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Because I was not a real music student and because Sullivan sucked at organizational skills, we had to meet for my piano lesson in the old auditorium building. Turns out the practice rooms were filled to capacity at five o'clock on Fridays, by real piano players and real clarinet players and real cellists and all their real teachers and ensemble leaders.
So instead, I picked my way over to ugly Brigid Hall. To prove that Brigid was no longer a useful member of the ThornkingAsh environ, the grounds people had let the lawn between
Brigid and the other academic buildings get autumn crunchy and allowed the boxwoods and ivy to take over the dull, yellowbrick exterior. It was a message to all visiting parents: Do not take pictures of this part of the campus. This building has been deemed too ugly for academic use. Don't think we didn't notice.
On the walk over, my phone beeped in my pocket. Pulling it out, I saw a text message from Dee. When I opened it, the first words of text I saw were
James im so sorry and I felt sick to my stomach and deleted it without reading any further. I shoved the phone back into my pocket and headed around the side of Brigid Hall to the entry.
The door was coated in peeling red paint that seemed somehow significant. I didn't think there were any other red doors on campus. Like me, a loner. I punched my knuckles lightly against the door knob in solidarity. "You and me, buddy,"
I said under my breath. "One of a kind."
I let myself in. I had entered a long, thin room, populated by old folding chairs all pointed attentively toward a low stage at the other end of the building. It smelled like mold and the old wood of the floor and the ivy pressed up by the frosted glass windows. On the stage, recessed lights illuminated a grand piano that was as old and ugly as the building itself. The whole thing was a crash course in all that was best forgotten about
1950s architecture.
Sullivan sat at the piano, knobby figures toying with the keys.
Nothing mind-blowing, but he knew his way around the keyboard. And the piano, for what it was worth, didn't sound nearly as bad as it looked. I walked up through the folding chair audience, grabbing one of the front-row chairs and bringing it onto the stage with me.
"Salutations, sensei," I told him, and dropped my backpack onto the chair beside the piano. "What a lovely creation that piano is."
"Isn't it though? I don't think anybody remembers that this building is here." Sullivan played "Shave and a Haircut" before getting up from the bench. "Strange to think this used to be their auditorium. Ugly little place, isn't it?"
I noted the detachment. Not "our auditorium." Sullivan was frowning at me. "Feeling all right?"
"I didn't sleep much." A understatement of cosmic proportions.
I wanted nothing more than the day to be done so that I could fall into my bed.
"You mean, other than what you did in my class," Sullivan said.
"Some would argue that recumbent listening is the most effective."
He shook his head. "Right. I'll be looking for evidence of its efficacy on your next exam." He gestured to the bench. "Your throne."
I sat at the piano; the bench creaked and shifted precariously.
The piano was so old that the name of the maker was mostly worn away from above the keyboard. And it smelled. Like ground-up old ladies. Sullivan had put some sheet music up on the stand; something by Bach that I'm sure was meant to look simple but had way too many lines for pipe music.
Sullivan turned the folding chair around and sat on it backwards. His face was intent. "So you've never played piano before."
The memory of Nuala's fingers overlaying mine was somehow colored by the memory of last night; I tightened my fingers into a fist and released them to avoid shivering. "I tinkered with it once after we talked. Otherwise"--I ran my fingers over the keys and this time, struck by the memory of Nuala, I did shiver, just a tiny jerk--"we're virtually strangers."
"So you can't play that music up there on the stand."
I looked at it again. It was in a foreign language--like hell could I play it. I shrugged. "Greek to me."
Sullivan's voice changed; it was hard now. "How about the music you brought with you?"
"I don't follow."
Sullivan jerked his chin toward my arms, covered by the long sleeves of my black ROFLMAO T-shirt. "Am I wrong?"
I wanted to ask him how he knew. He could've guessed. The writing on my hands, equal parts words and music, disappeared beneath both sleeves. I might've had them pushed up earlier, in his class. I couldn't remember. "I can't play written music on the piano."
Sullivan stood up, gesturing me off the bench and taking my place. "But I can. Roll up your sleeves."
I stood in the yellow-orange stage lights and pushed them up.
Both of my arms were dark with my tiny printing, jagged strokes of musical notes on hurriedly drawn staffs. The notes went all the way around my arms, uglier and harder to read on my right arm where I'd had to use my left hand to write. I didn't say anything. Sullivan was looking at my arms with something like anger, or horror, or despair.
But the only thing he said was, "Where is the beginning?"
I had to search for a moment to find it, inside my left elbow, and I turned it toward him, my hand outstretched like I was asking him for something.
He began to play it. It was a lot older-sounding than I remembered it being when I'd sung and hummed it with Nuala.
All modal, dancing right between major and minor key. It kicked ass a lot more than I remembered too. It was secretive, beautiful, longing, dark, bright, low, high. An overture. A collection of all the themes that were to be worked into our play.
Sullivan got to the end of the music on my left arm and stopped. He pointed to his flat leather music case leaning against the piano leg. "Give me that."
I handed it to him and watched as he reached inside and pulled out the same tape recorder he'd brought to the hill that day. He set it on top of the piano and looked at it as if it contained the secrets of the world. Then he pressed play.
I heard my voice, small and tinny: "You weren't recording before now?"
Sullivan's voice, sounding very young and fierce when not attached to his body: "Didn't know if I'd have to."
A long silence, hissing tape, birds singing distantly.
Then, Nuala's voice: "Don't say anything." I didn't immediately realize what it meant, that I was hearing Nuala's voice coming out of the recorder. She continued. "You're the only one who can see me right now, so if you talk to me, you're going to look like you were retained in the birth canal without oxygen or something."
Sullivan reached up and hit stop.
"Tell me you didn't make the deal, James."
His voice was so grave and taut that I just said the truth. "I didn't."
"Are you just saying that? Tell me you didn't give her a single year of your life."