“Go to sleep,” Mom says softly into the darkness.
“How do you know I’m not asleep?”
“Mother’s intuition.” I hear the smile in her voice. My mother told me once that with both Caleb and me, she would stay awake watching our chests rise and fall at night when we were babies to make sure we were alive. She felt almost that her watching us kept it happening—the rising and the falling of our chests, the breathing. And she’d do it until Dad dragged her away from our cribs and to bed. Knowing we were okay made her sleep better.
I hate that she still believes the closer we are to her, the safer we are. Her belief kept me from sleepovers and swing sets and the underappreciated horrors that are bouncy castles (she actually says this about them), and sometimes I’m afraid it could keep me from the rest of my life. She would wrap me and Caleb in Bubble Wrap and tuck us into her china cabinet if she could.
Usually I have no patience for her obsession with keeping us sheltered, but tonight her presence makes me feel safe and stable, like the bus has finally stopped spinning, like everything is going to be okay.
“Night, Mom.”
“Good night, Addie.”
I try to fall asleep so she can.
“Lord in heaven, girl!” Katy says in an over-the-top Southern accent (my fault for telling her about my nurse) when she sees me on Monday, holding her arms open all the way from her locker to mine, a length of about fifteen lockers. When she reaches me, she crushes my body against hers. “I nearly had a Cardiac Event. I should have gone with you!”
I laugh, choking a little on her lavender perfume. “Why? You’d just have gotten hurt and givenyourmother a Cardiac Event.”
“I would not,” she says indignantly, referring to the insinuation of getting hurt—not the part about her mother, because Katy’s motherwouldhave had a heart attack, and Katywouldhave enjoyed it.
I peel off my coat and stuff it into my locker. “Let me take a good look at you,” Katy says, clasping my cheeks in her palms. “You look like you got punched.”
“I got, like, four hours of sleep on Saturday night and then three last night,” I say, suddenly self-conscious about my puffy eyes. I’d been hoping they weren’t obvious.
“Poor thing,” Katy hums. The pain in my head is completely gone, and my thick black hair is covering the bruise on my temple. “And the arm?” She gives my bandaged arm a thorough inspection, then says, “Shouldn’t affect your playing. I give you a few more decades.”
“Thanks, Doctor.” I pick up all the books I’ll need until third period.
Katy is carrying her own violin case, even though we’ll have time to go back to our lockers before orchestra; she claims to need the time to socialize between periods. Even now, as we make our way to English class, she’s waving at and small-talking with people all the way down the hall.
Sometimes the fact that Katy and I are best friends seems like a minor miracle. When I changed schools after the first year of middle school, I found a small group of girls to follow around for the next two years, never fully included and never getting beyond surface-level friendship. Katy moved here from D.C. in ninth grade with her mom, and from the second she laid eyes on me in the viola section, she hated me. I realized quickly that she was jealous of my playing, and I tried not to take it personally. Mrs. Duboisisa little partial with solos—I’ve had seven in our last nine concerts, even though the viola is not the most popular solo instrument—and it wasn’t the first time a fellow musicophile hadn’t liked me.
I learned fast, though, that Katy’s hatred was on a different level from any I’d been used to. Acting was, after all, her first passion; music was her second, her backup. I’d walk into practice and the laughter would abruptly stop, with Katy shooting me a quick look of disdain or guilt, making it seem like her group been talking about me, even if they hadn’t. Or if I whispered to ask which bar Mrs. Dubois was talking about, she’d turn icily, pretending she hadn’t heard.
It was three months after she’d moved here—when she found out through the grapevine that I had no intention of ever applying to Juilliard, her holy grail—that she started speaking to me. That day, Mr. Quinn had been showing us a video in bio class, something about how new memory procedures had revolutionized neuroscience and the treatment of trauma, and we were supposed to be taking notes so we could debate the ethical pros and cons. I’d just scrawledInformed Consenton the top of my page when Katy, who was sitting behind me, tapped my shoulder with her pencil. I turned, and she tilted her head in the direction of Mr. Quinn, dozing with his mouth open at an empty desk near us, a tiny line of drool beginning to snake down his chin. I couldn’t suppress my grin, and Katy coughed to cover a laugh.
