Me. A 5K. Not a marathon, but still—this was hilarious.
Oscar would want to be there. Pre-debut Oscar. Not giant face on a banner Oscar or locked in a room Oscar or whoever he’d be when all of this shook out.
Jules looked heart-piercingly relieved. “Grams is going to be at the finish line if she can get out of work, but . . . yeah. It’ll be good to have a friend there too.”
She’s lonely, I realized with a lurch. I think Jules has been lonely her entire life.
I crossed the room in two strides to give her a hug. She laughed, shoving me away, but as she ducked into the hall, I saw her face soften back into a six-year-old at one of our first slumber parties, whispering princess dreams to me in the glow from her night-light.
I turned my phone over in my hand, thoughts swirling uselessly, then typed a text to Oscar—Hey
I need a minute Ruby, he wrote back.
“Okay,” I said, but didn’t type it.
* * *
• • •
Two movies down, neither a romance. I’d texted Dad to let him know where I’d be spending the night, triple-checked I hadn’t missed a reply from Oscar, then put my phone out of sight.
“You think you’re special, Max,” the villain snarled on the screen. “Nobody’s special.”
I picked at my shrimp fried rice with my chopsticks, eating one grain at a time. I looked up to see Jules’s eyes darting away, then back.
“So . . .” Her mouth bunched up, debating her words. “Is this a breakup?”
“What? No.” I gripped my chopsticks tight. “It’s a . . . freak-out.”
She nodded.
“A selfish one. Oscar’s the one dealing with real issues. I’m just a spoiled—”
“You’re not even remotely oppressed, no, but you’re still allowed to feel what you’re feeling.”
I stared at my food, less than convinced.
“So how do you feel?” she asked gently. “Obviously not hungry.”
My chopsticks slid out of my hand and into the carton, giving up the ghost.
“Okay, fun therapy game.” Jules clapped. “I’m going to throw words out and you tell me if any of them are right. Um . . . angry.”
I shrugged.
“Restless.”
Not really.
“Irritated.”
Getting there.
“Phlegmatic.”
I laughed.
“Making sure you’re paying attention. Jealous.”
I drew in a breath.
Jules frowned at me for a second. “I spend, like, ninety percent of my day feeling jealous, Ruby. It’s okay as long as you don’t let it get out of control. It’s just something you navigate until you can find your way out of it.”
“What if there is no out of it?” I flopped backward on the bed to stare at the ceiling. “You know where I didn’t feel it? On the edge of a tidal island, with no phone reception. I started to think maybe it was okay to get up in the morning and sustain myself and go to bed at night. But the second I come back here . . .”
“Well, it’s plain old senior year in a couple of weeks, right? You won’t have to keep thinking about Amberley.” Jules made spooky fingers. “How he got in, you didn’t. That’s got to be a kick in the teeth, for starters—”
“I did get into Amberley.”
Admitting it felt like a hatchet hitting the emergency box.
Jules looked as lost as me now.
I pulled myself upright. “I tried out for the summer program in April. It was a blind audition, there was—it’s a screen.” I mimed pulling a screen down. “An audition screen—between me and the judges, and I was . . .” I let out a hysterical laugh. “I was so terrible. It was a disaster. And I still got in. Got my letter in the mail.”
Jules watched me, understanding now. “But you turned it down.”
“I mean, of course, right?” I pulled a pillow into my lap. “And they begged me to reconsider—my dad, my godmother. Even the piano chair wrote me a fucking email. I’m sure they’d made him do it. ‘Think about what it’ll mean for Amberley to have another Chertok in our ranks.’”
Jules smiled wryly. “They want to put you in another ad campaign.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. God, the whole thing is so embarrassing and I was hoping to get clear of it and that has obviously not happened this summer. At all.”
Laying it all out like this, finally voicing it in actual words, made it lose some of its power. It was something that happened to me. Not everything.
“Okay, confession time?” Jules said, scooting closer on crossed legs. “You’re the one I’ve mainly been jealous of.”
“There are so many people in this city . . .”
“And I covet most of their lives too.” Jules glared out the window in demonstration. “I think it probably started with that photo shoot, a million years ago. I remember tagging along to Lincoln Center and watching you and all the other kid models get styled, and I totally fell in love with it. But it seems like it was a few weeks later that we kind of . . . drifted. And I always pictured you in that world and me stuck in mine and—”
“You’re not stuck anywhere.” I grabbed her hand, but my mind was spinning.
It was after that that we’d drifted, wasn’t it? It was the next day that I’d decided to become a serious ten-year-old, take up Mom’s practice schedule, give up anything that wasn’t music. Even my best friend.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Jules went on. “Don’t get me wrong, you’ve got it permanently easy in all sorts of mind-blowing ways. But I don’t think I’m jealous of you anymore.”
I burst out laughing. “Thanks!”
“I’m dead serious. I thought my life was a trap? Good Lord—your family. This world of yours.”
“Of theirs.”
“You can’t get out of it, can you? Except, hey now . . .” Jules pointed at me until she was booping my nose. “You did.”
“Going down south? I . . .”
