Not that I was going to enter the competition. Even just thinking about being up on a stage in front of a bunch of judges made the hair on my arms prickle with nervous energy.
The paper still lived in my pocket, though, crumpled and starting to wear a little bit, but legible:
Cash prizes. Beginners welcome.
Even with those two years of piano lessons from Mrs. Kline, I’d never felt like such a beginner in my whole life.
There were lots of cars in the parking lot when we got to the state park, but the trail wasn’t crowded. I hopped down the wide wood-and-dirt stairs that broke up the steep hill leading to the swinging bridge across the river. The trees around us were still green, their leaves just barely kissed with the tiniest hint of gold at the tops where their branches reached toward heaven.
“So,” said Mama after we’d crossed. “Tell me more about your friend. At school. The one whose house you went to last week.”
“Yeah,” I said, because how could I describe Mitch and do her justice?
“Well—what’s her name again? What’s she like?”
“Mitch Harris. She’s . . . fierce.”
“That’s an odd adjective to use.”
“She doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.” Including teachers, though I didn’t say that. “She just does what she wants.”
“There’s something to be said for a person who’s brave enough to follow their own happiness,” said Mama, and her voice sounded strange and choked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ve got a friend there now, Annie Lee. I’ve been worried about you, starting at a new school without Monica and Meredith. Remember how the three of y’all used to call yourselves the Three Musketeers? Sometimes it seemed like y’all made up one little girl, not three.”
I didn’t say anything, because now I was the one feeling choked, like I’d been sprinting down the woodsy trail instead of walking. The Three Musketeers felt like a long time ago. Before the M&Ms were born.
“I’m sorry, Annie Lee. I know something’s up with them, even if I don’t know what. You know you can talk to me about anything, don’t you, honey?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, even though I didn’t know any such thing.
I thought suddenly of Queenie Banks, cutting hair in her salon in Brightleaf, laughing so loud and strong that that laugh carried right out of the window and wrapped its arms around anyone who was passing by, like a hug. Thursday, when I’d met Ray for a lesson, Queenie had come out and talked to us for a little while, telling a story about her grown-up daughter locking the keys inside her car with the engine still running. Ray had laughed so hard he’d nearly cried, and even I had smiled a little bit.
It was impossible not to smile around Queenie. She was the kind of person who seemed to carry love around with her wherever she went. Queenie reminded me of Daddy—warm and larger than life, the kind of person you only had to see to love.
I had a feeling Queenie was the kind of person you could talk to about anything. When he’d been alive, Daddy had been that way.
My mama couldn’t be more different.
If I had to lose one parent, how come it had been the only one I’d ever been able to talk to?
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been much of a mother to you this summer.” Mama paused on the trail, rubbing at her forehead like it hurt her. “Some days I don’t even feel like a human anymore, like somewhere I got lost along the way. Like it was me and not Fitz who died that day.”
I swallowed.
“And the life insurance,” Mama went on. “It’s the icing on the cake, I tell you. I just keep thinking—if we had the rest of the money like we were supposed to, then I could stop worrying so much about everything, maybe work a little less. Maybe I’d go to beauty school. Spend more time with you.”
“How come you can’t go to beauty school now?”
“Oh, honey. I don’t know. No money for tuition, for one thing, plus I wouldn’t have a paycheck while I was in school. It all feels pretty daunting, Annie Lee. I don’t know if I can see beyond the current crisis right at the moment. Maybe in a few months I’ll be thinking a little clearer. I just wish—”
She stopped, and I could feel her reeling her frustration back in, like a pianist who’s let her speed get away from her and has to take a deep breath and start again slower.
“Well. Being prepared wasn’t your daddy’s strong suit. I haven’t checked my email yet this weekend—maybe there’ll be good news waiting for us when we get home.”
Mama reached her arm out and tucked it around my shoulders, pulling me in close to her, bringing me back to the present and the sounds of birds in the trees above us. She smelled like soap and vinegar and baby-powder deodorant. Like a stranger who spent her days cleaning other people’s houses.
I’d walked with Daddy like this sometimes, his arm over my shoulders and my arm around his back, me trying to match my steps to his huge ones. But it felt wrong with Mama: stiff, awkward, unfamiliar.
After a second or two, she pulled away.
We walked the rest of the trail in silence, our shadows getting longer and longer on the dirt in front of us. When we got back to the car, Mama turned to me and gave me a real hug, her arms soft around my back and her vinegar smell tickling at my nose. And before she let me go, I could hear the tiniest whisper:
“I love you, baby girl. I’m so sorry.”
18.
The TV was on when we got home, a replay of a Duke basketball game—Daddy’s favorite. And even though I kind of wanted to see the score, I went right for the remote and turned it off just as fast as I could.
Not today, ghost, I thought, clenching my teeth together so hard they ached. Not today.
Mama went straight to the computer. I sat on the couch while she booted the machine up, opened a browser, clicked into her email. The moment felt stretched and important, so that I was almost scared to breathe. Mama had seemed so different at the state park. She’d probably never be bubbly and happy, like Daddy had been, or like Queenie Banks—but on the hike she’d seemed like she was really trying, for the first time since Daddy had died.
