Page 4 of Strum Me

Chapter Three

Emily

Eight Years Ago

“Butter! BUTTER!! Wait up!”

I’m already late for class, but I stop without turning around. I don’t need to know who the voice belongs to and what it wants.

I stand there, shifting the weight of my school bag higher up my shoulder as the footsteps come closer, and I can hear it accompanied by panting. A hot, sweaty arm flings itself around my shoulders and a lanky teenage boy hangs off me as he clutches his side trying to catch his breath.

“What do you want, Brad?” I ask, without really needing to, as I watch my best friend drag air into his lungs.

“Ugh...Notes. Homework. Help.” He gulps as he slides to the ground in an exaggerated heap.

This is an act I’ve seen often and I know my part. I’m supposed to prod him with my foot and he’ll moan as if I’ve caused him grievous bodily harm. But I’m already late for class and I don’t have any time for his theatrics today, as much as they amuse me.

I turn and leave him in his lanky pile of arms and legs on the grass and continue walking briskly to class.

“Hey! Butter! Wait for me!” Brad calls out and I pivot back to him, my eyes rolled so high up into my head they ache.

“Argh, what? I’m late!” I snap at him as he catches up with me again. And then I can’t help but laugh.

He’s dropped to his knees and his hands are clasped in prayer and eyes scrunched closed.

“Dear Almighty One, please please please can you send a message to Emily Butter of Jervois Lane to take pity on her lazy BFF and let him copy her English homework, or else his blood will be on her hands after he dies at the end of Mr. Harris’s ball-point pen.” He ends his prayer and I can almost imagine God having his own giggle up there.

He opens one eye as if to make sure I’m still paying attention and then winks with it when he sees I am.

“Ugh. Fine.” I give in, as he always knew I would. “But must you chase me through the school grounds yelling BUTTER at the top of your lungs?”

“Firstly, thank you, thank you, thank you!” He holds his hands out as if accepting a sacred antiquity as I reach into my bag and pull out my homework binder. “And secondly, what else should I call you if not by your name?”

“By my first name, as a wildly random suggestion.”

“Brad and Emily? That doesn’t work. Nope. Brad and Butter just rolls off the tongue, don’t you think? We’ll always be Brad and Butter, so you might as well get used to it.”

I sigh and hand him the homework sheet before pulling it back abruptly.

“Wha?” His brow furrows in surprise…and fear.

“Last night, you said—”

“But...” he starts.

I cut him off. “You said…you had to get off the phone to do your English homework!”

“I…was going to.”

“What happened?” I ask him.

“Well, I, um, you know that I have to get into the zone, to produce my best work.”

“Yeahhhh…?” My eyebrow lift in question.

“And that means priming my brain…”

“Uh-huh…?”