Mayurakshi Deb
One
Jay Malhotra walked through the tiled corridors of St. Cecilia’s High School as if he were moving through static—half there, half not. Students passed in waves: some laughing, some shouting, some drowning in their own phones. He kept his earbuds in but played no music, just the illusion of sound to avoid conversations. Mondays were the worst. The sky outside hung like a faded grey hoodie, and inside his chest, the same damp silence coiled tightly. Jay moved to his locker, avoiding eye contact, already rehearsing excuses for why he hadn’t finished his chemistry worksheet. He spun the dial, opened the door, and froze. Nestled between his dog-eared English textbook and a rolled-up math graph sheet was a plain white envelope with his name typed neatly on it—JAY—all caps, no handwriting. He glanced around, but no one paid attention. Curiosity, the soft and dangerous kind, made him shut his locker slowly and retreat to the stairwell by the music room, where he could open it in peace. Inside was a link—just a short URL, and underneath, a title: “For the Days You Don’t Say Anything.” No name, no explanation, just a list of eight songs when he opened the link. And strangely, hauntingly, the first one was a track he had listened to on repeat the previous night while staring at the ceiling: “Motion Sickness” by Phoebe Bridgers. His fingers trembled slightly, as if the paper had just whispered his secrets back to him.
He didn’t show anyone—not Arjun, not even his phone’s algorithm. He kept it to himself like a newly discovered constellation. All day, Jay listened to the playlist on loop between classes, each track echoing something familiar yet unspoken. The second song was a mellow instrumental with only piano and rain sounds. The third one—“Between the Bars”—felt like a direct quote from the journal he kept under his bed. These weren’t random selections. They were too precise. Too… felt. It wasn’t romantic—not yet. It was stranger than that. It was intimate in a way that made Jay uneasy, like someone had stepped inside the quiet corners of his mind and left breadcrumbs made of melody. He didn’t speak of it to Arjun, who was too busy complaining about P.E. and cracking jokes about TikTokers. During lunch, Jay sat alone on the grass behind the auditorium, headphones in, as if the world was buffering and the only thing playing clearly was this mystery someone’s curated sadness. The playlist ended with a track called “Something in the Rain”—a song Jay had never heard, but it left him breathless. He didn’t cry. Not exactly. But something inside him moved—like the needle of a record player scratching across a long-forgotten vinyl. And in that strange hush between song and silence, Jay realized this wasn’t going to be a one-time thing. Someone was out there, listening to him without hearing a word he spoke.
That night, back home in his dimly lit room with fairy lights framing the window and the hum of his mother’s shift work silence filling the flat, Jay opened his journal and wrote a new entry titled: Who Are You? He listed the songs in order, then scribbled thoughts next to each one—not analyses, not reviews, just feelings. Track 1: “Why does it hurt more when someone else says what I can’t?” Track 4: “This one felt like a hug I didn’t know I needed.” He paused before writing anything under the last track. His fingers hovered. What did he want to say? What if they—whoever they were—could somehow read this journal too? It was absurd, and yet, that’s exactly how this felt: like a story he hadn’t written but had somehow become the protagonist in. At 11:38 PM, he typed the entire playlist into a clean Notepad file, saved it under the name “Week 1.” He lay in bed, phone by his side, the music looping quietly as the night pressed close. And just before drifting off to sleep, Jay whispered a single line into the darkness, unsure who it was meant for: “If you’re listening… thank you.”
Two
Naina Kapoor sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, surrounded by scattered CD cases, sticky notes scribbled with lyrics, and a soft-yellow desk lamp glowing like a warm secret. Her headphones hung loosely around her neck, the faint hum of lo-fi beats filling the quiet between her racing thoughts. She’d just finished curating Playlist Two—this one titled: “Rain Sounds and Unsaid Things.” It was softer than the last, a little more revealing. Song three had the same kind of melancholy Jay wore in his eyes whenever she passed him in the corridor—quiet, deep, but unreachable. She’d watched him from a distance for over a year now, never brave enough to speak beyond polite project exchanges. But every Monday, she could give him something. A way to say: I see you. I feel like you do. She wasn’t even sure when it began—this silent connection she had built from afar. Maybe it started in the music room last winter, when she’d heard him softly humming to himself while waiting for Mr. Sen. Or maybe it began even earlier, when she read a cryptic blog post on a music site by a writer named EchoReverb17—a username she later figured out was Jay’s. The voice in those posts had stayed with her, full of ache and half-healed thoughts. So she began replying in the only language she trusted: songs.