“When you said no. When you said fuck this letter, I’m not going to your bullshit school as a publicity stunt, hell to the no.”
Now I couldn’t stop laughing.
“It must have felt kind of good, right? Making a decision like that.”
“It was hard. It hurt, but . . . yeah. It was satisfying.”
“So maybe it’s not so much about jealousy. Maybe you just need to keep standing up and saying hell no. I mean—that’s an impact, right? Knowing what you want? Acting on it?”
Her expression clouded. I wondered if she was thinking about her own career goals. I was just about to say so when she jerked her thumb westward.
“Which brings me to this guy.”
Oscar. My brain blurred again with the thought of him.
“I like Oscar, actually. And that is relatively rare. But . . .” Jules winced. “And bear with me here . . . do you feel like your life is becoming a sublevel of his life? Like you’re his basement apartment?”
“I mean, yes? But again, I don’t know if it’s his fault.”
“If you took up birdwatching, what would he do?”
I blinked.
Jules whapped me. “Stop, I think about this a lot—what would he do? How would he react?”
“He would . . .” I smiled slowly, remembering him picking a favorite tree. “Honestly, even if he thought it was ludicrous, he’d get his own set of binoculars and go out into the wilderness with me. And then he’d write a symphony about it.”
My mind jumped to my family. Apart from Alice, would any of them be able to take their blinders off long enough to root for me in another field?
But there was something wistful about Jules’s nod. I had to ask.
“What about Ty?”
“He would resent birds for the rest of his life,�
�� she said simply. “He would mock them wherever he went. Like, ‘Look at that stupid blue jay, think you’re so special.’”
I had to admit, that was a pretty good imitation of Tyler.
“Like I said,” she sighed. “I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“You should break up with him.”
She covered her face with a pillow, then threw it on the floor. “Yep. I know. He’ll be there tomorrow night. Ugh. And he’s got all our tickets.”
“Tickets?” I frowned.
“Kudzu Giants!” She reached for her bedside lamp. “Did you forget?”
I had. Completely.
“No biggie.” Jules shot me a wry grin before she turned out the light. “It’s only music.”
Best possible words to fall asleep to.
37.
the sidewalk outside Amsterdam Ballroom was packed when I got out of my taxi. I pulled out my phone to text Jules, who’d gotten here ahead of me . . . and stared at the screen. I’d missed a call. His call. How, how—?
I dialed into voicemail. This message was crystal clear.
Okay. Minute over and . . . I miss you. I missed you while you were away, but I think I miss you even more today. The thing is, I would have run screaming too. I’m sorry that you came home to all this. I, um, I did clean my place up. I know that’s not what you were upset about, but . . . just know that I’m here now. I’m not gonna hide. And I think you’re exceptional in every way that actually matters. You’re not a cleaner, you are not a complication, you’re Ruby. And . . . I love you. So there’s that.
My tension unraveled, emotion flooding in its wake, an ocean rising from my toes to my eyes, filling them up.
Someone touched my shoulder and I jumped, tears flash-drying.
“Whoa!” Jules grinned, hands in the air. “You’re so skittish, it’s hilarious. Don’t worry, I know this isn’t your scene, but it’ll be fun. Joey!”
She called into the crowd, waving him over.
I crossed my arms, trying my best to convey friendly but unavailable. But when Joey emerged, his arm was looped around Sam’s waist. She stooped to kiss his neck as they staggered over like a three-legged race.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh my God! Hi!”
Relief shot through me, chased by a strong dose of embarrassment.
“Did I not tell you about this?” Jules murmured. “He’s had a crush on her since the sixth grade, but she was icing him until that first night you hung out and he was acting all into you. You did a good deed!”
“I didn’t even know it.”
“You still get the commission.”
“Where’s Ty?” I asked Jules, preparing myself for the broverload.
“He left.” Her expression barely changed, but I could tell how much effort was going into appearing blasé. “I dumped him! For real. He nearly took off without giving me the tickets, the bastard, but . . .”
She held them up, fanned out, and each of us stepped up to take one.
“How do you feel?” I asked, watching her.
She smiled. “Like a real person.”
Then she motioned us toward the crowd sifting itself into the ballroom’s entryway.
It smelled like alcohol in here, of which we could not partake, due to our underage hand stamps. The noise was raucous, the decor straight-up dive. Nothing like a symphony space. But I got a thrill when we found our spots at the front of the balcony and looked down at the empty, set-up stage, holding its breath for the music to start.
Then it did, everybody roaring as the warmup band took the stage. The crowd knew two of the songs well enough to sing along, then ignored the other ones, chatting while the band kept playing. It seemed as rude to me here as it had at the Wing Club, so I stayed quiet and listened, letting Jules carry the conversation.
“I’m so liberated! Is this how you felt after giving Amberley the shaft? I’m sure it just hasn’t hit me yet. I’ll miss him, I’ll second-guess, but right now I’m, like, flying over the Grand Canyon, letting out my eagle cry.”
She actually did an eagle cry. I shot her a laughing thumbs-up.
