Zen hit me the night before.
11:48 PM
Zen
come through tmrw. got something to show you on the tune side
what time
Delivered
Zen
after 2. slow morning
bet
Read 11:49 PM
I left around 1:30 so I could take the long way. I liked driving the Z when I didn't have to rush it. Let the boost build. Hear what it was doing. I had plans for more power but I didn't want to blow the motor chasing it blind, which is exactly why I needed Zen.
I was somewhere on the east side when I saw them.
Rue and Jules, on the sidewalk with their bikes. Jules was talking, hands moving, telling some story. Rue had her chin down a little the way she did when she was actually listening to something instead of just waiting for her turn to talk. Then Jules said whatever the punchline was and Rue laughed, the real one, the short surprised one that came out before she could decide if she meant to let it.
She looked left.
Clocked the Z.
Something shifted in her face. Not bad. Just caught.
I rolled the window down.
"Hey, Sis. Hey, Jules."
Jules waved like she'd known me longer than she had. Easy. No weirdness.
Rue said hey back. She looked embarrassed about something but I didn't know what and it wasn't my business.
They had their bikes so I couldn't do anything there. I figured they were heading to Jules's place. I said bye and kept moving.
* * *
Zen's shop sat between a muffler place and a check cashing spot, the kind of strip you drove past a hundred times without looking at it twice. Inside was different. Lifts, a dyno in the back, diagnostic equipment that cost more than most people's cars. Clean floors. Labels on everything. The other workers thought I was his nephew. That was the story and it was old enough now that nobody questioned it.
I walked in he dapped me and got right to work.
"You want more power," he said, not a question. "So first you need to understand what the stock tune is actually doing and why."
He walked me through it from the beginning. How the factory calibration was built around liability and emissions, not performance. How the boost was being cut before it needed to be. How the ignition timing was leaving power on the table. He talked about air-fuel ratios like they were common sense and waited when I had questions and answered them without making me feel stupid for asking.
I'd been around cars my whole life in this body. I knew the basics. But there was a difference between knowing how something worked and knowing how to make it work better, and Zen was somewhere past both of those.
Five hours went by. I didn't notice until my stomach did.
I drove home with the windows down, running back through everything he'd said, trying to hold onto all of it.
* * *
Nobody home.
I stood in the kitchen and listened to the quiet for a second. Then I reached up above the fridge in a cabinet and got what was left of the cough syrup. Last of it. I poured it slow into a Sprite from the fridge, watched the color sink in, buried the empty bottle under stuff in the trash.
Took the cup to my room.
I pulled the mini fridge out from under the desk and set the cup on top of it. Opened the laptop. The session was still there from two nights ago, the beat sitting unfinished, everything roughed in but not done. I put the headphones on and listened back from the top.
The bones were right. That low slow roll underneath everything, almost like the beat was exhaling. I just had to finish building around it and then figure out where my voice fit in.
The song was about falling for women who didn't know you. Not a sad song. Just an honest one. The version of that feeling that didn't dress itself up. You see someone. You think about her. She's never thought about you once. That's not a tragedy, that's just Tuesday. I wanted to write it straight.
What I didn't say out loud, not to anyone, was that the song already existed. Different timeline. I'd carried it here the way you carry something you memorized a long time ago. The words were in me. The beat I had to rebuild from scratch, just from the memory of how it felt, and that part was hard in a way I hadn't expected. You think you remember something until you try to reconstruct it note by note.
I sipped the cup and let it start to work.
First take was a mess. I was thinking about the words instead of being inside them and you could hear it on the playback, stiff, like I was reading out loud. I punched out, sat down, read through everything again.
The lean was doing what it does by then. Not heavy, just enough. That thing where your relationship to the room loosens a little and confidence stops feeling like something you have to manufacture.
I went back in and started on the hook. Let it come up from somewhere real instead of reaching for it. Making love to the beat so slow, makin' love to the beat, girl, it sounds so slow. Those first lines were about the music itself, the way a slow beat could feel like something physical, and once I stopped trying to perform that and just said it, it landed.
The first verse was about visibility. About being someone nobody had looked at yet. No, you don't know my name, lately all these bitches want is my fame. The irony in it was intentional. He was singing about being unknown but singing it like someone who expected to be heard. That tension was the whole thing. I kept the delivery dry. Didn't push it.
I punched in and out through the verse maybe six times before I had it.
The second verse got more specific and that's where it opened up. Girl, I got a thing for you. Hustle with them dealers when it's time to get that bling for you. Lines about wanting to provide, wanting to be chosen, the whole thing wrapped in a question the girl never actually answers. Can we get past all these one-word discussions, I need to know girl, I need to know somethin'. I said that last line three times before I got the right amount of wanting in it without crossing into begging.
Then the bridge.
That's where I felt it.
Girl it's obvious you got some problems, it's obvious you got some issues, what if God sent me all in your life and it's obvious I'm here to fix you. I didn't know who I was singing that to when I wrote it. I knew who I was thinking about when I said it out loud. More than one person honestly. Maybe that's why it hit. When I can't go no longer, I need someone stronger, to hold on to get through. I rode that section until the take was right and then I stopped.
Listened back.
It was a song. A real one.
I stayed in the session doing post-production until sometime after four. EQ on the vocals, compression, sitting the hook above everything else where it belonged, cleaning up the low end so the bass and the kick weren't fighting each other. Small things. Necessary things.
When I finally saved the bounce I just sat there for a minute with the headphones around my neck.
School was at ten.
I set an alarm, closed everything, and laid back.
Song N.A.M.E by Tory Lanez
END OF CHAPTER SIX