The Mockingbirds (30 page)

“Yes, do you?” T.S. asks eagerly.

“I do.”

“I want to know how it started with him. Tell us how it started,” T.S. says. “Tell us every little detail you’ve been keeping all to yourself for the last month, you little secret keeper!”

I flash back to the morning after Carter, when I didn’t want to tell her anything. Now, with Martin, I want to tell her everything.

There’s a knock on the door. “I’ll get it,” T.S. says, and she opens the door to Martin. “Well, hello there!”

“Hey,” Martin says, not nearly as festive as T.S. or Maia.

“I’m betting you want a few minutes alone with Alex,” T.S. says.

Martin just nods, and Maia and T.S. exit quickly.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“Don’t apologize,” he says. He nods to my bed. “Can I sit down?”

I say yes and he is careful to sit a few feet away from me. The air suddenly feels heavy and I know why he’s here. To break it off. I swallow sharply and wait. He turns to me. “I should have just told Amy from the start.”

“What did she say?”

He pauses, then says, “She said it’s not how she would have liked to have found out.”

“Oh.”

“She said my actions could have seriously undermined the Mockingbirds’ credibility.”

“Amy doesn’t mince words.”

“And then she said it was a good thing Maia’s quick on her feet and delivered her brilliant speech.”

“It was brilliant,” I agree.

“Brilliant and true,” Martin adds. “And then Amy said in the end it didn’t hurt the case and may have helped it, but still she said she’d deal with me later.”

“What do you think she means?” I ask, wondering if the Mockingbirds will use their very own Mockingbird-ian ways to punish Martin.

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry, Martin,” I say.

“Don’t be.”

“But I feel terrible.”

“Don’t. I made my choice. I knew what I was doing,” he says firmly as he looks straight at me, his eyes still deadly serious, all brown, no flecks right now. His hands are holding the edge of my bed tight, like he’s not letting go, he’s angry or something. Angry at me. “It was worth it,” he says.

The only word I hear is the one in the past tense.
Was
.

“It
is
worth it,” he quickly adds, correcting himself. “It
is
worth it. You are worth it. And I hope they nail him,” he says, releasing his hands and balling his right hand into a fist. “He deserves it, that asshole.”

He slides close to me. “To do that to you,” he says, anger still lacing his voice as he lays his right hand on my hair, sweeping it off my face. “To do that to someone I’m so
crazy about.” Then softly, letting go of his fury, he says, “Someone I’m falling for.”

He closes his eyes, leans into my neck, nuzzling me, his hand on my cheek now, warm on my face. I relax into the feeling of his hand on me, knowing I am close to falling too.

I have to admit I feel a twinge of victory in the air about the verdict tomorrow, not to mention the fact that someone—someone I really and truly like—is
falling
for me. So as I pace backstage, waiting for the quartet to finish their rendition of
A Little Night Music,
I tell myself not to be cocky, not to assume the game is in the bag. Then the last note of the Mozart serenade ends and there are cheers and clapping. The foursome bows and leaves the stage, and the spotlight is on me, just me. I walk straight to the piano, ready to perform the most awesome piece of music ever written in front of my friends, my boyfriend—no longer my secret boyfriend, now my
boyfriend
boyfriend—my teachers, Miss Damata, and a freaking Juilliard admissions officer.

The instant my fingers hit the keys, I soar. I fly. I glide back into the music, only music, and Beethoven is mine again; we’re reunited, we’re not mad anymore. We’re on the same side. And on and on we go through the first movement, then the second, into the third, and now the fourth,
and I feel as if it’s righting all wrongs, stitching up wounds, rewriting history. And it’s beautiful and it’s loud, but loud-good, loud like sweep-through-your-body-and-carry-you-away loud. Loud like the whole audience is enrapt. Loud like it’s epic because it is and we all are just bathed in music and light and sound and magic and art and perfect perfection. We’re not just in the concert hall; we’re in Carnegie Hall, we’re on the world’s greatest stage, and all I can feel is music, sweet music, pouring over me.

And then we come to “Ode to Joy,” the most perfect piece of music tucked near the end of the most perfect symphony by the most perfect composer. And it’s just me and the piano crashing through space and time. I’m me again, restored. I’m me, who I was, who I’m supposed to be, who I’ve always been.

And I’m nearing the end, I’m just a few bars away; I wrap the music around myself and I’m so unbelievably far away from
that night
. I strike my last triumphant chords, the sound reverberating.

But then I’m back….

He has the condom on and he’s coming toward me now, his face is coming toward me, his body is coming toward me, and there’s a hand pressed on the mattress right next to my arm. His other hand is between his legs. I think I know what he’s doing. I think I know why his hand is between his legs. He’s going to try to enter me. He’s going to try to push himself into me.

I look down at me, at my body, and I’m naked in this bed, and I don’t know how I got naked in his bed. All I know is I don’t want him inside me. I don’t want his penis inside me. The spinning slows, then it halts, and the room’s no longer turning; it’s suddenly still and quiet and calm and I’m strong. I’m so strong I put my two hands on his big chest. I press my palms hard against him and push him. I shake my head; I say no. And I keep my hands on his chest like that.

And then I’m somewhere else. My brain goes someplace else, it wanders off because it doesn’t want to be here, but now it’s back, and a boy I don’t want to be with is on top of me and it makes no sense, so I turn to my side and fall asleep.

