Ballad (16 page)

“Well.” Linnet spread our outlines out in front of her. “Then I don’t understand. Is this some sort of cheating or plagiarism? Or some sort of very unfunny practical joke? It’s not my job to grade Mr. Sullivan’s papers, but I couldn’t help but notice that your outlines for the composition project are identical.”

Paul looked at me. I looked at Linnet. “It’s neither. Didn’t you read them?”

Linnet made a vague hand gesture. “They were both gibberish to me.” She pulled the title page of mine close and read it aloud:

“Ballad:

A Play in Three Acts,

to rely heavily upon Metaphor,

meaningful only to those

who see the World as it really is.”

She looked at us, an eyebrow arched. “I don’t see how this fits into the assignment—isn’t it a ten-page essay on metaphor? And it doesn’t explain why your outline is the same as Paul’s.”

“Sul—Mr. Sullivan will understand.” I was tempted to take the outlines from her before she wrote something on them with the red pen lying inches away from her fingers. “It’s a group project, and the play itself is our essay. We’re writing and performing it together.”

“Just the two of you? Like a skit?”

I didn’t really see why I needed to explain this to her, when she wasn’t going to be the one giving us our grade. She was bending the corner of one of the outlines back and forth, her eyes on us. I wanted to smack her fingers. “Me and Paul and some others. Like I said, Mr. Sullivan will be okay with it.”

“Are
others
doing projects like this?” Linnet frowned at us and then at the creased corner on the outline, as if she couldn’t figure out how the crease had gotten there. “It seems unfair to grade such a drastically different project on the same scale as other, more traditional compositions that followed the rules.”

Oh, God, she was going to start talking about rules, and I wasn’t going to be able to keep myself from saying something incredibly sarcastic and I would get Angel Paul into trouble by association. I bit the inside of my lip and tried not to glare.

“Mr. Sullivan is new to Thornking-Ash. Quite new to teaching as well. I don’t think he understands the ramifications of allowing students to stray too far from the boundaries.” Linnet stacked our outlines and reached for the red pen. I winced as she marked
formatting/structure
on the top of each of them. “I think I’ll have a talk with him when he gets back. You will probably have to redo these outlines. I’m sorry if he let you think you could interpret his assignment so loosely.”

I wanted to snap something really cutting back, like
sorry you decided to interpret “looking female” so loosely
or
who died and made you God, sweetheart
, but I just gave her a tight smile. “Right. Anything else?”

She frowned at me, as if I really had said my choice phrases out loud. “I know about kids like you, Mr. Morgan. You think you’re something special, but just wait until you’re in the real world. You’re no more special than anyone else, and all your wit and disdain of authority will get you absolutely nowhere. Mr. Sullivan might think you’re a shooting star, but I assure you, I do not. I watch stars like you burn out in the atmosphere every day.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said.

I was playing like crap. I was standing on top of my gorgeous hill in the middle of the gorgeous day and everything was super-saturated with fall colors and my pipes sounded great and the air felt perfect on my skin and I couldn’t focus on a single thing.

Dee’s big red F.

Paul’s list of the dead.

Nuala’s fingers on my wrist.

I closed my eyes and stopped playing. I exhaled slowly and tried to focus on that narrow part of myself that I retreated into during competitions, but it felt like an inaccessible crack that I was too unwieldy and strung out to fit into.

I opened my eyes again. The hill was still empty because everyone else was in ensemble classes or private lessons. Good thing, too. Because it meant there was no one around to hear me suck. Maybe I was just a big shooting star like Linnet said, and I’d be a big nobody in a desk job when I got out of this place.

I gazed down at my shadow, blue-green and long across the trampled grass, and as I did, another long shadow appeared beside it.

“You suck today,” Nuala observed from behind me.

“Thanks for making me feel better,” I said.

“I’m not supposed to make you feel better.” Nuala moved around to face me, and I swallowed when I saw her hip-huggers and clingy T-shirt that was every color of the ocean, like her eyes. “I’m supposed to make you
play
better. I brought you something.”

She held out her fist toward me and opened her fingers for the great reveal.

“Nuala,” I said, reaching out to take her gift. “It’s a rock.” I held it up to my face to look at it closer, but it really was just a rock. About the length of my thumb, opaque white, and worn smooth by time.

Nuala snorted and snatched it out of my hand before I could stop her. “It’s a worry stone,” she said. “Look, stupid human.” She rested the rock in her palm and rubbed her thumb and forefinger over its surface.

