andy and devon

andy's alarm clock was set to play a radio station that he didn't like very loudly when it went off. he chose the worst station he could find, because he needed his brain to interpret the sound as utterly unpleasant, as plain noise, to better drive him out of sleep and eventually out of bed. a song that he liked might keep him hanging around to hear the end of it, and before he knew it he'd be fifteen minutes late everywhere he went, every day.

in reality, this was not likely to be all that big a problem, since andy didn't care much for any song. he was not a great lover of music. he was a great worrier, though, and so the situation remained as i have just described, and it worked swimmingly, and andy was renowned among his friends and colleagues for his punctuality.

so, one day andy liked the song.

he only heard the last ninety seconds or so of it, but he liked it so much that he sat through the next four songs, none of which he enjoyed even a little, hoping to hear the name of the first song. but he didn't hear the name of that song or any song, and by the time he realized four songs had gone by he was running quite late, as he had always known would be the case, and he full-throttled through his morning routine at a pace that led him to forget both his lunch and his wallet. he was, understandably, less than chipper for the rest of the day.

he couldn't get the song out of his head.

if it has happened to you, you know that there is nothing worse than having a song you have never quite completely heard stuck in your head. you can not sing it to yourself because you don't know any of the words, you can't even hum it under your breath because you have only the vaguest sense of the melody. you can repeat the four or five notes you are sure of over and over until you despise them, and that is pretty much all.

andy did this for several days. he hummed the four or five notes to his friends and coworkers and asked them if they thought they sounded familiar, and his friends and coworkers told him no. he started setting his alarm a little bit earlier so he could listen to the bad radio station for a while before he had to get out of bed, and he continued listening to it after the time for him to get out of bed had come and gone. andy was suddenly late for everything, and people became concerned. andy, too, was concerned, but powerless. he wanted his schedule back, he wanted his brain back, and until he had mastered the song inside and out he didn't believe he could regain either of those things.

andy was, needless to say, distracted.

in this state of frustrated and consumptive distraction andy managed to walk into a girl who had stopped to fish something out of her purse so hard that she and all of her belongings spilled forward onto the sidewalk. as she tried to sweep up the contents of her bag, andy apologized and apologized and apologized many more times, and he reached for her headphones, which had fallen off of her head when she hit the ground. he started to hand them to her, and then he stopped doing that and began to put them on his own head. she didn't stop him. she just sat next to him on the pavement.

"what's the name?" andy asked.
"devon," the girl answered.
"i meant the name of this song."

devon took her headphones back and listened for a moment, and then she answered him.

andy smiled, said to her, "you wouldn't believe how good it is to know that."

"tell me about it," she said.