It turns out Dr. Scaliteri did not call to congratulate me on my fortitude.
“Kiri, I am thinking we will cancel your lessons. It has been a very bad summer for you, and I cannot be teaching you if you are not doing serious practice.”
I lift the frozen peas off my chin.
“But I have been practicing. I’ve been practicing constantly.”
I’ve been practicing since six in the morning, in spite of brutal beatings and an awful comedown from those yellow pills that’s left me queasy and dry-mouthed.
“Yes, yes, I understand this, Kiri, but you know, if you are not serious about piano, it is not right you should be taking lessons from me. The rest of my students, they are very serious, and it’s not fair to them. Besides this, I have received a call from the Showcase, and they tell me you are wanting to change which pieces you play.”
“Yes—I’m going to play Sesquipaedia instead of the Prokofiev. Remember, I showed you the music last year?”
“This is completely unacceptable.”
“It’s a great piece. Risky, sure. But I think I’m up to the challenge.”
There’s silence on Dr. Scaliteri’s end. I pace to the window and look out. Our neighbor Mr. Hardy is pulling up a shrub from his front yard. He plunges his shovel into the dirt and pries it up. Each time he pries, a little more of the tangled, woody rootstock is wrenched up from the ground until the whole plant is lying on its side, naked and wretched and impossible to screw back in. Dr. Scaliteri sighs.
“I have told this Showcase you will not be able to perform. You do not have the discipline for piano.”
My body goes numb.
“You can’t do that. You can’t withdraw me.”
“Okay, Kiri. You remind your parents to mail me the check for your last lesson when they come home.”
“Wait—I need to—”
“Ciao.”
When I take the phone away from my ear, the air in the kitchen is hot and softly vibrating, as if someone just shot a gun. In the living room, the piano looks like it did on the day the movers delivered it to my house: a beautiful bomb shelter, a flotation device in an ocean whose depths I was afraid to see. Maybe it’s not discipline I’ve been lacking all this time. Maybe it’s something simpler—something that’s been staring me in the face this whole time.
I march to the front hall and open the door. The high noon sun is blinding, and the azaleas are snickering at me. “Hey, Mr. Hardy!” I shout. “Can I borrow that shovel?”
The first azalea bush takes fifteen whacks.
The second one takes ten.
I wrap my arms around the bushes, wrestle them out of the earth, and heave them, panting, onto the lawn. Mr. Hardy gapes at me from his driveway. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing to those pretty flowers?”
“They’re diseased,” I shout back. “You should probably kill yours, too.”
I go back into the house, sweating all over and electric with holy rage, and play through my repertoire one last time. I play passionately, brilliantly, as if Tzlatina Tzoriskaya herself was sitting on the living room couch. I drain my entire being into the keys. As I play, I hear things in the music I never heard before. My grief over Sukey. My fury at my parents. My vulnerability, my savage ugliness, my playfulness, my hope. It’s all there, laid out with terrifying clarity, where anyone could hear it—where I can hear it myself.
Holy crap, I think, Nelson Chow was right.
All this time, I’ve been afraid of the music, and I’m not afraid anymore.
When I’m finished playing, I lower the piano’s heavy lid and slide the curved wooden cover over the keys. Shuttered like that, it almost looks like an instrument again instead of the massive winged creature with polished white teeth it had started to become in my mind. Leaving the living room, I glance over my shoulder, but it stays like that—placid, benign—and I know the next time I play, it will be from love.
I want to see what the world looks like from the ground. I ride my bike to the Salvation Army thrift shop and buy a lime-green radio, then bike to Skunk’s house and leave it on the patio outside his door, tuned to the mystery station.
Next stop is the Imperial. I spy an old microwave someone put on the curb with a STILL WORKS sign and decide to bring it to Doug. On my way up the stairs, I make a list of all the things I need to remember to tell Doug about the microwave. Number one, don’t put metal in it. Metal will make it spark. Number two, don’t put anything in it for longer than five minutes. Longer than five minutes and even the rock-hardest frozen thing will be reduced to a hissing, bubbling goo. Number three, never put cat food in it. There is no reason to ever put cat food in a microwave, and I know you’re going to be drunk some night and try it. Number four, don’t let a crackhead sell this microwave for crack. Number five, do not make any part of this microwave into a deadly weapon.