At school, Naina waited until the corridor was mostly clear. Second-period bell had just rung. She slipped the second envelope—printed, sealed, precise—into locker 147-B and walked off, heart thudding. She always timed it just after first break. She never lingered, never looked back. To her, this wasn’t about recognition. It was about reaching someone who, like her, struggled with expression in the usual ways. And besides, no one would ever suspect her. Naina Kapoor: yearbook editor, head of the bake sale committee, Zara’s cheerful best friend who loved polaroid pictures and wore pastel cardigans. No one knew she spent nights stitching together meaning from minor chords and unsent letters. Back in class, she sat beside Zara, who was busy gossiping about some new couple in the eleventh grade. Naina smiled and nodded at the right times, but her mind was with Jay—wondering if he’d found it yet, wondering if he was listening. Later that afternoon, as she scrolled through her music app during lunch, she noticed something. A public playlist titled “Week 1” with her exact tracklist—same order, same title. Her breath caught. He’d saved it. He’d named it. That meant… he knew it mattered.
Jay, meanwhile, was pacing around the edges of the football field, earbuds in, the new playlist playing on loop. It was uncanny. Track two, “Coffee Stains on Blue Sweaters”, described the exact color he’d worn yesterday. Track four—his favorite so far—ended with a sample of footsteps fading into rain, and he swore he’d written a nearly identical line in his journal three days ago. Someone was either inside his mind, or worse, watching him. Yet he didn’t feel creeped out. He felt… known. Like he didn’t have to say everything out loud to be understood. The idea was terrifying and beautiful all at once. Arjun noticed the way Jay kept looking at his phone during lunch and teased, “Bro, is this a crush playlist? Who’s the lucky one?” Jay just shook his head and muttered something about finding it online. But when he got home, he added a new page to his journal titled “For Whoever You Are.” He listed lyrics from each song in Playlist Two and wrote little messages beside them. “Did you see me wear blue? Or was it a guess?” and “This one felt like you’ve been listening longer than I knew.” He didn’t know why he was writing back. He didn’t know if it would ever reach the sender. But the act itself—responding—made the loneliness shrink a little. As he put down his pen, a half-smile appeared, and for the first time in months, Monday didn’t feel like the end of something. It felt like the start of a conversation.
Three
Jay entered the music room for Thursday’s elective class a few minutes early, headphones slung around his neck, fingers still buzzing from the fifth listen of Track 7—a melancholic acoustic ballad called “We Built Cathedrals from Echoes.” It had hit him harder than he expected. Mr. Sen’s classroom was filled with vintage posters—The Beatles, Ravi Shankar, The Smiths, even an old LP player that still worked when it felt like cooperating. Jay sat at the far end, near the window, sketchbook on the table. He didn’t hear her enter. Naina walked in softly, sunlight catching the strands of her loose braid. She chose the seat next to him without a word, pulling out her notebook. Jay turned to her slightly, offering a faint smile, the kind that hovered somewhere between acknowledgment and retreat. She returned it—genuinely, but not too much. Mr. Sen walked in and clapped his hands, announcing that they’d be paired up randomly for a short-term project: “Find the sound of a moment, and create a mixed-media piece based on it.” Jay barely registered the full instruction because the next words from the teacher hit like static in his chest: “Jay, you’re with Naina Kapoor.” He looked sideways; she was already glancing his way, not startled, not nervous. Just… present.
Naina felt her stomach tighten, but not from nerves—from knowing. It was dangerous, sitting this close. Not because she didn’t want to. Because she did. Too much. They were given the topic “solitude”, and the idea was to record ambient sounds during the week and create a soundscape or art piece representing their interpretation. Jay spoke first, voice quiet but steady. “Do you… wanna maybe record near the lake behind the old school block?” Naina nodded, pretending to think about it, even though she had already planned on going there Saturday for her own recordings. They exchanged numbers “just for coordination,” and their fingers brushed when she passed him her phone. For a moment, her heart stuttered. She noticed how neat his fingers were, how he tapped the screen with the careful precision of someone who didn’t want to type the wrong thing—not even by accident. After class, Jay walked toward the library with a strange calm swimming in his chest. He didn’t know much about Naina—only that she was polite, carried a disposable camera everywhere, and once corrected a teacher gently without sounding like a know-it-all. But there was something familiar about her—like a lyric he’d heard before, just out of reach. Back in her room, Naina replayed the moment of their fingers touching as if it were a chord progression she needed to memorize.
