When We Wake (16 page)

I cast around for something from this day and age. I’d listened to some contemporary stuff and liked much of it, but it was all falling out of my head now that I was under pressure. “Um, that bhangra-punk group—what are they called? Brighton?”

“Birmingham,” someone supplied.

“Right, I like them,” I said. Feeling like an idiot, I retreated
to familiar ground. “But the Beatles, definitely, are my all-time favorite.”

Kieran nodded. “All right, Tegan. Play us something by the Beatles.”

My fingers tightened on Abbey’s case, appalled. Now? In front of everyone? “They don’t really… I mean, they’re songs, you know? It’s not compositional; it’ll sound weird without singing.”

“Then sing.”

I shook my head, pushing my voice past the lump in my throat. “I can’t, not really. Backup only.” I tried a weak grin.

Kieran wasn’t smiling. “Music is risk, Tegan. I want you to open yourself to the possibility of failure. I’m not judging you on the quality of your performance—only on your willingness to try and your ability to access emotion.”

My classmates were watching carefully, waiting for me to get over my fear and begin, so they could get a feel for who I was and what I could do. They’d decide in that moment whether I deserved to be there or if I was only at Elisa M because the government had told them to take me.

And then they’d tell the whole world what they thought. I recognized several of Soren’s cronies and wondered what a good famer could do with an exposé on my talent—or lack thereof.

Abdi wasn’t watching, though. He was holding his flute case on his lap and staring at a point above my head.

“Okay,” I said, and pulled Abbey out of her case. She got a few raised eyebrows—she really was a beautiful guitar. I
checked the tuning and snapped a capo on the seventh fret. “Okay, but I warned you.”

No one seemed to recognize the tune as I picked out the first notes, which tightened my throat again right before I had to sing. So I lengthened the introduction a little bit, playing around with that bare premelody, and then gathered my courage, opened my mouth, and gave it my best shot.

It was a disaster.

I’d chosen “Here Comes the Sun” because it has a simple voice part and I knew it very well. On the other hand, the guitar part has a lot of complicated time signature changes, making it a rhythmically impressive piece. I definitely wanted to be impressive.

And in a way, it worked. My playing was fine.

But even on the simple melody, my voice cracked and warbled; I hadn’t been lying about my singing. Worse, and more unforgivable, I didn’t catch the feel of the song. I didn’t sound like someone full of hope, at a glimpse of spring and a new beginning. I sounded exactly like a schoolgirl forced into a reluctant performance before her peers. I was mechanical and flat and soulless.

Hardly the performance of someone accessing emotion.

I was trying not to cry as I struggled through the final line of the first verse, singing that it was all right, when it most definitely wasn’t. Soren’s friends were flicking little glances at one another and moving their fingers surreptitiously over their computers. I absolutely couldn’t cry. The humiliation would never end if I did.

In the brief moment between the first verse and the second, Abdi stood up and tucked his flute under his stool.

People gave him sideways looks, but he ignored them as stonily as he’d ignored me.

Then he squared his shoulders and sang.

His face looked mildly disgusted, as if he wasn’t quite sure why he was doing it. But his voice was absolutely pure, and it filled every corner of the room with warm longing. I promptly dropped back and let him take over the melody, joining in on the chorus bits for extra volume.

We rocketed through the long bridge, my fingers hitting every shifting beat.

I still don’t know if it’s because Abdi was so good that he was able to anticipate my moves, or if it was because I was so desperate that I was instinctively following his cues, or something else altogether, but in the space of that bridge, we somehow achieved the kind of mind-reading synergy you get with someone you’ve been making music with for years. Owen and I had it. Owen and Dalmar had it. Dalmar and I didn’t have it, but we would have gotten there eventually.

But Abdi and I made it happen right away. So when he nodded at me at the end of the bridge, I knew he was going to leave me on my own for the final verse.

My voice still wasn’t pretty, but my singing was bright and strong, instead of faint and unemotional. I sang about ice melting and clear skies and sounded like I
meant
it.

And then Abdi picked me up for the final chorus, his
beautiful voice sliding around my creaky one. I strummed through the outro, and we were done.

It wasn’t until we finished that I wondered if it had really been appropriate to choose that particular song. People here were probably happy about long winters. The sun was the enemy, not something to welcome. But the silence didn’t seem angry—just faintly puzzled. And maybe a little bit awed. Soren’s friends were busily tapping away, but they didn’t have that air of triumph I knew to be wary of.

“Did you two work this out before class?” Kieran asked.

I shook my head.

“No,” Abdi said.

“Then… all right. Thank you, Tegan.” He waited a breath, and then added, “Thank you, Abdi.”

That didn’t sound like a teacher giving rote thanks to a student; it sounded like a fan thanking someone he admired. Which is when I remembered that Abdi hadn’t sung a note in public since he’d arrived in Australia.

No matter how much money he’d been offered or how many glittering stars had requested duets, he hadn’t sung for them.

But he’d sung for me.

Three weeks before I died, Dalmar had asked me why I liked the Beatles so much.

“Best musicians of their century,” I recited, as I had many times before. “And ours. And all the ones to come.”

“Yeah, but
why
? You think that lots of Paul’s melodies are saccharine and some of John’s experiments are horrible and Ringo—”

“Ringo is perfect,” I warned him. “Don’t say anything about Ringo.”

He grinned at me, the wide flash of teeth that always made me feel shaky and warm. Even in our garage “studio,” that smile belonged to a star. “You say things about Ringo.”

“I’m allowed. I love him most.” I fiddled with Owen’s guitar strap. “Have you seen my dopey brother?”

“He’s in the kitchen, trying to get money out of your mum. There’s a live gig at the Corner—”

“Oh, the pig! If he wants money, he can get out of bed and help her at the markets, like I do!”

