by Helena Newbury
Chapter 1
The answer is no, okay?
I saw the question in the eyes of the people I passed as I struggled down the icy street to Fenbrook, case strapped to my back and a determined expression on my face. They looked at the long neck of the case rising up over my head like I was carrying a brontosaurus in a backpack, the wide base whacking against my calves, the sheer weight of it hunching me over, and they frowned and muttered to themselves, “Didn’t she ever consider the flute?”
No, I didn’t. When I was six, my father took me to see the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. I was forced into a scratchy purple dress and made to sit absolutely motionless (“No Gummi Bears, Karen—the packet might rattle”), fuming at my father while I dreamed of how much better the orchestra would look if they were all dressed like my Barbies. Then the music started and my little jaw dropped, two hours gone in two minutes. At the end, I raised my pudgy hand and pointed to the cellist, her long limbs wrapped around the massive instrument, its varnished wood and smooth curves somehow a part of her. “I want to play that!”
I wasn’t to know I’d stop growing at 5’4”.
But I loved my cello more than anything else in the world and I had a stubborn streak a mile wide, so I strapped the damn thing to my back and I’ve been carrying it now for fifteen years. Boston was easier, because you could park a car—there’s an old joke that the most important accessory for your cello is a Volvo, and no sane cellist is without one. In New York, though, it’s subways and sidewalks and endless waiting at side streets for the “Walk” sign (I don’t jaywalk, even if there are tumbleweeds blowing past).
I’d forgotten my gloves and the biting wind meant I was steadily losing the feeling in my fingers. I passed a coffee shop and longed for a warming Americano, but even trying to lift a cup to my mouth would have killed what little balance I had, sending me tottering sideways until I fell flat on my back like a turtle, legs kicking in the air.
Ahead of me, Fenbrook’s cheery, red-brick exterior, so different from my first college back in Boston. That had been all polished wood floors and silent tension—
My stomach tightened as I thought of Boston. The ever-present fear that I was going to be hauled back there, the knowledge that my life in New York was enjoyed at the end of a tightly-held leash. I could pretend it wasn’t there, but I knew my father could give it a sharp jerk at any time.
Or, if I messed up, he wouldn’t even need to jerk it. I’d have no choice but to go scuttling back on my own.
I climbed carefully up the ice-covered steps and hauled open the doors. Warm air scented with linoleum polish hit me in the face, a physical accompaniment to the wall of sound.
The din of Fenbrook had taken some getting used to. The first day, the confident chatter of the actors on the first floor had almost pushed me back onto the street. I’d been used to musicians—we let the playing do the talking. And I’d been starting a semester late, so even the other freshmen had a head start on making friends. But—slowly—I’d come to love the place. Having people around me who weren’t obsessed with tuning and bowing technique was good for me, even if my father couldn’t see it. I fit in there—as much as I’d ever fitted in anywhere.
I took a step forward into the warmth and the cello case straps dug viciously into my shoulders. I staggered backwards, almost falling. While I’d been reminiscing, the heavy door had closed on me, trapping the cello case outside in the cold. I tried to turn around, but the case just banged around outside and the shoulder straps held me tight. I tried to back up, but I was off balance and didn’t have the leverage to push the heavy door open. I was trapped.
Worse, as I banged and rattled, all the actors—who were standing around gossiping about who’d got which part and who was sleeping with whom—started to turn and look. Understand, these were actors: every woman had cheekbones you could slice ham on, every man a chisel-jawed, muscled hunk. It looked—as the first floor always did—as if a movie was being filmed there. The only interloper on their scene of genetic perfection was me, wedged in the door like a kicking, grunting beetle stuck in a spider’s web, only with more frizzy hair. I felt myself flushing beetroot as twenty pairs of heart-breakingly beautiful eyes focused on me.
