The Friendship Song

The Friendship Song

Nancy Springer

To Joel, my husband and longtime best friend

FOREWORD

There were ordinary heroes, the ones with swords, and then there was the music hero, the one whose power was all for peace and singing. When he played his harp, the wild wolves came running to listen and oak trees uprooted themselves to follow him. He could lift beached ships back into the sea with his music, and make mountains weep, and calm earthquakes, and lull dragons to sleep.

Other heroes, the ones with swords, would venture to the world of the dead in order to steal treasure for the living. But the hero with the harp went there for another reason: love. The woman he adored, the love of his life, had died. He risked the dangers of the afterworld in an attempt to bring her back.

The king of the dead had cold eyes and no smile. Heroes were nothing but thieves to him. This one, the harper, came before him as a prisoner, his hands bound, his instrument hanging from his shoulder. As was the custom, the king told him, “You have one last request before we cast you into the shadowland where souls wander forever without rest.”

The harper said, “Let me play one song for you.”

They unbound his hands, and he played his harp so that notes flew out like silver birds. When he sang, the willow trees turned their heads toward him, the dark rivers of that place lay still and listened to him. After he finished the single song, he stopped, but the king of the dead urged him, “Play on.”

“Grant me the life of my beloved.”

“I will grant you, instead, your own life.”

The harper played. His first song had been of courage, and this one was of joy and hope. The shades of the dead gathered to hear, hanging like mist in the air around him. The three-headed, snake-fanged dog that guarded the gates of the dead left his post and came and lay by the harper's feet.

When he finished the song the king begged, “Play on.”

“Grant me the life of my beloved.”

“I will grant you, instead, a circlet of gold to be your crown.”

The harper played. This time his song was of sorrowing true love, and when he finished, tears were running down the hard face of the king, who could not speak.

“Grant me the life of my beloved,” the harper softly said.

A shadow of self, she floated near him like the others, listening without recognizing him, for she had eaten the food of the dead and remembered nothing. The king lifted his hand, and she became solid again, and breathed, and clung to her lover and started to shake with fear, for she remembered everything.

The king found his voice. “Go,” he told the harper gruffly, “and she will follow you, and nothing in my realm will harm either of you. But you must trust my word for this. Do not look back, or you will see her then and never again.”

It is said that no one who has entered the after-world and eaten the food of the dead can ever return. Perhaps the king knew the woman would never reach the living world, the hero would not be able to keep from looking back at her. He almost reached the gates, but then he had to look, he had to see, if his beloved was truly following him. When he turned, she screamed, melted into mist, and blew away, lost in the winds of shadowland.

Not many people remember her name: Euridice. But they still remember the harper, and say of him, “Orpheus wandered the world the rest of his days calling for her in song.” They say, “Orpheus could make stars fall with the music of his harp and sing down the moon out of the sky, but who can get the better of that cold-eyed king?”

Now there are other heroes, other music, to try to get the better of death.

CHAPTER ONE

The main thing I remember about the ride into the city is that Neon Shadow came on the radio and I turned the volume up real loud. Dad glanced over at me but didn't say anything. He knew I was way bad losing-sleep in love with Neon Shadow, and he knew I wasn't real happy about moving. So he just drove the U-Haul, and I just sat there listening to the hot metal music of the electric guitars and the way Nico's and Ty's voices melted together and the words they sang.

What we always been

Is what we're always gonna be
.

When the first two fish

Crawled up out of the sea

And looked at each other

And said, “Yo, brother
,”

Hey, doncha know they were you and me
.

We're friends
.

Friends. It was a nice thought, but girls like me—built like a moose and bigger than anybody else in sixth grade—girls like me didn't get a lot of friends. At least I sure never did. Okay, so I had blond hair and blue eyes, which made me a palomino moose, but so what? It took being cute to make a girl popular. There had been a few kids who seemed to like me, but no real close friends. And now I was going to have to start over in a new neighborhood, new school, new everything.

“That's a new release of an old song,” Dad said when the song was over.

“I
know
.”

Usually he would have grumped at me, “Harper, you don't have to yell.” But this time he just sighed.

I really did know it was an old song.
Metal Mag
said so. “Neon Shadow's nitro new cover of a rock classic,” they called it. The name of the song was just “The Friendship Song.” I liked it a lot. I mean, any kind of rock music gets me going, it makes me want to stomp my big feet and play air guitar, but this song—it was too good for air guitar, it was special. It really cooked, but it was want-to-cry beautiful at the same time.

I turned the radio down again to keep from annoying Dad too much. We were at the commercial strip right outside the city, where the Wendy's was, and the Taco Bell, and all the usual places. And then we drove past the Arena. The house, Dad's sweetie's house, was supposed to be near the Arena. So we were almost there.

Dad said, “Harper, you've got to admit a ten-room house is better than a little trailer.”

