, and she didn't bother.

But she still hadn't remembered to switch her phone back into silent mode, and about half an hour later another ping snapped her out of her thoughts.

Surprised, she stood up, picking up the phone again. Some small part of her fluttered with anxiety again. Jen hadn't changed her mind about the lyrics after calming down a bit, had she?

However, the thing she had sent wasn't a text message. It was a sound file.

Could it be…?

Elise pressed the play button. A crackling noise came from her phone's speaker, and then a voice: Jen's voice, singing the lyrics Elise had written, fitting them perfectly onto her own melody. Words and sound came together, forming a powerful harmony, a solid whole, like they had never been written by different people at all.

The sound quality was awful. Jen had clearly recorded it straight on her phone; it was full of crackles and background noises, and it sounded faintly tinny. It was a cappella, and it still sounded raw and incomplete; but even so Elise knew for a fact that it was only a few steps away from becoming a massive, powerful hit.

This time it was Elise's turn to use all caps as she texted back. WAIT YOU ALREADY RECORDED IT?!, she wrote. That was so fast…It sounds AMAZING OMG I LOVE IT SO MUCH!

Jen's reply was immediate. IKR?! this is acutally goign somewhere istill cant BELIEVE IT

Now we just need to write the rest of the song, Elise joked. Got any ideas for that?

There was a longer silence this time, and then the screen lit up with another sound file. Elise pressed play, then replay, over and over again until she had the melody memorized, humming it under her breath as she returned to her desk chair, swiveling from side to side and searching for the right words to fit the tune. Closing her eyes, she tried to visualize Jen's face again: her flash of neon-pink hair and patched-up jeans, the way her narrow hands gripped the microphone like a lifeline, her voice shaking up the small venues with endless power and ambition, sometimes frustrated, sometimes spiteful and always full of life.

And little by little, the words began to flow.

Elise's original writing lay forgotten on the side, put off as a problem for later Elise to deal with. Future Elise would likely curse her past self, but right now she had more important business to deal with.

Sure enough, she didn't get much story-writing done that day, and she did curse herself for almost not meeting her daily session goal. But when she went to bed that night, she was still singing a part of the song under her breath that she was particularly happy with.

"I can’t be who you want me to be
Can’t fit into the boxes you cut out for me
I can’t show you what you want to see
I’m dancing out of line, past the no-entry sign…"

~ ~ ~

"Are you meeting with that singing girl again?" Elise's mother inquired when Elise announced that she wasn't coming home straight from classes later that day.

"Yeah," Elise said impatiently, unwilling to repeat the usual argument again. They had it every single time Elise went out to meet with someone; and she could already recite it by heart. "No, I'm not inviting her here."

"Why not?" her mother replied. "You don't have to drag yourself through this big, dirty city every time! Just bring her here, and I'll make some tea and something nice for you to eat."

Elise rolled her eyes; been there, done that. "That's far for her," she insisted. "Also, we already agreed to meet downtown and it's rude of me to change plans now. I'm keeping the meeting spot."

"Come on, she's a healthy girl, she can take the trip here!" her mother insisted. "You were so tired the last time you met her. You're going to go into that dirty city and come back all tired and irritable again!"

Sighing, Elise tried not to think of the fact that other people her age could go out partying all night or lived on their own entirely, and here she was having to defend her choice to meet a friend for an hour or two in the middle of the afternoon. She was definitely not inviting anyone to her place. The last time she had tried, things had turned decidedly awkward, mostly due to a certain well-meaning but overbearing parent of hers.

"I won't be long," she said. "Just let me go, it's not like I even have to head downtown just for this meeting. I'll already be there anyway, what's an hour or two longer?"

"That's what you always say, and then you come back exhausted and sick and cause trouble for me again." Her mother shot her an accusatory glance, though Elise could tell she was already caving, however reluctantly. "Look at all the gray hairs you're giving me!"

She didn't even have that many, Elise thought. Her mother, already uncommonly beautiful, looked a solid decade younger than she actually was, a trait that Elise hoped she would inherit someday. People often said she was the spitting image of her mother, though Elise suspected it was only due to the unusual face shape they both shared.

As she slipped into her shoes and pulled her coat over her shoulders, her mother's voice rang out behind her. "Does that girl at least let you sing with her?"

Elise froze up. For a second something sparked up inside her—a buried desire, a half-forgotten childhood dream silently reawakened by watching Jen on the stage, the wish to stand there with her, to belong in the group.

But then she remembered—she had buried that desire for a reason.

"I don't sing," she said quietly.

"Why not? It would be good for you, you know." Her mother was already shuffling around the house again, searching for something in the bookshelves. "Improve your lung capacity."

It'd be fun, too.

Elise buried the thought.

"I don't sing," she insisted. "I can't sing. I can't hit the notes, and I don't have a good voice."

"That's not true, you have a—"

Suddenly Elise's throat felt tight, her heart strangely heavy.

"I can't sing," she said, "and that's the end of it."

Before her mother could protest again, she grabbed her bag and hurried out through the door.