People think that actors must be cruel—they are effectively the cool kids, after all, so it follows that they’d bully the geeks—the musicians. But they don’t look down on us so much as wrinkle their perfect foreheads and wonder why we can’t just be calm and confident and outgoing like them—as if it was that easy. I got a few pitying expressions and two of them walked over to help.
At that moment, someone opened the door from the outside and I went stumbling backwards—right off the edge of the top step. Dragged down by the cello’s weight, I fell with a surprisingly loud scream, my head heading for the sidewalk—
I snapped to a halt, the cello case pressing hard into my back. I was lying in mid air, face up, feet skittering at the top step. Almost all of my weight was held by one shoulder strap, stretched out in front of me and anchored by….
I followed the strap with my eyes. A fist, grabbing the nylon. A strong wrist, skin almost as pale as mine. A cracked leather jacket. I got all the way to the shoulder and his tight, powerful frame before it clicked.
Oh no…..
I looked up into his face. Blue-gray eyes, like a lazy summer’s day that’s darkening into a storm. Hair cut short and messy, glossy black against his pale skin. And the lips—those soft, full lips that had been the downfall of so many Fenbrook girls in downtown rock clubs or at drug-fueled parties. Even now, they were twisting into a smirk.
Connor Locke.
“I seem to have you helpless,” he told me, and his broad Belfast accent made it sound at once both innocent and absolutely filthy. The actors who’d been coming to help reached the doorway and stopped there, smiling.
“Would you like me to lay you down on your back?” he asked, at least partially for their benefit. “Or should I pull you up against me?”
I closed my eyes, feeling myself flushing even more than before. When I opened them, he was still holding me up. It felt like he could have held me there all day, if he’d wanted to.
“Up,” I said quietly, and he hauled me slowly upwards. As promised, he didn’t step out of the way, so that when I had my footing again on the top step I was right up against him, our faces inches apart. He was wearing some scent that made me think of big, cold skies and icy rocks.
He raised his eyebrows at me mockingly and we just stood there for a moment, close as lovers, while I gasped with the aftershock of fear, my face burning with embarrassment. I couldn’t meet his eyes, so I stared fixedly at the blood red t-shirt he wore. Black serpents, twisting over the broad curves of his chest.
“Thank you.” The words a hot rush between gritted teeth. Then I pulled the door wide and stumbled inside before I could get caught again. His chuckles followed me up the stairs.
***
At Fenbrook academy, dancers, actors and musicians are all mixed together. Natasha, a dancer I know, is fond of the college analogy. The dancers are the jocks, the actors are the cool kids and the musicians are the geeks.
I prefer my Lord of the Rings analogy. The dancers are clearly the elves. Up on the third floor with its huge windows and natural light, they jump and glide like otherworldly beings, all sensual and untouchable.
Down on the first floor, close to the action of the city, the actors are obviously the humans. Hot-blooded. Unpredictable. They command the attention of everyone else—deep down, we all want to be movie stars.
And the musicians? Crammed between the other two in a floor that’s a rabbit warren of twisting corridors and tiny practice rooms, we’re the dwarves. We just want to be lef
t alone with our craft.
Connor was the exception. He was a human living amongst the dwarves, causing chaos.
Fenbrook had only been taking non-classical music students for about five years and—like me—Connor was in his senior year, though he was a few years older. The idea was still scandalous when he started; I can almost hear the music faculty discussing it in shocked tones. “Amplified music, you say? An electric guitar? At Fenbrook?!”
His talent wasn’t in doubt—pretty much everything else was, but not that. I hadn’t really heard him play, because the handful of non-classical musicians didn’t really mix with the rest of us, but supposedly he was the next Hendrix. They’d given him an audition and a return plane ticket from Belfast to New York just on the strength of his CD, and once they heard him play it was apparently a no-brainer. Where I’d had to sweat and practice for months just to land an audition for my Boston college, then do it all again for Fenbrook, he’d just dropped a CD in the mail, strummed a few bars and he was in.
