by Nia Stephens
“And Kiki is not usually a diminutive of Katrina,” he continued.
“No, it’s not. Katrina is a diminutive of Katherine, and it is redundant to truncate a truncation.” You’re not the only one who knows a few big words, she added silently.
“So where’d you get the nickname?”
“Guess.”
Oddly, he seemed to perk up at the challenge. His brilliant smile was back, brighter than ever. “Okay, let’s see. You’re listed as Kiki Kelvin on the liner notes to Free for All, so it’s not a reaction to Hurricane Katrina.”
She shook her head. She didn’t like sharing her name with such a terrible storm, but she had already been Kiki to her friends for years when the hurricane flattened the Gulf Coast.
“Big anime fan?”
“When I actually have the time to sit down and watch a movie, yes, but I didn’t name myself after Kiki’s Delivery Service. ”
“It’s great, isn’t it? I like it better than Spirited Away.”
“Spirited Away is a much better movie!” Kiki said, straightening up.
“Technically, I’d agree with you. But I like Kiki’s Delivery Service better. There’s something about the tone, I guess you’d say, that’s so much lighter—”
Soon they were arguing like she and Mark did on a good day. Lyman wasn’t hung up on being right, though—he was as eager to listen to Kiki as to make his own case. And Kiki was so busy defending Spirited Away, even if it was a lot more depressing than Kiki’s Delivery Service, that she didn’t realize where they were going until Lyman pulled into a parking lot behind the Schermerhorn Center.
Oh no, she thought, but it was too late to try to convince Lyman to take her somewhere else. Schermerhorn was the just-built home of the Nashville Symphony, a building Kiki had toured with her arts appreciation class in the second week of school. And she did appreciate the building itself—she dreamed of playing a venue with acoustics like the Schermerhorn. But she wasn’t crazy about classical music. She only took the class because it seemed like a good way to get more sleep three days a week—she had napped through slide shows on painting, architecture, and sculpture, and snored through two weeks of Bach and Brahms. Any teacher who played nineteenth-century lullabies to teenagers after lunch ought to know what to expect.
But Lyman was still rattling on about Japanese movies, nodding at the ticket-taker by the door as if he knew her by name. Kiki didn’t think he was showing off—he really seemed to know the Schermerhorn well. And he seemed completely unaware that Kiki might not be quite as happy about being there as he was.
“Tonight’s program is kind of special,” he whispered as they took their seats. They were good seats, too—only ten rows back. Kiki had no idea how much symphony tickets cost, but she knew it was a lot more than dinner and a movie. “The guest pianist is one of my teachers, Jascha Kent. He almost never performs now, since he’s got arthritis, but he’s amazing. He hasn’t played on stage in two years.”
“Um, wow.” There went any chance of convincing him to leave before the concert started, while he could maybe get a refund on the tickets. Well, there was always the off chance that he’d be willing to sneak out during intermission. “How long have you been playing the piano?”
“Basically forever. My mom started teaching me when I was three, I think. She says I wanted to learn, but that’s not how I remember it.”
“But you must like it now.”
“Well, yeah. I love it. But I’m not sure I want to do it professionally. I sometimes feel like . . . oh, I don’t know. I mean, I love playing. Really. And I like traveling, too, and the competitions. But sometimes I wish I did something a little more . . . normal, I guess. You know? I haven’t gone to a real school since I was eight.”
“You’re not missing much,” Kiki said, but she gave his arm a little squeeze. After all, she knew exactly what he meant.
He smiled, and was about to say something else when the lights went out.
“Welcome to the Schermerhorn Center. Please silence your cell phones,” boomed a recorded voice in the darkness, so Kiki and Lyman both whipped theirs out and switched from ring to vibrate. Onstage, lights bloomed, and the curtain opened to reveal the orchestra already in place. The concertmaster—the lead violin—got to her feet and played a clear, ringing “a.” Soon, the magnificent acoustics magnified the chaos of an entire orchestra tuning up, but it was silent again after a minute. Kiki knew that the piano was not always part of an orchestra, but she was surprised to see that there was no piano onstage.