When I get to the fourth floor, Doug’s not in his room. I unplug his hot plate and thunk down the microwave in its place. I plug it in and stand there, setting the time. Doug would never in a million years bother to set the time.
I’m about to pay a visit to Sukey’s rooftop when I hear a grating yowl. Snoogie has wandered out of the closet and is skulking across the room in my direction. She gets close and starts pressing herself around my legs, doing that round-the-leg figure-eight thing cats do. I bend down and scoop her up, a skinny hot bag of bones with fur like a ragged bath mat. She sticks out her legs, claws extended, and rakes them against my shirt. I flip her around so her back is against my chest and her razor collection is sticking out in front of us as protection against crook-nosed Kids who might be roaming through the hall.
“Let’s find Doug,” I whisper, and she meows in response. “He needs a microwave tutorial.”
The usual suspects are drinking on the front steps of the hotel. I say hi to Jasmine, who is wearing a stretchy purple tank top, leopard-print sweatpants, and sparkly pink eye shadow that goes all the way up to her eyebrows. She’s sucking on a cigarette like it’s a stick of honey.
“Aw,” she says. “Doug wanted you to have that kitty.”
“I brought him a microwave,” I say. “I left it in his room. Where is he?”
Jasmine stubs out her cigarette. “He’s dead, baby. He passed on Tuesday night.”
I stare at her, stricken. “What? How?”
“He’d been sick for a long time, baby. HIV. He didn’t like people to know.”
“Does he have any family?” I say, but Jasmine says no.
I hurry back up the stairs to Doug’s room, blinking back tears. I will pack up his things; I will keep them in my closet until someone who loves him picks them up. But when I get there, there’s a skinny, sunken-cheeked, green-skinned elf in the room with the microwave under one arm and Doug’s blanket under the other.
“Hey,” I say, and he turns and snarls at me with a face of such pure, ugly, Gollum-like desperation that I take Snoogie and bolt before he kills us both.
Snoogie doesn’t stop yowling the whole bike ride home, and I have to hold her in one arm like a tattered, flea-bitten baby to keep her from twisting away and getting run over by a bus. When we get home, I drag us to the top of the stairs and pull my bedroom door open, ready to collapse on the floor.
But there’s already something on the floor. A smashed thing.
Blue shards crisscrossed with looping silver. The splintering angles of a broken frame.
I look at the wall. The nail is bare. I look back at the floor.
Sukey’s painting.
I die.
chapter thirty-seven
Someone’s knocking on the front door of my house.
I’m sitting in bed with my knees drawn up to my chest, licking the salt on my scabs. Snoogie is roaming around my bedroom with her nose to the floor, tail erect, her ragged ear oozing. Sukey’s painting is spread out on the blanket in front of me in sixteen splintery pieces. I’ll never be able to put it back together, or put anything back to the way it’s supposed to be
. It’s still Sunday, only Sunday, but Doug is dead and my band has dissolved and the azaleas are lying, unscrewed, on the lawn.
Someone’s still knocking on the front door. I hug my knees tighter and squeeze my eyes shut, willing whoever it is to go away.
I think it’s a mailman coming after me with a bushel of accusatory letters from the Showcase.
I think it’s my mother and father and Petra Malcywyck coming to cart me away and electrocute me until I confess to being a monomaniac.
I think it’s Motorcycle Man coming to confuse me with yellow pills.
I think it’s Dr. Scaliteri and Nelson Chow coming to stand around the piano and cast damning glares at me while I play, weeping, through all one hundred pages of Concerto No. 2.
I think it’s Doug’s druggie friends dragging a body bag.
I think it’s policemen and firefighters and emergency room doctors coming to declare me legally dead after I cut my wrists with a pair of scissors.
