And Jade clocks that—the same way I knew she would. She tilts her head, brows knitting together, her dark, straightened hair rolling down her back. "What's got you all fucked up?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, run a hand down my stubbly face.
Jade is my younger sister. Sixteen years old. My best friend, my purpose. She is full of life, not necessarily for the stale one she was given, but the one she has grand plans for.
However, since a young age, she had always sat herself between the sharp cracks of mine.
She knows when I’m mad, frustrated, happy, sad, fucking suicidal. Sometimes, I think she knows me better than I know myself.
And I hate that I wasn’t able to shield her from all of that.
I kick forward, stubbing the cigarette out on a small ceramic plate painted with red billowing flames and begin playing the five-chord riff I’m stuck on in a loop, minus the dead B-flat.
“What the fuck am I missing?” I ask, frustrated that my small pause still offered no clarity.
“Oh,” Jade laughs, and it’s light and airy. She jumps down from the sill she was perched on. “That’s easy.”
I slide my creaking chair out, opening the keys to her, the way I always have.
“An F-flat before the quiet B-flat,” she states, her fingers tapping out the riff with an added F-flat. “See?” She pauses, then adds as much of her left hand as the keyboard will allow, filling it out like she’s done for years. “That fucks now,” she finishes, her hands slipping off the keys, walking back toward the windowsill where she snatches up the cigarette she left smoldering on the edge, returning it to her mouth.
I stare at her in bewilderment. “How do you do that, J?”
She shrugs, burning another line down her throat. “It’s magic.” A grin extends across her lips, her crooked canine tooth peeking over her bottom one.
“Teach me,” I demand, rubbing my hands together, excitement a new, reinforced live wire through me.
She raises the hand holding her cigarette, pinching her ear lobe. “Use these…” She starts to say before dropping her open palm to her chest and placing it where her heart sits. “And make sure you let yourself feel it right here, too. Because ifyou don’t…” She tsks, shaking her head. “You’ll never find what you’re looking for.”
Goosebumps pop across my limbs and I try to mask the shiver that starts at my skull and shoots all the way to my toes, but she catches it, laughing again.
Jade was fucking talented. She could hear what I couldn’t, find what I wasn’t able to. She made my shit better; she made itunique.Harlen could do it too, but there was something about sharing moments like this with your sibling that could never be outweighed or replaced.
I just wish she did more with it—her music.
I shake my head. “Please tell me you’re gonna do something with that, J. Your talent…it's rare. It’s fucking…” A pause. “Special.”
She drops her eyes from mine, shakes her head. “Nah, not for me, big brother.” Then she curls her fingers around her knees and squeezes them, raising her shoulders to her ears.
“Why?” I ask, my brows pulling together.
Another heavy pause thickens the air around us.
“Because music is your future, Chase. You’re destined for that.”
I snort, then I drop my gaze from hers, dragging a trembling hand through the top of my hair, blowing out my cheeks.
You are nothing, a nobody, boy. A talentless waste of air space.Dad’s voice crackles again, and it pisses me off, and I think maybe Jade can hear the phantom static too because she whispers, “And I fucking mean that.”
I palm my jaw, crack it.I need another smoke.“Yeah, sure, the idiot that can’t find a missing note.”
She smiles. “Yeah, you kind of are an idiot.”
I point at her. “Careful.”
She chuckles freely, taking the last pull from her cigarette, turning to stub it out on the rotting windowsill. She fans the smoke cloud away.
“You might be an idiot, Chase, but you’re an idiot with a set of pipes that will set the entire world on fire.”
