The Friendship Song

by Nancy Springer

  “Look, I’ll think about it,” was the best answer we got from him. “It’s the least I can do, when you two kids came in here after me—”

  He stopped talking and looked at us with a strange, worried shadow starting in his eyes.

  “What?” Rawnie asked him.

  “Jeez,” he said softly, “now I know I’m far gone. Here I sit just thinking about myself, and what about you two? How are you going to get back?”

  Rawnie groaned. I rolled my eyes. “Through the maze again, I guess,” I said.

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Rawnie said. “And I’m so hungry.”

  Nico exclaimed, “You didn’t eat anything in here, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Don’t! If you eat anything, you can’t leave.”

  Rawnie looked at me like she wanted to say something that didn’t need saying. And I just wanted to change the subject anyway. I said, “I wonder what day it is.”

  “Isn’t it still the same night?” Rawnie looked startled.

  “How should I know? It feels like we’ve been in here a week.”

  “You can’t go out the way you came in,” Nico said. “The boatman won’t take you.” He was keeping his voice very quiet, but I could tell he was scared. As if it was his fault we were in there. It wasn’t. He couldn’t help it if we came in after him. But he cared about us. That was the kind of person he was.

  He was right too. That boatman was just the kind of person who wouldn’t take us back across the creek. Now I was scared. “Oh, my God,” I said to Rawnie, and the way she was looking at me didn’t help.

  We all three sat like spare tires for a minute.

  “How do you get in and out?” I asked Nico.

  “I fly.”

  Forget it. That wouldn’t work for Rawnie and me. We sat some more.

  “We sort of got in by letting the music take us,” Rawnie said, not sounding too sure of herself. “Maybe we can get out by not letting it have us anymore?”

  “Put your hands over your ears,” Nico told us, “and think about going home.”

  “What about you?”

  “Forget me. Do it.”

  I tried it and knew right away it wasn’t going to work. I could still hear the music. Or what I mean is, the music was still in me, right down to my bones, the way there was always music in Rawnie’s feet. I could feel it like I could feel my heartbeat. And deep down I didn’t want to make it stop. It would be like dying if I made it stop. I needed to have it with me always.

  “Think about summertime coming,” Nico was saying. “Think about, oh, I don’t know, things you like to eat. Petting a cat, walking a dog. Hanging out with people you really like.” His voice was starting to quiver. “Brothers, sisters, father, mother. People who love you.”

  I wanted all that, but I wanted the music too.

  “Nico,” said Rawnie very gently, “come with us.”

  “Give me a break and just get yourselves home, okay?” His voice was stretched tight as a drumhead.

  “We don’t know how,” she said.

  “Yes, we do,” I told her. I had gone kind of fuzzy because I was so tired and hungry, or I would have thought of it before. “The other way. By the pigeon coop.”

  “Yeah!” She understood. “The back way! But where is it?”

  “I see what you mean,” Nico said. “There ought to be a stage door.”

  He got up and headed toward where he thought it might be. Rawnie and I trailed along behind him. “Jeez,” I muttered, surprised at how tired and old I felt.

  Nico walked up onstage, and so did we, and Elvis kept jumping around and singing “Rock it, rock it,” but Buddy Holly stopped banging out the beat on his old Stratocaster and looked at us.

  “Hey,” he said. “People. Kids. Girls.”

  “Quite so, that’s what they are,” said Lennon. He was standing there playing a big mouthful of shiny metal, a harmonica. He smiled at us around the edges of it, then kept playing, and I was glad. I wanted the music never to end.

  “They need to go home,” Nico said. “They’re not dead.”

  “They ought to see the manager,” Buddy Holly said. He was dressed in a white nerd shirt and black nerd slacks, not like any rock star I had ever dreamed of. The only halfway cool thing he had on was a belt with a big silver lonesome-cowboy buckle. Actually it was kind of old-fashioned-looking, and I never was much for cowboy stuff. But I liked him anyway. He seemed nice. Not just smiley nice, but nice all the way to his bones.