Would whatever she found in her in-box make that stay, or would it disappear into mist again and leave me with the mama who cried in the bathroom every morning and hardly said a word to me?
Her fingers were claws on the mouse. Click. Click. Click.
And then silence, while she read.
Last time she’d been on the phone with the district secretary, the secretary hadn’t been able to find any of Daddy’s records at all. It was like Robert Fitzgerald had never even worked for the Durham school district, even though everyone knew that was wrong. So the secretary had promised to track his files down, wherever they’d got to in their computer systems. Once they did that, they’d be able to look at his pay stubs and figure out once and for all whether the insurance company owed Mama more money than they’d sent.
Without that insurance payout, Mama and I didn’t have a cent besides what she brought home every other week from cleaning richer people’s houses. Mama hadn’t ever said it in so many words, but I knew that there was no way we’d be able to keep on making ends meet without money coming in from somewhere else before long. Pretty soon, our problems would be bigger than washing our laundry in the sink and not having school clothes that fit right.
I watched Mama now, the glow of the computer screen lighting her skin blue.
Before she said anything, before she even looked up, I could tell it wasn’t good news. Her lips went thin and white, and her hand on the mouse shook.
Behind me, the TV crackled into life again, the Duke announcer yelling that RJ Barrett had made a two-handed slam dunk. Mama surged up from the computer chair and scrabbled for the remote. She turned the game off and then threw the remote at the TV; it bounced off with a clinking sound.
“Why couldn’t you ever do anything the easy way?” Mama shouted at the TV. “That woman’s starting to think your files got d
eleted completely. She can’t find them. Says there will be nothing else to try soon. How could you leave us like this, Fitz?”
Mama sank back into the chair and scrubbed her palms against her eyes. I wished I was anywhere else in the apartment—anywhere else in the world—right then.
“You know, Annie Lee,” said Mama, and I jumped a little. Her voice was strange and floaty. “I knew a girl once, back when I was in high school, who got herself stung by a Portuguese man-of-war while she was swimming out in Wilmington.”
A man-of-war was a jellyfish, a horrible kind with lacy tentacles that could be thirty feet or longer, and if it caught you it would wrap those tentacles around your arms and legs, tangling you up in it and stinging over and over again. I stuck my hand into my pocket, the warm familiar smoothness of George Washington’s faces calm and comforting.
“They had to cut it off her, there on the sand,” Mama went on, “and she spent the next five years getting plastic surgery over and over again to get rid of all those hard red scars. But you know the thing that’s never made sense to me?”
I waited, but she didn’t go on. “What?”
“She kept swimming after that day. Her family went to the beach a few weeks every summer, and she said she still kept swimming.” She paused. “I don’t think I could’ve done that.”
I turned the quarter over in my fingers. Daddy had been able to make it pass over and under every finger of his hand before disappearing it, poof, into the air.
“Losing your daddy,” Mama said, her face tired in the light of the computer screen, “it was like being wrapped up in those tentacles, Annie Lee.”
She looked back at the email, at whatever she’d seen there.
“Sometimes, it still is.”
19.
That Tuesday, Mitch wasn’t in school.
We didn’t have any classes together on even-numbered days, so I didn’t notice until lunch. I waited for almost ten minutes—practically half the time I had to eat—before I pulled my book out.
Even after I did, I could hardly keep my eyes on the pages in front of me. How had I never noticed before just how loud the cafeteria was? Or how annoying the tater tot boys were when I didn’t have Mitch to talk to? Or how strange it was to sit in a room full of what felt like a million people and still be completely, completely alone?
How had I honestly thought that being invisible to everyone was better than having a friend?
At Brightleaf that afternoon, I bit my lip as I concentrated on making my hand do what I wanted it to do: happy little eighth notes, B-D-D-D, B-D-D-D, until my fingers got all snarled up and I had to stop barely two measures into Beethoven’s old Russian folk song.
It was frustrating, the way my brain could hear how it should be played—like skipping, like dancing—but my fingers couldn’t keep up. They felt like somebody else’s hands, never doing quite what I wanted them to do.
Ray could play any song he wanted any way he liked: light like laughter, deep and full like tears, gentle and warm like a hug. All I could do was press too hard on every single note, wincing every time my fingers slipped from a right key to a wrong one. It was my fourth piano lesson, and even though Ray kept telling me I was doing great and moving quick, it didn’t feel that way. At this rate, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to get both my hands playing this song together, let alone capture any of the beautiful, elusive melodies that made their way through my heart all day and all night, just begging to slip out through my fingers.
“Everything okay, Annie Lee?” The corners of Ray’s eyes were drawn down like a basset hound’s. He was hunched on the bench next to me, little lines pressed into the skin around his mouth, looking tired. I wondered if the arthur was bad today.
“I just—” I took my fingers off the white keys and pulled the quarter from my pocket, flipping it over and over in my hands. “It doesn’t sound the way it should.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret, child. It never, ever does.”
I looked up in surprise. “Never?”
