Maybe I wouldn’t. And that would be okay, too.
In the girl’s bathroom, gazing a little unsteadily at my reflection, I sighed—long and deep. Preparations or no preparations, there was nothing in the entire world that would make this next hour any less excruciating. Music class was the part of my day I feared most.
I wetted a paper towel with cool water and pressed it to the back of my neck. I had only closed my eyes for a second when I heard the bathroom door creak open. In the mirror I found Vanya’s gelid stare, regarding me like I was something vile. I looked away and continued blotting the back of my neck.
“Ew . . . you,” she muttered, and let the door slam noisily behind her. There were only four sinks, but she walked to the one furthest from me and began washing her hands. “I thought you died?” she asked; and managing to sound so sincere, I actually had to see her to be sure. She was smiling, though.
Unlike when Jake had spoken similar words earlier, when Vanya said them, they were neither endearing nor humorous. And while Vanya’s odium of me no longer carried the same weight it once had, or the confusion, being in the presence of such strong hate did make me very tired. Her hatred was draining, though to none more so than Vanya herself. On the outside our afflictions looked very different, but really they were the same. Self-hatred was capable of manifesting many forms, and the one it took upon Vanya, the negligence and abuse of a very frail body, would eventually kill her.
I turned at the sink to look at her. “No,” I said quietly, my voice catching as I took in the pale slender neck, the wraithlike arms, the legs that wobbled and trembled ever so slightly at the knees, as if she had trouble holding herself up. “No, I didn’t die.”
Vanya shut off the water and yanked a paper towel from the dispenser. “Yeah, well there’s always tomorrow,” she intoned in a bored, remote voice, and came toward me to leave. The exit was premature. I knew why she had come in here, what she had planned to do. In truth, I had chosen this bathroom for much of the same reason, its location underutilized and nearly vacant at this hour—a few minutes before lunch’s end. I was confident I might have a few moments alone to prepare myself for what was in front of me, to purge the fear and anxiety welling upside me. Vanya had planned to do the same. Only now she couldn’t, because I was here.
When I moved away from the sink and into her path, I couldn’t decide who was more appalled, Vanya or me. Perhaps it was a tie.
“Excuse you,” she growled from her throat, her eyes like flashing icebergs. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I selected my words quickly and I hoped wisely. “It won’t take the hurt away, Vanya,” I said gently. “You have to find another way.”
Then I grabbed her hard, hugged her, and hastily left the bathroom before she gathered her wits and assaulted me.
Breathing loudly, I made my way down the path, forcing myself to slow some, once I was sure no one followed me—namely an enraged ballerina.
Whether from sheer nerves, or because it was actually somewhat comedic, I laughed out loud, recalling Vanya’s flabbergasted expression just before I turned and sprinted to the door. It was brief, but the plainly spoken shock on her face was red as roses. What had appeared after, for an even shorter period of time—a flash, then gone—was what I could only describe as a softening. Beneath the furiously shimmering eyes she questioned me earnestly. Within a second, rage and indignation rose up to steal its place, but it had been there; I was sure of it.
Maybe it would be enough.
Still smiling, I rounded the corner and collided with a body so thick and hard, I thought I had run into a brick wall. But though I staggered back, disoriented, and reaching for the first stationary object I could find, the brick wall made an equally surprised noise—a dull umph!—so I knew the impact was human.
I caught a glimpse of the sidewalk, bespattered in orange and red berries, and groaned inwardly. What I grabbed had turned out to be a Pyracantha bush that, while making exceptionally pretty shrubbery, unfortunately was not a very friendly plant, venomous in fact, for which I would be paying mightily in the ensuing hour; however, it kept me on my feet, and for that at least I was thankful. “Oh! I’m so—”
And as I raised my head to apologize, my heart stopped and immediately went numb. As if someone had taken a syringe and pumped me full of procaine.
There he was. My Dominic.
