Our Song

by A. Destiny

  I did a slow circle to see what else was nearby. I froze when I spotted an awning on the other side of the street. It was bedazzled with bright pink, green, and orange swirls. Through the big plate-glass window, I could see rows of sleek wooden booths, brightly colored wall tiles, and mod elephants dangling from the ceiling. On the awning was a single word: CURRY.

  “I want that,” I declared to Jacob, already stepping off the curb, “way more than I want a burger.”

  “What’s that?” Jacob said. “Indian food? Sure, I like Indian food.”

  “Not just Indian food,” I said, almost skipping as we crossed the street. “Indian food in a completely cool, completely urban restaurant. In short, everything that the Camden School isn’t.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  We trotted over to Curry’s glass door and peered through.

  “The food’s going to be spicy and exotic,” I whispered to Jacob. “It will definitely not involve condensed soup. I can’t wait!”

  When we went inside, a waitress with too many tattoos to count told us to sit wherever. We rushed to grab the last table by the front window so we could watch Asheville’s hipsters, hippies, and slackers lope by.

  We tucked our fiddle cases safely between our chairs and the window while we read the menu.

  “I don’t even recognize half these things,” I said happily. “Look, they have lime rickeys! I’ve always liked the sound of a lime rickey, but I’ve never had one. Limmmmme rickey!”

  I was acting like a goofy tourist, but I didn’t care. In fact, I loved that I could do that in front of Jacob, who one-upped me by saying, “I’m gonna have a mango lassssssi!”

  Then we laughed so hard we both flopped over on the table.

  After we’d ordered chaat, pakoras, and thalis, we gazed out the window.

  We were prepared to admire cool Ashevillians, but after a couple of minutes (and the discovery that a lime rickey was even more fabulous than I’d imagined), someone started looking at us. It was a little girl, maybe six years old. She was young enough, anyway, to stare and point at us while tugging on her mom’s skirt.

  “Um, I know we’re not from around here, but do we stand out that much?” Jacob murmured.

  “Yeah, I thought I looked pretty local,” I said, frowning at my outfit.

  When I looked back at the girl, I realized she wasn’t pointing at us but at our fiddle cases. Then she jumped up and down and clasped her hands in front of her, shaking them at her mom.

  “She’s begging for violin lessons,” Jacob said.

  “You think?” I asked, surprised.

  “Oh yeah,” Jacob said, popping a bite of kale pakora into his mouth. “I spent a year doing the exact same thing when I was little.”

  I smiled at the girl and waved at her. She got pink in the cheeks and grabbed her mom’s hand, dragging her down the street.

  “Aw, we should head in that direction after lunch,” I said. “I think that’s where Nanny told us to go anyway. It’d be so cute to play for her. Mmm, I wonder if I should get another lime rickey to take with us.”

  Jacob looked at me and shook his head.

  “So you never get nervous?” he asked. “About performing?”

  I shrugged and tore into a piece of naan.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  He stared out the window.

  “I got such a rush right then,” he said. “I was all, ‘Hey, that kid thinks we’re real musicians. Wow!’ But maybe you’re a real musician when you stop thinking things like that.”

  He turned to look at me, his smile a little sad.

  “You’re the real musician,” he said. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “Jacob,” I said. “What does that mean, anyway? You make music. You care about music more than anything else in the world. What’s more real than that?”

  Jacob’s face changed then, in a way I couldn’t quite interpret. He looked into my eyes.

  “I care about other things too,” he said quietly.

  I stared back at him. Was he saying what I thought he was saying? At a moment when we were literally on display in a picture window? Where kissing absolutely couldn’t happen? And when, by the way, we were only a couple of days away from saying good-bye?

  I broke eye contact with Jacob, gazing into my lap as these thoughts tumbled around my mind.

  “We’d better get going,” Jacob said, taking another quick bite of food. “I want to start this busking business before I chicken out.”

  I swallowed hard and nodded while I motioned to our server for the check.

