by CD Reiss
“Thank you!” I went into the cafeteria.
“Thanks!” Gabriel added before following me in. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“That. Get in here by smiling?”
“Where’s scowling going to get me?” I handed him a porcelain plate. He bounced it as if checking its weight. “Are you a vegetarian or anything? They always have a veggie option if you ask.”
“No. I like meat.”
I put a chunk of tri-tip on his plate, then another.
“I can do it,” he said, reaching for the tongs of the next chafing dish.
“I know.” I got to the tongs first. “Do you like vegetables?”
His hand was still out. He didn’t want to be attended like a guest.
“I invited you here,” I said. “I serve.”
He dropped his hand. “Next time, I’ll do the inviting.”
“Fair.” I loaded his plate with grilled vegetables. Risotto. Rosemary potatoes. I wanted to give him everything.
“I’m good,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. Where do we pay? I’m buying.”
“No.”
“Look, you already invited me and served me. Let me get lunch.”
I shook my head. “It’s free. Come. This way.”
I led him to the outdoor patio, around a corner to a metal table that was always empty. He slid into the bench across from me and unwrapped his silverware, watching as I plucked mine from the center of the napkin roll.
“Cloth napkins,” he said, laying it on his lap. “It’s like an alternate universe.”
“A lot of money in college sports.”
I waited for him to try his first bite. I wanted him to like it. I’d never craved anyone’s approval as much as I wanted his.
“Wow, this is delicious.”
As soon as I had the approval, my overriding compulsion was to diminish it. “It’s good food.” I shrugged. “But it all comes out the same.”
His laugh was so sudden, he almost spit out his tri-tip. “I didn’t know you’d be funny.”
“I’m not really.”
He smirked and chewed at the same time. He had mischief in him. “I’ve passed this building a hundred times. Had no idea there was distribution of free food for the physically gifted.”
“Wander without a purpose and you’ll find new destinations.”
“That from a brochure?”
“Sure. You like it?”
“Love it. Keep feeding me like this and I’ll travel wherever they want me to go.”
“Even if it’s across campus?”
“Especially if it’s with you.”
I was complimented all the time. Sometimes the compliments were sincere. Sometimes they were meant to ask a question or a favor. Often, they revealed a hidden motivation. Gabriel was saying he enjoyed my company and revealed no more than that he wanted it more often.
After I paused too long, he asked, “Was that too forward?”
“Well, I just…” There was no reason not to be completely honest. “I’m going to Duke for my master’s.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. So. I’m really not into anything that’s going to get in the way of that. If you want to be friends, I can do that. But right now, I want to graduate and go to North Carolina without attachments.”
“No time for charming musicians.”
“No.”
“Even a charming asshole musician who won’t distract you?”
“I haven’t met such a person.” I popped a forkful of meat between my lips.
“There’s a charming asshole musician right in front of you.”
“I meant one who wouldn’t distract me.”
He raised his eyebrows a bit, then put his eyes on his plate to cut a corner off his tri-tip. “Future me is congratulating present me for doing such a good job.”
“Of what?”
“Not distracting you in the last months of school, and saying a really heartfelt but final goodbye after graduation.” He chewed thoughtfully.
I watched him, wondering if I could have a casual relationship with him before a heartfelt and final goodbye.
“He won’t tell me how the final concert went,” he said.
“Future me loved it,” I played along.
“Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for inviting me. You were brilliant.”
“I didn’t play.”
“Really? Why?”
He shook his head quickly. “Scratch that. I remember now. I spotted you from the stage. Did you see me wink?”
“I thought you were winking at the girl behind me.”
“That was my sister.”
“You have a sister?”
“Nah.” His fork scraped against his teeth from smiling and eating at the same time. “My mother’s only child is a rogue artist.”
“Ah.”
“You?”
“Me? Seven sisters and a brother.”
“Holy… wow. You’re never lonely then.”
“It’s a big house.”
He speared a slice of grilled zucchini and ate it with delightful gusto. Did he do everything with such passion? Or was the food that good?
“I’m at Thornton.” He jabbed his fork eastward. “Right that way a bit. You wandered into Heritage Hall one day, so you must be close.” He looked at the sky as if trying to recreate the campus map in his head. “Film school’s just over there. You seem like the scholarly type so… critical studies?”
“Nope. Psych. Other side of campus. But I walk around a lot. Listen to music. Feel the breeze. Get a little sun. You know.”
“I do.”
A shadow fell over him. We both looked up at the source—a tall guy who’d walked right out of douche central casting, complete with side-parted blond hair and a keen sense of who was eligible for the free meal and who was squatting.
“I hear you’re in band?” he said to Gabriel.
Band meant marching band. Nutcracker uniforms. Drums on suspenders. Shiny brass horns whipping side to side. Marching band practiced on the game field every day in the off-season. You could hear the conductor berating them through a megaphone all the way to the library.
“Yeah.” Gabriel put down his fork and wiped his mouth.
“Haven’t seen you on the field.”
