Delaney and her friends wouldn’t be caught dead lugging around a knapsack.
Delaney shares two classes with me so far, English lit and American history, and she gives me a wide berth in each, as do her friends.
“Birds of a feather stick together,” Mama said.
It’s even more true here.
I exhale, long and straight, no wiggles for the first time today. The woods were a luxury of sorts, I reckon, cut off from the rest of the world. The peopled world is so fast, so loud and busy. Always things to do, with none seeming all that important. I’ve taken to popping aspirin most afternoons, my head punching back at all the hustle, bustle, and noise.
I watch a phoebe land on the cornice and characteristically pump its tail. Nessa healed a phoebe of a broken wing in the Hundred Acre Wood. The fledgling’s feathers were a silky grayish brown, with its stomach a happy yellow surprise. I pretend the phoebe followed us here, seeing how it’s such a sturdy, resourceful critter.
Fee-bee. Feeeeee-bee.
The bird sounds like it’s calling itself.
I take my violin from its case and, positioning my bow, imitate the sound.
Fee-bee. Feeeeee-bee.
When Ness was younger, she loved to trace the dark, discolored mark under my chin where the violin continually pressed; a mark she called my “purple flower,” blooming from years of playing.
I close my eyes and slide into Vivaldi’s “Spring,” and even the phoebe stills to listen. I ride the notes back to the Hundred Acre Wood, to the sway and dazzle of sun-drizzled branches, the wanwood leafmeal a spicy carpet, the air crisp as a bite from a rare apple as the Obed River rushed off to bigger things.
Some days, the longing for the woods breaks the ache in two until I can’t breathe. I slip into Brahms’ sonata no. 1 in G Major, my lunch completely forgotten, along with the constant motion, the tittering girls, the awkward fit of this outsider’s world. My bow glides across the strings and I play by heart, from the heart, as Mama taught me, my lashes wet and then my cheeks, the strings vibrating the stars behind the daylight, the notes deliberate as switch strokes at times, a caress from Saint Joseph at others.
“Woo hoo! Bravo!”
I hit a clunker, almost dropping my violin. He leans in the doorway, his gloves smacking together, his eyes sparkling like Obed sun off freshly fallen snow.
“Wow. And to think they were calling you ‘Clumsy Carey’ just this morning.”
“Is that what they’re calling me?” I say, drying my face and hoping he doesn’t see. “Could be worse, I reckon.”
I put down my bow, rest the violin on my lap.
“You looked like you were in another world. In orbit.”
I blush, but I don’t look away. Ryan Shipley. My heart leaps, but I don’t understand why.
Say something.
“You look cold,” I say, my own teeth chattering.
“Hold that thought.”
He returns less than a minute later, a thick coat in his arms. I wait for him to pull it on. Instead, he walks over and drapes it across my shoulders.
My heart beats upside down when he plunks down next to me. So close. I think of what Pixie said about him, my cheeks burning. With cold, I tell myself. But even I don’t believe it.
“You can really play. I mean, wow.”
An icicle crashes to the ground behind us.
“What are you doing out here anyway?” he asks, as if he’s been looking for me.
Has he been looking for me?
“Playing the violin,” I say.
Our laughter echoes off the walls.
“Where did you learn to play?”
I feel myself smiling the way Jenessa does when Melissa praises her. I always knew I was good; I’ve practiced enough. But the fuss everyone makes continues to surprise me.
“My mother was a concert violinist. She taught me from the time I was four or so, and I loved it. She said it’s in our blood.”
“It must be, if you can play like that.”
The phoebe pokes its head out over the cornice.
Fee-bee. Feeeee-beeeee.
We look up at the bird, and I answer back with my violin.
Fee-bee. Feeeee-beeeee.
“You must play somewhere, right, where people can listen and there’s heat and stuff?”
We’re both grinning. I can’t stop. I think of what Mrs. Hadley said about Delaney, then push the thought aside.
“I’ve never played for anyone but my mother and my little sister. Not on purpose anyway.”
“You can’t be serious.”
I nod, my chest puffed up like the phoebe itself. And then I think of Mama. Mama, playing her meth’d-up clunkers, or nodding off over the violin, me darting forward to catch it as it fell from her hands. The music couldn’t save her. I think of Delaney’s twenty-dollar bill, and what fifty would get you, and I see Mama’s toothless face, laughing at me when I asked her why I couldn’t play for the men instead.
“That’s not the kind of playing they want,” she’d said, shaking her head at me.
He’d never understand, and I could never explain.