Only he was not. I didn’t know whose Dominic he was, only that he was not mine. He couldn’t be. I knew of him, but not about him; a large family, comprised of female siblings, two of which attended Shorecliffs; owner of a beautiful black mustang.
Mostly I was guilty of quick and furtive glances during the class we had together, more than once wending into a daydream, wondering what Dominic Kassells was like; if his eyes truly were as blue as they appeared to be at a distance, and more curious if someone that physically beautiful could ever be as beautiful on the inside. But it was only the very last day before Shorecliffs recessed for an extended spring break, that my curiosity peaked to something more.
It was over before it ever began, really, but I had watched the whole thing happen, tucked away and unseen in an alcove between buildings. I had tutorial that period, and rather than read in the library or hang out in the common room, I did as I always did and isolated myself from everyone else. Dominic must have had tutorial as well, or had been on his way to use the restroom. Either way, he had passed right by me without ever seeing me. No more than a few steps, though, he stopped, both of us having heard the same thing: a strangled plea to, “Please stop!” When I blinked, Dominic was gone, having covered six yards in less than five seconds. He sprinted across the grass like a panther, arriving at what was a ridiculously unfair and disadvantaged scene—three against one very small boy—all before I had fully sat up. I watched his lips move furiously, but I couldn’t hear a word he said, because he didn’t yell. The three boys smiled viciously, but turned and walked away. Dominic helped the shaken and bewildered boy to his feet. And I . . . I was feeling something much more frightening than curiosity. I liked him.
Right now, however, I had room for only two distinct thoughts: I must breathe very soon or I will faint, and he should not be looking at me like that.
He spoke first, and just hearing him, his voice—it took everything I had not to cry. “That was my fault, I’m sorry,” he said, and glanced to the left where I still clutched the thorny bush. I watched his face move, fascinated by each small gesture and that I knew their significances.
Very slowly he stepped forward. I flinched. “Is your hand okay?”
My heart thumped wildly, beating so fast I couldn’t distinguish between the beats. “Yes,” I said breathlessly, almost a whisper. “Just a scratch.”
“It looks like you might have cut yourself on a thorn.” His brows remained furrowed, his face solicitous, the eyes like lapis lazuli blazing softly. “It will get infected if you don’t treat it properly.”
I felt my head angling of its own volition, my eyes searching him ostentatiously to see whether or not my imagination had remembered him accurately. Vaguely I was aware of my strange behavior, and might have tried to apprehend normalcy, except Dominic was looking at me in exactly the same way. We must have looked incredibly odd standing there puzzling at one another; luckily we were the only ones on the back path.
“I know,” I answered finally, unconcerned. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Good,” he said, and nodded. “I have Band-Aids in my backpack.” Dominic spoke all of these words as if he were actually saying something else. “Would you like one?” he asked, eyes searching and louder than explosives.
“Yes, thank you,” I replied, surprised that I was not at all surprised. By any of it.
When he broke eye contact to bring his backpack around front, I took another breath of air, taking advantage of the opportunity to examine him closer. The Band-Aids were loose, I supposed, as he dipped his hand in the front pocket and handed me one without sp
eaking.
“Thank you,” I said, and began fiddling with it.
He nodded. “It’s Summer, right?”
I don’t know why, but when he asked me this question, I got the feeling he was eager for an answer, something specific.
“I used to be.”
At this, he smiled faintly, and it very nearly brought me to my knees. “And who are you now?”
I swallowed, not sure if I could speak. “Foster.”
Again he nodded and he seemed pleased. “Foster is a very pretty name.”
“Thank you.” A warmth I knew well, flooded across my cheeks, and I thought I saw him smile. “Summer is my middle name,” I told him, because I felt shy and the quiet between us felt too intimate and painfully familiar. “I started going by Summer a long time ago, when I was a little girl.”
The ocean breeze blew the ends of my hair forward and lifted Dominic’s off his high golden forehead. A salty scent was carried on the wind, mixing with something else, something I recognized and stirred my memories as if boiling in a cauldron.
