Night School
Copyright© 2026 by AshRynn
Chapter 2: The Wall Between Worlds
Two weeks passed without seeing her outside of class.
Fifteen days, to be exact—not that Adam was counting. But he’d developed a habit of noting when he saw her, cataloging the small details that most people missed. Tuesday nights and Thursday nights, 6:30 to 9:30, and then whatever extra hours they could steal between his flight schedule and her carefully guarded calendar.
The library became their default. Third floor, back corner, the table near the window that nobody else seemed to want because the air conditioning vent rattled whenever it kicked on. Adam started bringing snacks—trail mix, granola bars, the kind of fuel you could eat one-handed while turning pages. She started bringing music recommendations, scrawled on Post-it notes in handwriting that slanted left.
“Los Fabulosos Cadillacs,” he read one Thursday evening, peeling the note off his textbook. “Argentinian?”
“Mm.” She didn’t look up from her notes. Her pen kept moving, that same rhythmic pattern. “Ska. Rock. Very political.”
“I’ll check them out.”
The project on joint military operations took shape between these exchanges. Adam wrote the section on Cold War restructuring—the painful birth of the modern joint command system, all the interservice squabbling that had gotten soldiers killed in Grenada. Shakira tackled the post-9/11 evolution with a precision that made him wonder, not for the first time, what she’d have become if music hadn’t claimed her.
“You write like a historian,” he said one night.
She paused mid-sentence. “I read a lot.”
“That’s not just reading. That’s thinking.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “My father wanted me to be a lawyer. I compromised by writing songs in hotel rooms while lawyers argued about my contracts.”
It was the first personal detail she’d offered unprompted. Adam filed it away carefully, like a piece of intelligence that might matter later.
Tuesday of the fifth week brought a familiar scene: Hendricks at the podium, wire-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose, droning about the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II with an enthusiasm that bordered on the inappropriate.
“The firebombing of Tokyo,” Hendricks said, clicking to a slide that showed a black-and-white aerial photograph of smoke columns rising over a flattened cityscape. “March 9, 1945. 279 B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries. Over sixteen square miles destroyed. An estimated one hundred thousand casualties in a single night—more than either of the atomic bombings.”
The Marine in the front row nodded solemnly. Morrison, the nervous undergrad, turned pale and began fidgeting with his pen.
Hendricks continued, his voice taking on a reverent quality that made Adam’s jaw tighten. “The sheer magnitude of destruction. The precision required. The logistical coordination—”
“Precision is a generous word for burning an entire city,” Shakira said quietly.
The room went still.
Hendricks blinked, his lecture rhythm broken. “I’m sorry?”
“I said precision is a generous word.” Shakira’s voice was soft but steady. Her hood was up, as always, but she’d stopped hiding her face during class. “The firebombing of Tokyo was an area bombing campaign. The target was not military infrastructure. It was civilian population centers. That’s not precision. That’s terror.”
Adam watched Hendricks process this challenge. The professor’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. His cheeks flushed slightly above his graying beard.
“Well, Miss Ripoll, that’s a ... that’s certainly one interpretation. However, in the context of total war—”
“In the context of total war, the United States incinerated over one hundred thousand human beings in a single night.” She delivered the line without heat. Just facts. Just history. “The Japanese firebombing campaigns are rarely discussed in American military history courses. I’ve always wondered why.”
A heavy silence settled over the room.
Chen, the business-attired perfectionist, looked up from her laptop with something like respect in her sharp features. Morrison stared at Shakira with wide eyes.
Hendricks adjusted his glasses. “Well. That’s a very ... nuanced perspective. Perhaps we can discuss it further during office hours.”
“Perhaps,” Shakira said.
The lecture continued. But something had shifted. Adam watched Hendricks steal glances at Shakira for the rest of the period—not suspicious glances, exactly, but curious ones. Like he’d just noticed something in his classroom that he couldn’t quite categorize.