“What’s it supposed to do again?”

Nuala swapped the rock to her left hand and took my thumb in her right one, holding it the same way she’d just been holding the worry stone. “You rub it,” she said, and one side of her mouth curled up, “To relax you.” She ran her thumb and forefinger over my thumb, just as she’d done with the stone. Her fingers grazed my skin, leaving behind invisible promises and
oh freaking hell
my knees went weak with it.

She grinned and slapped the stone into my hand. “Yeah. You get the idea. You rub the stone when you get anxious or need to think. I thought it might keep you from writing on your hands. Not that that will keep you from being a neurotic freak. But it’ll keep other people from being able to tell you’re a neurotic freak, until it’s too late.”

I swallowed, again, but for a different reason this time. The worry stone was maybe the most thoughtful thing I’d ever gotten from someone. I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t had to fake gratitude for a gift, and now that I actually was grateful,
thank you
didn’t seem to cut it.

It seemed wrong that the first thing that came to mind was a sarcastic response. Something to deflect this warm feeling in my cheeks and put me back in control of myself.

“You can thank me later.” Nuala wiped her palms on her jeans, although there was nothing on the rock to dirty them. “Next time you forget to bring a pen with you.”

“It—” I stopped because my voice sounded weird.

“I know,” she said. “Now, are you going to play, or what? You can’t just stop with that last jig. It was, like—”

“Absolute crap?” I suggested in a totally normal voice, pocketing the stone and readjusting my pipes.

“I was going to say something nicer, like … nah, you’re right. Absolute crap does it.” She paused, and her face turned into something quite different. Almost innocent. “Can we play my tune?” She meant the one she’d sent me in the dream, the one I’d played on the piano.

I sort of hated to tell her no. I felt I should reward her brief moments of lucidity and non-homicidal behavior. “Won’t fit into the range of the pipes.”

“We can change it.”

I made a face. We could squash it to fit, but it would suck the life out of it. The joy of the tune was in the high bits, and those were beyond the reach of the pipes.

“It won’t be bad. C’mon,” Nuala said. She seemed to realize that she sounded sweet, because her eyebrows arched sharply and she added, “It can’t be any worse than the jig you were just butchering.”

“Ha. You wound me with your words like knives. Fine. Show me I’m wrong.”

I readjusted my pipes again and Nuala stood at my shoulder. Our shadows became one blue-green shape on the grass below, two legs and four arms. I hesitated for just a moment before reaching behind me to catch one of her hands. I pulled it around me so that her fingers were stretched over the pipe chanter. Her hand looked small on the chanter, stretching to cover all the holes.

“You know that won’t work,” Nuala said softly.

Yeah, I knew it. Didn’t mean I had to like it. I slid my hand underneath hers and covered the holes with my fingers, her hand still resting on mine. “Then we can pretend. Where’s your other hand?”

She had to loop it between my arm and my body to keep from getting in the way of the bag, but she managed to get her fingers on top of my other hand. Her ridiculous giant cork heels made her tall enough to rest her chin on my shoulder.

My voice came out a little low. “Jig first, then your tune?”

“You’re in charge,” she said.

“Oh how I long for those days,” I replied, and started to play.

No crap this time. It was like everything I’d been thinking about, except for the music and Nuala’s arms wrapped around me, was gone. The jig felt light as a helium balloon, the high notes soaring off into the sky and the low notes tugging it down toward the ground before letting it bounce back up again. And my fingers—they were working again. Snapping up and down across the chanter like well-oiled pistons, every note perfect and even and clean. The tiny grace notes bubbled out like laughter between the huge round notes on the beat.

I silenced the pipes—absolutely silent, absolutely right—and grinned down the hill.

Nuala said, “Yeah, so now you’re done showing off. Do you want my help or not?”

“I—what?” I tried to turn my head to see her, but her chin on my shoulder was too close to see her face. I struggled to remember if I could sense her lending her musely power to me, but all I could remember was the music and the feel of her fingertips on top of mine. And then nothing but the utter joy of the jig. “I thought you were.”

“Whatever. Never mind. Can we just play?”

“You’re in charge,” I said sarcastically.

“Oh how I long for those days,” she mocked me. I started the drones up, waiting for her to tell me what to do.
This
time I felt it—first, the sort of silence that trickled through me, and then the heat of golden inspiration coursing through me in long strands that came out my fingers. The tune I’d played on the piano became a tidy entity in my head, a little box that I could mentally turn this way and that to see how it was made and what made it beautiful and where I could eliminate notes and add others to make it suit the pipes.