“Never. I been playing most my whole life, and I still have to stop myself from cringing every time something comes out different than I was expecting.”
“Really?” Now that I was trying to steal away as often as I could without Mrs. Garcia getting suspicious—to scooter over for a piano lesson, or to practice by myself when nobody else was around—I hadn’t had as much time to spend listening to Ray perform. Still, I’d never once heard him play a note that didn’t sound like it fit just perfectly into his songs. Wasn’t that what those magic lights above the piano meant, that what he was playing was all the way perfect?
“Really. I’ll let you in on the secret of all music, Annie Lee: sometimes, it’s not so much about playing things without mistakes as it is about moving past the mistakes. You’d be surprised how much most people don’t notice.”
I flipped the quarter some more, thinking about that.
“Whatcha got there?”
My fingers stilled, and I showed it to him—first one side, heads, then the other side, heads. He laughed. “Can’t say I ever seen a coin like that.”
“It’s not a real coin. It’s for magic tricks. It used to be my daddy’s.” I rubbed George Washington’s face. “He always said it paid to carry your own luck. You know, ’cause it comes up heads whichever way it lands, so having it with you is making certain luck will always be on your side.”
“I’d have to agree with him there,” Ray said. “It just takes time, Annie Lee. That’s all. You only been at this a few weeks. Music, it’s a long game. It takes years to master it. Give it more time, and your fingers will relax. They’ll know what to do.”
I put the quarter back into my pocket, my fingers brushing up against the contest paper.
Beginners welcome.
I could do a lot with that hundred dollars—buy myself some winter clothes that fit before the cold came. Splurge on Kraft mac and cheese instead of just the store brand.
Buy that new washer.
The words were on my tongue, ready to ask: How soon could I be ready for a competition?
But before I could say them, Ray spoke first.
“You ready to try again, Miss Annie Lee?”
I pulled my hand out of my pocket quick and swallowed the question back down. It was silly, anyway. I didn’t have a chance at that prize.
“Sure,” I said, then laid my fingers across the keys and started from the beginning.
20.
Mitch was back in school the next day, white hat sitting defiantly on her head, just like normal. Science was the only class Mitch and I had together, and after the first week she’d paid some kid to switch seats so she could sit next to me. Our science teacher, Mr. Barton, had raised his bushy eyebrows, but he’d let it slide.
“Where were you yesterday?” I whispered now, while everyone was getting notebooks out at the beginning of class.
“I had to get some teeth pulled so I can start braces soon. My face was all swollen and stuff, so my mom let me stay home.”
“Oh.” I lined up my two sharpest pencils on the desk beside the notebook.
“You miss me?”
I stared down at my desk. “Yeah, I guess. Lunch was pretty boring.”
Mitch grinned, freckles crinkling, but before either of us could say anything else, Mr. Barton stood up and cleared his throat. Today he was like a turned-on lightbulb, his mostly bald head almost shining with how thrilled he was to be telling us about our first big project of the year. Behind him, he’d drawn EGG-DROP PROJECT!!! in huge letters on the whiteboard, complete with an illustration of a little egg sailing down to the floor with a parachute overhead.
“This is science at its best, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, sweeping his arms wide, brown fingers spread out like he was throwing invisible glitter. “Making theories, creating prototypes, recording results, sharing lessons learned! It’s one part physics, one part fun!”
Mitch rolled her eyes and slid her head onto her arms
. When Mr. Barton was looking away, she caught my eye and mouthed, One part FUN? I swallowed a giggle.
Mr. Barton grabbed a stack of papers from his desk. “We’ll be dividing into pairs for this assignment. Your objective will be to build a vehicle for your egg that enables it to be dropped from the roof of the school without cracking. I’ll pass out these rule sheets so that you know what materials are off-limits. We’ll be working on this for the next three weeks. After that, we’ll start two weeks of demonstrations, where each team will be required to test the integrity of their contraption from a two-story height, as well as give a joint oral presentation. This means that it is imperative that both partners be there on presentation day. My dear friends, stop groaning. I assure you this will be your favorite part of the year.”
“At least we can work together,” Mitch muttered as we filed out of the classroom. “Want to come over Friday after school and get started?”
I slowed. I’d already been to Mitch’s house once. If I went again, would that mean I had to invite her to my apartment, too? I thought about trying to explain all the unpacked moving boxes, or the mildew smell everywhere you went, or how Mama’s eyes always looked either like she’d just been crying or was about to start.
What would I say if Mitch saw Mama washing our clothes in the sink? Would she think we were like those people on reality TV shows who yelled and slapped each other around and lived off beer and McDonald’s?
And what if the ghost did something while we were there?
“Hello?” Mitch said. “You alive in there? Do you want to come to my house or not?”
“Okay,” I said, not meeting her eyes. “I’ll come.”
I tried hard to ignore the nervous little flutter in my stomach as I said those words.
21.
Mitch’s mom was sitting at the kitchen table with Mitch’s nana when the bus dropped us off Friday afternoon. They were laughing at something, hands cupped around glasses of iced tea, and there was a sweet, yeasty smell in the air.
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