“Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
He looks like he doesn’t quite believe me, but he seems to let it go. “All right. Go back to class.” He starts to walk toward the snow-covered football field.
I turn and head back in the direction I just came from, stopping at the music-room window again to see if there’s anything I missed.
Isawhim.
I freakingsawhim.
With the adrenaline gone now, the cold sweeps over my skin and I hug myself to keep warm. My teeth are chattering, and I remember I saw his chattering, and I can’t be crazy. Ican’t.
I slide down against the wall and sit on a snowy patch of ground, going over everything in my mind.
Every now and then, I have this one dream. I’m standing in the middle of a crowd—the food court in the mall or the park during a summer festival, sometimes a subway platform I’ve never actually been to—and suddenly all these things start to disappear. Cars, the grass, tables. People. It’s when the sound goes with them—the swirling wind or scores of laughing voices or the marching band that plays at summer festivals—that I start to panic. Force myself awake.
I’m most afraid of the silence.
Of the space that is left by all the lives and people and things I can’t hold on to. I don’t know what makes them disappear, or where they disappear to. Only that the feeling terrifies me.
I skip back to the accident again, rewind to when he got on the bus, afterIgot on the bus. Fast-forward to the hospital and the movie theater and this window, five minutes ago. I’ve been doing it a lot the last few days, but I go over every detail I can think of again.
Just one more time. Just so I can figure out what I’m missing.
The weird thing is, he got on the bus before the accident, before I hit my head. Shouldn’t it have been after, if he’s the result of some sort of concussion? There has to be a way this makes sense.
But I can’t come up with anything, and by the time a couple of minutes have passed, I know I really am going to catch my death if I don’t go back in now.
I haven’t told my parents what I saw, and I’ve stopped telling Katy the truth. Because I don’t want them to think I am crazy. Because I don’t want whatever this is—this tangled, itching cloak over my mind—to cost me the things I want most. But I have to understand what’s happening.
I need tostopwhatever’s happening.
My jeans are damp from the snow when I stand.
I can’t handle this on my own.
There has to be someone I can go to without involving my parents.
The vaguest of plans forming in my mind, I hurry back into the building. My wet shoes squeak against the floor as I make my way to my seat in the music room. Katy points at my fingers, wrinkly from the cold, as I flip to the right page in my binder.Gangrene,she mouths. Not frostbite, but gangrene.
“Okay?” she whispers. I nod, not looking at her, pick up my viola and bow, and focus on the sheets of paper in front of me as we wait for the strings to come in.
BEFORE
Mid-July
At the risk of sounding crazy, the great thing about being the only member of orchestra without a life is that it gives me plenty of time to practice and possibly get a leg up on everyone else when school starts in the fall.
I’ve been practicing Bartók’s Viola Concerto for nearly an hour, trying to get the tempo exactly right. It goes from steady and lyrical,andante,to manic, notes tripping over each other in their hurry to burst out. Then back to calm again. Mrs. Dubois says that all good music tears down walls, shatters glass, shakes the foundations, then puts the house back together. Piece by piece. Brick by brick. Note by note. The strokes of my bow are like blows of a sledgehammer: heavy, violent. I imagine the house I’m flattening is mine—my father’s absence, my brother’s distance, the way we can’t reach each other no matter how close together we are. When I get to the second movement, I picture construction workers reassembling what’s been broken. I feel exhausted, like I’ve been working with them. After playing through all three movements once, I go back and start again. My heart moves at walking pace, then quicker and quicker, the kind of pace that takes you whirling around a corner too fast. It takes a second to slow down again, tolumberinstead of run. I’m not happy with the first section, so I stop, preparing to start yet again, and that’s when I hear my phone ringing. I’m not sure how long it has been going, and when I reach for it on my table, I don’t recognize the number on the screen.
I debate letting it go to voice mail, but then an image of the receipt I scribbled my number on for Zach yesterday pops into my mind. I hold my breath as I answer it.
“Hello?”
“Addie!” he says brightly, likehe’spleasantly surprised to hear me on the line. “I wasn’t sure whether this was your cell phone or not, or I would have texted.”
“Hey! No. It’s my cell phone. So you could have texted. But it’s fine that you called, also.”Oh my God. Shut up,my brain screams at me. “How are you?”
I put my viola down on my bed. What do I say? Why is he calling? Where does one buy stock in Wit and Decent Phone Skills?
