The Friendship Song
Nancy Springer
To Joel, my husband and longtime best friend
FOREWORD
There were ordinary heroes, the ones with swords, and then there was the music hero, the one whose power was all for peace and singing. When he played his harp, the wild wolves came running to listen and oak trees uprooted themselves to follow him. He could lift beached ships back into the sea with his music, and make mountains weep, and calm earthquakes, and lull dragons to sleep.
Other heroes, the ones with swords, would venture to the world of the dead in order to steal treasure for the living. But the hero with the harp went there for another reason: love. The woman he adored, the love of his life, had died. He risked the dangers of the afterworld in an attempt to bring her back.
The king of the dead had cold eyes and no smile. Heroes were nothing but thieves to him. This one, the harper, came before him as a prisoner, his hands bound, his instrument hanging from his shoulder. As was the custom, the king told him, “You have one last request before we cast you into the shadowland where souls wander forever without rest.”
The harper said, “Let me play one song for you.”
They unbound his hands, and he played his harp so that notes flew out like silver birds. When he sang, the willow trees turned their heads toward him, the dark rivers of that place lay still and listened to him. After he finished the single song, he stopped, but the king of the dead urged him, “Play on.”
“Grant me the life of my beloved.”
“I will grant you, instead, your own life.”
The harper played. His first song had been of courage, and this one was of joy and hope. The shades of the dead gathered to hear, hanging like mist in the air around him. The three-headed, snake-fanged dog that guarded the gates of the dead left his post and came and lay by the harper’s feet.
When he finished the song the king begged, “Play on.”
“Grant me the life of my beloved.”
“I will grant you, instead, a circlet of gold to be your crown.”
The harper played. This time his song was of sorrowing true love, and when he finished, tears were running down the hard face of the king, who could not speak.
“Grant me the life of my beloved,” the harper softly said.
A shadow of self, she floated near him like the others, listening without recognizing him, for she had eaten the food of the dead and remembered nothing. The king lifted his hand, and she became solid again, and breathed, and clung to her lover and started to shake with fear, for she remembered everything.
The king found his voice. “Go,” he told the harper gruffly, “and she will follow you, and nothing in my realm will harm either of you. But you must trust my word for this. Do not look back, or you will see her then and never again.”
It is said that no one who has entered the after-world and eaten the food of the dead can ever return. Perhaps the king knew the woman would never reach the living world, the hero would not be able to keep from looking back at her. He almost reached the gates, but then he had to look, he had to see, if his beloved was truly following him. When he turned, she screamed, melted into mist, and blew away, lost in the winds of shadowland.
Not many people remember her name: Euridice. But they still remember the harper, and say of him, “Orpheus wandered the world the rest of his days calling for her in song.” They say, “Orpheus could make stars fall with the music of his harp and sing down the moon out of the sky, but who can get the better of that cold-eyed king?”
Now there are other heroes, other music, to try to get the better of death.
CHAPTER ONE
The main thing I remember about the ride into the city is that Neon Shadow came on the radio and I turned the volume up real loud. Dad glanced over at me but didn’t say anything. He knew I was way bad losing-sleep in love with Neon Shadow, and he knew I wasn’t real happy about moving. So he just drove the U-Haul, and I just sat there listening to the hot metal music of the electric guitars and the way Nico’s and Ty’s voices melted together and the words they sang.
What we always been
Is what we’re always gonna be.
When the first two fish
Crawled up out of the sea
And looked at each other
And said, “Yo, brother,”
Hey, doncha know they were you and me.
We’re friends.
Friends. It was a nice thought, but girls like me—built like a moose and bigger than anybody else in sixth grade—girls like me didn’t get a lot of friends. At least I sure never did. Okay, so I had blond hair and blue eyes, which made me a palomino moose, but so what? It took being cute to make a girl popular. There had been a few kids who seemed to like me, but no real close friends. And now I was going to have to start over in a new neighborhood, new school, new everything.
