She played it. It was beautiful — fuzzy, aching, a two-minute jangle of heartbreak and cheap reverb.
“M — The book is wrong about #37. Look up ‘Sleepwalking Through Saturday’ by The Deadlights. Never charted. But it should have. Trust me.”
But Mona found a loose page tucked inside the entry for “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John. It was a handwritten note from Sal: the billboard book of top 40 hits 10th edition
The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits , 10th Edition, sat on the corner of Mona’s desk like a brick of forgotten dreams. Its spine was cracked, the gold lettering mostly rubbed off, and coffee stains circled the entry for “Baby One More Time.”
Mona uploaded it to a dead forum for chart nerds. Within a week, a bootleg label pressed 500 copies. Within a month, a streaming service added it to a playlist called “Lost Top 40 Ghosts.” She played it
Now it was 2026. Streaming had long since made the physical chart obsolete. Billboard itself had rebranded as “Billboard: A Sonic Mood Matrix.” No one remembered the ritual of watching Casey Kasem count down from 40 to 1.
That night, Mona drove to a shuttered AM radio tower outside Tulsa. Buried in a lockbox beneath the transmitter was a reel-to-reel tape labeled “Sleepwalking Through Saturday — The Deadlights (Chart position: 37, 11:34 PM, March 17, 1979).” Trust me
The 10th Edition of the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits never got a reprint. But Mona didn’t mind. She kept the book open to page 372, where she’d penciled in her own entry: