by Kasie West
“They do?” my mom asked. “That’s not very nice.”
“They don’t,” I mumbled. But they should’ve. It had a nice ring to it.
“Cade … ” My mom’s eyes narrowed in thought.
“Isabel used to date him. Our freshman year.” Until Cade and I fought so much that my best friend basically had to pick a side. She’d claimed the breakup wasn’t my fault, but I knew it probably was. Half the time I felt guilty, the other half I figured I had saved her a lot of heartache.
“I thought that name sounded familiar,” Mom said, making a right turn. “Did we ever have him over to the house?”
“No, we didn’t.” Thank goodness. Cade would have no doubt mocked me about our constantly cluttered house. With four kids, it was in a never-ending state of disaster.
Isabel had dragged me to Cade’s house once, for his fourteenth birthday. When we’d knocked on the door and he’d answered, his face had shown how he felt about me tagging along.
“Great birthday surprise,” he called in a sarcastic voice as he headed back into the house, Isabel and I following behind.
“Believe me, I didn’t want to come either,” I’d answered back.
Isabel had hurried to catch up with Cade. Meanwhile, I’d come to a standstill in the entryway. The inside of the house was massive and shockingly white. Even the furniture and decorations were white. Nothing would have stayed white for a second in my house.
I’d turned a slow circle, taking everything in, when Isabel poked her head around the corner and asked, “Are you coming?”
My brothers’ voices brought me out of the memory and back into the car with my family. They were now fighting over a fun pack of M&Ms. “I found it under the seat. That means it’s mine,” Wyatt said.
I pulled out my notebook and got to work on sketching the skirt again. “Hey, Mom, can we get some black thread? I’m out.”
Mom turned onto the main street. “Can it wait until the end of the week? Your dad is finishing up a job.”
My dad was a freelance furniture designer. The amount of work he got could be unpredictable, and so was our family budget. Basically everything about my family was unpredictable.
“Yeah, of course,” I said.
Back home, I stepped over the pile of backpacks just inside the door and made my way to my room. “I’m borrowing the laptop,” I called out to anyone who wanted to listen, and grabbed the computer off the hallway desk.
Nobody responded.
I walked into my room … Well, half of it was my room. The clean half. The half with fabric samples and color palates pinned to the walls. Not the half with magazine clippings of makeup ideas and cute celebrities. Although I had found myself appreciating that half every once in a while.
But with Ashley not here now, I was free to flop down on my bed and pull up YouTube. I searched for an instructional video for the Blackout song. It wasn’t a well-known song so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find someone teaching the guitar part for it. I had to scroll through several pages, but finally I found one. I positioned the laptop on my dresser.
I kept my guitar stowed under my bed in a hard case. It wasn’t a precaution. With two younger brothers, it was a necessity. I slid it out and opened the case. This guitar, my baby, took me six months to earn. I had given up every Friday night to watch the neighbors’ two-year-old twin boys. They were more difficult than any kids I’d ever watched. And considering the nickname I had for my own brothers, that was saying a lot. But it was worth it. This guitar was everything I’d dreamed it would be. Its tone was perfect. And playing it made me feel like I wasn’t as awkward as usual. It made me feel like there was something I was meant to do. This. It made everything else disappear.
Well, it made everything disappear for a little while. I was positioning my fingers for the first chord when the door to my … our … room slammed open.
“Lily!” Jonah said, running in and sliding to a halt in front of me. “Look! I have a loose tooth.” He opened his mouth wide and pushed on his top right tooth with his tongue. It didn’t move at all.
“Cool, buddy.”
“Okay, bye!” He was out just as fast as he came in.
“Shut my door!” I yelled after him, but either he didn’t hear or didn’t want to. I sighed, got up, and shut it. Then I focused back on the video and my guitar.
Two minutes later, there was a knock and then my mom appeared. “Your turn to unload the dishwasher.”
“Can I just finish this?” I ask, nodding down toward my guitar.
“I can’t start dinner until the sink is empty and the sink can’t be empty until the dishwasher is.”
I considered fighting for five more minutes but then I glanced up at my mom. She looked even more tired than usual.
“Okay, I’ll be right there.” I closed my eyes and played one more strum, letting the notes vibrate through my arms. My whole body relaxed.
“Hurry up, Lily!” my mom called.
Ugh.
The next morning before school, I stopped in the kitchen to grab some cereal. Mom had already dropped off Jonah and Wyatt, and was folding laundry in the den. Ashley was still getting ready (it took her hours) and my dad was at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper.
I took a box of cereal from the pantry and was pouring some into a bowl when I saw something on the counter that made me shake my head. Two necklaces lay on the beige granite, a piece of paper beneath each one. The necklace on the right had two checkmarks on the paper. The one on the left had two checkmarks.
“No,” I said.
My dad peeked over the top of his newspaper. “Just vote. It’s not a big deal.”
“You say it’s no big deal but then you make it a big deal. Whose friend did you rope into voting this time?” I asked, noting there were already four votes without mine.
“Voting is a privilege. There is no rope involved. It’s all in good fun.”
“Then they’re both equally pretty. I vote for both of them.”
“Nope. You have to choose.”
“You and Mom are weirdos. There is no hope for any of us when you two do weird things like this.” I poured myself some milk and sat down at the table. Dad’s newspaper was still in front of him as though he were reading. He was just trying to lull me into a false sense of security. Pretend like the competition didn’t matter.
“You know Mom is not going to leave you alone until you vote,” he said.
“Sure. It’s Mom that cares. Just tell me which one is yours and I’ll vote for it.”
“That would be cheating, Lil.”
“Why did you start this tradition? Mom doesn’t take over your job and try to outdo your fancy carved furniture.”
Dad chuckled. “She’d win for sure.”
I took a bite of cereal. To get his mind on a different track, I asked, “Why do we still get the newspaper? You know you can find these same stories on the Internet … yesterday?”
“I like to hold my words.”
I laughed, then stopped when I saw something on the page he held in front of him that changed my mind about newspapers.
Suddenly, I loved newspapers.
Songwriting Competition. Earn five thousand dollars and a three-week intensive with a top professor at Herberger Institute for Music. Visit our website for more details! www.herbergerinstitute.edu
“You ready to go?” Ashley asked, coming into the kitchen. She was yawning, but, as usual, she was perfectly put together, in skinny jeans, a pink scoop-neck T-shirt, and platform shoes, with her hair in a ponytail and her makeup flawless. Although we looked alike—same long, auburn hair, hazel eyes, and freckles—our style was totally opposite. Ashley would have fit in well with Lauren and Sasha at school.
“What?” I blinked at my sister, confused. “I mean, yes. I mean, Dad, can I have that?”
Dad looked at his plate, which had a half-eaten bagel on it, shrugged, and pushed it my way.
“Gross. No, the newspaper.”
“T
he paper? You want to read the paper?”
“Yes.”
Ashley came over and snatched the bagel off his plate.
“Hey, that was for Lily.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “I want the paper, not the bagel.”
He grunted. “Nope, it still didn’t sound believable the second time I heard it either.”
“Funny, Dad.”
“You can have the paper if you go vote.”
I rolled my eyes, pushed my chair away from the table, and went back to examine the necklaces. The one on the right had feathers. My mom was going through a feather phase. I was normally a fan of my mom’s jewelry but the feather thing was a little too hippie for my tastes. Other people seemed to like it though. I lifted the one on the left. “This is your winner.”
My dad pumped his fist. “She voted for mine, Emily!”
I held out my hand.
Dad gave me the newspaper, kissed my cheek, and went off to find my mom, I was sure.
“It’s funny how they think we don’t know whose is whose,” Ashley said. “Like the score would be so close every time.”