When class ended, Hendricks called out: “Miss Ripoll? A moment?”
Shakira paused near the door. Adam lingered nearby, pretending to check his phone.
“I wanted to thank you for your contribution tonight,” Hendricks said, his voice lower now, less performative. “Most students don’t challenge the narrative. They just absorb it.”
“Most students are here for a grade.”
“Indeed.” Hendricks smiled, and for a moment his professional mask slipped, revealing something tired and a little lonely underneath. “You remind me of a student I had years ago. Very sharp. Very questioning.” His eyes drifted, unfocusing. “She transferred after one semester. Got a job in Washington. I still think about—” He caught himself. Straightened. “Well. Keep up the excellent work.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
Outside in the hallway, Adam fell into step beside her.
“You just made his year,” he said.
“I made him uncomfortable.”
“Same thing, for a man like that.” Adam pushed open the exterior door, and the warm October night swallowed them. “He’s lonely. You can see it. He uses those lectures like a shield. If he stops talking about strategic bombing campaigns, he might have to talk about himself.”
Shakira pulled her hood down, letting the breeze catch her hair. The campus was quiet at this hour, the undergrads mostly gone, the palm trees silhouetted against the city glow.
“You notice things,” she said.
“It’s my job.”
“Is it?”
They walked in silence toward the parking structure. A helicopter thumped somewhere in the distance—probably one of the medical evac birds from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Adam tracked it automatically, identifying the rotor pattern before his conscious mind caught up.
“Japan,” he said.
“What about Japan?”
“You mentioned it in class. The Tokyo firebombing. I’ve been there. To Tokyo. Not the 1945 version.” He smiled ruefully. “The modern one. With the neon and the ramen shops and the seven-story electronics stores.”
“I’ve played there,” Shakira said. “Three tours. The fans in Japan are...” She searched for the word. “Devoted. They wait outside the venue for hours. They bring gifts. Little origami figures and handwritten letters in Spanish that they’ve clearly practiced for weeks.”
“I flew into Yokota Air Base a few times. C-17 carrying relief supplies after a typhoon. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces met us on the tarmac at three in the morning with hot coffee and perfectly organized loading crews.”
“The coffee,” she said, her voice brightening. “The vending machines on every corner. Hot and cold. You can buy an entire meal from a machine.”
“I bought a can of corn soup from one at 2 AM. Best soup I’ve ever had.”
She laughed—that surprised sound she never quite seemed ready for. “Corn soup from a machine. And you call yourself a pilot.”
“A pilot who appreciates efficient soup delivery systems.”
They’d reached the parking structure. Her car was on the second level, a modest silver Honda Civic that couldn’t have been more different from what he’d expected. No Mercedes. No Range Rover with tinted windows. Just a practical sedan with a UCLA parking permit and a small crack in the rear bumper.
“Korea,” Adam said, leaning against a concrete pillar. “Have you been?”
“Seoul. Busan. Incheon.” She unlocked her car but didn’t get in. “The crowds in Korea are different. More ... vocal. They sing every word back to you. And they dance.” She smiled at some memory. “I did a show in Seoul where the audience was louder than my monitors. I couldn’t hear myself, so I just let them sing.”
“Kunsan Air Base. That’s where I was. We were rotating crews through, moving equipment for a joint exercise with the ROK Air Force.” He paused. “ROK. Republic of Korea.”
“I know what ROK means.”
“Sorry. Force of habit. Acronyms everywhere in the military.”
“The music industry has its own language too. A&R, BPM, DSPs. You learn to translate.” She leaned against the driver’s side door, mirroring his posture. “The Middle East.”
Adam nodded slowly. “Dubai. Qatar. Kuwait. Iraq. Afghanistan.” He counted them on his fingers. “Djibouti once, which is technically Africa, but it’s the same sand. The same heat.”
“Tours?”