Saturday came cloudy and soft. Jay reached the lake first, armed with his voice recorder and a freshly sharpened pencil tucked behind his ear. Naina arrived five minutes later, a small portable mic in one hand and a thermos of hot cocoa in the other. They sat a few feet apart at first, each recording the breeze through reeds, the occasional chirp of distant birds, and the whisper of water brushing against mossy stone. But as time passed, the space between them closed. Naina began humming softly while checking her levels, and Jay instinctively joined in. Their voices blended for a moment—unrehearsed, raw, like a harmony formed in passing. When they listened back to the audio, neither spoke. The silence was weightless, companionable. Naina smiled. “It doesn’t sound lonely,” she said. Jay replied, “No. It doesn’t.” They walked home slowly, taking the long way around the back gate. Neither asked questions they weren’t ready to answer. And neither realized that their shared moment was about to be the inspiration for Playlist Three, which Naina would begin curating that very night—tentatively titled: “For When You Start to Hear Someone.”
Four
Jay sat on his bed later that Sunday night, notebook open on his lap, the memory of the lake still echoing in his ears—not the actual sounds they had recorded, but something quieter, more human. Naina had laughed when he tried to mimic a heron’s awkward gait, and it had been the first time he’d heard her laugh that wasn’t attached to a polite response or hallway greeting. It wasn’t just pretty. It was unafraid. He wrote that down. Her laugh doesn’t apologize for being real. When he opened his locker the next morning, the third envelope waited for him, light green this time, with a faint smell of peppermint—new detail, deliberate, thoughtful. Inside, the title made him freeze: “For When You Almost Feel Brave.” He leaned against the locker door and read the tracklist. The first song was “Young Lion”—a one-minute instrumental that rose like courage in the chest. The third song, “If You Could See Me Now,” had lyrics that practically mirrored what he’d said to Naina at the lake. It was no longer just eerie. It was tender. And frightening. Whoever was sending these, they weren’t just picking songs based on moods. They were responding—to him. Listening back.
Naina watched him that day from two corridors down, heart in her throat as he pulled out the playlist, blinked, then placed it gently in his hoodie pocket like it was something sacred. She hated how much she needed that validation. How a boy who barely spoke could make her feel more visible than the dozens of friends who texted her emojis and compliments. In Mr. Sen’s class, their project was halfway done, but something else had started to grow. Naina caught Jay sketching in his notebook between discussions. “You draw?” she asked, genuinely surprised. He looked startled, then hesitant, then flipped the sketchbook toward her. It was a pencil drawing of a lake, soft shadows, gentle trees—and two figures sitting apart, not looking at each other, but not strangers either. “It’s us,” she whispered, not meaning to say it out loud. He nodded once. “Yeah.” The room stayed quiet. She could’ve told him then—about the playlists, about her reasons—but she didn’t. Instead, she pulled out her phone and played a voice clip from the lake. Their shared laughter. “I’m saving this,” she said, half to herself. Jay smiled. For the first time, she saw what he looked like when he wasn’t guarding his face with silence.
That evening, Jay posted the new playlist under a private account titled echolistener. He didn’t tag anyone, didn’t share it. But he named it “Week 3 – Crossfade.” In his journal, he wrote next to the final track—“Only When You’re Close”—the words: I think I know who you are. But I don’t want to break the spell. Across town, Naina sat on her windowsill in oversized socks, listening to her own playlist on repeat. She almost didn’t care about the homework piling on her desk. Her parents were arguing in the kitchen again—softly, but clearly enough to turn up the volume. The final track looped and she imagined Jay hearing it, imagining her. It wasn’t about being clever anymore. It was about being understood, piece by piece, note by note. She looked at the sketch Jay had texted her after class—just the lake, no people this time. She made it her wallpaper. The caption he’d sent with it read: “Sometimes quiet feels like company.” She replied with a single emoji—🎧. He didn’t respond. But he didn’t need to. Because tomorrow was Monday. And the music would keep playing.
