By December, the list had 47 songs. By January, 200. Students added songs for test anxiety, heartbreak, snow days, silent lunches. Teachers didn’t find it because it looked like a homework tracker. The filter didn’t block it because it wasn’t music—it was a spreadsheet. But everyone knew what it was.

He thought about Mia before the surgery—how she’d drum on the kitchen table with chopsticks, how she’d sing off-key while loading the dishwasher. He typed: “Safe. Warm. The kind you hear when you’re falling asleep in the car.”

Between the lines of his history textbook, he typed desperate strings into the search bar: “free music no block,” “unblocked music websites,” “mp3 stream school wifi.” Most results were dead ends—pop-up graveyards and fake download buttons. But then, buried on page four of the search results, he found it.