“I like them both,” he said definitively. “They fit.” His lashes swept down for a moment, fluttering in the hollows beneath his eyes. Then, in one fluid gesture, he lowered his chin and lifted his eyes, adding in a voice like simmering caramels, “But in that order.” He paused. “First Foster, and then Summer.”
Now I was certain I couldn’t speak, so I didn’t try.
The lunch bell rang, its shrill ring blasting from somewhere far off in the distance. I barely heard it, though. Dominic didn’t take his eyes off me, and I didn’t take mine off of him.
“Foster.” As he spoke my name, I sensed he was testing it, seeing how it felt and sounded on his tongue. He smiled. “Foster, I forgot my Music binder in the car. Would you—” I watched him struggle with his words, knowing something important was about to be said, because I had seen this look, many, many times before. “Would you want to walk with me? I have something . . . to tell you. And I’m afraid that if I don’t do it right now, I might never again work up the courage. I know we’ve never spoken to each other, so if it’s too weird or—”
“It’s not,” I said. “It’s not too weird.”
It occurred to me then, to wonder if any of this was actually happening. And if it wasn’t, was there any way to tell? Already, I knew I could feel pain in my dreams, both real pain and figurative. I also knew I was capable of dreaming while asleep. I excelled at dreaming the way Emily excelled at water polo, so how could I trust that any of this was real?
Dominic took one step forward, waiting for me to fall in line with him. I turned to do so, and when our fingers brushed, I would have wagered my next seven heartbeats that he had been about to hold my hand. Our eyes met and held, then we both looked away at the same moment.
“What I’m about to tell you . . .” He trailed off, and took a deep breath through his nose. “It’s not going to sound possible,” he finished. “But I’m going to tell you anyway, because if there’s even the slight chance I’m not going crazy, I want to know.”
Though our steps were slow, a gentle gliding across the grass, my pulse quickened.
He turned to look at me then. His expression was serious but not severe, almost giddy. And after conducting another full inspection of my face, he blurted, “I’m just going to say it, all right? Because I don’t know another way of doing it.”
Every muscle in my body was clenched, which made it very difficult to walk. “All right,” I said.
He nodded once, then he grew very determined, his brow furrowing. “I’ve been dreaming about you every night since Spring break started.”
That was all it took. I pitched forward, beginning my descent toward the grass. I felt his hand take hold of me just above the crook in my elbow. It was a lightning fast reflex. Once he was certain I wasn’t in danger of falling, he released me. But he didn’t back away. There was very little space between us.
“You do that.” He spoke deeply and gravely, the words surfacing around a lump in his throat. “In my dreams, you fall—all the time.”
“And in mine you always catch me,” I said, confirming his blatant inquiry. Then I smiled up at him.
The information registered in stages, his reaction layered and multi-dimensional: it took root in his eyes first, a look of wonder, mixed with relief and euphoria; then his mouth, a twitching at one corner, a slight smirking of the full lips that ended in a peaceful exhalation. My eyes fixed to the small scar running vertically down his bottom lip, I decided that the final stage of his reaction emerged from a location without a name. Rather than seeing it, I felt it all over, but nowhere more so than in my heart. It tingled, the way a muscle does when it’s asleep and is restored to feeling.
He blinked hard, all the breath leaving him in one gust. “You’ve been dreaming about me, too?” Before I could answer, he wrenched around, pulled something from his backpack. It was a piece of paper, well-worn from being handled, folded, and refolded. No longer hesitant or chary, he thrust it into my hands. “Does this—do these words—do they mean anything to you?”
Still shaking from my near fall and everything else, I took the piece of paper from him, and as I read, I bit into my lip so hard I nearly drew blood.
I looked into his face, shaking my head from side to side. “Where? Where did you get this?” I whispered.
“I think I wrote it,” he said softly.
“You think you wrote it?” I repeated, incredulous. “When?”
