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The first thirty seconds of the song were just noise — a low, grinding wall of guitar that rattled the car speakers and made the rearview mirror buzz faintly against its mount. Then the vocals kicked in, somewhere between a scream and a sob, and Chase nearly drove off the shoulder.
"What," he said, very carefully, both hands locking on the wheel, "is that."
From the backseat, Hazel didn't even look up from her phone, one earbud dangling loose around her neck where she'd plugged it into the aux cord like this was a perfectly reasonable thing to inflict on a moving vehicle. "Korn."
"Corn?"
"Korn. With a K." She finally glanced up, fifteen years old and radiating the specific superiority of a teenager who has just introduced an adult to something they consider deeply uncool of them not to already know. "Uncle Deacon put me on."
Chase shot a look at Nox in the passenger seat, silently begging for backup. Nox, who had been quietly reading the map on his phone with the particular stillness of a man pretending not to be affected by anything, met his eyes for exactly one second before returning to the screen.
"Of course he did," Chase muttered.
"He said it builds character."
"It builds something," Nox said, mild as anything, and Chase barked out a laugh loud enough that Hazel rolled her eyes and turned the volume up another two notches in retaliation.
They'd been on the road for three hours already, somewhere in the long flat stretch between nowhere and the lake house Nox had insisted on renting for the week, and Chase had cycled through exactly one playlist's worth of pop before Hazel staged her coup over the aux cord. He'd put up token resistance. It hadn't worked. It never did, not against her — she had Nox's stubbornness wrapped in Chase's smugness, and the combination was, frankly, unfair to deploy against two grown men who loved her more than was probably good for their authority in this household.
"This is not road trip music," Chase said, raising his voice slightly over a guitar riff that sounded like it was actively trying to dismantle the car. "Road trip music is supposed to make you want to roll the windows down and sing along, not make you reconsider every choice that led you to this exact moment."
"You can roll the windows down." Hazel kicked the back of his seat, not hard, just enough to be annoying on principle. "I'll sing along."
"Please don't."
"Too late." And she did, badly and gleefully off-key, mouthing along to lyrics she clearly knew by heart, headbanging just enough to mess up the half-up style she'd done that morning — something complicated with little twists that Chase recognized immediately as a more advanced cousin of the same technique he'd spent an entire evening years ago teaching Nox at their kitchen table.
He glanced at Nox again. Nox was watching her in the side mirror with an expression that gave nothing away on the surface, but Chase had spent enough years learning to read past the stillness to catch the small twitch at the corner of his mouth, the thing he did instead of smiling outright.
"You're enjoying this," Chase accused.
"I'm enjoying that it's loud enough I don't have to pretend I'm not listening to you complain about it." But the corner of Nox's mouth twitched again, and he reached over without looking and turned the volume down exactly one notch — not enough to actually quiet the song, just enough that conversation could survive over it.
"Hey!" Hazel protested.
"You can have it back at the next song," Nox said, in the tone that meant negotiation was over, and Hazel huffed but didn't argue, already scrolling for the next track with the focus of a DJ taking requests from an audience of nobody.
Chase took the opportunity of the lull to merge into the right lane, eyeing the exit sign for the next rest stop. "We need gas in like twenty minutes. And I want a terrible gas station coffee."
"You always want a terrible gas station coffee."
"It's a tradition, Buddy. I'm an old man with traditions."
"You're thirty-eight."
"In Korn years that's basically eighty." From the back seat came an offended noise that might have been a laugh, quickly smothered, and Chase grinned at the road, victorious.
The next song started before anyone could stop it — somehow louder than the first, if that was even possible — and Hazel let out a whoop of recognition, throwing both arms up despite there being nowhere for them to go in the back of a packed sedan. "This is the one, this is the one, turn it up—"
"Absolutely not," Chase said, at the same moment Nox reached for the dial and turned it up two notches instead of down.
"Buddy!"
"She likes it," Nox said simply, like that settled the entire debate, and maybe it did, because Hazel immediately reached forward between the seats to high-five him, nearly elbowing Chase in the process.
"Thank you," she told Nox solemnly. "You're my favorite dad now."
"You say that every time he agrees with you over me!" Chase scoffed.
"It's true every time he agrees with me over you," Hazel shot back, deadly accurate, and sat back satisfied with herself while the guitars screamed on and the windows, eventually, did get rolled down, all three of them yelling along badly to a song none of them — Nox included, though he'd never admit it — could actually keep up with.
By the time they pulled into the rest stop twenty minutes later, Chase's voice was shot, Hazel had declared the trip officially saved, and Nox had quietly, privately, already saved the song to his own phone for later — a fact he managed to keep to himself for almost an entire week before Hazel caught him listening to it alone in the kitchen and never, ever let him live it down.