Authors: James van Pelt
The sun dropped below the horizon as Peter walked across the lawn to Christy’s front door. She answered when he knocked. She put her fists to her hips. “So, did you duke it out with the FBI guy in Dr. Hecke’s office, or did you fold under the threat of torture?”
“How’d you know I was in the office?” Peter wondered if she’d sneaked the gun into school and had been watching him.
“Brittany Jones is on the Poms squad and she’s the secretary’s aid. She told me you looked like a five-year-old with his hand in the cookie jar.”
Peter laughed, and it felt like the first time he’d relaxed since he’d found the gun. Christy closed the door behind them. “Let’s go to my room. We can talk there.”
Her mom sat on the living room couch, reading a magazine. “Sure,” she said, “You kids go talk about your young adult things behind closed doors so you don’t shock an old fuddy-duddy like me.”
Peter said, “Hi, Mrs. Sanders. I heard you ran a 5K a couple of weeks ago that would have made you a part of the varsity on the high school cross country team. I don’t think that qualifies you as a fuddy duddy.”
“You can’t sweet talk a sweet talker,” she said, smiling. “Nice try, though. Oh, and I was kidding about closing the door. Keep it open.”
Christy rolled her eyes.
When they got into her room, she handed him her backup guitar and said, “If mom thinks we’re playing guitar, she won’t wander back here. Try this fingering.” Peter held the instrument, a beat-up acoustic, awkwardly across his lap. She showed her fingers on the strings of her electric guitar that she’d said was a “Bulldog, modeled after the Les Paul Gibson Junior classic,” which didn’t mean anything to Peter. Her guitar was black. She slid her fingers up and down the strings, producing a squawk through the little speaker at her feet. “Okay, now strum, like you’re scraping toast. Not too hard.”
Holding his hand the way she said made his fingers feel as if they were being sliced open. He dragged the pick across the strings.
“Not bad. I think you let up on your little finger. You have to keep the strings against the frets. Try again.”
The sound was better this time.
“That’s the first chord for the Beatle’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ Listen, you’ll hear what I mean.” She picked a file off her playlist on the computer, filling the room with the song, but stopping it after a few seconds. “Now do it again.”
“Don’t your fingers bleed?”
Christy shook her head. “Not now. At first, though. Whew! Mom made me quit for a couple weeks so that they would heal up. Now I have callouses. I hear if you start with nylon strings it’s easier, but I didn’t like their sound as much. So, what did the FBI guy want?” She picked a few notes on her guitar.
“I thought he had me, but he’s fishing. When I ditched the meeting in the gym, he noticed. I think he wanted to check my shoes. He had a mini-version of the mat everyone walked over to get to the assembly. It’s a good thing I have more than one pair. What’s that you’re playing? It’s pretty.”
She ran through the riff a couple of more times, and then sang, softly, “
Hey, Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me. I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
.” She played the whole song, her voice barely loud enough to hear. Peter closed his eyes for a second, then realized he didn’t want to miss what she was doing with her hands. It was magic. Her fingers moved up and down the strings, jumping from one position to the next.
Peter thought about transcendent moments, a concept they’d learned in English last year: a moment beyond normal, human experience. He felt like he was in one. Christy strummed and picked and sang the words like nothing he’d ever heard before. This is silly, he thought. He’d listened to music, of course, even this song, but it hadn’t ever been like this. Songs weren’t things that real people that you know could do. They weren’t available next door from a neighbor you’d known since kindergarten. Her hair hung down, partly covering her face as she bent over the guitar. How can you get that much sound out of one instrument? How can a few notes and a voice blend like this?
Her hands were strong, competent. Fearless. Moving, it seemed, on their own accord. The tendons on the back of her hands showed her effort. For a second he thought he might weep. Chills ran up and down his back.
Christy played the last note. Her voice trailed off.
Peter didn’t speak. He couldn’t speak.
Christy laid the guitar flat on her lap. “I’ve never sung
for
somebody before. I’m sorry. My voice is awful. And that song needs a harmonica. I’ve got a neck strap, but I haven’t practiced with it.”