I think it’s all my teachers from school coming to click their tongues and shake their heads over how far I’ve fallen after such a promising year.
I think it’s Lukas and Kelsey coming to squint at me like an animal at the zoo.
I think it’s a murderer.
I think it’s a vampire.
I think it’s the bizarro version of myself, and when she sees me sitting on her bed in a cave of blankets, we’re going to fight each other to death like wolves.
Someone’s knocking on the front door, and I’m too messed up to go downstairs and answer it but too scared to stay here listening, not knowing who’s there.
I wrap my quilt around my shoulders like a cape and go downstairs. As I walk toward the front door, I can see them all standing there on the front step: the mailman, my parents, Petra, Dr. Scaliteri and her Serious Students, the burnouts from the Imperial, the police, my teachers, Kelsey Bartlett, Lukas, the murderer, the vampire, and my own indignant double, all shaking their heads.
With every step I take, I’m conscious of my bare feet connecting with the cool stone floor of the front hall. I’m shivery and feverish. My body is grinding and listing like a broken bicycle. I’m sorry, I want to say to everybody who is waiting outside. I especially want to say it to my double. I want to hug my other self and apologize for crashing my bicycle and hurting my leg. I want to kiss her scabs better and not let her take Motorcycle Man’s yellow pills. I want to call her a cab instead of sending her limping through the night. I want to tuck her into a clean bed with a mug of Sleepytime tea and a good book to read until she falls asleep. I want to make her some good food and make sure she eats it. I want to hold her hand when Doug dies and tell her she was a good friend. I want to tell her Sukey would be proud of her, that Sukey would have said any kind of pain is worth it if makes you brave.
I want to do all these things, but I can’t because I’m chilly and panicked and wearing a blanket for a cape. I hear the click of Snoogie’s claws on the floor behind me. I watch from a distance while I touch the cold doorknob and pull open the door.
It isn’t my parents or Lukas or a mailman.
It’s Skunk.
He’s wearing clothes I haven’t seen him wear before, old jeans and a dark blue shirt with a tear on the left sleeve. His face is pale like he hasn’t been sleeping either; his eyes are red like mine.
He’s carrying his electric bass in one hand and the little green radio in the other.
He starts to say something, but instead he puts down the bass and the radio and gathers me very tightly into his arms.
Skunk and I decide that the best place for us to be right now is my basement. We bunker ourselves down there with the boxes and the spiders and the bass and the synth and the amp and the little green radio and yowling, prowling Snoogie the cat, and we close the door and plug everything in and we play, slow and mournful, a dark dreadful dirge for Doug and Sukey.
The neck of Skunk’s bass is cracked. I hadn’t noticed it before. There’s a jagged seam running across it where the wood split and was glued back together. When he plays, the bass moans like a broken animal. My synth keens along like a lovelorn bird. Between us, the radio crackles.
As we play, I start to cry, and when I look over at him, I see that Skunk is crying too.
“How long has it been since you played?” I ask him.
“Six months,” says my beautiful tearstained love-bison. “Not since before the Thing happened.”
“Last night at the diner,” I start. “You seemed like a different person.”
“Please, Kiri,” says Skunk.
“No,” I burst out. “I need to know what’s going on.”
His fingers travel over the strings as if their melody could answer for him.
“I freaked out,” he says. “I even knew I was freaking out—I was aware—but I was so scared when I found you on Hastings Street, I couldn’t control it.”
“Are you still freaking now?” I say. “Has it stopped? Are you better? You thought people were trying to kill me—”
“Please,” Skunk says again, but I’m shaking, remembering the look on his face when he deleted his number from my phone.
“Maybe your aunt’s right about the medicine,” I say.
I feel terrible saying it, like I’m betraying him, but I’m so scared he’ll slip back into that cold place again and I won’t know what to do.
Skunk casts me a pleading glance.
“I know I messed up this time, but I can get by without the pills if I try hard enough, I really can.”
“If the pills help you, why does it matter?”