He shrugged. “Really, why the Beatles?”

“They changed the world,” I said. “And they changed themselves. I mean, there are lots of reasons I like them. They were amazing composers, and they reformed pop forever, and they gave young people a voice. But they also realized they’d made terrible mistakes, and they tried to reform themselves. Like, John, he hurt a lot of people—”

“He hit his first wife,” Dalmar said. “And he cheated on her.”

“Yeah. He had a lot of anger, and he took it out on people. And doing those things was bad, the sort of thing that’s bad forever. You don’t get to take that back; the best you can do is change yourself and never do it again.” I tightened my hands on the guitar strap. “I just… I need to believe that people can change, Dalmar. The world’s so horrible, and I’m scared that no one’s going to care enough to do anything about it, and I really need to believe that they can.” It was the first time I’d ever said it to anyone else.

“The Beatles give you hope,” he said softly.

I nodded. I didn’t dare look at him. “You give me hope, too,” I said. “Well, you know. On your better days.”

“You’re not so bad yourself, Tegan Marie Mary Oglietti.”

“I should never have told you my confirmation name,” I said, and looked up. He was staring at me, and for a moment, I saw uncertainty in his eyes.

But that was absurd. Dalmar was never uncertain about
anything. It was one of the reasons I’d been in love with him for years, without hope or expectation.

He moved closer to me, and I felt my heart contract. “Tegan Marie Mary Oglietti,” he said softly, like a prayer.

And then, of course, Owen crashed in, having scammed forty dollars off Mum, and dragged Dalmar off to the gig, while I sat in the garage and practiced until Alex turned up and we hit the old sewers for some urban exploration.

It makes me wonder, now. What if Owen hadn’t come in? What if Dalmar had said what I now know he’d been planning to say right then? What if he’d kissed me, in the garage that smelled of old socks and the pine air freshener Owen loved?

We could have had three weeks, not one day. If I’d been standing a little to the left, if the sniper’s aim on the Prime Minister had been better, we might have had a lifetime.

But “what if” and “might have had” have never been any real use to anyone.

Hope, though. That’s still important.

I didn’t look at Abdi for the rest of the class—surprisingly easy, with Kieran giving me the hard word on filling in the gaps in my education. He made me take a battery of tests before he conceded that my sight-reading wasn’t totally abysmal and my knowledge of musical history—up to a hundred years ago, anyway—was almost up to par. He loaded Koko with a bunch of
music references to get me up to date on the last century and told me to pick two other instruments to start learning—preferably a percussion and a wind.

But there were no further hints that I didn’t belong in Kieran’s class. And when he let us go, Abdi and I, through unspoken agreement, lingered. Zaneisha stood near the door, doing her best impression of a human statue.

“Thank you,” I said, without looking at Abdi’s face, and jumped off my stool. “After I—I mean, that was really pretty cool of you.”

“I don’t like bullies,” he said.

“Yeah, well, apparently that’s just part of the deal, and I’m going to have to get used to it.”

“It’s not something you get used to,” he said, and I looked up at him.

“About yesterday—” I said, and he made a cutting gesture with his hand.

“Bethari talked to me, about this Dalmar. Do I really look like him?”

“A little bit,” I admitted. “But not a lot. I screwed up, and I’m sorry.”

“He was Somali, she said. From Somalia?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Somali from Djibouti,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I looked you up. You’re a popular guy on the tubes. Lots of information.”

He smiled, then—a small, guarded smile. There were a few stubbly hairs at the corners of his lips that he must have missed
shaving. I felt something tingle down my spine.
Stop thinking about his mouth, Tegan Marie.

“But the tubes didn’t tell you I liked the Beatles.”

“That was a surprise,” I admitted. “Are you a big fan?”
Oh god, please make him say yes.

The smile grew. “Did John ask the Queen Mother to rattle her jewelry at the Royal Command Performance?”

I nearly collapsed with relief. The questions boiled out of me like rice from an overflowing rice cooker. “What’s your favorite album? Do you listen to the solo stuff? What’s your take on the Yoko question?”

“
Revolver
, some of it—not Wings—and what’s the question?”

“Whether she was a scheming money-grubbing bitch who broke up the Beatles or the woman who brought John the most happiness and therefore should get credit for being the best helpmeet.”

“Um,” he said, eyeing me carefully. “An artist in her own right who married another artist and managed his money because he was very bad at it? The Beatles broke up because they were fighting more days than they were playing.”

“That is the
right
answer,” I said, and beamed at him.

He smiled back. “My turn. What’s your least favorite song? Do
you
listen to the solo stuff? And how much of their work can you play?”

“ ‘Revolution 9,’ and I’ve listened to it all, but Ringo’s All-Starr stuff is the best, and I can play nearly everything.”

“Are you joking?”

“No. Some of it I need tabs for, though. Oh, we have to do
something from
Revolver
together. Can you play guitar? Your voice would be great for ‘And Your Bird Can Sing.’ Or ‘Good Day Sunshine,’ though I don’t know; maybe people would want the harmonies there, and I definitely can’t manage them, though Kieran’s saying that with training I’ll get better and—”

“I can’t sing,” he said, and this was so clearly a total lie that he amended it immediately. “I mean, I don’t sing.”

I thought about saying
I understand
or
It’s up to you
or anything else that was empathetic and accommodating, but what came out of my mouth was, “Well, you’re really good.”

He didn’t seem offended, though. “Thanks.”

“Like
really
good,” I said. “Why did you stop?”

“Everyone asks that.” The smile was gone, his lips in a rigid line, and I was sorry I’d asked. But not too sorry to wait for the answer. “When they ’cast me singing… it was big. I don’t want all that attention. They want to use it; they want to use me—”