“Dozens. Maybe hundreds of flights by now. You lose count after a while.” He looked up at the concrete ceiling of the parking structure, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. “It’s different from tour stops. You don’t get crowds. You get cargo. Pallets of water, food, ammunition. Vehicles. Medical supplies. And sometimes you get passengers—troops rotating in or out. They’re quiet on the way in. Different quiet on the way out.”
Shakira’s expression had shifted. More serious now. “Have you ever been in danger?”
Adam considered the question carefully. Not because he needed to decide what to say, but because he needed to decide how much. Classification boundaries were blurry things, and he’d learned to err on the side of silence.
“A mortar hit about a hundred yards from my plane once. Bagram Airfield. 2005.” He kept his voice level. “I was doing pre-flight checks. Heard the whistle—you learn to recognize that sound. Hit the deck. Waited for the all-clear. Finished my checks. Took off two hours later.” He shrugged. “That’s the closest I ever came.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“It was loud.” He met her eyes. “There was a moment of initial panic. Do I run, do I find shelter? But at that point it’s too late. Training says hit the deck, make yourself small. You don’t stand a chance against a direct hit, but that’s unlikely. It’s the fragmentation that gets people. Get down, get small, cover the vital parts. That’s all I can really say about it. Classification.”
“I understand.” And she did—he could see it. She understood secrecy. Understood walls. Understood the careful curation of information that became second nature when the world was always watching.
“I’m fortunate though. I just fly in, drop off, pick up, and get out. The troops ... the ones we bring in. They deal with that every day, and worse. I don’t envy them.”
“The Middle East,” she said quietly. “I’ve never been.”
“You’d be a sensation.”
“Politics. The label doesn’t like it.”
“Your label doesn’t know you’re in this parking structure either.”
She smiled. It was a different smile than before—slower, more deliberate. “No. They don’t.”
Thursday arrived with a Santa Ana wind that made the palm trees thrash and the sky turn that particular shade of brownish-orange that meant somewhere in the hills, something was burning.
Class was subdued. Hendricks was covering the early Cold War—the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the birth of NATO. He’d glanced at Shakira twice when he mentioned the airlift, as if hoping she’d challenge him again. She didn’t.
Afterward, they didn’t go to the library. They went to the coffee shop again—same booth, same corner, same herbal tea and black coffee. But something was different now. Easier.
“I keep thinking about what you said,” Shakira said, wrapping her hands around her mug. “About music.”
“I said a lot of things about music.”
“About reimagining songs. The metal versions.”
Adam straightened. “You mean the YouTube stuff.”
“Yes. You said you liked pop songs that are reimagined as metal. Heavier. Faster. Different tuning.” Her dark eyes studied him over the rim of her mug. “Show me.”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
He pulled out his iPhone—the same one he’d shown her weeks ago, the one with her albums nestled between Metallica and Meshuggah. The coffee shop’s WiFi was slow, but YouTube loaded eventually. He scrolled through his saved videos.
“This one.” He turned the screen toward her. “It’s Britney Spears. ‘Toxic.’ But listen to what they did with the guitar.”
The video played. The familiar synth intro of “Toxic” played, but instead of the pop production, a distorted guitar crashed in—heavy, downtuned, the chord progression dark and aggressive. The vocalist growled the lyrics instead of singing them, turning the seductive pop song into something predatory.
Shakira watched with fascination. “They didn’t just cover it. They ... transformed it.”
“That’s the point. It’s not about making fun of pop music. It’s about finding the bones of the song and rebuilding it with different materials.” He was talking faster now, the enthusiasm leaking out despite his usual reserve. “Pop songs have great structures. They’re built to be earworms. But when you run them through the metal filter—the dropped tunings, the heavier percussion, the vocal distortion—you find things in the song that weren’t visible before.”
“Show me another.”
