This Song Is (Not) for You (11 page)

Ramona missed school after I told her I wasn’t going to Artibus or majoring in music at all.

I should have told her that I never applied to Artibus. I could have told her when I filled out the application for Saint Louis University, or even when my acceptance letter came. Any time before would have been better, but when Tom had dropped his bomb, I knew I couldn’t hold out any longer.

After school Tom came over and we sat in the silent garage.

“We should have told her sooner,” I said to him. He nodded.

“I knew she would be disappointed, but I never thought she would be so devastated. And I thought she would still have you.”

“And I thought she would have you. Are you really not going to college at all?”

He shrugged.

“Maybe someday I will. I want to travel and do my own studying first. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop being with you and Ramona.”

I felt myself smile.

“I’m not going to let that happen either,” I said.

• • •

My father lives a life of neat boxes.

He chooses the people in his life by what

expected function

they can provide him.

He loves me, within limitations.

I love Ramona for who she is, for loving music and humans

so fiercely.

She loves Tom for the same reasons I do: for his passion

and his idealism, his hidden vulnerability.

My father would want me to separate Ramona and Tom.

Have me secure Ramona in a Girlfriend box

and lock Tom far away from her in a Just Friends box.

My father has very little love in his life.

My father has never had friends like Ramona and Tom.

• • •

The next day, Ramona came to school. She smiled and said, “Hey.” She drummed on the picnic table and talked about math class, but it was obvious everything was still wrong. A spark had gone out; her smiles were too slow. Her hope for the future has turned into fear.

I texted Tom. He told me he had a plan.

I’d hoped he would say something like that.

Tom will know what to do for our Ramona.

There’s an empty warehouse near the Mississippi River with high, tall, broken windows that take in all of the afternoon’s sun. I scouted out this location weeks ago, but I didn’t know what would go here. It was a place to make an avowal; I knew that much.

Now Ramona needs a declaration. She thinks high school will be the end of us, the end of Vandalized by Glitter.

It’s time I told her (them) how I feel.

Yesterday, I started making the stencil. Today is the day of execution.

I sent Sam the address, but it takes them an hour to find me through the unused streets and forgotten buildings of the riverboat industry.

“Tom?” Sam calls, standing at the broken door. He holds one hand over his eyes, squinting in the sun. Ramona, pale and quiet, peers around his shoulder. “That you, Tom?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Come on in.”

They step toward me, and I see their eyes shift from my face to over my shoulder to the crumbling brick wall behind me.

In the brightest blue paint I could find, I painted three intertwined circles on the dirty redbrick wall. Each circle shares a part with the others’; each circle has a part in the center.

Underneath that, I’ve added,
THINK DIFFERENTLY, LOVE MORE.

“So the way I see it,” I say, “Ramona is the heart. And, Sam, you’re our equal sign. I’m the question mark.” I point to each of them in turn. I’m nervous. What I’m trying to say is kind of a big deal.

“And the circles. We’re all our own person. We’re all a part of each other. We are all of us together.

“When I’m with you guys, I see the world in new ways. I’m less cynical. I think connecting with you guys has, like, opened up my heart. I care about other people more, everybody more. What I’m trying to say is—” Suddenly the truth of what I am saying gives me the confidence I need.

“This isn’t just a high school thing,” I tell them. “I’d been waiting my whole life to meet you guys. You’re a part of me now, and no matter where any of us goes, I know I’m gonna know you for forever.”

It’s like I’ve let go of the trapeze first, and I don’t know if they will want to catch me or not.

They step closer to me.

Ramona takes my hand and then Sam’s. I touch Sam on his shoulder. He meets my eyes and nods.

We stand together in the sunlight pouring down upon us.

Emmalyn’s mother took a long time to die. That’s how Ava Schumacher put it to me in the girls’ bathroom. I know it’s weird that I asked her about it, but it was also kinda weird how eager Ava was to tell me about it. It’s just that I needed to know.

My mother took a long time to die too.

Cancer hits the body like ocean waves. It recedes, dies back like autumn, and is reborn in the spring. Like hope, it lingers.

My mother died when I was nine, and I remember her two ways.

I remember her at the piano, playing for me, teaching me, touching me, the keys, my fingers, her fingers. Her voice in my ear as we practiced, low and encouraging, firm, never scolding.

I remember her on the couch, too sick to get up and sit at the piano. I played for her until she would smile. Her smiles were frail, often sleepy. I remember the bones of her face, the rattle of her chest, the whisper of her breaths. I remember the hospital bed we lay in together, the sheet music, and the electronic keyboard.

There is another prominent memory from those years. I went to a hippie charter school that pushed freethinking and health food. My classmates weren’t ridiculously rich, but they could all read, and I only sort of could.

I could tell you all the sounds of the letters. That wasn’t a problem. I had been fine when it came to learning that. But once the letters were arranged together for words Iw as lo st.

The l ett ers mo ved a nd rea rranged

and

lit tle
d
was ide ntical to l it ttle
b
db db bd db

At first, it was just that I took a little longer to read than my classmates, and because I was still obviously bright, no one was worried. But suddenly (one day, so suddenly, it seemed to me), I was DELAYED in reading. I couldn’t finish reading assignments on time, or even at all. The teachers recommended my parents seek a DIAGNOSIS.

“DYSLEXIA?” my mother said. “But she can read music just fine.” She had been well enough to come to the appointment. Her floral headscarf was the brightest thing in the office, until she said those words and I felt my face get warm.

It had been easy to fake. When my mother quizzed me on the notes, I knew their names. Looked at individually, I could read the note, hum the tone. But when I sat at the piano and tried to st r ing t he no tes to get her my ey es could not foll ow.

