Ballad (5 page)

The practice rooms that filled Chance Hall felt like holding cells. They were tiny, perfectly square rooms just big enough to hold an upright piano and two music stands and smelled like one thousand years of body odor. I cast a scornful look at the music stands—pipers memorize everything—and set my pipe case down by the piano bench. I took out my practice chanter and sat down; the bench creaked like a fart.

My piano lesson wasn’t for days, but I hadn’t been to the practice rooms before, and I wanted to see what they were like before Friday.

It wasn’t exactly a room built for inspiration. A practice chanter doesn’t have a beautiful tone to start with—the words “dying goose” come to mind—and I didn’t expect that the crap acoustics of the room would improve it.

I looked at the door. It had one of those little twist locks on the doorknob so that you could lock yourself in—I suppose so you wouldn’t have people barging in all the time while you were practicing. It occurred to me, randomly, that the practice rooms would be a great place to commit suicide. Everyone would just assume you were inside practicing until you started to smell.

I locked the door.

I sat back down on the very end of the bench and held my chanter to my lips. I didn’t quite want to begin playing, because I could feel the song from my dream still lurking right at the edge of my consciousness and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to stop it falling from my fingers if I started to play. And it would be amazing. The half-remembered song begged me to play it, to discover just how beautiful it would sound released into the air—but I was afraid that by giving in, I might be saying yes to something I didn’t want to say yes to.

I debated, my back to the door. I don’t know how long I’d sat there, unmoving, when I felt a tug in my head, a prickle of something, and watched goose bumps rise along the skin of my arms. And I knew that something was in the room with me, though the door had made no sound and I’d heard no footfalls.

I inhaled silently, wondering if it was worse to look or worse to not know. I looked.

The door was closed. Still locked. I was frigid, my sixth sense screaming at me
something’s not right; you’re not alone.
I fingered the iron band on my wrist, superstitious, and the action focused me. Close to me—very close—I smelled a weird smell, like ozone. Like just after a lightning bolt.

“Nuala?” I guessed.

There was no answer, but I felt a touch, like a weight, against my back and shoulder, from behind me. After a few seconds it was more than just weight: it was warmth, with shoulder blades against my shoulder blades, ribs against my ribs, hair against my neck. Nuala—if it was Nuala—said nothing, just sat silently behind me on the bench, her back leaning against my back. My skin prickled with goose bumps, cleared, and then prickled all over again, as if it couldn’t get used to her presence.

“I’m wearing iron,” I said—very quietly.

The body against mine didn’t shift. I imagined I could feel the thump of a heartbeat against my skin. “I spotted that.”

I let out the air in my lungs, very slowly through my teeth, relieved because it was Nuala’s voice. Yes, Nuala was bad—but an unidentified creature leaning against me, matching me breath for breath, would’ve been worse.

“It’s very uncomfortable,” I said, intensely aware of how speaking tightened my chest and created friction between her back and mine. The sensation was simultaneously terrifying and sensual. “The iron, I mean. It seems like such a waste of discomfort. I only put it on for you.”

“Should I be flattered?” Nuala’s voice was taunting. “There’s worse than me about.”

“Comforting thought. How bad
are
you, while we’re being friendly?”

Nuala made a little sound as if she were about to say something but thought better of it. Silence hung, fat and ugly, between us. Finally, she said, “I was only coming to listen to you.”

“You could’ve knocked. I had the door locked for a reason.”

“You weren’t to know I was here. What are you—a seer or something? A psychic?”

“Or something.”

Nuala shifted away from me, turning toward the piano. The loss of her touch was heartbreaking; my chest ached with abstract longing. “Play something.”

“Holy crap, creature.” I shifted toward the piano so that I could look at her, and shook my head to clear the agony. “You’re difficult.”

She leaned forward, across the keys, to see what my face looked like while I spoke. Her own hair fell in front of her face as she did so; she had to push the choppy pale bits back behind an ear. “That feeling only means you want to be more than you are. It only means you should’ve said
yes
instead of
no
.”

I was sure she meant her words to be convincing, but they had the opposite effect. “If I get somewhere in this life, it’s going to be because of me, bucko. No cheating.”

Nuala made a terrible face behind her freckles. “You’re being quite ungrateful. You haven’t even
tried
the song I helped you with. It’s not cheating. You would’ve written it eventually. Like, if you’d lived to be three thousand or something.”

“I’m not saying yes,” I told her.

“I wasn’t doing it in exchange for yes,” Nuala snapped. “I was doing it to show you what we could be together. Your damned thirty-day free trial period. Could you just take advantage of it? No, of course not! Have to question! Have to over-analyze. Sometimes I hate all of you stupid humans.”

My head hurt with her anger. “Nuala, seriously. Shut up for a second. You’re giving me a splitting headache.”

“Don’t tell me to shut up,” she said, but she did.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “But I don’t exactly trust you.”

I set my chanter down—it felt like a weapon that Nuala could use against me—and laid my fingers on the cool keys of the piano instead. Unlike my chanter, which was familiar and pregnant with possibilities under my fingers, the smooth piano keys were meaningless and innocent. I looked at Nuala, and unspeaking, she looked back at me. Her eyes were so wrong—so dazzlingly not human—when I really looked at them, but she was right. When I looked into her eyes, I saw myself looking back. A me that wanted more than what I was. A me that knew there was so much brilliance out there to find but that I would never begin to discover.

Nuala climbed off the bench, very carefully so that it didn’t make a fart-creak, and ducked between me and the piano, my arms forming a cage on either side of her. She pressed back against me, forcing me back on the bench so that she had an edge to sit on, and then she found my hands where they were spread artlessly on the piano keys.

She lay her fingers on top of my fingers. “I can’t play any instrument.”

It was weirdly intimate, her sitting in the framework of my arms, her body perfectly mimicking the shape of mine, long fingers fitting exactly on top of mine. I would’ve given one of my lungs to sit with Dee like this. “What do you mean?”

Nuala turned her head just enough for me to get a good whiff of her breath, all summer and promises. “I can’t play anything. I can only help others. It wouldn’t matter if I thought of the best song in the world—I couldn’t play it.”

“You physically can’t?”

She turned her face back away from me. “I just can’t. Music doesn’t happen for me.”

Something stuck in my throat, uncomfortable. “Show me.”

She slid one hand off mine, pressed a key down with her finger. I watched the key depress—one time, two times, five times, ten times—but nothing happened. Just the small, muffled sound of the piano key being depressed. She took my hand and dragged it to the same key. Pressed my finger down, once. The piano rang out, a sullen bell that stopped as soon as she lifted my finger back up again.

She didn’t say anything else. Did she have to? The memory of that single note was still singing in my head.

Nuala whispered, “Just give me one song. I won’t take anything from you.”

I should’ve said no. If I’d known how badly it would hurt, later, I would’ve said no.

Maybe.

Instead, I just said, “Promise. Your word.”

“My word. I’ll take nothing from you.”

I nodded. It occurred to me that she couldn’t see it, but she seemed to know, anyway, because she rested her fingers on mine and leaned her head back against me, her hair scented with clover. What was she waiting for? Me to play? I couldn’t play the damn piano.

Nuala pointed to a key. “Start there.”

Awkward, her body between me and the piano and her
whatever the hell it was
between me and my brain, I pressed the key and recognized it as the first note of the song that had been occupying my brain since I woke up. I stumbled, clumsy, to the next note, hitting several wrong ones on the way—the piano was a foreign language that felt wrong in my mouth. Then the next one, guessing a little faster. The next one, only getting one wrong. The next one, right on the first try. And then I was playing the melody, and I joined in with my other hand, hesitantly picking out the bass line that sang in my head.

It was clunky, amateurish, beautiful. And it was
mine
. It didn’t sound like a song I’d stolen from Nuala. I recognized a scrap of tune that I’d played with on and off over the years, an ascending bass line I’d admired on an Audioslave album, and a riff I’d toyed with on my guitar. It was mine, but intensified, focused, polished.

I stopped playing and stared at the piano. I couldn’t say anything because I wanted it so badly. I wanted what she had to offer and it stung because I had to say no. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Say something,” Nuala said.

I opened my eyes. “Shit. I told Sullivan I didn’t know how to play the piano.”

Nuala

This golden song on my tongue, melting

This golden tongue giving song, longing

—
from
Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

I didn’t really know what I was feeling. The song that James had just played swelled in my head, and it was so beautiful I felt drunk with it. I’d almost forgotten how good it felt to have my inspirations made flesh, even without taking any energy from James in return. Suddenly wearing my human skin exhausted me.

“I’m leaving,” I told James, ducking out from under his arms and standing up.

He was still staring at the keyboard, his shoulders stiff.

“Did you hear what I said?” I said. “I’m leaving.”

James looked up, finally, and the hostility in his eyes surprised me for some reason. “Do me a favor,” he said. “And don’t come back.”

For a long moment, I looked at him, and I really thought about blinding him, to punish him. I knew it was within my power. I’d seen a faerie do it before; he’d spat in a man’s eyes when he noticed that the man was able to see him walking down the street. It had only taken a second. And James was looking right at me.

But then I looked at James’ hazel eyes and imagined him staring out on the world with wide, unseeing pupils like the blinded man.