  “What about you, kid?” he said to Nico. “Made up your mind yet?”

  “No,” Nico said.

  “Listen, y’all go back, then. Take it from me, never die young. It’s not worth it. Being a dead rock legend sucks.”

  I saw Nico’s eyes go wide. But all he said was, “Where do we find the manager?”

  “Where do you think?” somebody else shouted over. It was Hendrix, and he sounded mad that we were interrupting things. “Backstage!”

  See, the strange thing was, even though I knew we were in Gus’s backyard, it was like we were in a stadium or an arena. There were walls. And I looked to the right and I looked to the left, but I didn’t see any doors in them.

  “How do we get there?” Nico asked.

  Nobody answered him. Maybe nobody heard, because the band was swinging into “Born to Be Wild,” Buddy Holly was hitting the strings hard, John Lennon was swaying to the beat, drums were pounding, the lights were flashing blue and purple and bloodred, and I laughed out loud, because suddenly I saw. I grabbed Nico with one hand, Rawnie with the other.

  “Step in,” I told them. “Step into the circle.”

  Right in front of us, big, was the backdrop with the circle that kept turning. And I had been thinking its black-and-white design was yang and yin, but watching the colors hit it all at once, I saw it in a different way. With the lights on it, it was the hex sign from the pigeon coop. And if things could come through it to make the band play, maybe we could go through it the other way.

  “Come on,” I urged. “It’s the hex.”

  Something strange was happening. The music was dwindling away like into the distance, and light was coming from somewhere, everything was getting bright. The circle blazed like fire. “What’s happening?” Rawnie exclaimed, holding me back.

  “Night’s ending,” Nico said. “Gig’s nearly over. Get going, you two.” He pulled his hand out of mine.

  “Nico, come with us!”

  “I don’t know what to do! Stop thinking about me and just go!” One hand on each of us between the shoulder blades, he gave us a shove that should have sent us slamming off the stage and into the wall behind it.

  But the stage did not end when it should have. We fell into the slowly spinning circle, I fell into yang and Rawnie fell into yin, or it might have been the other way around, it didn’t matter. Then we weren’t falling anymore, we were floating or drifting or spinning, backstage, behind everything, the two of us.

  And then we were face to face with the manager of eternity’s band.

  “Harper,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

  He knew me. And I felt like I should know him, but I wasn’t sure who he was, and I couldn’t think, because he was so—he was hot, like the sun. His face was young and handsome and almost golden; it seemed to shine. His hair was long and thick and flowed back from his face like a lion’s mane and formed a circle in the sky. His eyes—they were so bright I couldn’t look at his face after the first glimpse, and I felt Rawnie’s hand tighten on mine like she needed something to hang on to.

  “Daughter,” the golden man said. “What are you doing here?”

  There was some kind of mistake. I whispered, “I’m not your daughter.”

  “But you told my gatekeeper you were.”

  Oh, my God. Aengus Mac Og.

  He was right. I nodded. “Yes, okay, I remember. I was thinking of Gus. She’s—she’s real nice, I wouldn’t mind if she wanted to be my mom. But
I haven’t had a chance to talk with her about it yet.” Aengus Mac Og and Gus were not exactly the same person, I could see that now. I mean, obviously Aengus Mac Og was a man and Gus was a woman, but it was more than just that. It was—Gus was Gus. She was born in a real place, Youngstown, Ohio. In a real year, even though I didn’t know what it was. She went to Iowa State University, she protested the Vietnam War, she could never get a good job because she wouldn’t shave her legs and wear high heels. She had a birth certificate and someday she would die. But Aengus Mac Og would never die, and he was a lot more powerful and a lot scarier than Gus would ever be.

  “Answer my question,” he commanded. “What treasure have you and your comrade come to steal from me?”

  “We, uh, we came to take Nico.”

  “The one who wavers between the worlds. Nico Torres.”

  “Yes. But it was a mistake to try, we can’t make him come back, we don’t own him, we can’t tell him what to do.…” My voice faltered as I remembered the feel of Nico’s hand pulling out of mine.