However, when my mother sat down to help me with the piece, all I had to do was watch her hands, and I would know what to do. Before long, I was able to stare straight ahead uncom prehe n ding ly, at the sheet music, and play from memory the song I’d been instructed to learn.

When my mother understood what had been happening, she wasn’t angry with me. She was heartbroken. She felt that she had failed me.

“I should have known,” she kept saying. Again, she tried to teach me to read music, but every teaching session ended in tears.

I still played for her when she lay on the couch. I played all the songs I knew from memory. But her eyes would stay sad even when she smiled. When I told her that I hadn’t meant to lie to her, she hugged me and told me that she knew, that she would always love me and be proud of me.

My parents hired a reading tutor who came twice a week. Her name was Miss Judy. She covered texts with cards so that I could see one

L e t t e r

at a time. Then one

Word

at a time

until I could read lines of text aloud at a slow but reasonable rate.

Mom had to go back into the hospital around then. We didn’t know it, but she wasn’t coming home. Miss Judy wanted me to read for twenty minutes every day, and suddenly Dad was acting like this was more important than piano.

Twice I had screaming meltdowns because Dad wouldn’t let us go to the hospital until I’d done that day’s reading.

Mom stopped responding to treatment, but there was an experimental drug doctors wanted to try.

When I told Mom about playing piano, she didn’t respond as eagerly as she always had before. She always wanted to know how reading was going. Stressful, upsetting reading—it seemed like that was all anyone cared about anymore.

Finally, Mom and Dad told me that the doctors were moving her to hospice. Hospice wasn’t a new way of fighting cancer. The fight was over; cancer had won.

Mom was still alive, but her life was over. She’d toured Europe as a professional musician; she’d had a husband and child. It wasn’t a bad life, but it was over, and it was all she would ever have.

I was the only child my mother ever had, and as she smiled at me from her pink-sheeted hospice bed, I finally realized that unless I learned to read music, my promise as a pianist had come to an end. I could love music, I could feel as if I lived for music, but I would never be a musician if I could only play what I’d learned from watching my mother.

Every day after school, I did my twenty minutes of reading practice, and then Dad and I went to see Mom. She had a keyboard there in her room, always set to grand piano, and with it, she helped me practice reading sheet music for hours, until we were both too tired to continue.

Until Mom didn’t continue to be anymore.

I passed third grade with an average score in reading.

And I was playing through Mom’s old sheet music so fast that Dad realized that it would be worthwhile to replace Miss Judy with a piano instructor.

Anyway.

That’s the story of how my mother died and how I became a musician.

I don’t know how Emmalyn’s mother died, but I know that it’s the story of how Emmalyn became the person that she is, and it’s the story of every person that she will ever be.

And because I am someone with a story, someone who is more than just who I am in my worst moments, I know that I can’t judge Emmalyn because I don’t really know her. I only know some of her actions these past few years.

So even if I never hug her, maybe it would be worth it to make peace with her before we never see each other again. We’re about to start our adult lives. Maybe she’d like to start it with a clean slate too.

“Hey,” I said. We’d just gotten off the highway where we’d rolled the windows down and dragged our hands through the air and sunshine. We’d had a half day of school, and the afternoon was ours.

“Hey,” she said, grinning at me, suspecting nothing. I looked away again and rolled all the windows back up so that she’d hear me clearly.

“I love you,” I said. I only had time to glance over at her surprised face. I’d decided to do this while driving in my car because driving soothes me, and that way she couldn’t leave until I’d finished saying what I had to say. “I’m sorry if that’s a problem. And I want us to be friends no matter what. But anyway, I love you, and maybe I’m crazy, but I think there’s a chance that you love me too. So if you do, I think we should be together.”

“Sam,” she asked, “are you serious?”

“Yeah,” I said. I nodded to reinforce the point. We’d come to a red light, and I slowed the car to a stop.

“I love you too,” she said. I’d never heard Ramona’s voice so quiet.

“Really?” I turned to face her so quickly that my neck popped. When I looked at her, she was laughing at me, and there were tears in her eyes.

“Oh, Sam,” she said. I took one hand off the steering wheel and laid it over hers. Her lips parted. Behind us a car horn honked, and we both jumped. I had to turn away from her and look at the road.

“But, Sam, I love Tom too. I know that it isn’t supposed to be possible to sincerely love two people at once, but it’s true. I swear I do.”

“I know!” I said. And I do know it. Ramona is full of love. Again, I only had a chance to glance at her surprised face, but my speech was prepared and I was ready to launch into it. “And I love Tom too. I don’t have sexual feelings for him, but I love him. He’s massively important to me. He’s somebody I want to see and talk to every day, just like you.

“I love you, and he loves you, and I know he loves me too, and I think that we can all work this out. I mean, we’ll have to talk to Tom about this obviously, but if everybody loves everybody, why should that be a problem? Why can’t we all just be together?”

I’d timed it perfectly, and we’d just pulled into the parking space outside the condo. I took the keys out of the ignition and finally turned in my seat toward her. The mix of emotions on her face was too much for me to gain any information.

She paused, tears still in her eyes, then said, “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“Do you remember last week, when we were all lying on the garage floor together?” I asked. “You were holding Tom’s hand and I was on your other side, and I thought that if I could just hold your hand too, I would be happy. It wouldn’t bother me that you were holding Tom’s hand too, because I love Tom too. So, yeah, if Tom’s okay with it, I’m serious about this.

“Ramona, you are extraordinary. You’re smart and hilarious and full of life. I don’t want to own you. I just want to be near you and to love you.”

When I used the
L
word again, I laid my hand over hers once more and waited.

“Oh, Sam, I don’t know. I just don’t know,” she said. She started crying for real then, and I got to hold her while she cried on my shoulder and explained to me everything she did not know.