  A few minutes later we’d finished eating. (Well, Jacob had done the bulk of the eating. I’d sort of lost my appetite.) We got to-go refills on our lime rickeys, hoisted our violin cases, and headed for the door.

  Did he say what I thought he said? I asked myself again. I’d been at this guessing game with Jacob for so long, I didn’t trust myself to answer.

  I could only hope.

  • • •

  We followed our map, stopping along the way to peek into cool boutiques, an amazing bookstore, and a spice shop where we got to taste sea salt flavored with chocolate and wine.

  When we found the spot Nanny had told me about—a small courtyard at the intersection of a couple of cute, narrow streets—I burst out laughing. Plunked in the middle of the little plaza was the most tremendous feat of blacksmithing I’d ever seen. It was a shining, black, eight-foot-tall clothes iron, tipped onto its back end. The back end of the handle touched the sidewalk, creating a perfect perch for little kids to climb. Two giggling girls were crawling on it when we arrived. The bottom of the iron cast a neat triangular shadow onto the concrete.

  It was the perfect place for busking.

  We unpacked our fiddles and placed Jacob’s open case near our feet. I pulled out my wallet and fished out a few dollars to toss into it.

  “Peer pressure,” I explained to Jacob, making him laugh.

  Since he was the student, he picked our playlist.

  “How about we start with ‘Do You Love an Apple?’ ” he proposed.

  “Sure.”

  We launched into the piece, with me playing harmony to Jacob’s melody. In my head, I sang the lyrics. I knew Jacob was doing the same, as Nanny required.

  But these lyrics were the last thing I needed running through my head.

  Do you love an apple?

  Do you love a pear?

  Do you love a laddie with curly brown hair?

  I glanced at Jacob. His hair, in the humid almost-July air, was wavy enough that you could almost call it curly.

  And still, I love him, the next line of the song went.

  I can’t deny him.

  I’ll be with him wherever he goes.

  And that was just the first verse! I was sure I was turning bright red. I definitely couldn’t look at Jacob. It made staying on the same beat challenging, to say the least.

  Where’re the songs about black lung or poisonous snakebites when I need them? I lamented silently.

  Clink.

  The sound of coins hitting coins startled me. I hadn’t even noticed that we had a small audience. Well, it was a tiny audience of four people, all of them gray-haired and smiling at us. I could tell they thought we were cute.

  But I supposed I didn’t mind being cute if they were paying us for it. I gave them a little bow to thank them for the money. Then I glanced at Jacob.

  He was positively beaming. And his playing was speeding up, going from sweetly romantic to a happy little jig.

  It took all the awkwardness out of the love song. By the end, we were playing it twice as fast as it was meant to be. We were almost racing.

  And somehow I knew this was going to be the most fun I’d ever had busking.

  • • •

  We played for at least another twenty minutes before we paused.

  “This is awesome!” Jacob whispered as another spectator tossed a dollar into his case. “Even those moments when nobody’s watching a
re cool. Because then I’m trying to attract listeners, which is probably even harder than keeping them once they get here.”

  “I never thought of that,” I said. “You’re right.”

  “So what do we do now?” Jacob said. “We’ve played all the fiddle songs I know. I could do some classical stuff. Or should we just start over again with ‘Do you Love an Apple?’ ”

  “No!” I said, way too quickly.

  Jacob squinted at me, confused.

  “I mean . . . why not do something really new? Let’s jam.”

  “Jam?” Jacob looked even more confused.

  “You know,” I said, “improvise. Just pretend this is my front porch.”

  I nodded at the giant clothes iron.

  “That’s the magnolia tree,” I said. “And your lime rickey is now an Arnold Palmer.”

  “But you don’t like your front-porch jams,” Jacob said.

  “Maybe,” I ventured, “I just haven’t been playing with the right people.”

  And then, because saying something so overt almost sent me into a panic attack, I started playing.

  My improv began with a two-string shuffle, a standard fiddler’s rhythm, in the key of D. I had no idea where I was going to go with it.