“I thought you said your teacher was a pianist,” Kiki whispered.
“He’s playing in the second half, after intermission.”
Oh well. Another plan foiled. Kiki sighed silently and settled in for a couple of hours of sheer boredom. She hadn’t decided what she was doing with the beats on a couple of their new songs—if the music wasn’t too annoying, maybe she could get that figured out. But if she was going to be sitting quietly for two hours, she would rather get some reading done for AP English. Unfortunately, that was not an option.
The conductor walked onstage, a very tall woman with long, dark hair, wearing the traditional conductor’s tuxedo. The faint buzz of whispered conversations died as she crossed the stage, bowed swiftly, then climbed onto the little dais that held her music stand. She waved a slim ivory wand up once, then down, and the orchestra plunged into something fast and wild that Kiki had never heard before. It sounded more like Latino dance music than Brahms lullabies, but there was a certain sophistication along with the swing. It was fascinating, which was not something Kiki said about a lot of music. Unlike when she listened to rock, this music made her want to dance and to think.
“What is this?” Kiki whispered, speaking right into Lyman’s ear so that she wouldn’t disturb the old people sitting to either side of them.
“Villa-Lobos,” he whispered back, handing her the program. “Like it?”
“I love it!”
The woman sitting to Kiki’s left shushed her. Kiki just smiled, settled back, and enjoyed the music. She had no idea a symphony could sound like this! At some point, Lyman took her hand, and she saw no reason to snatch it back. His hand was warm and dry; it fit like a puzzle piece. Where his left wrist pressed against her right, she could feel his pulse racing in time with hers.
After three fast pieces with lots of interesting rhythms going on with the tympanis, snare, and bass drums, they played a slow, dreamy piece by another composer Kiki’s arts appreciation teacher had never mentioned. Then the lights came up, and Kiki and Lyman joined the line snaking out of the auditorium and into the lobby.
“So, what do you think?” he asked, grinning because he already knew the answer.
“Of course it was awesome. Hey, where are we going?” Kiki asked as Lyman led her to an unmarked door near the end of the lobby.
“I told Jascha that we’d come backstage and say hello.”
“Don’t you think someone will stop us?” she whispered as they slipped through the door into a narrow hall. There were a couple of security guards at the other end of the hall.
He winked at her and led the way. If he hadn’t been holding her hand, Kiki probably would have snuck back out. She knew that security guards might look like cops who’ve had a few too many doughnuts, but most of them took their work pretty seriously. One of the roadies on the Wasted tour was shot in the foot when he refused to tell a guard who he was and didn’t produce his ID badge fast enough.
“Alex Lyman to see Jascha Kent,” Lyman announced when they were halfway down the hall.
“Who did you say you are?” asked one of the guards.
“Alex Lyman. I played with Youth Symphony last month.”
The younger guard nodded slowly. “Oh, yeah, I remember seeing you around. You’re here to see who?”
“Jascha Kent, the soloist.”
The guards looked at each other, shrugged, and got out of the way. Kiki was impressed: Lyman seemed totally confident in this
world.
The area backstage wasn’t that different from any venue Kiki had visited: musicians stood around drinking bottled water and gossiping. It took less than a minute for Lyman to find Jascha—he was sitting on a stool in a corner, wiggling his fingers in some kind of warm-up exercise.
“Lyman!”
“Mr. Kent!” They didn’t shake hands or hug, like Kiki expected, but she could tell they were happy to see each other. Interesting. She couldn’t imagine any of the Pussycat Posse eager to see a teacher outside of school.
“This is Kiki Kelvin,” Lyman said, tugging her forward.
“You look familiar. Was your face outside of Tower Records a few months back?”
“More like a year, but yeah. Nice to meet you.”
Jascha Kent wasn’t as old as Kiki thought—his brown hair was only sprinkled with silver. But when he stood up, he moved very slowly—you could tell he expected pain. A career in classical music was so precarious—anything from arthritis to earaches could mean a forced early retirement. Rock was, if anything, worse: the touring schedule was hard on the body, there was the constant temptation of heavy drugs, or alcohol at least, and who wants to watch a middle-aged woman rock out? Probably the average age for a drummer was twenty-five, and Kiki knew fewer than ten who were over thirty.