When I wake up again, there’s a noise, a sound, like a cross between a bark and a whisper, like an “oomph.” It’s like someone just sat on my chest. It’s dark and my mouth tastes like a sock, feels like wool. And there’s Carter. On me. Over me. In me. He’s pushing in me and I can feel him. I can feel his penis in me, even though I’m barely aware, half-asleep, half-awake, half-dreaming, half-dead. But I can feel him and he’s breathing. He’s breathing kind of heavy, hitting some sort of rhythm.

I realize the noise came from me. The “uh” came from me, from the feel of someone’s weight on me, someone’s body on me. And it’s like I just came to or something, the “uh” marking the line between sleep and awake, there and here. Now I’m here, still in his bed, still naked, still under him. Only now he’s pressing into me and he’s going faster and faster and I want to do something, say something, but all I feel is slower and slower and slower and all I can do is breathe, breathe, breathe….

And there’s nothing I can do to stop this, nothing I can do to move. My eyes are closed, and I’m just going to pretend I’m not here.

I will pretend, I will pretend, I will pretend I am enjoying it. It’s the only way to get through it. The only way is to pretend.

I’m enjoying it, I’m enjoying it, I’m enjoying it.

Then I open my eyes and I see my hands are on his back. My arms are around him. They’re around him and my hands are on his back, almost as if I want this, but I don’t want this, I don’t want this at all, I’m just pretending, so I don’t know why my hands are on his back.

Because this is not how it’s supposed to be. I’m not supposed to be enjoying it. My hands are not supposed to be on his back.

Somehow I finish the last few bars of the Ninth Symphony and this must be what they say about adrenaline, about lifting a car when your kid’s stuck under it. Sometimes you just do it. I do it, I play through it and I don’t know how. I make it through my world completely crashing in on me, and now I’m standing up, taking a bow, walking offstage.

Miss Damata finds me. She says she was blown away. She introduces me to the admissions officer. He says I have mad talent. He will arrange for an early audition in New York in the fall. How does October sound? I nod. Walk away. I see T.S. and Maia and Mel and Dana and Amy and Ilana and Sandeep and Martin. They all want to hug me, touch me.

But
my hands were on his back,
I want to say. My hands
were on his back and I pretended to enjoy it. And then I did enjoy it. I didn’t have a choice. I made myself enjoy it. And now I feel sick, horribly, awfully sick, because there can be no other explanation for my hands being on his back other than my enjoying it. My hands should have been pushing him, fighting him, or at least limp at my sides. But they were on his back. Forget the first time when I was practically asleep. Because the second time I let it happen with my hands.

I try to grab T.S.’s wrist, pull her aside, whisper in her ear, “T.S., I think I made a mistake. I think I messed up. I think I was wrong.” I try hard, so hard, to lift my hand to grab hers. I put my left hand under my right hand and try to push my hand closer to T.S., try to make it move, but it’s lead and my mouth is cotton and I can’t speak. Because if I did I would scream or I would whimper, “My hands were on his back.”

Somehow, like I did when I was onstage, I find the will to say something. “I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

I walk away, like a robot, a sleepwalker, heavy anti-gravity boots on. They wait for me, thinking I’ll be right back. But I slip out the back door of the music hall and they don’t even see me. I walk across the quad; the cold March air nips at me, but I don’t care because I don’t feel anything anymore. I’m in a cocoon with only one thing to keep me company—a memory that’s now come careening back at full speed.

I walk past my dorm, past McGregor Hall to the edge of campus. I walk and I don’t have a clue where I’m going or if my friends will figure out and follow me or if I have points, but I don’t care because I have to get away from here, away from me, away from the awful truth of my own hands that betrayed me.

My hands that are everything to me. My hands, the map that led me back to
that night
. These are the hands I play the piano with; like a surgeon’s hands, they make everything I do possible. They are the agents, the instruments that revealed me—who I really am.

Someone who got it wrong. Someone who liked it.

Thick shame fills my head and I keep walking down the hill, down the street, away from Themis, away from people, away from music, from Beethoven, who did it again, who deceived me again.

I walk and I walk and soon I’m on Kentfield Street and then I’m crossing it and then I’m walking up another street and up the porch and I’m at my sister’s house and I pray she’s here on a Saturday night. I knock on the door and her roommate Mandy answers.

“Is Casey here?”

“She’s spending the evening with
Vogue,
” Mandy says drily.

I walk past Mandy, up the stairs, down the hall, and into my sister’s bedroom. She tosses her fashion magazine to the ground and says, “What’s going on?”

I say nothing.

“Today must have been really hard. The trial, then your performance. You went one hundred eighty degrees the other way. Come sit,” she says, patting her bed.

I sit next to her on her bed, as I did when we were little. “Casey, why did you start the Mockingbirds?”

“I told you, Alex.”

“No. I mean why did you really start it? Who was that girl to you?”

“Her name was Jen.”

For Jen
. The book—
To Kill a Mockingbird
—was inscribed to Jen. My sister started the Mockingbirds for Jen.

“She lived next door to me senior year,” Casey continues. “We weren’t good friends. I mean, I had nothing against her. But she was…” her voice trails off.

“She was what?” I ask.

“She was really heavy,” Casey says quickly.

“Okay?” I say, not sure where she’s going.

“And some of the students called her names. They called her Beluga Whale and Goodyear Blimp, and it just kept going on. Sometimes when I heard them say things, I’d tell them to stop, but it didn’t make a difference. They kept doing it.”