  But when Jacob jumped in, I realized I didn’t have to know. He was taking the lead. I began harmonizing to his melodies, tracking the sway of his body, the tilt of his bow, and the flash in his eyes.

  Before long, this communication—part ear, part intuition—began to go both ways. Jacob followed my lead as much as I followed his.

  I’d done this so many times at our jams at home, spotting the raised eyebrows or the subtle elbow swing of the other players and using that cue to take the music in a new direction. But it had never felt like this. It was like Jacob and I were talking without talking; like he knew what I was going to do a moment before I did and vice versa.

  It was instinctive and exciting and . . . well, it was a lot like kissing.

  But without, alas, any actual kissing.

  We weren’t the only ones who thought our busking was pretty amazing. As soon as we began improvising, the coins and bills really started pouring into our fiddle case. They came from the parents of little kids who danced to our songs and from more gray-haired folks who thought we were charming.

  But it was when we got applause from a handful of hipsters in ironic T-shirts that Jacob and I knew we’d arrived.

  Of course, we completely ruined the moment by high-fiving and jumping up and down. The cool kids rolled their eyes and marched away, but we didn’t care.

  “That was incredible,” Jacob said to me, his eyes shining.

  “We were incredible,” I said.

  He took a step closer to me.

  I tilted my face upward.

  He’d just started to lean down when my grandmother’s voice called to us from across the street. What was it with her timing?!

  “Oh, kids, that was amazing!” she said, hustling toward us. “Jacob, I’m so proud of you. You let go!”

  “Did you hear that key change in the second half?” Jacob asked, turning away from me and grinning at Nanny. “You taught us that in week one! I don’t know how it came back to me!”

  “All that practice paid off,” Nanny said, squeezing Jacob’s arm with her good hand. She placed my camera case on the ground as she went into teacher mode. “Now, you still have to watch your wrist. And I want you to play me that part where you went dee, dee, DEE, dee. Remember? That was really special. . . .”

  While Nanny and Jacob chattered, I slumped against the giant flatiron, feeling my heartbeat gradually slow. Between the music and the almost-kiss, it had been racing. Now, as the adrenaline of the moment drained away, I felt as limp as a rag doll. I slid down the smooth, cool metal of the sculpture until I was cross-legged on the sidewalk. With nothing else to do, I pulled out my camera to peek at the photos that Nanny had shot.

  Squinting at the small screen, I found Nanny’s first images. They were of Tamara and Victoria, hamming it up as they played together on a street corner. Then it was Will looking serious and studious on another. Shana and Harley’s photos alternated between them playing blissfully together and arguing. It made me laugh because they completely reminded me of my parents.

  And then, I clicked on a photo of me and Jacob.

  Of us.

  Of us gazing into each other’s eyes while we played.

  There were also shots of us with our eyes closed while we communicated only through rhythm and tone.

  There were some frames featuring the hipsters dancing in circles with their arms linked; of them tossing coins into our cases.

  Finally, there were a few photos of me and Jacob both looking completely and simply happy, absorbed in our music.

  Or maybe we were absorbed in each other.

  But what could we do about it if we were? My grandmother was here, and after that, we’d be back in a van full of people. Then it’d be the dining hall and the sing-along. We’d be surrounded at all times.

  What’s more, we were all heading home the day after next. Our time left together was so fleeting, you could count it down by the hour.

  It’s too late, I thought miserably. I turned my camera off, and the image of me and Jacob—like an alternate reality that would never come to be—went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The next morning I woke up early, my mind busy playing and replaying my day in Asheville with Jacob.

  Annabelle stirred.

  I turned on my side to find her staring up at the ceiling, just as I’d been. Her top sheet was twisted in her slender fingers. I wasn’t the only one awake and obsessing.

  “Owen?” I asked.

  She didn’t look at me as she nodded.

  “Jacob?” she said.

  “Oh yeah,” I sighed. “Are you sad to be leaving him?”