Jascha asked them what they thought about the first half of the program, and Kiki told him how much she liked newer symphonic music.
“You’ll probably like the Rachmaninoff then. At least, I hope you will.” He smiled at her, a young man’s smile, then hustled them back to the side door. They had to jog down the hall to get back into the auditorium before the doors shut, and then apologize to half a dozen people as they crawled over their laps, back to their seats. When the curtain came up, Kiki joined the crowd applauding Jascha’s triumphant, if slow, walk across the stage.
“This is going to be great,” Lyman whispered, and it was. The Rachmaninoff piece sounded older than the Villa-Lobos—or, at least, it wasn’t from the new world. But it was wild, fast, and complicated, and Kiki gripped Lyman’s hand the whole time, except when the audience broke into applause. At the very end, a choir joined the orchestra onstage, and they performed part of Carmina Burana. Kiki actually was familiar with that piece, from movie trailers and dramatic Superbowl commercials, as well as from arts appreciation. But she had never heard it performed live—it was a completely different experience. The jumps that seemed melodramatic on recordings were strangely moving in live performance. She sighed and rested her head on Lyman’s shoulder, close to tears.
At the end of the concert, the audience responded with thunderous applause, Kiki clapping as loudly as everyone around her.
“That was amazing!” Kiki was almost dancing in the aisles as they made their way to the exit. The old woman who had shushed her earlier smiled and said to her equally old husband, or maybe date, “It’s so nice to see young people appreciating real music, not that punk rock stuff.”
They laughed, and Lyman’s arm somehow found itself around Kiki’s shoulders. For a guy who didn’t seem to spend a lot of time around girls, Lyman could be pretty slick. He even smelled delicious—Kiki had been appreciating his cologne since he first whispered in her ear.
She enjoyed it even more once they stepped outside of the Schermerhorn. A frosty wind was blowing off the river, belling Kiki’s skirt and freezing her bare arms. Lyman slipped his jacket around her shoulders before she even had time to complain of the cold.
“I should have brought a wrap at least,” she said, snuggling into the crook of his arm. “I didn’t think it would get cold so fast.”
“But you’ve got such nice shoulders.” He sounded completely serious. Kiki got her share of compliments, of course, but she didn’t think anyone had ever told her that she had nice shoulders.
“Long gloves, then,” she said. “But I don’t suppose they’d be warm enough.”
“Depends on what they’re made of. There’s a really nice synthetic silver yarn at Threaded Bliss. You could stripe that with black cashmere, and that would make them warm. If you made them ribbed and fingerless, you could probably knit them up in just a few hours.”
Kiki stopped dead to look up at Lyman’s face.
“What?” he asked, eyebrows innocently raised.
“Oh my God.” This time, Kiki couldn’t hold back the giggles. “You really do knit!”
“What can I say? I’ve got a lot of free time.”
“But why?”
“Why not? I’m supposed to break my leg playing football, or lose a few brain cells playing Warcraft, just because I was born with a Y chromosome? I’m not going to let other people’s ideas of what guys do determine what I do with my free time.”
“Well, okay. I can see that.”
“A female drummer in a hard-core band? I bet you can.”
Kiki was saved from coming up with a response by the buzz of a vibrating phone.
“I’m guessing this is for you,” she said, fishing his phone out of his jacket pocket. She glanced at the screen and did a double-take. The first half of the number displayed was Jasmine’s, the second half, Camille’s. If their cell phones had a baby, she thought, stifling a giggle, that would be its number! She handed the phone to Lyman.
He checked the number then slipped the phone into his pants pocket.
“Anyone special?”
“Not really. Are you hungry?”
“Starving.” She was too nervous to eat before the show, but now she could kill a plate of hash browns.
“Are you a vegan or just a vegetarian?”
“Just vegetarian.”
“How do you feel about Waffle Hut? There’s one right around the corner, near the clubs, and they do a killer grilled cheese sandwich.”