What made it especially galling was that, now that he was here, he treated the place as little more than a convenient supply of impressionable dancers and actresses to hook up with. He’d show up for lectures late or not at all. Once, I was pretty sure he was still drunk from the night before. There were rumblings about him being kicked out but, from what I could see, he was still behaving exactly as he had in his freshman year. For Connor, Fenbrook was one big party.
For me, it felt like life and death.
***
I’d booked a practice room for some solo work. As the door shut behind me, I closed my eyes and let the blessed relief of being alone wash over me. People made me nervous—strangers, doubly so and men, triple.
Fenbrook practice rooms are literally that—room enough to practice in and nothing more. The cello case almost grazed the walls as I turned around, un-slung it and cracked open the battered chrysalis to reveal the gleaming beauty of the instrument inside.
I settled the cello between my legs and leaned the neck down onto my shoulder. Immediately, just from the touch of the wood, I felt better.
It should have been easy enough to concentrate on the music. I was practicing my parts of the Brahms Double Concerto, and that was enough to focus anyone’s mind. But within seconds of my bow hitting the strings, my attention started to wander. I was downstairs again, dangling in space, completely reliant on Connor. That was the worst part of it—that he’d had to save me. I hated owing anything to anyone.
Concentrate. I stopped, took a breath and continued. Big, slow notes that vibrated through my body. My wrists needed to be smooth as butter to get the changing angles right, but they felt rigid and taut. I’d tensed up.
I knew I’d be reliving that moment at the door for weeks. Everything embarrassing I’d ever done was stuck in my mind on endless loop. Sometimes people would tell me that I needed to “let things go.” How?
I missed a note and had to stop again. Squeezing my eyes shut for a second, I shook out my wrists and restarted. I was getting close to the fast part….
I didn’t see what his groupies saw in him. I mean, yes, he was good looking in a dark, dangerous sort of a way, but it wasn’t as if he was bulging with muscles. He was more lean and wiry, like a panther. Was it just the rock star thing, even if the closest he’d got to stardom was playing in local bars?
The notes were flying now, my breath coming in quick little gasps. Playing fast is a bit like skiing downhill on the very edge of control. It can be heady and brilliant when it goes well. This wasn’t going well, so it was just terrifying.
He’d smelled good. Sort of clean and outdoorsy, like the air after a storm. That was new to me, the idea that a guy would have a particular scent. I didn’t get up close with many men. Okay, any men. I knew my fantasies were now going to have to include an extra element.
Not fantasies of him, obviously. But whatever nameless, faceless guy I thought of late at night, as my hand slipped between my thighs, I’d now give him a scent. Not even that scent, necessarily.
The bow lanced off at an angle, shrieking in protest. I stared at the ceiling for a moment, letting my hair fall down my back. What was wrong with me? I’d nearly fallen—that was all. I hadn’t even been hurt. Why couldn’t I get it out of my mind?
Because I’m trying to distract myself from the real problem, I decided.
It was my senior year, and my final year recital was looming on the horizon—ten weeks, three days and counting. I’d have to perform the Brahms, together with my duet partner Dan on violin, for a panel comprising three Fenbrook judges. That in itself was scary, but it was a good piece, I had a great partner and I was certain we’d get a good grade. That wasn’t the problem.
Also on the panel would be two talent scouts. One I didn’t care about—some guy from a record label who was really there for the non-classical musicians. But the other would be from the New York Philharmonic. Impressing him was my one shot at scoring a trial and maybe, just maybe, saving a dream that was close to slipping out of my grasp forever.
My dream, or my father’s dream. Sometimes it was difficult to tell.
My phone buzzed to tell me to meet Natasha for coffee and I stared at the clock disbelievingly. My practice hour was up, and I’d barely scratched the surface of the music. Great.
***
There are two places that are so much a part of Fenbrook, they might as well be on the official map. One is Flicker, a movie-themed bar just down the street. The other is Harper’s, a café and deli that’s practically next door. If Harper’s ever closed down, about eighty percent of Fenbrook students would die of starvation.