  “Yes,” Annabelle said immediately. “And no. I mean, my next phase? College? It’s all about freedom. About studying and traveling and dating and not dating and definitely not being tied down by someone who lives thousands of miles away. I want that freedom! I do. But then I think about Owen and . . . I don’t. I wonder what it might be like if I wasn’t going to Brown or he wasn’t going to Berkeley.”

  “Maybe it would have been easier,” I said, propping myself on my elbow, “if you guys hadn’t gotten together at all?”

  “Definitely,” Annabelle said with a sigh. “Nell, I’m going to cry on my plane trip home tomorrow. I’m probably going to think about Owen every other minute for a long while. I might think about him forever. It’s really going to make it hard to write my feminist theory thesis. It was going to be all about the rise of the new Amazon.”

  I covered my mouth until Annabelle laughed, authorizing me to let out my own giggle.

  Then Annabelle did something equally unexpected. She said, “But you know what? I don’t regret a thing. I’d do it all over again.”

  She got out of bed and stepped over her suitcase, which was open on the floor and already half-filled. As she headed for the bathroom, I stayed in bed. I listened to the water pipes groan as Annabelle turned on the shower. I heard her say good morning to one of our other dorm mates.

  I stared at the ceiling and pictured Jacob’s face. I pictured his hair, too long now after a month at Camden. The dark tendrils of his bangs kept flopping over his glasses. His pale skin had turned ruddy early in the month, and now it was golden. He was maybe a little skinnier than he’d been when I’d first met him, which only made the muscles in his arms and legs pop more.

  He had new freckles.

  He had a smile that lit up his whole face.

  I didn’t know if I could bear to look at that face for six hours on this, our last day of class. Not when we’d be leaving each other so soon.

  And not when so much had—and hadn’t—happened between us.

  I rolled out of bed and shuffled to the closet. I dug into the bottom of the badly folded stack of clothe
s on my shelf. I found a plain ribbed tank top and a pair of long cargo shorts. I tossed them onto my bed and grabbed a handful of hair clips off my dresser before heading to the bathroom.

  If I hurried, I could make it to Nanny’s cottage before breakfast and explain why I wouldn’t be showing up at breakfast, or at our last class.

  • • •

  I was tentative when I pushed through the big barn doors. But as soon as they spotted me through the gloom, the blacksmiths treated me like their long-lost sister.

  Clint whooped and rushed over to give me a hug that left sooty fingerprints on my upper arms and squeezed all the breath out of me.

  Coach grinned at me so hard, his eyes disappeared into his bushy brows.

  “What brings you back to the barn, Olive Oyl?” he boomed.

  “Well, I never did finish that platter I was making,” I said. “And I missed the beast!”

  I pointed at the forge. Michael was pumping away at the bellows to liven up the fire. He waved at me between pumps, seemingly oblivious to the great gusts of heat that poured over him through the forge’s open door.

  “So it’s okay that I’m here?” I asked Coach. “I don’t want to get in your way.”

  “Please, you’re welcome here,” he boomed. “Anytime, my dear. Anytime.”

  I found my platter, looking dirty, crooked, and pretty pathetic, under a pile of the other guys’ work. Their pieces were beautiful, even the horseshoes.

  I knew there was no chance that my platter would be pretty. I just wanted to finish it before I left.

  Even more than that, I wanted somewhere to hide. In the barn, my flushed face could be explained away by the two-thousand-degree fire in the forge. Tears would just blend in with the sweat. And the jangle of hammer on iron would drown out my thoughts.

  At first it worked. As I struggled with my tongs and pounded my lava-colored platter, all I could think about was trying not to incur any more scars.

  But then I got back into the rhythm of the ironwork—the loop from fire to hammer to hissing water bath to fire again. I luxuriated in those moments of rest, when my piece was heating up in the forge. I felt that familiar, incredulous zing as my tray thinned out further and even took on a respectably oval shape. I loved the way my hammer made a pattern of dents in the iron, a substitute for my fingerprints.