About the Book

A regular California town where the weather is always a little too perfect and everybody’s living their best life. Or doing a good job of pretending. Almost every house here has a pool. Like they sell you a small piece of California sky along with the mortgage.

Santa Sirena, California. Twenty minutes from the offices where the future gets made.

Miles Keller is sixteen. If he stopped showing up to school for a week, two people would notice: the front office, so they could call his parents, and Bob. Paige stands outside Building Two every morning, and he has been planning to walk up to her for three years. Nights, he and Bob play in the garage. They put their first song online and got five views. Three of them their own.

Miles is good with code. He spends the whole summer working out why the brain asks for one song again and deletes another like a mistake. He writes a program called HUM.

A month later the whole school gym is singing the BIG MAGE chorus. Paige learns his name before the rest of the country does. A year later there’s a label deal and a national tour. People sing every word and can’t remember the first time they heard it.

Bob said it sounded like cheating. All Miles heard was that it worked.