Oscar was probably mid-rehearsal at Lilly Hall right now—the last work-through. Tomorrow would be the dress, two full run-throughs without stopping, and then . . . the big night.
I would be terrified—and I’d grown up in that world. As much as I’d always chafed at it, I was somebody who could hide in the wings there, slide into the shadows, but not Oscar. They’d never given him the chance. From day one, Nora and Bill had segregated him right there at the top. Oscar Bell. African American YouTube sensation, playing live tonight at Wing Club. Step right up and see the eighth wonder of the world.
Even I hadn’t been immune to it. My very first impression of Oscar was that I’d hallucinated him. I hadn’t been able to reconcile him in that moment with the music he was playing. How long had it taken me to really see him? How long would it take everybody else?
No wonder he’d been having anxiety attacks. No wonder he’d shut himself in rehearsal rooms and stopped sleeping until the symphony was complete. And now it was time to present it to the world. The grandest exhibition of all.
All the sound got sucked out of the ballroom, truth hitting me in hard blasts.
Oscar needed me. Right now. And I was at a rock concert.
Before guilt could overwhelm me, the mezzanine lights went dark, and everybody screamed their heads off. Kudzu Giants were coming on.
I’d googled them this morning and listened to some of their stuff, but I didn’t know the song they were opening with. Others seemed to, a ripple of excitement pulsing through the crowd. It was weird—some sea shanty, filtered through an indie rock lens. I tried to relax, sipped my ginger ale, listened with an open mind.
What if Oscar hadn’t even made it to rehearsal? What if he couldn’t face it? He’d sounded better in that last voicemail, but—
I clenched my fists.
Kudzu Giants were deep into the song now—catchy, I had to admit, the guitars making this susurration with their strumming that seemed to imitate the movement of the ocean. I wondered if they could imitate forks.
“Stop freaking out,” Jules whispered, turning my head to face her. “This is fun. You deserve to have fun!”
I bobbed along with the music to show I was trying.
“Yes!” she said, shoving me. I wondered if she’d managed to sneak past the stamp restrictions at the bar. “This is what I mean. It’s not just saying hell no, you know? You need to seize life, Ruby. Plunder it. Don’t think about other people—you do that too much. Take it. Like a goddamn pirate.”
Did I think about other people too much? Was there such a thing as too much? Didn’t we all owe each other something by virtue of being alive at the same time? And when you loved someone, it was a contract. You could walk, break it, fight against the pain, but you’d wind up like Mom. Or feeling the way I felt right now. Fragmented.
Without a pause, the band transitioned into a new song—one that sounded eerily familiar, like I’d heard it a long time ago, played by a different band.
Was it a cover, classical, something that they’d adapted? Or . . . no.
It was “Sparkler,” a Kudzu Giants original, but to me it was Oscar’s, forever and always, the song he’d turned into the Kudzu Variations. I remembered him now as he was in that handheld YouTube video—not a lightning strike—just a bright spark, playful. Free.
I gripped the railing while Jules’s advice replayed in my head. “Take what you want.”
My whole life had been spent collecting definitions, one after another, piling up, cluttering my brain. The music washed over me, and I let go of them, one by one, watching them drop over the edge onto the crowd beneath us.
Musician.
Socialite.
Daughter.
Muse.
A
nchorite.
All gone. I was Ruby. This was my life. So—what did I want? More than anything else in the whole, real, world? Right this second, now, now, now?
I answered the question before I’d even finished posing it, engines firing.
To hear Oscar’s symphony.
I turned to Jules.
“A for effort.” She kissed me on the forehead. “Tell him I say hi.”
And with that, I was off, through the crowd, out the door. I flagged a lit-up cab—seconds before it was taken. Then I ran to Madison, waving wildly just in case, towers of lights cheering me on in every direction. Thunder grumbled above, louder than the city drone, and the skies opened up.
The streets snarled instantly, I’d missed a crosstown bus . . . I eyed the way west, running calculations. And I started to jog.
A brisk half block, dodging wet pedestrians, before I hit the park—familiar territory. Jules and I had run it yesterday.
Unfortunately, this route was far easier in Nikes. The darkness rendered everything unfamiliar, the path winding me in the wrong direction, so I pointed myself west, left the pavement, hurdled over a low wire fence, and zipped through soggy grass, clumps of dirt flying in my wake. There went the zoo, the giant boulder, the carnival at Wollman Rink, its jangling music hushed beneath the splatter of rain, up and over and around.
Darting between trees, I felt the ground gave way—the decline slick with mud from the downpour. My shoes skidded from beneath me, sending my butt sledding, my back, elbows, hair coated with loamy soil. I laughed, screamed, got up, ran.
I could do this. I was good at this!
Out of the park, onto the sidewalk, into Midtown gridlock, the crosswalk signs interminable, dodging umbrellas, wiping water from my eyes so I could see, this flimsy dress clinging to curves I was sure were now completely exposed, but I didn’t care—because I saw the Lincoln Center fountain gleaming tall ahead of me, a mystical vision, the end of a quest.
Two steps into the Lilly Hall lobby and I heard the answer to my last question. The second movement was playing. Oscar was here.
Night Music Page 29