Casually, I work in that I love to sing.
The key to a believable story is to keep it simple. Avoid unnecessary details, and don’t answer questions you haven’t been asked. Weave in true things that are quick and easy to prove.
Jeannie wraps an arm around my shoulders and says, “She sings!” getting the attention of two women chatting beside a table of quartered bagels and coffee jugs. “Oh, say you’re not busy after the service. We’d love to hear you.”
I hunch my shoulders shyly. “I have my guitar in the car.”
Jeannie looks at me like I’ve just answered all her prayers. I haven’t talked to my mark yet; I saw him file into the chapel area while I was giving Jeannie the life story of Jade Johnson. But I can feel his nearness, the way the air starts to shift and the sky gets heavy before a summer rain.
When Jeannie starts to chat with the two other women, I slip away and enter the chapel room. It’s bright and cheerful, with a vaulted ceiling, white walls, and a worn blue carpet. It smells like baby powder, perfume, and fresh laundry. Parents shush their fidgeting children, and the wooden pews creak out a chorus as bodies settle into them.
My mark is standing up at the podium, adjusting the mic stand for a nervous-looking teenage boy in a tuxedo. Amplifiers and speakers rest on either side of the modest stage.
It’s all so perfect, I could believe I’m dreaming. There’s aserendipity to your first kill. It’s just like falling in love, but more romantic because it’s permanent.
He loves music, or at least knows how to get the sound system set up. I watch from a pew in the middle of the room and wonder who this boy is to him. A nephew? Son? Brother? But a moment later, the boy’s parents come up to whisper something encouraging, and my mark sprints back to his seat. They’re nothing to each other.
Five more teenagers take up the stage, among whom are a stick-thin boy at the drums and a girl sitting daintily with her violin. The service begins with their rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The boy sings a high soprano, and it’s flawless, especially given that it comes from a boy with a sheen of grease on his face.
I sit through a sermon about the dire importance of hoisting one’s burden onto God’s shoulders, and by the fourth hymn, I’m so anxious that I’m buzzing. I’ve been staring at the back of his head for forty-five minutes, memorizing the lines that the light makes in his golden brown hair, imagining the stylist’s fingers running through and through those curls, shearing them just before they grow unruly.
He was always beautiful, I think. A little boy with heavy lashes and dark pink lips. Tall and athletic in his teen years. And now, somewhere squarely in his twenties, bearing the cool charisma of someone who has always been comfortable in his skin. He takes care of his body—even his nails are trimmed and clean.
How is he alone? Sitting between a dozing grandma and a family of four, seemingly unattached to any of them. All it will take is for one girl to look at him and see how ripe he is, like a blushing apple that will fall from the branch at a touch, with no resistance.
When the service ends, he pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps twice at something on the screen before shoving it back in withthe cross keychain and the ring with three different keys on it. Car, home, mailbox.
I wait for half the congregation to be gone. I pretend to be interested in something on my phone, even though there’s not much to it. It’s brand-new, with only the numbers of the car rental place and Apple tech support. I haven’t even downloaded any games yet. I need to know who my mark is before I know who Jade Johnson is.
Jeannie is the one who hands him to me, God fucking bless her. She stands at the door that leads to a small kitchen with another cup of coffee in hand. “Jade! I hope you can still stay. I want Edison to hear you sing.”
Edison.
Edison.
The name fills me with rivers. I know it belongs to him even before he’s the one to turn around in the pew and look at me. His eyes find mine, and he feels it. Feels me. I know he does. He’s been waiting for me in this sea of meaningless faces that drift between the pews. I’m the one who’s going to love him the way that they can’t.
When he smiles, I see all his perfect teeth. Years of braces to make that even smile. Just a bit of stubble on his chin, little flecks that wink like dark stars in the sky of his face. He stands—not all the way, just enough—and extends his arm out to mine. A tuft of hair falls forward to have a better look at me.
I rise like it’s nothing, like the world hasn’t just crested into a wave with us at the summit, and let him shake my hand.
His skin is rough, cool, and he hooks his thumb over the back of my palm. It sweeps back and forth just slightly, and goddamn it, just like that I’m wet. My stomach is ice-cold. My face is clammy and numb.
“Hi,” he says, and his voice is deeper than I’d expected, but still cadenced and mellow.
“Hi.” My armpits are hot and damp. “I’m Jade.”
“Jade,” he says, and I hate that name because it isn’t mine, but it’s one of the first words he’ll ever say to me. “It’s great to meet you. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
4
I sit on the stage in the chair previously occupied by the girl with the violin, and I pluck at my guitar strings to test the tension, even though I know they’re perfect. Down, up, down on the top strings, up, down, up on the bottom ones. “Ave Maria” teases us in those simple notes, and in the corner of my vision I see him smile.
He sits in the front pew, his fists clasped between his opened legs. I let him think I’m fumbling to find the music, though I know it like my own soul. I play those chords over and over, and then I start to sing.
It’s like there’s someone else living inside me when I sing. This high soprano comes out, knowing all the inflections to “Ave Maria,” sounding so unlike the voice I use to speak.
I first heard this song on one of Elaine’s Christian CDs that she played while she drove us to our extracurriculars in her minivan. My foster brothers were fighting over whose turn it was with the GameBoy Advance. One of them threw the Mario Kart cartridge into the front seat so neither of them would have it, and the other let out a keening wail. Elaine turned up the volume.
