Next to me, I could feel Ray holding his breath.
I played on and on, my fingers creeping up the keyboard to the chime notes and then back down to the ones that were deep as the sea. Here and there, I even played a few notes that sounded just a little bit like summer nights when I was a kid, with Daddy in my dusky bedroom singing “Annie’s Song” as I fell asleep.
I played until the melody had gotten too complicated and my fingers tangled over themselves. I stopped and opened my eyes, breath coming out of me in a long sigh.
And as I opened my eyes, I caught just the faintest hint of light like pale gold, shining in the air above the piano keys before it winked out of existence.
“See that, Annie Lee?” Ray asked, turning aside to cough again. “You’ve got great things inside of you, child, if you can just find a way to open up and let them through.”
“But I messed it all up.”
Ray shrugged. “So? There’s a little mess in all of us.”
I stared at my reflection in the shining ebony of the piano. I was small and faraway and watery, wisps of hair flying around my face. Playing like that, like Ray did, had been scary—terrifying, even. My fingers curled into fists at the idea of trying it again.
But it had been amazing, too, listening to that slow, beautiful song coming out of me, telling the world who I was. Telling the world about my daddy. About all the things that scared me. About all the things that gave me hope.
I’d always thought it was silly when books described people’s eyes as twinkling, but as Ray looked at me right then, the blue in his eyes seemed extra bright, like he was laughing on the inside. “All right, then. Thanks for humoring an old man. You can take out that sheet music now. And I want you to remember what it felt like, playing like that, and see if you can take a little bit of that feeling and put it into these two pieces. If you play like that at the competition in December, child, I’d put my money on you walking home with a prize.”
I unfolded “Minuet in G Minor” and set it on the piano stand.
But even as I started picking out Bach’s melody, I couldn’t stop thinking about how it had felt, playing my own.
30.
The next day, a week before the day Mitch and I were supposed to present our egg-drop project, I did something even scarier than playing my own music for Ray: I asked Mitch if she wanted to sleep over at my house.
Mama had been more excited than I’d ever seen her when I asked if it was okay. Her eyes had gotten big and her mouth had the kind of genuine, delighted smile that hadn’t been there for months.
“Of course, honey,” she’d said. “Let’s do something fun! We could make cookies, or go see something in the theater, or—”
I shook my head fast. “We’ll just hang out here.” Mama deflated like a four-day-old balloon. “Maybe cookies,” I added, and she perked back up a little.
It wasn’t like we could’ve afforded the cost of a movie in the theater, anyway. The last time we’d gone, a few weeks before Daddy died, I’d overheard him telling her that the three of us together for a matinee had cost over twenty bucks.
Mitch, when I asked her, was calmer, her too-cool-to-care attitude pulled around her like a sweater. But I could see the way her lips tugged themselves up into a smile when she turned away from me.
“It’s a little weird,” I said, thinking about the ghost.
“No way is it as weird as my house,” said Mitch. “It’s you and your mama, right? All I’m saying is, at least we won’t wake up to Jacob rubbing mustard on our faces.”
“Did he—”
“Yup. He heard my dad saying it was good for burns or something. I couldn’t convince him it would be bad for pimples.”
Her mom brought her over that night after dinner, once Mama had gotten home from work. Mama and Ms. Johnson chatted for a while, their smiles stretched into their cheeks and their voices bright as tin, until Ms. Johnson pulled Mitch into a hug and then waved goodbye. She was out the door and down the steps before half a breath had passed, and then it was just me, Mama, and Mitch.
And Daddy’s ghost.
Earlier that afternoon, I’d gone over to where Daddy’s record player sat in the corner as soon as I got home from school. Of all the places in our apartment, it seemed to be the one that held the most of Daddy left inside it. I’d sat down by the record player and put on a record of John Denver’s greatest hits, letting the soft guitar notes of “Annie’s Song” fill the family room.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, Daddy,” I’d whispered, letting John Denver’s voice cover my own. “But if you can, can I ask a favor? My friend Mitch is coming over tonight for a sleepover. Our first ever. Can you keep things quiet around here till she leaves? It’s really important to me.”
I’d felt weird all over as I’d said it, and been glad Mama wasn’t off work yet so there was nobody home to see me making a fool of myself. But I’d been desperate enough to try anything.
When “Annie’s Song” had finished playing, the record player had made a scratching sound and the song had started all over again.
I really hoped that had been Daddy agreeing with me.
Now, Mitch and I sat at the kitchen table while Mama fluttered around, too excited to sit down. I hadn’t seen her trying this hard to act like a regular person for months. “I’m so glad you could come over tonight, Micheline.”
“Mitch, Mama,” I said through my teeth. “Her name is Mitch.”
“Oh—yes. Sorry.” Mama laughed, and even though she was still trying too hard, the laugh was real. “Well. Do y’all want to work on your project first, or break out the cookie dough?”
Later, after we’d baked pan after pan of gingersnap cookies and eaten them dipped in milk, we went out to the balcony to test our latest egg prototype: a pyramid-shaped contraption made of dozens of drinking straws and duct tape.
“Who should do the honors?” Mitch asked.