And I couldn’t do it.

I didn’t know why.

So I just left, stumbling a little on my way out into the hall, going invisible before I closed the door behind me. Once out of the practice room, I was in such a hurry to get outside that I nearly ran into a woman coming into the hallway. I ducked against the wall and she turned her head, her pink-nailed fingers lifting like claws. I swear she was
sniffing
in my direction, which was the sort of bizarre behavior I’d come to expect from faeries, not humans.

I was ready for this weird day to be over. I spun out of her reach and into the autumn evening, trying to forget James’ eyes looking at me and to pretend that it hadn’t hurt when he asked me not to come back.

James

I had a love-hate relationship with the dorms. They were independence: the freedom to leave your crap on the floor and eat Oreos for breakfast three days in a row (which isn’t a good idea—you always end up with black chunks in your teeth during your first few classes). They were also camaraderie: seventy-five guys thrown into one building together meant you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a musician with balls.

But they were also brutal, claustrophobic, exhausting. There was no space to get away, to be by yourself, to be who you were when no one was watching, to escape whoever the masses had pegged you to be.

This afternoon, it was raining, which was the worst—no one in class, no one outside. The dorm was screaming with sound. Our room was full of people.

“I miss home,” Eric said.

“You live five miles from here. You’re not entitled to miss home,” I said. I was multitasking. Talking with Paul and Eric, reading
Hamlet
, and doing my geometry homework. Eric was non-tasking: lying on his face on the floor distracting us from homework. Teachers’ assistants lived on campus and did double duty as resident assistants, keeping students in line, but the idea of Eric as an authority figure was fairly hilarious; he wasn’t any more responsible than the rest of us.

“There’s microwave macaroni at home,” Eric replied. “But if I go back for it, I’ll have to put gas in my car.”

“People like you deserve to starve.” I turned to the next page in
Hamlet
. “Microwave macaroni is too good for sluggards like yourself.” I missed my mom’s macaroni. She put about eight pounds of cheese in it and a pig’s worth of bacon on it. I knew it was probably an evil plan to clog my arteries at a young age, but I missed it anyway.

“Does it say that in there?” Paul asked from his bed. He too was wrestling with
Hamlet
. “It sounds very
Hamlet
. You know, ‘you are not well, my lord, ay, and all that, you are naught but a sluggard.’ ”

Eric said, “
Hamlet
rocks.”

“Your mom rocks,” I told him. Outside our open door, I saw a bunch of guys run down the hall with swim trunks on, yelling. I didn’t even want to know.

“Dude, I just want to know why they can’t just say what they mean,” Paul said. He read a passage out loud. “What. The. Hell.” Then he added, feelingly, “The only part I get is this: ‘
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us.’
Because that’s just how I feel when I have to see my sister-in-law.”

“That part’s not that bad,” I said. “At least you can tell what they mean is ‘Horatio says we’ve been smoking mushrooms, but he’ll change his mind when he too craps his pants after seeing the ghost.’ It’s not like this
‘colleagued-with-the-dream-of-his-advantage
’ stuff here. I mean, he just goes
on
, doesn’t he? Can you really blame Ophelia for killing herself after five acts of this? She just wanted the voices to shut up.”

Actually,
I
just wanted the voices to shut up. The swim-trunk guys were making laps up and down the hall, and on the floor above us someone was pounding their feet in time to inaudible music. Down the hall, some idiot was practicing his violin. Really high. Really catlike. My head was throbbing with it.

Paul groaned. “Man, I hate this book. Play. Whatever. Why couldn’t Sullivan just assign
The Grapes of Wrath
or something else in plain English?”

I shook my head and dropped my thick volume of
Hamlet
on the floor. There was a shout from the floor below, and a thump under my feet as someone threw something at their ceiling. “At least
Hamlet
is short. I’m going to go down to the lobby for a sec. Right back.”

I left Paul frowning at
Hamlet
and Eric frowning at the floor and went downstairs. The lobby was still noisy—some idiot who played piano worse than me was pounding on the old upright down there—so I pushed out the back door. The back of the dorm was covered with a high-ceilinged portico, held up with massive creamy columns. The rain was coming down hard, but not hard enough to blow water under the roof.

But it was cold. I pulled my sleeves over my hands, balled the edges in my fingers to keep the chill from getting in, and spent a long moment staring at the hills behind the dorm. The rain had bleached the color from everything, filled the dips between the hills with mist, and brought the sky down to the ground. The landscape before me was old, unchanging, beautiful, and it hurt in a way that made me want to have my pipes in my hands.