Finally, Peter said, “That’s amazing. How long did you say you’ve been playing? Can you do another one?” He hoped she would play “Mr. Tambourine Man” again. He knew he’d never hear it the same way.
“No, not amazing,” she said. “I miss-fingered a couple of times. I can do better, but thanks for saying so. I like this song too. Most people play it on an acoustic. Here’s a different one.”
She checked her tuning, then picked the first few notes before singing again. Her voice this time stronger and somehow despairing. He didn’t recognize the song. It was about a fast car and driving somewhere. The story was good, though, and while she was singing, he decided that “transcendent” was exactly the right word.
When she finished, she said, “Dante called me. He wanted me to tell him where the gun was.”
Peter shook his head. In the shadows of her room, listening to her play, he’d forgotten their more serious business. “What did you do?”
Christy strummed another note, but it sounded discordant, not beautiful. “He said you were hogging it, that he should have it because he could keep it safer than you could. He sounded definite about it, like I should just believe him and hand it over.”
“So, what did you do?” The idea that Dante would go behind his back this way surprised him. They’d never fought before, like they did the night before on the porch, but Dante always said what was on his mind, or at least he did a year ago, before the two of them started drifting apart. Peter’s dad used to call them “a majority of two.” If the world went sour, but Dante was his friend, Peter felt fine. If everything in the world looked great, but Dante was mad, gloom and horrifying shadows filled Peter’s life. They protected and trusted each other. Sadly, Peter admitted to himself that the rules of their friendship had changed.
“You guys are pretty close, aren’t you?” Christy looked uncomfortable. “I feel like I’m getting in the middle of something.”
“I don’t know him as well as I used to,” said Peter. “He’s changed a lot in the last few months. Friendship’s a flexible state, I guess.”
“We’re friends, right?” Christy studied her guitar, not meeting his eyes.
“Yeah, I’d say so. Do you want to be friends?”
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “I don’t think I have any.”
“Friends?” Peter didn’t know whether to laugh or not. The idea was ludicrous. She was one of the most popular kids at the school.
“I’m not kidding. I used to love
Anne of Green Gables
. Have you ever read that book? It’s great—not a boy’s book, I suppose—and it has this amazing character in it, Anne Shirley. She’s on a lifetime search for a ‘kindred spirit.’ I like the idea of a kindred spirit. It’s somebody who gets you, who you don’t have to worry about because they don’t have an agenda with you. They just want to be around you, and you want them to be around you too. It’s an uber-friend, an ultra-friend. Somebody who I can confide my inmost soul. I don’t have one of those.”
Peter thought about how it used to be with Dante. Can someone be a kindred spirit temporarily? Wouldn’t a kindred spirit be forever? He tried to finger the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” while he thought about it. He could get his fingers to the right place, but it hurt. The sound wasn’t quite right either.
“I need to tune it. Give it here.” Christy took the guitar and played with the tuning pegs.
“What about the Pom team?”
Christy snickered. “Girls can be the most competitive beings on the planet. A couple of them are mad at me for being captain. Another couple think their boyfriends are interested in me. One is sort of in love with me, which makes me sad, and the rest aren’t interested in what I’m interested in. And don’t ask me about boys, either. What’s up with boys anyways? I keep catching them staring at my chest, and everything they say sounds like a come on. And you know what really worries me? That I’m just being full of myself. Maybe none of this is true. The world doesn’t revolve around me. I’m not special, but it seems to revolve around me. Have you ever read Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
? That’s an eye-opening book. Poor Sylvia Plath spent her whole life pretty sure that men just wanted to sleep with her, and she couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or not. Evidently she didn’t believe that she could be both an intellectual human being and an attractive person. Sort of hell for her since she was both.”
“Do you think everything I say is a come on?” Peter tried to remember if he’d spent time staring at her chest, and cursed a little bit that she’d said it, because now he was conscious of looking or not looking at her. “I’m a guy.”
“That’s why I asked if we were friends. Do you think I’m a human intelligence that you like spending time with, or am I a girl who you want to rub up against?”
He tried to pick his words carefully. “That’s a minefield question if I’ve ever heard one. You’re sort of both. I mean ‘a human intelligence’ and ‘a girl.’” It seemed that just a few minutes ago, though, she’d been playing the guitar, and he thought of her as a creator of music. He didn’t think he had an ‘agenda,’ whatever she meant by that.