Before we bonded over music, Katy and I bonded over people. Over Mrs. Dubois and the loud, clashing patterns she wore, though she herself was timid and sweet and so quiet we couldn’t hear her speak unless we were silent.
Today, as she passes us in the hallway, Mrs. Dubois is wearing one of her signature outfits, a flowing turquoise skirt with bright yellow diagonal stripes, and a brown shirt with orange polka dots. One slight lift of Katy’s left eyebrow, her patented expression, and we both giggle quietly.
We bonded over Paulie Wentz, a perpetually sunburned wannabe surfer, whose presence in senior high orchestra can only be explained by Mrs. Dubois’s adamant belief that music is about not how well you play but howjoyfullyyou play. Paulie is joyful all right, and actually a nice kid, but there is no better description for his playing of the French horn than glorified fart sounds. Katy and I physically have to turn our bodies away from each other when he plays, or we will be gone forever.
And we bonded over Gilbert and Sullivan. Katy is Gilbert, since my last name is Sullivan, but their personalities fit us, too. Sullivan composed some of the most incredible operetta music, and Gilbert wrote the stories that went along with the music. To Katy, it is the other way around—the music molds around the story, covering it, accompanying it, but for me, the music always comes first. It has to. We argue about it all the time.
We disagree on Juilliard, too. My first choice is NYU, major undeclared, but Katy swears she came out of the womb intending to go to Juilliard for theater.
“The plan was for the doctors to cut the umbilical cord, clean me up a little, and then send me straight there. But my mother missed the memo and kept me forseventeen years.” She says this with such solemnness that I always laugh, no matter how many times I’ve heard it.
I discovered the viola in fifth grade, the first year we had orchestra in elementary school, and everyone went scrambling for the flute, recorder, or clarinet. Miss Root played us short recordings of all the different instruments in an orchestra to introduce us to their “voices” so we could find which of them best matched ours. For the viola, she played Lionel Tertis’s performance of Brahms’s Viola Sonata in F Minor, and I fell in love with its full, heavy sound. Miss Root said it was one of the few instruments that used the alto clef, and I thought maybe that explained why it sounded a little bit lonely. Even when the melody it played was joyful, I liked that its sound was tinged with a trace of sadness and that the pockets of space between the notes were so deep, it sounded like you could hide entire worlds in there.
Katy can’t understand how I could possibly be interested in another school—though the irony is that she would not have befriended me if I had wanted to go to Julliard. It’s so odd, now that I think about it, how she seemed to figure that being friends with me somehow affected the probability of her getting in, ornotgetting in, as the case might be. But we’d spent hours filling out application forms together and editing the essay she sent off to Juilliard in December. My NYU application was a month later, in January, and we’d worked on it together, too.
Juilliard—being totally immersed in music—has just never been something I wanted. Music, unless you write it, is always vicarious. It’s written by a composer in a particular manner with a particular style. It’s somebody else’s story, and even if you can relate to it or find yourself in it orhideyourself in it, it doesn’t belong to you. When I explain this to Katy, she always says something like, “Well, write your own story, Sullivan.” But you actually need a story in order to write one. You need peaks and valleys, crescendos and decrescendos, and things that wreck you and put you back together. It’s not like I’m some tortured emo kid; I have a pretty happy life. But there’s something in me that’s always wanted a little more than I know.
I love my viola. Many times a week, I play so hard I sweat, play till all the world melts away in the heat, and hours feel like seconds, or seconds like hours. And sometimes when I stop playing, the world seems so empty and quiet that I just want to curl up at the foot of my bed and cry.
I love losing myself in the sensation of playing, in the distraction and competitiveness of orchestra, and feeling more awake than ever when I do. But I want to love something else just as much. Something that’s a part ofmystory. A new place, a little street-side café, a class in college I signed up for just because, a person I haven’t met yet.