Five
Jay couldn’t sleep the night before Open Mic Friday. His guitar leaned against the wall like a silent dare, strings recently replaced, frets still unfamiliar to his calloused fingers. He hadn’t performed since middle school—since before everything went quieter inside him. But Track 5 of this week’s playlist had been a live acoustic performance, and he couldn’t stop thinking about one line in particular: “Don’t wait for the silence to ask you to speak.” That lyric haunted him all week, enough to scribble it across his wrist in ballpoint pen like a makeshift tattoo. So when the sign-up sheet passed around Mr. Sen’s class, Jay didn’t overthink. He wrote his name on the third line, as if his hand had moved before fear could catch up. Naina saw it, glanced at him, and offered a smile that made his stomach turn into a murmuring drumbeat. She hadn’t told him she was going, but she planned to. She had to. This was bigger than just music now. It was about seeing him be heard—for real this time, not just in lyrics or curated melodies. At home that evening, Jay practiced with trembling fingers, half-whispering the chords to a song he’d written weeks ago but never dared show anyone. He titled it “Middle of the Hallway.”
The auditorium filled faster than usual that Friday—teachers, students, even a couple of alumni who always came back for the performances. Naina sat near the middle, fingers tangled in her sleeves, camera on her lap, playlist link already prepared in her drafts. She wasn’t performing. Not tonight. Tonight was for watching, for listening. Jay walked onto stage slowly, gripping his guitar like a lifeline. He didn’t look at the crowd. Didn’t need to. He found the mic, exhaled once, and said softly, “This one’s for anyone who never said anything out loud but meant everything.” Then he played. The song began with two repeated chords—gentle, unsteady, like a thought forming mid-sentence. His voice cracked slightly in the second verse, but he kept going. The lyrics spoke of wandering locker-lined mazes, invisible smiles, and the ache of unspoken gratitude. And somewhere around the bridge, when he sang, “I see your name in song titles / and maybe that’s enough,” the room fell so quiet even the air stilled. Naina felt her throat tighten. No one else knew, but she did. He was singing to her. Or at least… to the version of her he thought was still hidden. When he finished, there was a pause—then claps, loud and surprised, like no one expected him to bleed emotion in such perfect, broken melody.
After the event, Jay stood near the backstage door, guitar slung over his shoulder, notebook in hand, unsure if anyone would approach. Arjun gave him a loud, back-slapping hug, yelling, “Bro! What the hell! Where was this voice hiding?” But the only reaction that mattered was missing—Naina hadn’t come up. Not yet. He spotted her at a distance, camera still in hand, expression unreadable. For a moment, they just looked at each other. Then, as if orchestrated by fate, she walked over, quiet and sure. “You wrote that?” she asked. He nodded. “I’ve had it for a while. Just never played it aloud.” She hesitated, then said, “I… I liked the part about song titles.” Their eyes held a weight that wasn’t ready to spill yet. Later that night, she uploaded Playlist Four—titled “For When You Finally Speak.” The final track was an unreleased acoustic version of the same song Jay had performed—she’d found it on a blog months ago, uploaded under the pseudonym EchoReverb17. And in the description, she added a simple line: “Sometimes, a voice doesn’t find the words. It finds you.” Jay received the link at midnight. And when he pressed play, he didn’t smile or cry. He just closed his eyes—and listened.
Six
The Monday after Open Mic, Jay found himself standing at his locker earlier than usual, anticipation curling in his chest like smoke. But when he opened it, there was nothing—not even a trace of mint-scented paper. He checked again. Top shelf, beneath the notebooks, behind the cracked copy of Lord of the Flies—still nothing. For a moment, his heart thudded louder than the morning announcements. Had it stopped? Had she—whoever she was—decided this story had run its course? He carried that quiet panic with him through the first three periods, replaying Playlist Four in his head like a memory he couldn’t shake. Maybe he had ruined it. Maybe the song he performed had said too much. Or worse, maybe he had guessed wrong. In the cafeteria, Arjun waved him over, talking loudly about fantasy football trades, but Jay’s gaze drifted to the other end of the hall—where Naina sat with Zara and the yearbook team, eyes flicking toward him once, then away. The air between them felt… different. Not tense. Not warm either. Just full of something unspoken. And then, sometime between last period and the final bell, he returned to his locker for his physics notes—and there it was. Envelope #5. Pale blue this time, with a subtle imprint of musical notes across the edge. No name. Just one line typed on the back: “Even echoes fade if you stop listening.”