He shrugged. It was a wholly bemused and awe-filled shrug. “I don’t know. I just know that I woke up one night and couldn’t go back to sleep until I had written down these lyrics,” he explained, glancing down at the neat scrawl I recognized as his handwriting. He shook his head and exhaled. “But they never felt like mine. It was only as if I was copying them, do you understand? Even as I read them the next morning, began charting out the music, still, it was like the song belonged to someone else.” His eyes begged me to confirm this too, to acknowledge the impossible. “To you, Foster. They belong to you.”
If I had any control over myself, I would have tried for Dominic’s sake at least, to react differently. As it was, the sob formed, expanded, and exploded from my lips with such prodigious strength I couldn’t have done anything to prevent it. I shook and I cried and I laughed.
“They are yours, aren’t they?” he impelled, having been eager to believe, but scared also. “This is your song. I knew it. I don’t how—”
He broke off as I began shaking my head. I breathed rapidly through my nose, my throat pulled tight as a climber’s cord. “It’s not mine,” I managed, my words hiccupy and broken. At this he looked severely disappointed, devastated if I was being honest . . . until I said, “It’s ours, Dominic. We wrote this together.”
Epilogue
“How bad is it?” I called out, craning my neck and leaning aside in the chair I sat in. I told myself I didn’t want to see—but really I did a little. A lot.
There was a deep-throated considering noise, but no answer; then, “It’s pretty bad,” a headless Dominic replied grimly. He popped back through the long, black, ceiling to floor curtain, the only thing separating the musicians from the excessively vocal crowds below. Kings of Leon had just walked on stage.
“It’s pretty awesome, too,” he said and grinned at me, the exhilaration evident by the way he smiled. “Come on, you really need to come here and see for yourself.”
My fingers clung just a little tighter to the armrests. “No-no. I’m good here.”
He gave me a look, a very Dominic look. “It will help,” he said reasonably. “Once you’ve seen it, you’ll know, and then it won’t be so intimidating.”
“No-thank-you. I don’t need to see it,” I said, my voice quivering. “I can hear it. It sounds like there are a million people are out there.”
Dominic made a show of speculating the swarm. “Oh, more than that I think,” he said offhandedly.
Though I knew he was
most definitely teasing me, that the BandSlam venue wouldn’t hold a million people, I did not find the statement at all humorous, and I told him so. “The first time I did this, I fainted I was so nervous.” Paranoid, I glanced to my left, to my right, and to my left again. “I keep waiting for Lionel to appear and start yelling at me to put on makeup and fix my hair.”
Dominic stepped back and the curtain swung back into place. “First of all,” he said, standing straight and tall, and looking wonderfully aristocratic, “you do not need any makeup. You’re perfect.” He strode toward me, a purposed look on his face. “Secondly,” he said, and offered me his hand, “are you really scared, Foster?” Bringing me to my feet, he pressed his body to mine, wrapping his arms around me securely.
And though my fear diminished considerably in that instant, still I admitted, “A little,” and began playing with the ends of his silky hair.
“It’s performing for this many people?”
I thought about that for a moment. There was a certain amount of anxiety that coincided with performing for large groups, but once we were on stage, and it was him and me and our song, all that just went away with the first couple of notes. “To be honest, no, not really,” I said. “I’m actually looking forward to that part.”
He tipped my chin upward, murmuring, “Then what?”
I smiled. “Just being here,” I whispered, my voice reverent. “I wouldn’t have expected it to smell the same, or sound the same. And I don’t know why, but that scares me a little.”
“I think that’s normal,” he allowed, his eyebrows rising. “It feels familiar to me, too.”
I blinked, unable to hide my shock. “It does?”
“Yeah.” He chuckled at my wide-eyed incredulity. “I don’t know how, but it does.” He dropped his eyes to my throat, to where my silver necklace had been restored, and smiled. “You are forgetting one important thing, Moon-pie,” he said, sounding both assertive and seductive. “Not everything is the same.” Then he ducked his head and pressed his lips softly to mine, sending soft vibrations throughout my body and across my lips as he murmured, “This time I’ll be with you.”
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