Both places rely heavily on students for their staff and it’s not unusual to look around and find that literally everyone in the room, on both sides of the counter, is an actor, a dancer or a musician.
When I walked in that day, the barista was a guy who I’d seen in a poster for some off-Broadway satire about the financial crash and the woman wiping down the tables was an oboe player I sometimes had classes with. And sitting all by herself at a table in the center of the café was Natasha, a junior year dancer.
I was a senior, but almost all my friends at Fenbrook were juniors for three very good reasons. Firstly, my father made me start high school a year early. My friends were in the year below, but that meant they were my age: twenty-one.
Secondly, being juniors meant they weren’t stressed out by final year recitals or performances. That was annoying, sometimes—it meant they all wanted to go out drinking while I wanted to work (to be fair, that had been the case even in my freshman year). But the advantage was that we didn’t talk about work the whole time as I would have done with other seniors. Being with them was an escape. Except for Dan, my recital partner, none of them were musicians for the same reason.
Thirdly, I’d started Fenbrook a semester late. The other freshman students had already formed tight-knit groups by the time I arrived and I was a year younger than all of them. I pretty much hunkered down and didn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the year. It was only when the next year’s students started that I came out of my shell a little and made some friends.
So that was me. The final year, geeky musician amongst a group of vivacious, beautiful dancers and actresses. The odd one out. The straight man, if you will. I loved them all, and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.
Natasha was asleep, or close to it, slumped down with her head on her hands. I got a triple shot Americano for her, a latte for me and carefully sat down. She didn’t move.
I pushed the coffee nearer to her sleeping head. Her hair was almost the same shade of chestnut as mine, only hers was always soft and wavy and sexy when she let it out of her dancer’s bun, while mine was a frizzy mess.
The smell of coffee caught her nostrils and they twitched like a rabbit’s.
“...and then we decided to get married, so we’re moving to Mexico,” I told her.
She sat bolt upright. “WHAT?!”
; Despite my worries, I smirked. “Nothing. My life’s as boring as always. You can go back to sleep.”
She shook her head. “Karen, it’s too early in the morning for tricks like that.” She sipped her coffee and closed her eyes in bliss. “How’s your lullaby?”
I stiffened. “It’s not a lullaby. Brahms composed all sorts of things apart from—”
“Okay, okay, how’s the Brahms?”
“Awful.”
“I’m sure that’s not true. I know you—you’ll be amazing as always.”
“Amazing isn’t good enough. It needs to be perfect, or I let Dan down. I let everyone down.”
“You have months until your recital.”
She was right. It was still winter, and I wouldn’t face the hell of the recital until spring was taking hold (Fenbrook has a short final year, to give us an extra long summer break before we hit the real world). I had two months and change, but that isn’t as long as it sounds when you’re trying to get something absolutely right. I knew how fast those weeks would burn away as the date crept closer, and while everyone else was just trying to graduate, I’d be trying to impress the scout for one of the best orchestras in the world.
“You’ll be fine. This is what you do.” She tried to stifle a yawn and failed.
“Why are you so tired?” I asked.
She looked at me guiltily and I saw her flush.
“Oh,” I said delightedly. “How is your billionaire?”
“Millionaire.”
“Same thing.”
The previous summer, Natasha had been propositioned by Darrell, a rich guy who wanted her as his “muse.” She’d danced for him at his mansion and they’d wound up in some sort of breakneck romance full of hot sex.
And tears.
One night in my apartment during winter break, aided by Chardonnay and candlelight, she’d told me how she’d been self-harming for years, unknown to everyone but her roommate. She’d been wracked with guilt over something that happened when she was fifteen—something she still didn’t feel ready to tell me about. Darrell had found out and it had nearly killed their fledgling relationship. He’d had his own issues, too. They’d wound up helping each other and, eventually, had worked things out. As far as I knew, Natasha hadn’t gone back to cutting herself—she certainly seemed happy.
In Harmony Page 1