  “He will make his own decision. And you wish to go back to the world of the living?”

  “Yes. Yes, sir.”

  “And you are taking with you nothing you have found here?”

  “No.”

  “Do not trifle with me. I know you have stolen treasure from my realm.”

  Aengus Mac Og sounded very stern. I looked at Rawnie before I answered, and she looked back at me. Had we taken something, maybe by mistake? She shook her head. I couldn’t remember anything either.

  Except—there had been music I didn’t want to leave behind.

  “The music,” I said, “It’s in me now. Is that what you mean, sir?”

  “How is it in you, Harper?” And now his voice had gone softer.

  “It’s—like my own song. A dream.” I couldn’t explain any better than that, and maybe Aengus Mac Og didn’t understand. Or maybe he did. I don’t know, because I wasn’t looking at him, I was looking at Rawnie, and she understood all right. It was as if she and I were partners in something. On the same team. And either one of us alone wasn’t a bad deal, but put us together and we were more than twice as strong, we could be heroes, poets, whatever we wanted. Our hands curled together like yang and yin, and we lifted them into the air. Our arms made a shape like a mountain peak. We were adventurers, and we would ride together. We were gladiators, and we had both won. Rawnie smiled at me, and there was a tear on her cheek. It shone there like a jewel, just like she was somebody. Just like we were rock stars or something.

  “I see,” Aengus Mac Og said, and his voice sounded gentle and proud. “It is a treasure you have earned. Take it, therefore, and go.”

  Then before I had time to think or be afraid the sky behind his head was a circle that grew, and flew toward us, and swallowed us up and spun us around. “Hey!” I yelled. Rawnie’s hand hung on to mine. Then everything was very still, and life smelled like a spring morning, and I blinked: We were sitting on the grass by a pile of old buckets and hubcaps, and Gus was standing there looking down at us with those dreaming gray eyes of hers. The sun was shining bright and golden, and there was a circle hanging like a halo behind Gus’s head, but it was just the hex sign on the pigeon coop.

  Next thing I knew I got up and grabbed her around the middle and started to cry into the bib of her overalls.

  “Groover!” Her hands came up and hugged me and patted at me. “What is it, buddy?”

  “Nico,” I managed to blurt out, and then I couldn’t say anymore, but I guess she understood. I was crying because the world was beautiful and I was back in it—and Nico was not. The sun was warm, but Nico was still flying in the wind somewhere.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Gus knew what was going on, of course, but there was no way we could explain to my father or Rawnie’s father how we’d been up all night trying to rescue Nico from shadowland. So after I was done crying on Gus, Rawnie had to sneak into her house and I had to sneak into mine, and we each had to go to bed for all of ten minutes and pretend we had been there all along and get up and get ready for school.

  “How’d you get the black eye?” Dad wanted to know the minute he saw me, which was when I walked into the kitchen for breakfast.

  I surprised him, because instead of answering I went over to him and gave him a big hug and a kiss and rested my head on him a minute. After the way I’d been hugging Gus, I guess I felt like he should get equal time. “Dad,” I told him, still hugging him, “I need new sneaks. One of mine got the toe whomped off.” I swung up my foot to show him. “And I need a bra, sometime soon,” I added.

  Gus sloshed her coffee all over the table and gawked at me. “Criminy,” she said. “I never thought of that.”

  I grinned at her. “You’re gonna be my mom, you have to think of these things.”

  She heard what I was trying to tell her, and she smiled back at me like a big pink sunrise.

  Dad’s coffee was still brewing, so he was cranky and he was missing half of this. “What did you do to your shoe?” he wanted to know. “And you still didn’t tell me what happened to your eye.”

  I could have made up a lie, I guess, but I didn’t feel like it. I let go of him and looked straight at him and said, “I’m not going to.”

  “What?”

  “Dad, it’s private.”

  “You got in a fight and you’re not going to tell me about it?”

  “That’s right.” He was starting to look mad, so I said, “Dad, suppose I was a boy, would it bother you? Girls can do things too.”