“We should go,” I said into some invisible void where female voices went when men were escalating the situation.
“You haven’t been paying attention,” Gabriel said, standing.
They were about the same height, but Band Guy had more Band Guys behind him. Gabriel had me.
They leaned into each other. We were going to have to run for it. I picked up my bag and the violin case.
Band Guy snarled, “I know every guy on that field.”
“Obviously.” Gabriel pulled out his wallet and broke eye contact to poke into it. “Obviously you haven’t been doing this very long.” He took out a card and showed Band Guy, who snapped it away.
“What the fuck is this supposed to be?”
“It’s Sammy Daniels’s student ID. You know who Sammy Daniels is, right?”
“I do, and it’s not you, fucktard.” He flicked the card at Gabriel. It hit his chest and landed on the ground.
“We should go,” I said, laying my hand on Gabriel’s arm. My request was lost in the sea of ambient testosterone.
“No, if I were Sammy, I’d be in babylit, reading from the seventh-grade canon. He was this close to getting kicked off the march of the wooden soldiers. I tutored him.”
“And you stole his ID.”
“When I wouldn’t write his essay for him, he spilt so fast he left it behind. I’ve been hanging on to it for him. Now you can pick it up off the ground and deliver it.”
“Hey, Chad,” a stocky guy said from behind the side-parted blond, “I remember this dude. He tried out for the arrangement assistant.”
“Oh, yeah.” Chad
nodded, turning down the aggression half a notch. “Yeah, the arrangement was pretty all right. Kind of gay, but not bad.”
Gabriel leaned against the table, arms crossed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Seeing an opening, I bent down for Sammy’s ID and handed it to Chad. “Here. We’ll just finish lunch and go, okay?”
Chad averted his gaze to me, and more aggression drained away. I gave him a smile meant to demilitarize a situation. It would work with another little push.
“I know he shouldn’t be here. Officially. But he’s with me, so we’ll just eat.” I knew he wouldn’t ask me to prove to security that I belonged in the athlete’s cafeteria.
Chad took the card.
“Thanks,” I said with an appreciative, meek smile.
Behind him, his group broke up, finding a table by the door.
“Come on, man,” Stocky said.
“Cool, cool.” Chad seemed confused by his own compliance.
Gabriel clearly caught on to Chad’s need for a face-saving way out. “Say hi to Sammy for me. Tell him I’m glad he passed. I knew he could.”
Chad was pulled away, still confused.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“Me neither.” Gabriel took his violin case from me. “Let’s get out while the getting’s good.”
We put our trays on the bussing station and stepped out onto Watt Way. The sky was clear and blue right down to the horizon, and the air was still and crisp from the night’s rain.
“Do you have to get to class right away?” he asked.
“Not until two fifteen.”
He leaned into me while we walked, and when the crowd separated us, we maneuvered back together like opposite magnetic poles. We reached a grassy patch where groups of students clustered together.
“There’s a shady spot,” he said, stopping.
“Let’s grab it.”
He put his case and bag by the oak tree and shrugged out of his leather jacket. He laid it on the grass for me and held out his hand for my bag.
“Jesus,” he said when he took the full weight of the bag. “You minoring in rocks?”
I laughed and sat on his jacket. He set my bag by his violin case against the tree.
“I’m minoring in abnormalities,” I said.
“You going to listen to people’s problems all day?”
I tucked my legs under me. He put his back to the tree.
“Probably not. I’m just curious about it. People. How they think.”
“You’d be great at it.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw what you did back there,” he said.
“I just made a suggestion.”
“You cast a spell over him. You going to do that with your patients?”
I shrugged, plucking at the grass. He was right in one way. In another, he had it all wrong. “It would be a good career, I guess. My friend Lenny’s all about social change, one patient at a time. He’s a really good person. He and his girlfriend, Andrea, they want to open a practice together to help kids in poor neighborhoods. I’d feel… weird doing something like that.”
“Why? You wouldn’t feel safe?”
“No, nothing like that.” The grass was taking a beating, so I brushed it straight before I did more damage. “My family has… we’ve done well. I’d feel like an impostor or something. Saying I understood when, really? I can’t. Ever.”
“So you really meant to put that Benny in my case?”
“I told you I did.”
“I thought you wanted to get rid of me more than admit a mistake.”
“That says more about you than it does about me.”
He smiled and nodded a little, looking away. His profile was just short of perfect, with a strong chin and a slight bump in his nose that added masculinity to a face almost too pretty to be real. “Touché, Carrie. Touché. I bet your friends don’t get away with shit around you.”
Men had called me beautiful and perfect more times than I could count, but this compliment—that I saw clearly and judged well—made me blush.
He rummaged through his bag and came out with two cans of soda. “Nabbed these from Heritage Hall.”
“Slick. I didn’t even see you take them.”
“Coke or Sprite?”
“Sprite.”
He cracked it open and handed it to me.
We tapped our cans like wine glasses and drank. I watched how he tipped the opening against his lips and poured, closing his eyes so his long, black lashes brushed against his cheek.