Nuala’s breath was hot on my neck and her fingers were tight on mine, as if she could force the pipes to play for her, and I let the tune out. I heard the riffs from before, the bulk of the melody, the way I could let the sustain of the pipes make up for the lack of the high notes. The tune ached and breathed and twisted and shone and it hurt just to play it because it was what the pipes had been made for. Maybe what I had been made for. To play this tune with Nuala’s summer-thick breath on my face and this stillness in my heart and nothing more important than this music right now.

I could almost hear Nuala’s voice, humming the tune into my ear, and when I half-turned my head, I saw that her eyes were closed and she was smiling the most beautiful smile in the world, her face freckled and joyful.

This was the whole world, this moment. The wind beat the golden grass to the ground and back up again, and above us, the deep, pure blue of the sky was the only thing that pressed us to the earth. Without the weight of that clarion sky, we would’ve soared into the towering white clouds and away from this imperfect place.

Nuala dropped her arms from mine and stepped back.

I let the pipes sigh to a stop and turned to face her.

I was this close to saying,
Please give me the deal. Don’t let me say no. Don’t let me be a shooting star burning out in a cubicle somewhere
. But her expression stopped me cold.

“Don’t ask me,” she said. “I take it back. I won’t make a deal with you.”

Nuala

This is my fall, my autumn, my end of year,

My desperate memory of summer

This is how I tell her who I am.

This is how far I am from the beginning

This is how I want everything, this is how I want what I was, this is how I want her

This is my fall, my stumble,

my descent into this darkening fling
.

—
from
Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I was brilliant as a flame when I was first born, this time around. I didn’t quite remember my first pupil, but I remember that his paintings were huge and yellow, and that his death was violent and very fast.

The second guy lasted a little longer. I thought maybe almost six months, but maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better now, remembering. He had wanted me so badly; he had been so tormented by the dreams I sent him and the words I whispered in his ear, he’d not even waited for his body to give up on him. I just sort of felt—
hungry
—in the middle of the night, and when I found him, he was hanging like a dead pig in a butcher’s.

And then there was the first one who I could remember really well. I had better control then, and I knew how to make them last. Jack Killian was his name, and he had been a brilliant fiddler. He made me think of James now, recalling how much he’d wanted
more
. He didn’t even know what more was, he just knew he wanted to be more, that there must be more to life, that if he didn’t find this
more
, life was only a terrible trick played on him by nature.

Two years. I made his fiddle sound so lovely that onlookers wept. The tunes he wrote had a stranglehold on tradition but reached out to grab what they needed from contemporary music. He was dynamite. Killian toured and toured and sold albums and wanted more more more more and I took more more more more until one day he looked at me and said, “Brianna”—I’d told him my name was Brianna—“I think I’m dying.”

That was a long time ago. Now, I sat in the theater seat the way they told you not to at the beginning of every reel, my feet resting on the seat in front of me, trying not to think about it. There weren’t enough people in the theater to care about my feet being up; it was only a matinee in tiny Gallon, Virginia after all.

The movie was an action adventure that swept across three different continents. It bristled with action scenes and tension and all kinds of crap that should’ve held my attention, but all I could think about was James looking at me on the hill, about to beg me for the deal.

I closed my eyes, but I saw Killian’s face. I thought I had forgotten it long ago. I thought I’d forgotten all of them long ago.

“Let’s blow this place,” said the ruggedly handsome hero on the big screen, and I opened my eyes. He had his finger on some sort of detonator; he didn’t realize that somewhere offscreen, his dewy-eyed love interest was trapped inside the building he was about to blow up. She was calling him on his cell phone, and the camera angle showed that it was set on vibrate so that he didn’t hear it over the legions of helicopters floating around him. Idiot. Morons like that deserved to die alone.

I wasn’t supposed to care about my marks. How could I care about them and live?

In front of me, the Rugged-Faced Hero pushed the red button on the detonator. The screen filled with a giant fireball that took out two helicopters in an intensely unrealistic way.

If I’d been directing, I would’ve cut back to the heroine’s face one second before the explosion, just as her muscles tensed, right when she realized
I’m trapped. There’s no way out of this.

I was so hungry. I’d never gone this long without making a deal before.

In my head, I thought of Killian again, looking at me, and I heard his voice—I thought I’d forgotten that too. But this time, when I saw the scene, it was me, and I was looking at James.

“James,” I said, “I’m dying.”