The Fourth Child Jessica Winter (i love reading .txt) 📖

of Gish, by the Smashing Pumpkins. She liked how the music on Gish sounded literally like metal, as if someone had translated into music the sound of metallurgic processes that she was vaguelyaware of through factory field trips and reading Johnny Tremaine in eighth grade. Casting, forging, extrusions. A gleaming sound that hinted at a gruesome suffering beneath it, like JohnnyTremaine’s mangled hand were at the mixing board. But the singer was trying too hard to be hard, nasal and sneering, like he was mocking the listener for her poor judgmentin listening to him, or for thinking she was good enough to listen to him. She could imagine Stitch singing the songs instead.

After Gish, Stitch gave her a cassette with Nevermind by Nirvana on one side and their other record, Bleach, on the other. All the songs written in pencil, each word individually underlined. Lauren had listened to Gish and Bleach enough to be able to speak with Stitch about them in a knowledgeable way, but Nevermind was the one she listened to over and over. Everyone was listening to Nevermind. Danielle Sheridan had a Nirvana T-shirt, and Rajiv gave her endless shit about it. For Lauren, Nevermind offered freedom in an enclosed space. The space could be Abby’s car on the way to Delaware Park or to the record stores and cafés on Elmwood Avenue, or the space could be the width of two headphones on the days when Lauren took the bus to school. Or at night, to drown out Mirela screaming.

“I don’t really pay attention to lyrics,” Stitch said, which struck Lauren as a radical idea. “I pay attention to production.”Stitch was interested in how a sound was constructed, compressed, how it scrambled the air around it. He wasn’t interestedin words because they didn’t mean anything without the sound—an isolated lyric couldn’t bear to stand all on its own. Therewas a song on Nevermind, “On a Plain,” about not having words and not making sense. It made fun of itself for trying to have a message. Stitch hadread that Kurt Cobain just dashed off the lyrics right before he recorded himself singing them. It was strange to be so carelessabout words that millions of people would hear and think about. But the emotions in the song were clear: restlessness, irritation,but also humor and not taking yourself seriously. The song was about caring about not caring. It had the feeling of markingtime just before something big was going to happen. In class, Mr. Smith called this “liminal space,” and told the studentsto watch out in their reading for characters having important conversations on thresholds or staircases or through the windowsof trains departing the station, one person on the train and the other left behind on the platform.

Kurt Cobain liked R.E.M., who had a big embarrassing hit record out when Lauren was in eighth grade, but Stitch said theyhad a lot of older records that were okay to listen to. He said Reckoning was the best R.E.M. record because the band wrote it very fast and didn’t have much time to think about it. A lot of secondrecords were like that, he said—Nevermind was a second record.

That night, Lauren lay in bed listening to the tape of Reckoning that Stitch had made for her. Mirela was asleep, so Lauren could listen to the music chiming out of the small speakers onthe tape deck, nothing to drown out. The most unfinished song on Reckoning was “Second Guessing,” because the entire chorus was “Uh-oh-oh, here we are,” over and over again. The song was stupid in a Smashing Pumpkins way, like it was daring you to become bored and frustrated with it, but it also made Lauren think of Kurt Cobain saying “Here we are now,” like he was in liminal space, like party guests standing in the doorway announcing themselves, bringing big expectations that they were expecting to be disappointed. Lauren imagined everyone she liked standing in this doorway, singing along with Nirvana or R.E.M. or the Pixies: Abby, Deepa, Stitch, even Claire. The only friend she couldn’t see there was Paula.

The phone rang, and Lauren knew it was Paula, like she was calling to ask why she wasn’t included in the doorway, and Laurenyelled, “I got it!”—remembering Mirela too late, hoping she wouldn’t wake up—and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”

A click, and someone lightly breathing. “Hello?” a voice asked, and it took Lauren a moment to place it.

“Hello? Who is this?” Lauren asked.

“This is—wait, you called me,” the voice said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’m confused. Hello.”

“Stitch? Is that you?” Lauren asked.

“Yeah. This is weird. Uh, who is this?”

“This is Lauren.”

A crush call. They were back in middle school.

“I don’t get it—what happened?” Stitch asked. He sounded lost but so close, inside her head. Like there were doors openinginside her and he was walking through them, not knowing where he was. For the second time that day, Lauren felt the old thrill.She wanted to play—she hadn’t realized how much she missed this.

“What happened is that you called me,” she said lightly, like she was the one in charge of the joke.

“I didn’t—this is crazy,” Stitch said.

“It’s okay,” Lauren said. “If you’ve changed your mind about talking, that’s fine.”

“What?”

“Thanks for calling, Stitch,” she said.

“Wait—”

Lauren hung up the phone and sputtered a laugh like someone was watching her. She started to pick up the phone again to callaround, try to figure out who had done it—but no, on second thought, better not to seem interested in a kiddie prank.

She switched off the lamp on her bedside table, and then she was alone in the dark with Reckoning. There were songs on Reckoning that felt ancient and bottomlessly sad, a sadness as old as a riverbed. Listening to some of the songs made her imagine sittingon the banks of a creek where a classmate had drowned—not a best friend, maybe someone you knew was nice and said “Hi” toand had always meant to get to know better, and now you never could.

She wouldn’t tell Stitch that