“That’s a new release of an old song,” Dad said when the song was over.
“I know.”
Usually he would have grumped at me, “Harper, you don’t have to yell.” But this time he just sighed.
I really did know it was an old song. Metal Mag said so. “Neon Shadow’s nitro new cover of a rock classic,” they called it. The name of the song was just “The Friendship Song.” I liked it a lot. I mean, any kind of rock music gets me going, it makes me want to stomp my big feet and play air guitar, but this song—it was too good for air guitar, it was special. It really cooked, but it was want-to-cry beautiful at the same time.
I turned the radio down again to keep from annoying Dad too much. We were at the commercial strip right outside the city, where the Wendy’s was, and the Taco Bell, and all the usual places. And then we drove past the Arena. The house, Dad’s sweetie’s house, was supposed to be near the Arena. So we were almost there.
Dad said, “Harper, you’ve got to admit a ten-room house is better than a little trailer.”
I didn’t say anything, because he was so happy about what was happening, it made me feel bad for not being happy too. I mean, we were always real close, we hardly ever fought. It was just that right now everything was so sudden. Like, one minute he meets this truly strange woman named, of all things, Gus at a stupid art class, and the next minute they’re getting married. So we had to move in with Gus, because her place was bigger than ours. But I liked the trailer. I’d lived there all my life, since the day I was born, practically. It was plenty big enough for just Dad and me.
“Try to give it a chance, Harper,” Dad said.
“Sure.”
“Gus is really looking forward to having a family.”
What the heck was her real name? Gustavia? Augusta? Something gross anyway. And I wasn’t about to be her “family.” But I didn’t say anything.
“The school district is a better one too. They offer Latin, calculus—”
“Dad, I know.”
That was Dad, always worrying about me, always hoping I’d do better than he had. Which was why he had given me such a bizarre name. His name was Buddy. Buddy Ferree. “People with cute names don’t get taken seriously,” he’d told me once. I thought he’d done just fine for a person who’d taken care of a baby, me, instead of going to college. He was head of sales at Rugged Pak, a corrugated-box company.
“Here we are.” Dad stopped the U-Haul at the curb. I spotted Gus walking toward us from—her house.
Oh, my God, what a freaky house.
Of course I should have guessed. I’d met Gus a couple of times. I knew she wore overalls and a baseball cap backward whenever she wasn’t asleep. But it’s hard to guess some things just from meeting a person. No matter how weird they are, you’re still not going to assume they have a sixteen-foot metal cactus in the front yard. I m
ean, it was a thing put together out of pipes, and it looked like a cactus to me.
Gus said, “Yo, Groover,” to me. She called me Groover, who knows why. But she kept on going past me, vaulted over the hood of the U-Haul, and went around to the driver’s side. My dad had his window down, and Gus started kissing him.
“Ew, sick.” I turned my back on them and got out.
Across the street there was a girl about my age sitting on her front steps watching Gus kiss my dad and everything. Wonderful. Just wonderful.
I meant to go inside the house and look around, but Gus’s whole place was so strange I just stood and stared. All the other houses in the neighborhood were regular row houses close together, but her place stood off by itself with a big yard all around, and every inch of the yard had some kind of bizarre object on it, like a tower of hubcaps, and a claw-footed bathtub painted red and black, and a Statue of Liberty made out of venetian blinds. The house was all funkied up with pillars and steeples and things, and there was strange stuff hanging in the windows.
Just the same I would have gone inside, because I wanted to get dibs on the best bedroom, but it was like something took me by the shoulders and turned me around and shoved me away.
Really. It was just as if the yard or the house or something grew invisible hands and gave me a good push. As if something didn’t like me, which was okay with me because I wasn’t in any mood to like it. But then again, it wasn’t okay. What the hell was going on?
There I was all of a sudden heading across the street when I didn’t mean to. And there was the neighbor girl still sitting on a normal-looking house’s front steps and watching.