“Fair answer.” She mulled it over while still playing with the tuning pegs. “I think it’s the sort of answer a friend would make. If you were hitting on me, you’d say something flattering about my looks. I know how this game is played.”
“So, if I say you look good, I’m not your friend anymore?”
She smiled. “No, once you’re in the friend zone, there are no fouls. I trust you. You trust me. We’re safe with each other and we like each other. We’re kindred spirits.”
“Okay, then. Tentatively, under your definition, I’d say we’re friends. Doesn’t friendship normally evolve subconsciously, though? I mean, you look at a relationship that’s built for a while and you realize that it’s the kind of friendship you’re talking about? You can’t just decide you’re friends. You are or you aren’t. It’s like being in love.”
“Another fair point. I’m a self-conscious person. You’re a self-conscious person. If you get two people together who think about who they are, who are introspective and self-aware, I think that they could have a conversation like we’re having.”
Peter let out an appreciative “Hmmm.” This didn’t sound like any conversation he’d heard in a movie or read in a book before, but it seemed reasonable. “Okay, but I don’t think we should have this conversation again. It makes me feel gicky. If you get too analytic about a thing, you can kill it. It’s like Mrs. Pickering with that ‘To a Mouse’ poem. By the time we finished counting the syllables and summarizing the verses and identifying every fricking literary technique Robert Burns used, the poem died. The first time I read it, I thought the whole mice and men are similar idea was cool, but by the time we finished, I think I would have pulled my plow around the field a few more times to see if I could turn up mouse nests that I’d missed. If I don’t hear that poem for fifty years, it will be fine with me.”
She handed the guitar back. “That’s funny! The way you talked about the poem in class, I thought you’d decided it was the best thing you’d ever read. You sounded smarter about it than she did. I’m not kidding. A couple other kids thought so too. How’d you get so smart about literature?”
“How’d you get so good on guitar?”
Christy’s dad poked his head in the room. For a big guy, he moved quietly. Peter didn’t even know he’d been in the house. “Something’s going on outside. Have you heard anything about it?”
At the end of their block, under the streetlight, a large, canvas covered army truck parked next to the curb. Two soldiers cordoned off a section of the street behind the truck with traffic cones and yellow tape, and then set up on a folding table what looked like a small satellite dish. Christy, Peter and a couple of neighborhood adults gathered at the edge of the tape.
“What you boys up to?” asked a middle-aged man wearing a jacket that was too small for him and decorated with lavender fur trim. Peter guessed that it was his wife’s jacket.
One of the soldiers, a woman who didn’t look much older than Christy, said, “Just a security check, sir. Standard operating procedure. Nothing to worry about. We’ll be gone in the morning.”
Peter wondered what would happen if he trotted around Christy’s house, retrieved the duffle bag and handed it to the soldier. It would be an
easy
solution. He also wondered what would happen if instead he used the gun to peek inside their truck. Were there other men in the back? Were they studying an array of monitors connected to the little satellite dish? Maybe they were monitoring cell phone calls. Maybe they could listen into the nearby houses.
It’s not fun being paranoid, he thought. The tension returned to his neck and shoulders. He could feel the relaxation leaking away. It would be so simple to believe what people told you, particularly authority figures, but he’d never been able to do it.
Two people stood under the porch light at his house, facing the door.
“Isn’t that Dante?” Christy said.
Peter stopped and grabbed her arm. “He’s with Blue-suit.”
The dark-eyed, FBI (maybe fake) guy knocked on the door. Peter’s dad opened it, but Peter couldn’t hear what they said. It looked like Blue-suit shoved Dante when they went in.
He stood on the pavement, stunned. “Dante gave me up,” Peter said. “Or he got caught somehow and Blue-suit made him talk. Come on!”
Without looking to see if she followed, Peter ran toward the army outpost on the corner, cutting across a lawn when the traffic cones and tape blocked the path. He heard Christy running behind him. He turned left, past the corner house, around it, and then into the unlit alley. When he got to his own yard, he ducked to stay out of view until he reached Christy’s backyard and her gate.