He pulled up a metal cover of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” The video opened with a single, clean guitar note—deceptive, almost church-like—before the distortion slammed in like a wrecking ball through stained glass. The familiar gospel choir became a guttural chant. The chorus exploded into double-kick drums and chugging palm-muted riffs that turned the song’s ecstatic release into something darker, almost desperate. Shakira’s pen stopped tapping mid-beat. Her eyes widened slightly as the breakdown hit—a slow, crushing section where the vocalist switched from screaming to a clean, vulnerable delivery that mirrored Madonna’s original phrasing exactly.
“Listen to that,” Adam said, pointing at the screen. “He kept the melody. The exact same notes. But the context is completely different. It’s the same confession, but now it sounds like he’s praying in a war zone.”
Shakira didn’t respond immediately. She watched the remaining minute of the video in silence, her tea cooling in her hands, steam rising unnoticed. When it ended, she let out a breath she’d been holding.
“Play the next one,” she said.
He pulled up Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”—the metalcore version. This one was faster, more aggressive, built on a foundation of galloping drums and a riff that alternated between thrash-speed verses and a breakdown so heavy it practically detonated through his phone’s tiny speakers. The singer’s voice cracked with rage on the chorus, a raw, unpolished sound that transformed the pop anthem’s catharsis into something genuinely dangerous. Adam watched Shakira’s face as the song reached its peak—the bridge where the instruments dropped out except for a single, clean guitar arpeggio, the vocalist whispering the lines before the entire band crashed back in like a collapsing building.
“That’s the part,” he said, his voice rising with enthusiasm. “Right there. The quiet before the storm. Pop songs understand that better than metal sometimes—the tension of pulling back before you destroy everything.”
“The architecture,” Shakira murmured, echoing his earlier word.
“Exactly. The architecture.”
She reached for her phone, not to check it, but to hold it—a nervous gesture he’d noticed before. “Show me another.”
He found a cover of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” reimagined as doom metal. The tempo was glacial, the guitars tuned so low they vibrated through the table, and the singer delivered the chorus in a haunted, almost funereal croon. It should have been absurd. Instead, it was devastating. By the time the song reached its second chorus, Shakira’s pen had started tapping again—not against the table, but against her thigh, keeping time with the slow, crushing beat.
“Esta canción,” she said softly. “I never realized how sad it was until now.”
“That’s the trick,” Adam said. “Heavy metal isn’t about being angry. Not really. It’s about being honest about things that are too big for regular music to hold.”
Shakira looked at him. “You believe that.”
“I live that.”
She set her pen down just long enough to pick up her tea and take a sip before picking it back up. It had gone cold. She didn’t seem to notice. “Play another. I’m enjoying this.”
“Last one,” Adam said. He hesitated for a fraction of a second.
“What?”
“I don’t know if I should—”
“Show me.”
He tapped the video.
The opening riff of “Whenever, Wherever” filled the coffee shop’s corner booth—but not the version the world knew. Not the pan flute and the Latin pop production. This was different. The guitar was distorted, the tempo slightly faster, the chords darker. The familiar melody was there, but it had been dragged through a metal filter and come out the other side snarling.
Shakira’s pen stopped.
She listened for thirty seconds. Forty-five. A minute. The barista glanced over at the unusual sound coming from the corner booth.
When the song ended, Shakira didn’t speak immediately. She stared at the now-dark screen, her face unreadable.
“Where did you find this?” she asked finally.
“YouTube. Some guy in Finland, I think. He does a bunch of these.”
“It’s...” She shook her head. “It’s strange. Hearing my words. My melody. But through this ... lens.”
“Does it bother you?”
“No.” Her voice was certain, but there was something else beneath it now—a tremor she was trying to control. “No, it doesn’t bother me. It’s just...”
She reached for her tea, wrapped both hands around the mug like she needed something to anchor herself. The steam had stopped rising minutes ago, but she held it anyway, her fingers tracing the ceramic rim in a slow, unconscious circle. When she finally spoke, her voice was quieter, almost wondering.