Skunk’s face boxes up. “You shouldn’t have to take pills to be okay.”
“Everyone does something to be okay, Skunk. That’s how the world is. At least the only things you need to muffle to survive are the voices in your head. Some people muffle their hearts.”
“I just wish I could be strong for you,” he says.
“I wish I could be strong for you.”
We play on, weeping, until the little green radio runs out of battery and its power light quietly blinks out.
When we come upstairs from the basement, I hear Denny and his friend Chris in the living room, playing Xbox. I’m still a little drunk with tears, and my head feels big and clunky like it’s filled with wet cement. Skunk’s behind me, his hand warm and still on the small of my back. We go into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee.
The kitchen is blurry and confusing in my post-music stupor. I pull the big tin of Folgers toward myself, peel off the plastic lid, and scoop coffee into a filter. The scoop is red, like the wheelbarrow in the poem. How red the plastic coffee scoop amid the black coffee. I forget how it goes.
Skunk rinses the glass tureen and pours water into the machine, locates mugs. He asks me where the bathroom is, and I point him down the hall. While Skunk’s in the bathroom, Denny wanders into the kitchen holding a beer. I drop the coffee filter into its plastic cradle, shut the little door, and press on. The machine burbles to life.
“Hey,” he says.
I ignore him. Denny smashed Sukey’s painting. I have decided he no longer exists. He’s an evil ghost. A mean phantom who lives in my house. A thing that will go away if I ignore it for long enough.
Down the hall, the toilet flushes. Denny leans against the kitchen counter, arms folded over his chest. He has that elaborately interested look about him like he’s trying to make peace.
“Was that you and Lukas playing? You sound a little like this band called Birdseye.”
When he says that, Skunk comes into the kitchen. Denny does a double take. His eyes flit to Skunk’s tattoos and back to his face, as if putting something together.
“Hey, man,” he says. “You want a beer?”
I slide past Skunk. “I’m going to the bathroom,” I whisper so Denny can’t hear.
Skunk freezes. “Actually, Kiri, I gotta get home.”
“You’re not staying?”
“I can’t. I’m supposed to be home for d
inner with my aunt and uncle.”
“You sure you don’t want a beer, man?” says Denny.
“No thanks, I don’t drink.”
Denny is using his cool voice, all casual, super-chill. He leans against the counter like, Oh, I’m the cool older brother who always takes an interest in Kiri’s friends. He keeps trying to check out Skunk’s tattoos while pretending he’s not. I have never, ever seen him act like this before.
I put my hand on Skunk’s arm. “What about coffee?”
“I’ll make some at home. Sorry, I lost track of how long we were in the basement. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He walks to the front door. I follow him.
“Hey, nice meeting you,” calls Denny. “You should come over and jam again sometime.”
Outside, Skunk kisses me before getting into his van.
“What’s going on? Why are you leaving?”
“I got shy.”
I arch my eyebrows. “Highly dubious.”
“Kiri?”
“Mm.”
“Give me your phone.” I hand it to him, and he keys his number back in.
“Call me any time of day or night if anything’s going bad.”
“Why don’t you just stay?”
Skunk glances at the house. “I just can’t. I’m sorry. I have to go.”
When I go back inside, Denny has been joined in the kitchen by his friend Chris. They’re both holding their beers and watching out the window while Skunk drives away. I glare at them and pour myself some coffee.
Denny looks at me like I have snakes growing out of my head.
“You never told me you were dating Phil freaking Coswell.”
I forget I’m not talking to Denny. “Who?”
Chris is still staring out the window, as if there’s a chance Skunk will come back.
“Dude, didn’t he go psycho?”
chapter thirty-eight
There were the magazine headlines: BIRDSEYE FRONTMAN ATTACKS BANDMATE. PHIL COSWELL ASSAULTS DRUMMER DURING SHOW; BANDMATES BLAME DRUGS. BIRDSEYE TOUR CANCELED FOLLOWING FRONTMAN’S PSYCHOTIC BREAKDOWN.
Wild Awake Page 21