I wondered if Nuala was watching me. Close, invisible, dangerous. In the library, I’d looked online for a stronger ward against faeries than the iron, and found one that I’d written down on my hand, on the base of my pinky finger:
thorn, ash, oak, red.
This ward would have to stay just words until I figured out what the hell an ash tree looked like.

I stepped away from the door and moved toward the end of the portico that had the least water on the bricks. Crap. Double crap. So much for being alone.

A small, dark form crouched against the wall of the dorm, arms huddled around body, hood pulled up. I would’ve turned and gone back inside, but the way the hand was turned against the hidden face looked a lot like crying, and something about the shape of the body indicated femininity. Not something we saw a lot of here in Seward, the guy dorm.

The girl didn’t look up as I approached, but I recognized the shoes as I got closer. Scuffed black Doc Martens. I crouched beside her and lifted the edge of her hood with one finger. Dee looked up at me and dropped her hand. There were no tears on her face, but they’d left evidence of themselves in her red eyes.

“Psycho babe,” I said softly, “What are you doing here in this fearful country that is the men’s dorm?”

Dee reached up to her eye again, as if to stop a tear that I couldn’t see. She rubbed it and held out her index finger to me. “Want an eyelash?”

I looked at the lonely little eyelash that stuck to the end of her fingertip. “I read that you only have a finite number of eyelashes. If you pull them all out now, you won’t have any more.”

She frowned at the eyelash. “I think you made that up.”

I shuffled around to put my back to the wall and settled next to her, wrapping my arms around my legs. The bricks were cold on my butt. “If I was going to make something up, it’d be a hell of a lot more interesting than that. They were all like ‘teen girls are pulling out their eyelashes to relieve stress and now they’re hideously bald.’ I wouldn’t make that up.”

“I’ll put it back, if it makes you feel better,” Dee offered. She poked at her eye, reminding me again of its redness. I hated that she’d been crying. “My harp teacher is an ogre. How is your piping person?”

“I killed and ate him. They’re making me learn piano to punish me for it.”

Dee’s eyebrows pulled together in her cute worried way. “I can’t picture you playing the piano.”

I thought of earlier that day, Nuala’s fingers on mine and the piano keys beneath. “I can’t picture a harp teacher as an ogre. I thought all you harpists were supposed to be, I dunno,
ephemeral
.”

“Forty-point word.”

“At least fifty. Have you ever tried spelling it?”

Dee shook her head. “But she is an ogre. She keeps on telling me to hold my elbows out and I don’t
want
to and she goes on and on about how I’m doing everything all wrong and that I’ve learned from idiot folk musicians. What if I don’t want to play classical? What if I just want to play Irish stuff? I don’t think you have to hold your elbows out to be a good harpist.” Her mouth made a terrible shape, very close to tears. But there was no way something like a jerk teacher would send Dee to tears—she was a lot stronger than she looked. There had to be something else bothering her.

Dee bit her lower lip, as if to straighten her mouth out. “And the stupid dorms are so awful when it rains, you know? There’s no place to get away.”

I couldn’t ask her what was really wrong. Funny, now that I thought about it, I’d never really been able to—so I just sighed and stretched one of my arms over her head, an invitation. She didn’t even hesitate before edging closer and resting her cheek against my chest. I heard her sigh, deeper than mine, weightier. I wrapped my arms around her shoulder and leaned my head back against the wall. Dee in my arms was warm, substantial, surreal. It felt like it had been a thousand years since I’d hugged her.

I closed my eyes and thought about what someone would think if they came out onto the portico and saw us. That we were boyfriend and girlfriend? That Dee loved me and had snuck over from her dorm to meet me back here? Or would they see the truth—that it meant nothing. I’d thought we had something, until this summer, until Luke. But I’d been stupid.

It was killing me, the wanting. The wanting for this—her in my arms, her tears on my T-shirt—to mean the same thing for her that it meant for me. If it had, if she’d really been my girlfriend, I would’ve asked her why she was crying. Why she was sitting under the columns of my dorm instead of hers. If she’d seen Nuala. If it was her fault that Nuala was here in the first place.

But I couldn’t ask her anything.

“Talk,” Dee said, her voice muffled against my T-shirt.

I thought I’d misunderstood her. I opened my eyes, watched the gray clouds roll in sheets to the ground. “What?”

“Just say something, James. I just want to hear you talk. Be funny. Just talk.”

I didn’t feel like being funny. “I’m always funny.”

“Then be what you are always.”

I asked, “Why were you crying?”

But she didn’t answer, because I hadn’t said it out loud.

The truth was that I was too grateful for her presence here at all to push my luck by asking questions that might frighten her away. So I babbled to her about my classes and the foibles of Paul and Doritos as alarm clocks, and I was completely flippant and funny and even as she began to laugh, I was dying with wanting.