“I know. We should really make Mom win by a landslide every time and then maybe they’d stop the competition.”
“It’s good for Dad’s self-esteem. Now let’s get you to school, little one.”
I clutched the newspaper to my chest, hugging the words, and followed after my sister. Now I just had to write the perfect song and win this competition.
There was something about Chemistry that stimulated every thought in my mind to fire at once. Maybe it was the mixture of boring subject, monotone teacher, and cold seat. I wondered if there was a chemical equation for that. Those three factors, combined, created slush brain. No, that was the wrong term. My brain didn’t become lazy. It became full. Hyperactive brain. A brain that made it impossible to concentrate on the sluggish words exiting Mr. Ortega’s mouth. Were his words coming out slower than normal?
Today, amidst all the usual thoughts and words that I now couldn’t write down in a notebook, I had the song I had learned to play on my guitar the day before looping through my mind. It was a torturous song—one I loved and hated. I loved it because it was brilliant, the kind that made me want to write a song equally as good. I hated it because it was brilliant, the kind that let me know I’d never write a song anywhere close to as good.
And I kept thinking about that contest.
How was I going to win? How would I even enter it?
My pencil hovered over my paper—the single Mr. Ortega–approved page. If I could write the song down, it would get out of my head and let me focus on the lecture. This paper would go in front of Mr. Ortega in exactly forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes? This class was never-ending. What was he even talking about? Iron. Something about the properties of iron. I wrote the word iron down on the page.
Then, as if my pencil had a mind of its own, it moved over to the fake wood desktop and jotted down the words playing in my head:
Stretch out your wilting petals and let the light in.
I added a drawing of a little sun, its rays touching some of the words. Now, just forty-three minutes left of class.
I was in the midst of writing in my notebook and walking down the hallway—something I hadn’t quite mastered, despite how many times I had done it—when I heard the laughter.
I thought it was directed at me, so I looked up. It wasn’t.
A blond kid—a freshman, maybe—stood in the middle of the hall, books gripped to his chest. Balanced precariously on top of his head was a baseball bat. Cade Jennings stood behind him, holding his hands out to his sides like he had just let go of that bat.
“Toss me the ball,” Cade said to his friend Mike, who was standing across from him and the poor freshman.
Mike did just that and now Cade was trying to figure out how he was going to reach the top of that bat to place the ball. The kid looked too terrified to move.
“I need a chair. Someone find me a chair,” Cade said, and people immediately scrambled to do his bidding. The bat began to wobble, then fell, bouncing across the tile floor and coming to a stop against the lockers.
“You moved, dude,” Cade said to the freshman boy.
“Try it again,” someone in the watching crowd called.
Cade smiled his big, perfectly white–toothed smile. The one he used a lot, knowing its power. I frowned. I seemed to be the only one immune.
As much as I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, I knew I should probably help the cowering kid.
But I wasn’t sure what I could do. Being the center of unwanted attention thanks to Cade Jennings was something I was very familiar with …
I thought back to freshman year P.E. I wasn’t one of those girls who thought she was horrible at everything. But I did know my weaknesses, and P.E. was one of them. And co-ed basketball was the ultimate form of P.E., so I did my best to stay as far away from the ball as possible.
For reasons that I later realized were probably malicious, the ball was constantly thrown to me. By my team, by the opposing team. And I could never catch it. It was like being the only target in a game of dodgeball. I was hit in the shoulder, the back, the leg.
That’s when Cade, who had been sitting on the bleachers, shouted for everyone to hear, “It’s like she possesses a force of energy that sucks the ball straight into her. A black hole. A Magnet. Lily Abbott, the Magnet.”
He’d said that last part in a movie announcer voice. Like he had transformed me into some sort of clumsy superhero. Then all through the gym, everyone copied him. Using that same voice, and laughing.
They’d laughed and laughed, and the laughter had stuck in my ears just as the nickname “Magnet” had apparently stuck in everyone’s heads.
