by Ron C. Nieto
I stared at his hand, transfixed. He was bleeding. All his fingers were smeared with blood, and it coated the steel strings and the neck where he’d been playing.
“Alice. Alice, help me.”
Without a second thought I pulled the guitar out of his lap and left it on its stand, in the corner. For good measure, I took off my jacket and covered it. Irrational, but I didn’t care. Then, I took a deep breath, trying to convince myself that there was a perfectly sound explanation to what I’d just seen.
“Your father was worried to death,” I started, not mentioning that I had been scared to death and back as well.
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t stop.”
Going back to the bed, I sat beside him and wrapped my arms around his neck, trying to calm both of us down.
“It’s okay. I know you wanted to get that song right, but…”
“Alice, I couldn’t stop.” He twisted in my arms to look me in the eye, and the fear I saw in his gaze nearly choked me.
I wanted to patronize him, to tell him he was being silly. To laugh and tell him I’d bought the joke, and it had been funny. But I couldn’t, because that face was more scared than my own. So I just held him.
Sparrow purred by my side and I managed not to flinch. Apparently, our bonding session had worked because he climbed over my lap to curl up in Keith’s without huffing.
I might have felt a smidgen of jealousy, though.
Keith’s hand, the non-bleeding one, buried itself in the rich fur and he took a deep, gasping breath.
“Sparrow’s smarter than me,” he said, his voice still shaky. “He hated that stupid song from the beginning, remember? He would never stay around when I played it.”
I grasped his chin and twisted his head to look him in the eye.
“Forget the cat,” I said. “Let’s try to calm down and analyze what just happened, okay?”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“When you say you couldn’t stop playing, you mean…?” I prompted.
“I mean to say that I couldn’t physically stop playing.”
“That’s not possible.” My throat was dry, but I would not give up my reasoning.
He shook his head.
“I would love to agree with you on that, but I can’t think of anything else. There were moments when I wasn’t even aware of what I was doing. I knew I hadn’t stopped because when I came back, the music was still sounding but…”
“You spaced out while keeping that speed.”
“I… guess.”
“Okay.” I raked my brain, but explanations were in short order. “Did you… did you have something?”
“Like what?” he frowned slightly.
“Like, some drink or a pill or something?”
Keith jerked his hand free from my grasp and stood, turning on me with a hurt expression. Circulation returned abruptly to his bent leg, which he had been sitting on for the last twelve or so hours, and he staggered off balance when his knee refused to support his weight.
It didn’t keep him from shoving away from me when I tried to help him straighten up.
“That’s your answer, then? That I’m taking drugs.”
“I didn’t…” But I had meant it. “Well, what else could it be?”
He buried his head in his hands, taking a deep breath. “A mental disability settling in, maybe.” He barked a bitter, sardonic laugh. “Hell, why not? I’ve definitely gone off my rocker. It’s not as if I was very normal to begin with.”
“Don’t talk like that. You were perfectly fine.”
“So fine that I became a junkie, right?”
I knew he hadn’t. I knew he might be weird, but he wouldn’t do such a thing. I had seen the fear, not the addiction, painted all over his anguished face and his shaking hands, but I had said the words anyway. I couldn’t take them back.
“We should call the doctors, perhaps,” I offered, instead of the apology he needed.
“I’m fine. I’ll be fine,” he said, shaking his head.
“You scared the death out of your father,” I repeated.
“I’ll apologize to him.”
“What will you tell him?”
He shrugged. “I’ll come up with something.”
“Keith, I don’t want to leave like this. I’m scared, too.”
“I’m sorry my father called you.” A dismissal, if I ever heard one.
Part of me wanted to walk up to his face and hit him, because the emotional roller coaster he’d sent me on wasn’t fair. The other part saw the distress and pain in him and acknowledged that I had put a great deal of it there.
“Okay,” I said, even though I had to bite the words out. “I’ll see you tomorrow at school then.”
When I came out, Mr. Brannagh had retreated to the kitchen. I figured he was one of those guys who calmed down when they had things to do, when they felt useful, and that suited me. That way, I could slip unnoticed out the front door and begin the run back home.
I only realized that I’d forgotten my jacket when I plopped down on my bed and started to cry.
CHAPTER 18
I woke up extra early the next day. The alarm sounded as soon as my eyes had managed to close, and I just wanted to turn around and curl up into a ball, dead to the world, and get a few precious minutes of rest.
But I couldn’t, of course. I had a make-up masterpiece to produce if I wanted to look anywhere close to normal, which was the reason I had set up the alarm so early in the first place. I had gone to bed late, crying, and I could not allow it to show.
All my effort went down the drain when I purposefully strode out of my house only to find Keith camped in my driveway. I missed a step and then gathered myself, calling back to mind the Bitch Princess image he’d implanted there. I tried to hold my head up and walk past him.
I can’t talk to him now. I haven’t had time to prepare that conversation. I can’t stop to make a fool out of myself. I’ll just walk on and…
“Alice,” he said, his voice raspy and broken. I stopped dead. “I’m sorry. I had no right to react like I did.”