“I’ve spent years protecting those songs. They’re mine. Every note, every word, every arrangement choice. I’ve been in rooms with producers who wanted to change them, label executives who wanted to make them more commercial, choreographers who wanted to make them more danceable. And I’ve said no to all of them. Because they were mine.”
She set the tea down, her pen finding its way back into her hand—that nervous reflex she couldn’t quite control. The tapping started again, softer this time, like a heartbeat slowed down. “And then someone in a bedroom in Finland decides to rip them apart and rebuild them, and...” She trailed off, her gaze drifting somewhere past his shoulder, past the coffee shop’s windows, past everything familiar.
“I thought I’d be angry,” she continued, her voice gaining strength. “When you showed me that first video—the Britney one—I was waiting for the anger to come. The protective instinct. The part of me that’s spent fifteen years fighting to keep control of my own work.” She shook her head slowly, a rueful smile touching her lips. “But it never came. Instead, I felt ... seen. Like someone had looked at the architecture of my song and understood what it was actually made of.”
She looked at Adam then, her dark eyes holding his with an intensity that made the coffee shop’s ambient noise—the hiss of the espresso machine, the chatter of students at nearby tables—fade into insignificance. “Do you know how rare that is? To have someone understand the bones of what you’ve built?” Her pen tapped twice, then stopped. “And they’re still mine. The bones are still mine. But now they’re also ... something else. Something I didn’t know they could be.”
Her voice dropped lower, almost to a whisper. “It’s like looking at a photograph of yourself that someone else took. You recognize the person in the image, but you’re seeing them from an angle you’ve never occupied. A version of yourself that exists only in someone else’s eyes.” She paused, her fingers tightening around the pen. “That Finnish guy? He’s never met me. He doesn’t know what I look like when I’m tired or what my mother’s cooking smells like or why I wrote that bridge the way I did. But he heard something in my song that I didn’t know was there. And now I can’t unhear it.”
“That’s what makes a great song,” Adam said. “The bones hold up no matter what you do to the surface.”
Shakira leaned back in the booth, studying him with an intensity that made the coffee shop feel suddenly very small.
“You’ve thought about this,” she said. “More than you’re letting on.”
“Maybe.”
“You have songs picked out. Mine. Songs you think would work for this kind of reimagining.”
Adam rubbed the back of his neck. The slight crook in his nose caught the dim light. “Maybe,” he said again.
“Tell me.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a challenge.
Adam took a breath. “The obvious choices are ‘Objection (Tango), or maybe ‘Las de la Intuición.’ They both have the right energy. Strong rhythms. Dramatic builds. You could transpose them to minor key, crank the distortion, and they’d work.”
“But those aren’t the ones you’d pick.”
“No.”
“What would you pick?”
He met her eyes. “‘La Pared.’”
The words hung between them.
“‘La Pared,’” she repeated. The Spanish came out richer in her mouth—La Pa-red, each syllable distinct, rolling off her tongue like she was tasting it for the first time. “A love ballad? Why?”
Adam leaned forward, his elbows on the table, the coffee shop’s ambient noise fading into a distant hum. He could feel the weight of her attention, the way she was studying him with those dark eyes that missed nothing. “Because it’s already about walls,” he said slowly, letting the words settle between them. “It’s already about separation and longing and the thing that stands between two people. The original is soft. Vulnerable. Almost fragile. You sing it like you’re pressing your palm against glass, hoping the other person can feel the warmth on the other side.”
He paused, his fingers tracing an absent pattern on the tabletop. “But there’s something underneath that—something you put there intentionally or not. That ache in the bridge, when the piano drops out and it’s just your voice and a single guitar note. That’s the moment where the song stops being about a lover and starts being about everything you’ve ever wanted but couldn’t reach.” He met her eyes, his voice dropping. “And in my head, that moment doesn’t fade into silence. It explodes.”
Shakira’s pen had stopped tapping. She was perfectly still, her breath shallow, her gaze locked on his face like she was trying to read something written in a language she’d only just learned.