The school day stretched like a badly looped sample, each class a test in containing the anticipation that hummed through my veins. Miss Rodriguez's Spanish lessons washed over me – vocabulary I'd mastered in another lifetime, when collaborations with Latin artists had demanded fluency. Even calculus, usually a careful performance of teenage struggle, barely registered. My mind kept returning to that box of vinyl, to the ghost of innovation pressed into those grooves.
During lunch period, I sat in the music room, fingers hovering over keys that had taught me their secrets twice now. The Baldwin upright was older than me in both timelines, its ivory worn to autobiography by thousands of student hands. In my first life, I'd used these spare moments to practice basics. Now, muscle memory threatened to betray me with phrases that wouldn't be written for years.
"Yo, Marcus."
Devon Washington's voice pulled me from reverie. He leaned against the doorframe, gold fronts catching fluorescent light – fronts he'd replace with veneers by 2010, when his own production career took off. In my original timeline, we'd lost touch after graduation. Another thread I could reweave.
"That track you laid down at Rico's..." He crossed to the piano, sliding onto the bench beside me. "People talking about it. Like, really talking."
I remembered this conversation from before, but it landed differently now. "Good talking or bad talking?"
"Both." Devon's fingers picked out a simple melody – the beginning of what would become his signature producer tag in my old future. "Some saying you got a ghost producer. Others saying you selling your soul or some shit." He glanced sideways at me. "But Rico... Rico saying you got old soul. Like you been here before."
The irony almost made me laugh. Instead, I started accompanying his melody, adding chords that would compliment but not overwhelm – a skill learned through years he hadn't lived yet.
"Just trying to make something different," I said, the practiced humility of my second chance keeping my younger self's ego in check.
"Different is dangerous, though." Devon's hands stilled on the keys. "Different is what took your pops out the game, right?"
My fingers slipped, striking a harsh discord. In my first life, I'd never known about my father's music, so this conversation hadn't happened. The ripples of change were already reshaping the waters of time.
"What you know about my father?"
Devon shrugged, but his casualness felt studied. "My uncle used to engineer at Red Eye. Said your pops was trying to push things too far, too fast. Had ideas about where music was going, but nobody was ready to follow." He resumed his melody, slower now. "Said it broke something in him when people couldn't hear what he heard."
The words hit like feedback through overdriven speakers. In my original timeline, I'd faced similar resistance – critics calling my work too experimental, too future-forward. The difference was, I'd known I was right, known those sounds would eventually find their audience. My father had only had faith and vision, without the certainty of lived experience.
"Maybe," I said carefully, "he was just ahead of his time."
"Maybe." Devon nodded toward the door, where other students were beginning to filter in for next period. "But time catches up, right? Look at Kanye, Pharrell – cats doing things now that people would've called crazy five years ago."
If he only knew how tame today's revolutionary sounds would seem compared to what was coming. But his words sparked something else – an idea that hummed with possibility.
"What if..." I chose my words carefully, aware of how they might alter the future, "what if someone could bridge that gap? Take those ahead-of-their-time ideas and make them make sense now?"
Devon considered this, adding a new phrase to his melody that unknowingly echoed a riff from his 2015 platinum single. "That what you trying to do? Build bridges between tomorrow's sound and today's ears?"
"Something like that." I stood as the warning bell rang, shouldering my backpack heavy with histories yet to be written. "Maybe that's what all producers are trying to do. Some of us just see further ahead than others."
"Man, you do sound old sometimes," Devon laughed, but his eyes were thoughtful. "Like you got wisdom beyond your years or something."
If he only knew.
As we left the music room, the hallway was alive with the chaotic symphony of changing classes. Somewhere in the cacophony, someone's phone played a tinny version of a beat that wouldn't be produced for another three years. The sound of the future leaking into the present, like a remix bleeding through headphones.
I thought of those vinyl records waiting at home, of my father's attempts to translate tomorrow's music for yesterday's ears. Maybe his failure wasn't in the translation, but in the timing. Maybe some bridges needed to be built gradually, one carefully placed beat at a time.
The afternoon light slanted through wire-meshed windows, casting prison-bar shadows across institutional tiles. In a few hours, I'd hear my father's music for the first time, understanding at last where my gift for future sound had come from. But for now, Devon's melody lingered in my mind, mixing with phrases that hadn't been written yet, creating something that could only exist in this strange intersection of what was, what would be, and what might never need to be at all.