He had rehearsed the words, I knew. They were too fluid to be spontaneous. But the feeling behind them was real enough. Still, I didn’t say that everything was all right.
“Do you have an answer today?” I crossed my arms and stared at him. Then I blinked. “God. What’s happened to you?”
If the previous night had shown me an eerie Keith, today he was emaciated, like a walking corpse. His usual slimness made him look sick, and the skin stretched over his bones was paper white and frail. I was afraid I’d bruise him if I touched him.
“Beatrice.” He lifted his eyes to mine and I fought to stifle a gasp. Sunken, all the light extinguished. There was a blanket of calm settled over his expression. Only, it was the wrong kind of calm. The one that meant giving up.
“That’s all I have,” he added when I stayed quiet.
“Do I know her?” I couldn’t think of any Beatrice, but maybe she was a junior or something.
He motioned for me to walk with him toward the school and shook his head. “No. I don’t think so, at least. I hope not. I don’t even know whether she’s real.”
Real? What?
“Who is she, again?”
“I haven’t slept.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
He shot me a tired look and I shrugged, letting him find his own pace through the story.
“When you were gone, I just wanted to sit down and keep on playing,” he said. “I knew the impulse was stupid, that I had to eat and sleep, but I still wanted to play again. My own guitar scared me, if you can believe that.” He laughed a bit, humorless. “So, I went out to the yard. But the melody was stuck in my head, and if I focused only a little, I could hear every nuance. I heard it played with a string quartet, and I heard how it should sound on my guitar. And I know it’s crazy, but it wasn’t my song. I thought I had
been creating it, following some inspiration, but it was already written. I just had to… remember. And play it. For Beatrice. The composer made it for her.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
He’d not shed any new light on yesterday’s events. He’d just uttered a lot of nonsense. Of scary nonsense. The crazy kind of scary. But I found my fingers wrapping around his anyway.
“I believe you,” I promised. I did for some strange reason. “I’m not sure what to make of it, but I believe you.”
We walked in silence a bit longer, approaching our school entrance and garnering a lot of attention as we walked together.
“You have study hour before lunch today, right?” he asked when we stopped in the corridor.
I nodded and he pulled a crumpled paper out of his pocket. “Could you try to look this up?”
“What is it?” I said, peering at the lines and dots and letters interspersed through the note.
“The song. A piece of it, at least. The only one I can recall, to be honest.”
“Wait. You were playing it for twelve hours straight yesterday and you don’t remember how it goes?”
He looked chagrined. “I can play it, and I know how it sounds, but when I try to put it down, it gets fuzzy. The notes I write are wrong. That’s the most I’ve managed to notate.”
A suspicion invaded me. “How do you know the other parts sound wrong? Have you tried them?”
“Just a little.”
“You’re hopeless! What if you’d gotten stuck again?”
“I didn’t. I was careful. Trust me; I did not enjoy doing the transcription, not this time. But I needed to know what I was playing.” He cupped the side of my face and, no matter how badly he looked at the moment, I knew I was goners. “Please? Can you look that up? See if you can find out what it is?”
“And who Beatrice is, right?”
“Yeah. If it’s even on the net.”
I gave him a confident smile. “Everything’s on the net.”
***
My study time passed and slipped into lunch hour, and I cursed my own words while squinting at the screen. The lack of sleep wasn’t helping in the slightest, and the letters and lines and whatever insisted on dancing around in the backlit monitor, giving me a monster headache and refusing to yield useful information.
The search was proving to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Of course, entering “Beatrice” + “crazy boyfriend” was absurd, but I felt I had tried every combination short of ridiculous.
I hadn’t found the song. There were a lot of minuet scores—or tablatures, or whatever they were called—that started off similarly to the one Keith had given me. But after a few lines, one or two notes were off, and then four, and then the whole thing became something entirely different.
I had tried to look up famous composers, figuring that they’d be more likely to be remembered by Keith unconsciously. When I ran through my shamefully short list of Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin, I decided to try and focus on the most obscure composers, because it was possible that, if the song was dedicated, it had been just a nameless man pining after a nameless woman. If that was the case, both of them remained nameless and unknown by the time I gave up.
In the end, I wondered if the song I was looking for just went a bit off key, or if it was a different kind of song altogether. I started to look up minuets as a whole to compare.
Apparently, there is a pattern that a song must conform to in order to be considered a minuet. It has to be divided in movements, whatever a movement might be, and each movement must be written in a scale that is harmonious with the other scales and…
Consider my brain imploded.
I couldn’t do this. There was nothing to find, the song was not online, and I didn’t know the first thing about music. If I kept at it, I’d only be bashing my head against the wall. I got that Keith didn’t want to worry his father looking this up at home, but I was in way over my head with the topic.
Still, I tried to look up a couple more pages.
In one, I could listen to several examples of minuets, used to explain their complex structure, and I listened. They started out a lot like Keith’s mystery song, but then progressed evenly. When Keith would pick up and start weaving notes sharper and sharper, the examples kept their consistent, relaxing tune. It was a comfortable music to dance to, and I remembered Keith that first day in theatre class saying that they’d been favorites of the Season balls.