And now that kind of laughter was happening again, in the hall, and it was directed at Cade’s latest victim.
I cleared my throat and said, “Oh look, a game to see who is more thick-headed—Cade or his bat.” I nodded to the side, trying to tell the kid to leave now that I’d distracted Cade.
Cade’s smile doubled in width as he took me in, from the top of my hair—its waves feeling crazier under his scrutiny than normal—to my Docs with mismatched shoelaces. “Oh look, it’s the monitor of fun. Is there too much of it happening here, Lily?”
“I only see one person having fun.”
He glanced around at the hall crammed full of students. “Then you’re not looking hard enough.” He lowered his voice. “I get it. It’s hard to see anyone beyond me, right?”
If I showed how annoyed I was, he’d just be winning. “I’m just here to rescue another soul from your arrogance,” I said through gritted teeth.
Although maybe I wasn’t rescuing anyone at all. The kid hadn’t moved. I’d given him a wide opening to leave and he still stood there. In fact, he opened his mouth and said, “What if you put the ball on the bat first and then put the bat on my head.”
Cade patted him on the back. “Good call. Where’d the bat go?”
I sighed. There had been no need for an intervention. The kid liked abuse, apparently. I resumed my walk.
“Next time, come by earlier. We wouldn’t want things to get out of hand,” Cade called, to more laughter.
Anger surged up my chest and I whirled around. “Have you ever heard of alliteration? You should try it.” It was a lame comeback. An inside argument that he wouldn’t get, but it was the only thing that came out. The kids around him laughed harder. I turned and it took everything in me to walk away at a normal speed.
“I’m going to enter a songwriting competition,” I said.
Isabel’s hand paused while reaching for her pajamas.
It was Friday night and we were at her house about to watch a scary movie. I had held in this announcement since I’d read about the contest the day before, turning it over in my mind. Now I’d said it out loud. That meant I’d have to follow through. I would follow through.
“You are?” H
er voice held more than a little skepticism.
I threw myself back onto her queen-size bed and stared at the poster of Einstein pinned to her ceiling. I wondered, like I always did, how she could sleep with him staring down at her like that. I always had a hard time.
But I still loved sleeping over at Isabel’s. She was an only child, so her house was like an oasis of calm for me. We would eat dinner with her parents—tonight it was delicious homemade tamales with rice and beans—and then we’d come upstairs to hang out in her giant room, with its own pullout sofa, TV, and tiny refrigerator for stashing Diet Cokes and ice cream.
“You don’t think I can?” I asked her now, frowning.
“It’s not that, Lil. I’m sure your songs are great,” Isabel replied, pulling her pajamas out of her dresser drawer. “I’d be able to tell you for sure if you would actually share one with me—you know, your best friend in the whole world.”
I groaned. “I know. I’m sorry. I don’t have one finished yet.”
“That’s what you always say. How are you going to enter a contest when you won’t even share a song with me?”
I covered my face with my hands. “I don’t know.”
She sat next to me on the bed. “I’m sorry. I know you can do it, Lil. You just need to believe in yourself.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Don’t be a brat. I’m trying to help.”
I took my hands off my face and looked at her. “I know.”
“Tell me about the competition.”
I propped myself up on my elbows. “It’s through the Herberger Institute,” I began.
Isabel gasped, her dark eyes widening. “Oh wow. That’s really prestigious, Lil!”
I nodded and tugged on a split end of my hair, feeling nervous. “I know. Anyway, there’s a five-thousand-dollar prize, which would be so amazing, of course. But even better, the winner gets a three-week course with one of the professors.”
Isabel smiled. “That’s huge. Knowing a professor could help with admissions, right?”
I nodded. I was trying not to think too much about this fact. Not only would winning the contest get me some money to help pay for college, something my parents couldn’t afford to do, but it might help me get into the college music program that I’d been dreaming about for years.