  Gus was watching him in her quiet way, and he felt it and stared back at her. “You in on this?”

  “Yes.”

  He flapped his hands in the air and gave up. “All right, then. Harper, what you don’t tell me, you tell Gus. You hear me?”

  “Okay. Hey, Dad. Thanks for marrying Gus.”

  He smiled, and tried to hide it, and stomped over to get his coffee. “I hate Mondays,” he muttered.

  Rawnie said pretty much the same thing on the way to school. “And it’s Monday, yet,” she moaned as we headed down the street. “If we live through this, we can live through anything.” For once her feet weren’t dancing. She was almost dragging them. And I was walking like a drunk moose.

  I had my Walkman, and most of the way to school we listened for news of Nico. We didn’t talk much about him, though. What could we say? It was all up to him now, whether he lived or died. We couldn’t talk to him, even to say good-bye. He could be walking right by my side now and I wouldn’t know it, because he was in the air like a distant song. I couldn’t see him or hear him anymore.

  There was no change in the news about him.

  “If he decides to come back,” I said to Rawnie, “probably he won’t remember anything.”

  “I guess not.”

  “But that’s okay. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t remember us. Just if he comes back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Please come back, Nico.”

  Some time that morning, I really don’t remember when, Aly Bowman came up to me and said in my face, hard, “You sitting with me at lunch today?” I stood in the hall blinking at her. So much had happened that it was like I barely remembered who she was, like she was somebody I knew for a little while a long time ago and now I couldn’t think of her name, but it didn’t matter. I knew she wasn’t anyone I wanted to eat lunch with.

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean, no. I’m sitting with Rawnie.”

  “Butch bitch.” The way it came out so fast I could see she had already thought of what names she was going to call me. “You are a big overgrown butch, Harper.”

  She walked away just as I remembered who she was. “Hey, Aly,” I called after her, “you’ve got green worms hanging down from your beak. Juicy ones.”

  She shot me a killer look over her shoulder. “I’ll get you,” she said.

  I didn’t care about that or what she
’d called me, because she just wasn’t important.

  Nico was way bad important. But when I met Rawnie for lunch, there was still no news about him.

  I wanted Nico to get well so hard that I wasn’t thinking about much else. Or maybe it was because I was so tired I just didn’t care anymore. Or maybe it was more like, I didn’t scare anymore. Anyway, I didn’t tell Rawnie about Aly, I didn’t worry about the glares she was giving me or the way she was whispering with her boyfriend, and for some reason I wasn’t carrying my books in front of my chest that day. I just didn’t feel like it. They were so heavy. My arms always ached after a day of going around that way. And why should I have to, anyhow?

  Right after lunch, when everybody was sloshing around in the lobby like clothes in a real noisy washing machine, a hand came grabbing straight for the front of my sweatshirt.

  I didn’t even wait to see who it was, I didn’t even think about what to do, I just punched for all I was worth. Rawnie was standing right beside me, and she hit him the same time I did. Between the two of us, we flattened him pretty good. Then all of a sudden there was a circle of space around us and kids staring at us. We didn’t try to sneak away or anything, we just stood there looking at the boy getting up off the floor. It wasn’t Brent this time, it was somebody else, some skinhead boy I didn’t even know. His nose was bleeding, but I couldn’t feel sorry for him.

  “Young ladies,” Mr. Kuchwald roared in our ears, “to my office!”

  He didn’t say anything until we got there, but I could hear him breathing hard, like he was really mad and not just putting on an act. Rawnie and I just looked at each other and didn’t say anything. We didn’t have to. I was scared, but it was okay, because in another secret way I wasn’t scared at all. It was like I was just me, but I was more than just me when I had to be.

  Like “The Friendship Song” in one way was just a song, and Nico and Ty were just singers, they had never really died for each other. But in another way the song was true.

  Mr. Kuchwald waited until he had Rawnie and me in his office with the door closed before he said anything. But then he turned straight to me. “You,” he yelled, pointing his finger almost into my face. “Here you are in my office again, for fighting, just the way you were the very first day you set foot in my school.”