“Know it well.” Kiki smiled. “Perfect.”
Because of the cold, Lyman and Kiki had the sidewalk to themselves, though Broadway was clogged with cars, which was to be expected on a Friday night. It was quiet enough that Kiki could hear Lyman’s cell phone buzzing in his pocket four times before they got to Waffle Hut.
“You’re a popular guy, huh?” Kiki asked as he held the door open for her.
“You have no idea.” He grinned. Kiki smiled back—she’d had nights on the road when the Pussycat Posse had filled the entire missed-call queue on her cell phone. If she hadn’t specifically warned them not to call her that night, she knew that each one of them would have called to check up on her at least once.
They slid into a booth, and a few minutes later two grilled cheese sandwiches were frying in a puddle of what passed for butter at Waffle Hut.
“You can order meat,” Kiki had told him. “I don’t mind.”
“I’ve been a vegetarian since I was nine,” he said.
“What happened when you were nine?”
“I saw Babe.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“I was just thinking . . . you watch a lot of movies.”
He shrugged. “Not going to school gives you a lot of free time.”
“So what do you do when you aren’t watching movies or knitting?”
“Or playing the piano? That does take up a lot of time. Oh, I do workbooks, play around with some of my dad’s old recording equipment, read manga and old Sandman comics. What about you? What do you do when you’re not at school or working on music?”
“That’s pretty much all I do, really. I used to read graphic novels—I loved The Sandman, and I like Alan Moore’s stuff, you know, like—”
Kiki forgot what she was saying when she saw who was walking into Waffle Hut. Jasmine’s face was turned away, since she was talking over her shoulder, but Kiki would recognize the particular shade of her hair from half a mile away. And the person she was talking to?
Mark.
“Is something wrong?” Lyman asked, swiveling to look behind him.
“Wrong? No. Of course not.” Kiki’s heart was banging like a drum-track playback on double speed. She
had talked to Mark and Jasmine every single day that week, and neither one mentioned that Mark had asked Jasmine out, much less that she had said yes.
“Are you sure?” Lyman turned back to face Kiki. He held her hands with both of his and peered into her face. She knew she must look absolutely awful for him to be so concerned.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Kiki lied, plastering a false smile on her face. Waffle Hut was not a large restaurant. They would see her sooner or later, and if she didn’t say anything it would be even worse. She cleared her voice and called, “Jazz! Mark! Hey!”
Jasmine’s face, pale to begin with, went stark white. Mark turned pink, but both of them managed to sound perfectly normal when they said hello to Lyman, though Mark’s face had gone strangely still. Kiki wasn’t quite as successful. She almost introduced Mark as her friend, choked halfway through the word, then said he was the bassist for Temporary Insanity, as if that was all he was to her. Kiki didn’t introduce Jasmine at all. She clearly wasn’t the friend that Kiki had thought her to be.
“Is something going on with the band?” Lyman asked as soon as Jasmine and Mark settled at the other end of the diner, out of Kiki’s line of sight.
“There’s always something going on with the band. We’re called Temporary Insanity for a reason.” She sighed. Of course, she had told Jasmine that she was over Mark. She must have said it one hundred times since Tuesday morning. But she never thought Jasmine would actually go out with him. She didn’t really think Mark would have the guts to call her. Other guys were scared of Jasmine—she was kicked off the debate team for being too mean in cross-examination. She actually made a boy from Carroll cry at her first and last tournament.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Lyman gave her hands a gentle squeeze. “I think you’re really strong, to handle the pressure as well as you do.”
Kiki could feel herself blushing. “Um, thanks. I mean, I don’t think I do all that great a job at it really, but—”
“Seriously. I’m on the periphery of the industry myself, remember. You’re fantastic.”
“Wow. Thanks, Lyman. For the record, I think you’re pretty impressive, too.” She twined her fingers around his and leaned across the table. She knew Jasmine would think this kiss was for their benefit, and maybe Mark would, too, if he had half a clue. But it really was all about Lyman, his reward for saying just the right thing at just the right time.