“Where did you learn to play, Slick?”
“Chicago. I’m from Chicago. I’m a card-carrying Midwestern boy. I had a choice: piano or violin.”
“You chose well,” I said, remembering the day I first saw him busking.
“I didn’t choose. I love both. All of them. My mother could only afford one instrument, so I picked violin. Officially. She got me lessons once a week. Mrs. Forte came to the house. I saved up and got a thirty-two-note keyboard from Goodwill. Every week, after Mrs. Forte left, I learned piano from library books, and Mom let me take cello and music theory in school.”
“Your mom sounds pretty cool.”
“I was supposed to be a lawyer like my father. Or a doctor would have been acceptable. She wasn’t paying a cent for music school. I got a scholarship so she doesn’t have to.”
I had questions. If his father was a lawyer, why could his mother only afford one instrument? Where was he in all this? But objective facts took a backseat to emotional truths. “Is she mad?”
“Yes and no. Mostly yes. That’s why I have to be the face of success.” His eyes dropped to the ground then rose up my body, lingering everywhere and nowhere in particular, as if everything he saw was equally pleasing. He landed on my eyes and stayed there, disarming me. “Can I play you something?”
“Sure.”
He grabbed his case and snapped it open. “Promise you won’t drop a Benny?”
“I only have twenties.”
He lodged the instrument under his chin. “I wrote this.” He ran the bow over the strings and adjusted the knobs. “You’ll want to drop all of them.”
“I’m withholding judgment,” I lied. I wanted to like it as much as I liked him.
His fingers touched the knobs so slightly, I couldn’t imagine anything actually changed. But his ear was tuned and he found his pitch. He made a final adjustment and brought out a long, mournful note.
“Okay, here goes,” he said, checking me with a smile before dropping his gaze and giving all his attention to his instrument.
His fingers articulated on the bow with gentle power. He slid it against the strings like a call to attention, turning it into an invitation, gathering the space around him in the rhythm of a gentle mandate. A plea and a demand, layered with the promise of splendor. The air vibrated with music, trembling in his hands, under his control. The notes blossomed into grandeur with such precision they sneaked up on me, elevating my heart from tight expectation into the release of a promise kept.
The music drowned out even my attention on the way he moved, veiling my sight with the hum of the tender conclusion, cupping me in his care and dropping me back to earth.
When it was done and he looked up, the circles of students all applauded with me. He got up, held his arms out with bow in one hand and violin in the other, and bowed.
I didn’t keep the time, but it couldn’t have been more than four minutes. It felt like a lifetime had gone by.
“That was great,” I said when he sat back down.
“Glad you think so.” He finished his Coke. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged, but obviously the thing he was trying to shrug off stuck to him. “It didn’t get picked for a solo.”
It seemed impossible that another piece of music could have been better, but I didn’t know anything about anything. I only had ears and a heart. “Why not?”
> “My piece was too… what did they say? Wait.” He snapped his fingers as if trying to remember, but made it an act. He’d memorized it. “‘Too experimental for the audience.’”
“That’s kind of a compliment.”
“Well, I’m not doing the recital at all.” He put the violin and bow away as if every movement was a punctuation on the end of his decision. “This isn’t the required show. My mother can get her ticket refunded.”
“I can’t believe she didn’t want to see you anyway.”
“I haven’t told her yet. But I’m not asking her to come all the way here so she can watch me sit with the orchestra and play someone else’s piece. The entire Thornton School of Music can kiss my ass.” He snapped the case closed, locking his disappointment away for safekeeping.
“You should play,” I said.
“Why? They’re fine without me. They have enough strings.” He pretended he didn’t care while daring me to convince him.
“Who got the solos? Anyone you know?”
“We all know each other. My good friend Shelley, and I’m happy for her. I’ll go to the concert and clap for them, but especially her.”
“She needs you behind her, not in front.”
He tapped the case, looking at me, holding my stare. He pressed his lips together so hard that when he relaxed them, they were pink. “You’re doing it. That thing.”
“What thing?”
“Making me want to do what you say, to make you happy.”
“I’d like to see you up there in the orchestra. It would make me very happy.”
He considered. I sensed an opening for a changed mind. Without thinking, I put my hand on his. It was warm from playing, heated from the inside, yet frozen still from the surprise of my gesture. After a second, he moved his calloused finger over my palm leaving a path of shuddering nerves in its wake.
“And I bet your parents would like to see it too,” I added.
“My father’s gone…” He spaced out for a split second before continuing. “Cancer.” He waved his free hand as if he knew unwanted condolences were coming, then placed it over mine. “I have an extra ticket if you want.”
“I can get my own ticket.”
“It’s already sold out.”
The Drazen Foundation donated enough to the university to guarantee any of us a spot at any event we wanted, from fifty-yard-line seats at a championship game to John Williams fundraising concerts. I wasn’t ready to tell him my family name or explain the dynamics of our money. Once I did, everything would change.