“Hi,” I said to her, like it was my idea to come stumbling into her face.
“Oh, hi,” she said, pretending she hadn’t seen me before. She wasn’t tiny, but she wasn’t an overgrown geek like me either. She was slim and pretty, with dark hair and huge dark eyes and skin the smooth brown color of caramel, and I could tell right away she wore a bra. I was still hiding everything under a baggy sweatshirt.
We both stared across at Gus’s house. She and my dad had finally got done sucking face and had the back of the U-Haul open.
“My name’s Rawnie,” the girl said.
“I’m Harper.”
“Huh?”
“Harper.” I hated my name.
“Oh. You’re moving in?”
“Nah. We just stopped by because it looked like a garage sale.” Jeez, what did she think a U-Haul was for?
“Okay, dumb question. Is your dad marrying Spook House McCogg?”
That was another dumb question. Like, Dad and Gus were just chewing on each other because there wasn’t a McDonald’s burger handy? But I let it go, because something else seemed more important. I said, “Spook House?”
“That’s what we call her around here.” Rawnie looked up with eyes that flashed white, then moved over on her steps so there was room for me to sit down. So I sat beside her, and she said real soft, “Listen, I don’t mess with her. She’s nice and everything, but there’s something strange about her place.”
“No duh.”
“Listen.” She spoke in a hurry, with her voice low, like she was telling me something important and dangerous. Her eyes were like woods lakes, brown and deep. She said, “There’s lights and voices over there after dark. And nobody goes in there with spray paint or anything, even though they do everywhere else. And there’s this kid, Benjy Jacobs, down the street, he was missing for two days once, and when he finally showed up, he said he was in Spooky McCogg’s backyard the whole time and couldn’t get out.”
“What do you mean, he couldn’t get out?”
“He just couldn’t get out! He said it was like there were spirits or something wouldn’t let him get out.”
I tried to laugh, but I didn’t really because I was remembering a feeling like two invisible hands on my shoulders shoving me off the sidewalk into the street.
“Great,” I said.
“Harper,” Dad called, looking around for me like I was a little kid, like I might get snatched or hit by a car or something. That was the only thing that bothered me about my dad, the way he treated me like a baby sometimes.
“Over here,” I called.
He saw me and beckoned for me to come help. He and Gus were finally ready to move stuff in. I got up to go, and Rawnie said to me, quick, “Hey, you need anything, I’ll be here.”
I just looked at her. Maybe she was trying to scare me because I had smart-mouthed at her. I mean, I wasn’t happy about Gus, but I knew my dad wouldn’t marry an ax murderer or anything.
Rawnie looked right back at me. “I mean it,” she said.
I said, “Sure,” and went back across the street to carry my boxes into Gus’s house.
Gus went first and beckoned me after her, and I didn’t feel anything strange sending me out of the yard this time when I walked across it to get to her front door. There was a knocker in the shape of a peace symbol on it. The inside of the house was as junked up as the outside, with all sorts of goofy things, like a brass bed instead of a sofa, and a porch swing in the living room hanging by chains from the ceiling, which was made of molded tin. And there was an old rusty plow blade done up to look like a sailing ship with copper-tubing masts. It sat in a huge bottle on the floor. Standing in a corner was some sort of metal chest with a big metal sunburst on its lid.
Gus saw me looking at it. “That’s my coffin,” she explained.
“Ew!”
“I don’t want anybody ever putting me in one of those funeral home Dracula boxes, see. So I built my own.”
“Well, shouldn’t you keep it in the basement or something?”
“I like to look at it. Makes me humble. Reminds me where I’m headed.”
I didn’t get to choose my bedroom after all, because she had already cleared one out for me. Otherwise I never would have gotten my stuff in. Gus kept every room in the house full, with just a little path through the middle for people to walk on. My room was nice, the biggest one except for the one she and Dad were going to share. And it faced the house across the street where what’s her name—Rawnie—was still sitting on her front stoop, watching.