I didn't say anything, because he was so happy about what was happening, it made me feel bad for not being happy too. I mean, we were always real close, we hardly ever fought. It was just that right now everything was so sudden. Like, one minute he meets this truly strange woman named, of all things, Gus at a stupid art class, and the next minute they're getting married. So we had to move in with Gus, because her place was bigger than ours. But I liked the trailer. I'd lived there all my life, since the day I was born, practically. It was plenty big enough for just Dad and me.

“Try to give it a chance, Harper,” Dad said.

“Sure.”

“Gus is really looking forward to having a family.”

What the heck was her real name? Gustavia? Augusta? Something gross anyway. And I wasn't about to be her “family.” But I didn't say anything.

“The school district is a better one too. They offer Latin, calculus—”

“Dad, I
know
.”

That was Dad, always worrying about me, always hoping I'd do better than he had. Which was why he had given me such a bizarre name. His name was Buddy. Buddy Ferree. “People with cute names don't get taken seriously,” he'd told me once. I thought he'd done just fine for a person who'd taken care of a baby, me, instead of going to college. He was head of sales at Rugged Pak, a corrugated-box company.

“Here we are.” Dad stopped the U-Haul at the curb. I spotted Gus walking toward us from—her house.

Oh, my God, what a freaky house.

Of course I should have guessed. I'd met Gus a couple of times. I knew she wore overalls and a baseball cap backward whenever she wasn't asleep. But it's hard to guess some things just from meeting a person. No matter how weird they are, you're still not going to assume they have a sixteen-foot metal cactus in the front yard. I mean, it was a thing put together out of pipes, and it looked like a cactus to me.

Gus said, “Yo, Groover,” to me. She called me Groover, who knows why. But she kept on going past me, vaulted over the hood of the U-Haul, and went around to the driver's side. My dad had his window down, and Gus started kissing him.

“Ew, sick.” I turned my back on them and got out.

Across the street there was a girl about my age sitting on her front steps watching Gus kiss my dad and everything. Wonderful. Just wonderful.

I meant to go inside the house and look around, but Gus's whole place was so strange I just stood and stared. All the other houses in the neighborhood were regular row houses close together, but her place stood off by itself with a big yard all around, and every inch of the yard had some kind of bizarre object on it, like a tower of hubcaps, and a claw-footed bathtub painted red and black, and a Statue of Liberty made out of venetian blinds. The house was all funkied up with pillars and steeples and things, and there was strange stuff hanging in the windows.

Just the same I would have gone inside, because I wanted to get dibs on the best bedroom, but it was like something took me by the shoulders and turned me around and shoved me away.

Really. It was just as if the yard or the house or something grew invisible hands and gave me a good push. As if something didn't like me, which was okay with me because I wasn't in any mood to like
it
. But then again, it wasn't okay. What the hell was going on?

There I was all of a sudden heading across the street when I didn't mean to. And there was the neighbor girl still sitting on a
normal
-looking house's front steps and watching.

“Hi,” I said to her, like it was my idea to come stumbling into her face.

“Oh, hi,” she said, pretending she hadn't seen me before. She wasn't tiny, but she wasn't an overgrown geek like me either. She was slim and pretty, with dark hair and huge dark eyes and skin the smooth brown color of caramel, and I could tell right away she wore a bra. I was still hiding everything under a baggy sweatshirt.

We both stared across at Gus's house. She and my dad had finally got done sucking face and had the back of the U-Haul open.

“My name's Rawnie,” the girl said.

“I'm Harper.”

“Huh?”

“
Harper
.” I hated my name.

“Oh. You're moving in?”

“Nah. We just stopped by because it looked like a garage sale.” Jeez, what did she think a U-Haul was for?

“Okay, dumb question. Is your dad marrying Spook House McCogg?”

That was another dumb question. Like, Dad and Gus were just chewing on each other because there wasn't a McDonald's burger handy? But I let it go, because something else seemed more important. I said, “Spook House?”

“That's what we call her around here.” Rawnie looked up with eyes that flashed white, then moved over on her steps so there was room for me to sit down. So I sat beside her, and she said real soft, “Listen, I don't mess with her. She's nice and everything, but there's something strange about her place.”

“No duh.”

“Listen.” She spoke in a hurry, with her voice low, like she was telling me something important and dangerous. Her eyes were like woods lakes, brown and deep. She said, “There's lights and voices over there after dark. And nobody goes in there with spray paint or anything, even though they do everywhere else. And there's this kid, Benjy Jacobs, down the street, he was missing for two days once, and when he finally showed up, he said he was in Spooky McCogg's backyard the whole time and couldn't get out.”

“What do you mean, he couldn't get out?”

“He just couldn't get out! He said it was like there were spirits or something wouldn't let him get out.”

I tried to laugh, but I didn't really because I was remembering a feeling like two invisible hands on my shoulders shoving me off the sidewalk into the street.

“Great,” I said.

“Harper,” Dad called, looking around for me like I was a little kid, like I might get snatched or hit by a car or something. That was the only thing that bothered me about my dad, the way he treated me like a baby sometimes.