Naina hadn’t meant to delay the playlist. But something in her cracked after the performance. Watching Jay on stage, pouring out everything she had been hearing in silence for weeks, felt like watching a diary entry be read aloud to a crowd. She knew she should have felt proud. Connected. But instead, she felt exposed—like her secret language was no longer secret. And worse, she wasn’t sure if Jay’s song had been for her… or for someone he thought she was. Zara, who had noticed her zoning out more than usual, finally asked, “You like him, don’t you?” Naina didn’t deny it. She couldn’t. But she didn’t admit it either. “I think he hears things I don’t say,” she said quietly. That night, she hesitated before compiling Playlist Five. It took longer than the others. She changed songs three times. The theme—“For When You Think You’ve Said Too Much”—became both confession and apology. Each track was intentionally blurry in meaning, more ambient than lyrical, as if she were asking Jay to listen between the beats. One song in particular—“Shadowboxing in Rainlight”—held a looped vocal that whispered, “I was always nearby.” She almost didn’t include it. But then she thought of his drawing of the lake, how he had erased the people from it in the last version, leaving only the silence between them. She left it in.
Jay listened to the playlist that evening like someone decoding a forgotten language. It was different from the others—less structured, more atmospheric, like it wasn’t meant to guide him somewhere, but reflect where he already was. Track four sounded like water dripping inside an empty room. Track seven, his favorite, was a duet in a language he didn’t understand, but the emotion in the singers’ voices hit him like memory. And then, tucked at the very end, a hidden track—literally. The file was labeled “echo_05_hidden.mp3” and it didn’t show up on the app playlist. He only found it when he downloaded the whole folder. The song was familiar. So familiar that his breath hitched. It was the exact same chords from his Open Mic song—but slower, rearranged, like someone had recorded their own version of it. Not a cover. A remix. A response. Jay sat frozen, headphones pressed tight, staring at the screen as if it would confess the name he’d been aching for. But it didn’t. The file ended. Silence followed. And in that silence, Jay knew two things: first, the person behind the playlists knew his music. Second, he wasn’t just being observed. He was being understood. And somehow… that made it even scarier. He closed his eyes and whispered to the ceiling: “If you’re real… then say something back. Not in music. Just once. Say something with your voice.”
Seven
Jay couldn’t sleep that night. The hidden track echoed in his ears long after it ended, the rearranged version of his own song haunting him more than he wanted to admit. Someone had heard his music and spoken back, not just through lyrics or curation, but through creation. That meant something. It had to. The next day, he carried that electricity in his chest like a stormcloud—quiet, heavy, expectant. Every hallway glance became a theory. Every girl carrying wired headphones felt like a potential sender. During music class, Jay barely touched his notes, distracted by the sound of Naina’s pen tapping. When Mr. Sen paired them again for a short critique session, Jay dared to ask, “Do you… ever remix music?” Naina’s pen froze midair. She looked up slowly, something unreadable flickering behind her eyes. “Not really,” she said, then paused. “Why?” Jay shrugged, voice too casual. “Just heard something recently that reminded me of your style. You know, layered… subtle.” Naina smiled, tight-lipped. “You think I have a style?” That stopped him. He didn’t respond. She watched him carefully and, for the first time since this all began, feared he knew. After class, she lingered near her locker until he passed, hoping for another question. But he just nodded and walked by, the look on his face like a line waiting for a chorus.
That afternoon, Naina walked home slowly, every step accompanied by the weight of a thousand unsent messages. Her phone buzzed with Zara’s texts about an upcoming school festival, but she ignored them. Her mind was still at the lake, at the music room, at Jay’s voice—soft, unguarded, asking questions he wasn’t ready to hear answers to. That night, she didn’t open Spotify. She opened her voice memo app. It was time. She recorded a short message—barely twenty seconds. “Hey,” she whispered. “If this really is you reading between the lines, then I guess… you’ve been listening longer than I’ve been brave. I’m sorry I made it a game. I didn’t know how else to say hello.” Her voice cracked slightly on the last word. She didn’t edit it. She didn’t even name the file. She uploaded it to a shared folder she knew only he accessed—the one where the hidden track had lived. And then she waited. No playlist. No envelope. Just… her, raw and without harmony. Across town, Jay found the file later that evening. He opened it expecting another remix, another fragment of some emotional riddle. Instead, he heard her voice. Not singing. Not hiding. Just saying hello. He didn’t cry. Not quite. But he did close his laptop, press the back of his hand to his mouth, and whisper, “Naina.”