It was Saturday. I knew that sometime before Monday I ought to go over and find out what grade Rawnie was in and ask her if I could walk to school with her. Dad wanted to take me, but I’d been telling him no, thanks anyway, but I could handle it. I didn’t want kids to see me getting brought to my new school my first day like a baby. If I didn’t have somebody to walk with, though, I might chicken out yet, because everything was different. Where I lived before was way out in the country, so I just waited at the entrance of the trailer park and got on a bus to go to school. But now I was going to have to find my school in the middle of the city, and I wasn’t looking forward to that, and I wasn’t looking forward to being there once I found it.
Rawnie glanced up toward my room, and I stepped back from the window. I wasn’t ready to wave at her yet or anything like that, and I didn’t want her to see me standing there. Probably she couldn’t see me anyway. There was a big circle of heavy lacework metal hanging in the window. In fact there was some kind of metal circle hanging in every window in the house. Downstairs too.
“Whadaya think, Groover?” It was Gus, standing in the doorway, wanting to know if I liked my new room. Her face was pink, and she didn’t perm her hair or wear any kind of makeup, and she had kind of a big nose. Actually she was big all over. She had monster feet. Well, maybe it was just that the work boots she wore made them look big, but anyway she was not much to look at, especially not in her baseball cap. My dad had dated lots of women who were a whole lot better looking than she was.
“I think you’ve got dirt on your face,” I told her.
She just held up her hands, which were dirtier, and smiled, and came in. “C’mon. Do you like your room?”
“It’s okay,” I admitted. “What are those things in the windows?”
“Old h
eat grates I polished up. You know, from old houses?”
I didn’t know.
“They used to put a hole in the floor so the heat could get up from downstairs, and they’d cover the hole with a fancy cast-iron grate.”
“So what?” I sounded pretty rude, but I didn’t care. Okay, so I wasn’t going to fight with my dad about her, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t fight with her.
Gus didn’t even blink, though. She pretended I was just asking a question, and said, “So what are they doing in the windows? Don’t you think they look witchy? I like circles. Yang and yin and all that. But you can just say they’re to keep what’s outside out and what’s inside in. There’s magic in metal.”
Ordinarily I might not have paid much attention, but after what Rawnie had been telling me, you better believe I did. I think my eyes bugged, and I said, “You serious?”
I would have felt better if she’d laughed at me. Mad, but better. But she didn’t laugh. She just let her smile curl up around that honker of hers and shrugged her big shoulders and went out to get some more of my stuff for me to unpack.
I stayed in my room for a long time, arranging my stuff, partly because I knew I would feel better once I got my room set up and partly because I didn’t want to deal with Gus or her house more than I had to. But finally I had to go to the bathroom, which was at the back of the house, and while I was there I looked out the bathroom window, and my mouth came wide open because I was looking down at Gus’s backyard.
It was huge. Here was this neighborhood all full of skinny brick row houses with no front yards and only skinny little backyards running between fences to skinny little alleys. And here in the middle of everything was this big square wooden house Gus had, and its yard stopped the alleys and stretched clear to the next street.
And every inch of the yard was full of some kind of junk.
What I’d seen out front was bad enough, but at least it seemed like it was arranged for people to look at. Besides the cactusy-looking thing and the hubcap tower there was a tall metal spindle out front with octopus arms on top, and there was a weird-looking metal deer with pipes for legs and antlers made out of old pitchforks. Kind of lawn-ornament stuff if you were really nutsoid. But the backyard was like a huge crazy playground made of sheer junk. In between big trees I saw the usual backyard trash, like old cars up on blocks and old washtubs, but also cockeyed street-lamps, and old steam radiators, and a cookstove, the kind with legs, and a ton of other things I couldn’t figure out through the branches in my way. There were sheds down there too, and a creek with some little ponds strung along it like shiny beads on a shiny ribbon.
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