I could see why. And I could sort of see that what I was looking for was not a minuet, in spite of Keith’s notes and of the promising beginning of the melody, because it morphed into something way too furious for the Victorian dances.
That was all.
I was tired, and hungry, and not just a bit frustrated, so I closed the computer and made my way to the cafeteria, almost thirty minutes late.
Anna and Dave were sitting alone, laughing at some private joke and polishing up their desserts.
“Hey,” Anna looked up when I approached, confused. “What happened, girl? You look like a Zombie Princess today.”
“Thanks, Anna. I love you too.” I dropped on a chair in front of them. “So, where’s Keith?”
“With you, I was hoping.”
“He hasn’t come to lunch,” offered Dave. “Since you weren’t around either, we thought you two had gone off to catch up on yesterday or whatever.”
“No, we came together to school, but I was busy,” I said, pushing myself out of the chair in spite of my weariness. So much for lunch. “I have an idea of where he might be, though. See you two later?”
“Sure.” Anna waved at me. I left my two bewildered friends and rushed off in search of Keith.
Life was easier when I didn’t care for the weirdest guy in school.
The corridors were deserted. I pushed open the door to the auditorium and closed it again behind my back before hitting up the lights. I preferred to keep this visit under the radar, because I had an idea of what I’d find.
I looked around. No sign of Keith.
I peeked into the pit, half-holding my breath at what I’d find, and there he was. He’d not brought his guitar today, so he wasn’t playing, but his fingers drummed a disturbingly familiar pattern on his thigh while he stared out at the stage.
I feared another episode, but he looked up and smiled at me.
“Hey. How did you know where to find me?”
“I had this feeling you’d be here. How are you?”
He shrugged, awkwardly. “Fine, I guess.”
I went to sit by his side and we just contemplated the stage, with the antique furniture and decorations. In my mind’s eye, it was all too easy to see the graceful figures swirling around in huge dresses, moving to the complicated steps of the country dance.
“Do you think I should call a doctor?” Keith said at length.
“No. You’re not… you’re fine. There must be a reason for this, and we’ll find it.” I reached over and squeezed his hand. “Besides, what do you expect them to say? Probably it’s just stress or something. The opening date is crawling closer, you know.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound very convinced. “Did you find anything at all about the song?”
“Not really. The first part is similar to a minuet, or at least, a lot of minuets popped up when I put it in. But then it goes in a completely different direction, so that’s the end of our hopes.”
“It doesn’t sound like a minuet,” he said, frowning a little. “The pattern of the movements is not there.”
“I said the first part. Then your playing goes wonky and it stops sounding like anything recognizable at all.”
“Wonky?” He chuckled and I offered my best pout. “What kind of description is that?”
“A suitable one. Come on—admit it.”
“I have a few adjectives in mind, but ‘wonky’ isn’t one of them.”
“You can’t even remember the notes. Your vote doesn’t count.”
&
nbsp; We laughed, even though the conversation wasn’t particularly witty, because it was normal and we felt safe together.
“Thank you,” he said, out of the blue.
I blinked and tried to smile it off, but Keith’s determined eyes belied the softness of his tone. He meant it, and he wasn’t willing to let me ignore his feelings.
“I did nothing special,” I tried.
He reached out his free hand, curling his fingers around the side of my neck and pulling me to him. Surprisingly, instead of engaging in a passionate kiss, as I half-expected and half-hoped, he just guided my cheek to rest against his shoulder, my face turned into the curve of his neck, and then let go of our intertwined fingers so that he could hug me to him, gentle but firm.
“You’re still here,” he whispered, his warm breath tickling the shell of my ear. “That’s special enough.”
My arms wrapped around his waist like he’d disappear if I didn’t hold onto him. Again, while we were doing absolutely nothing but hugging, the moment turned strangely intimate. Like we were meant to be, however corny the concept might sound. His hands didn’t roam; I didn’t climb into his lap. The only concession we made was the gentle caress of his thumb rubbing shooting circles behind my ear.
“Look what we found here!”
The shrill voice shattered the moment and I jumped away from Keith, embarrassed, as if we’d been doing something wrong. I felt his sharp intake of breath, but otherwise, he did a remarkable job of being relaxed while staring up into… Lena’s face, of course.
I didn’t know why she’d come to the theater on one of the few days when we didn’t have to be there. For a moment, I entertained the silly notion that she’d been following us, but quickly dismissed it as being stupid. However, her sneer didn’t allow me to forget that she was there and that we were alone.
Bitch Queen? She looks like a vicious Rottweiler about to pounce!
“What do you want, Lena?” I asked, keeping my tone as blank as I could.
“What do you want, Alice?” She mimicked my voice and tone.
I didn’t reply, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed Keith shifting. The mood had gone from warm and comfortable and even romantic to freezing and tense and ugly in record time, and neither of us liked it one bit. Still, reacting would only give an opening to Lena, and I wasn’t willing to let that happen.