The next day, he approached her between classes, while the hallway buzzed with pre-festival chaos. He said nothing at first—just stood beside her locker until she noticed. When she did, her eyes widened, hands pausing mid-zip on her backpack. “Hey,” he said. Her voice caught. “Hey.” There was a beat—quiet, humming with possibility. Jay reached into his bag and handed her a folded sheet of notebook paper. No music, no lyrics—just a sketch of two people under headphones, sharing the same cord. Underneath, he’d written: “I think this is your song too.” Naina laughed, soft and breathless. “It always was,” she said. The hallway didn’t disappear, but for that moment, it blurred at the edges. They didn’t hug. They didn’t confess anything loud. But they didn’t have to. Because for the first time since it all began, their voices—unfiltered, uncurated—had finally found their way into the same quiet space. And this time, it wasn’t a secret. It was a beginning.
Eight
The week after everything was quiet—not the kind of awkward silence that follows a storm, but the comfortable stillness that settles in after a long piece of music has ended, and no one rushes to speak. Jay and Naina didn’t change overnight. They still sat apart in class, still listened to music with their earbuds in, still scribbled thoughts into the margins of notebooks like secrets were safest there. But now, they glanced at each other and smiled without looking away. During group assignments, their hands would brush over the same pencil and neither would pretend it didn’t happen. The playlists stopped arriving in the locker, but they didn’t need to anymore. Jay knew. Naina had said hello—not through a song, not in code, but in her own voice. And that had rewritten everything. On Thursday afternoon, under the same tree by the lake where they’d recorded ambient sound weeks ago, Jay brought his guitar and a sketchpad, and Naina brought two sets of earbuds and a thermos of coffee with exactly three sugar cubes—his favorite. They didn’t talk much. They didn’t need to. Jay played a quiet melody, unfinished, hesitant. Naina hummed along instinctively, and together they let the wind and water fill the space between notes.
Later that night, Jay uploaded a playlist to a shared drive titled “Week 8 – For the Girl Who Hears Me.” It was the first one he had made for her. The cover image was his own sketch—two silhouettes under a tree, a single pair of headphones connecting them. The tracks weren’t melancholic this time. They were hopeful, tentative, warm. There was a song by Dodie, one by Prateek Kuhad, a lo-fi instrumental layered with quiet laughter (sampled from their lake recording), and at the very end—a short song Jay had written and recorded in his room. It had no title, just a single lyric looped twice: “I found you in the static.” Naina found the playlist that night before bed. She didn’t cry. But she did sit with it playing softly as she added a new page to her journal. It wasn’t lyrics or sketches or clipped ticket stubs this time—it was just a single sentence: He knows. And he stayed. On impulse, she opened her camera roll and found the old candid photo she’d taken of Jay at the back of the music room—earbuds in, face half-shadowed, completely unaware. She finally saved it to her favorites.
Friday morning, under a sky scrubbed clean by early monsoon clouds, Jay and Naina walked together through the gates of St. Cecilia’s for the first time. Not hidden in silence. Not trailing behind their respective friends. Together. Side by side. Zara nearly dropped her iced latte when she saw them. Arjun actually applauded. Jay rolled his eyes. Naina blushed. But they didn’t let go of each other’s presence. As they entered the music room for the final class of the term, Mr. Sen—half-asleep behind his newspaper—muttered, “Look at that. Harmony at last.” That afternoon, Jay tucked his guitar away, but kept one earbud out. Naina leaned closer. “So what now?” she asked. He thought for a second. “Now?” he said. “We start a new playlist. Together.” And as they walked home—headphones shared, music pulsing softly between them—they smiled at the thought that sometimes, the best love stories don’t start with fireworks. Sometimes, they begin with a song. And a locker. And a boy learning to speak. And a girl who was brave enough to listen.
___