“You can.” I didn’t want to be responsible for spilling any more yolk on that parking lot.
“Okay,” said Mitch, both of us barely breathing as she held the pyramid out over the railing. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
I waited for the smack against the pavement as Mitch threw the egg as hard as she could toward the ground.
Instead, there was silence.
“What happened?” Mitch asked, staring down into the darkness of the parking lot below. The streetlight closest to our apartment had gone out two weeks before and the landlord still hadn’t fixed it, so our part of the building was shrouded in gloom as soon as the sun went down every evening.
“I don’t know,” I said, going inside and rummaging through Mama’s catchall drawer for a flashlight. “Let’s go see.”
When we got down the creaky metal stairs, we found the drinking straws pretty smashed out of shape, with one of the strips of duct tape flying free. But the egg inside was whole and uncracked, shining white in the light from my flashlight.
“We did it,” I whispered.
“We did it!” Mitch whooped, jumping up and down so that her curls bounced under her beanie. “We did it, Annie Lee! We’re getting an A on this one for sure!”
I scooped up the mess of straws and tape and still-intact egg and carried it upstairs. Mitch trailed behind me, and even though I couldn’t see her face I had a feeling she was grinning just as broadly as I was.
Mama was waiting for us in the doorway when we got back to the apartment. The skin between her eyebrows was puckered up, and she seemed distracted. “Annie Lee, honey. Mrs. Garcia just came over to see if we wanted any of her pears before they all went brown. While she was here, she mentioned that she stopped by to check on you after school yesterday, but nobody was home.”
I froze with one foot inside the apartment and one foot still in the stairwell. I’d been at Brightleaf yesterday, with Ray.
“I was wondering why she said that,” Mama went on, “since I was at work yesterday afternoon, so you should’ve been here.
Care to explain what was going on?”
I just stared at her. What could I say? How could I possibly get out of this one? I couldn’t say I’d been playing outside the complex—Mrs. Garcia could’ve seen me. But no way could I tell Mama I’d been all the way over at Brightleaf Square, taking piano lessons from a man she’d never met.
Mitch cleared her throat behind me and nudged me into the apartment. “I can explain that one, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” she said brightly, closing the door behind her with a loud snap. “Me and Annie Lee had to stay after school awhile. Everyone who has presentations next week did, to work on some stuff with the egg-drop project. We had to get our final designs approved by the teacher.”
I stared sidelong at Mitch. How had she come up with that whopper so easily?
All the tension went out of Mama’s shoulders, like the wrinkles being shaken out of a bedsheet. “I see. Thanks for letting me know, Mitch. Annie Lee, I hope you know that next time something like that comes up, I expect a phone call about it in advance. I may not be able to be here after school, honey, but I’m still your mama, and I still need to know where you are at all times, understand?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good. I forgive you—this time. So, how’d your egg do?”
I looked down at the remains of our prototype; I’d forgotten all about it when my heart had nearly stopped at Mama’s question.
“Oh.” I cleared my throat, pasting on a smile. “It worked!”
Mama flung her arms up into the air cheerleader-style. “Yes! I knew y’all could do it, honey!”
The smile on my face shifted into something real.
“If you can manage to get that egg free of everything else,” Mama said, “go on and put it back in the fridge. Omelets for breakfast tomorrow seems appropriate, doesn’t it?”
31.
Later, after we’d all celebrated the successful egg-drop with one more cookie, Mitch and I blew up the air mattress and got into our pajamas.
It had taken awhile for my heartbeat to return to normal after Mama’s comment about Mrs. Garcia. I had come so close, so close to losing everything—Ray, Queenie, Brightleaf, the thrill of feeling piano notes roll out under my fingertips. If Mitch hadn’t jumped in to save me, I’d be grounded for the rest of my life. No piano. No Ray. No little thread of hope for the first time since the Bad Day in June.
But Mitch had saved me. And slowly, so slowly I almost didn’t realize it was happening, my shoulders had loosened up, the wound-up tightness that always seemed to hold me in its grasp these days slipping away like sand in an hourglass.
The ghost had been quiet all evening, like my plea to the record player had worked—until Mitch and I were brushing our teeth. I heard the record player whir to life in the family room, the soft chords of “Annie’s Song” starting again. Just like the nights Daddy had sat by my bed and sung to me in the darkness until I was sleepy.
Mama was sitting at the kitchen table—our apartment was so small that the table was barely ten feet from the bathroom door. My eyes met hers across the hallway. Neither of us went over to turn the song off. We let it play all the way until it was done, until the last sad guitar note had faded and the record player clicked itself off.
“That was pretty,” Mitch said as we climbed into our beds. “What song was that?”
I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “It’s the song my parents named me after. It was Daddy’s favorite. It’s called ‘Annie’s Song.’”
“Cool,” said Mitch. “I liked it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do, too. Hey—” I paused, my words hanging in the air between us. “Thanks for covering for me earlier. With my mom.”
Mitch shrugged. “I figured you had a good excuse.”
“Sometimes it’s just too hard staying here all by myself every day while Mama’s at work. I have to get out, or I feel like I’ll pull apart at the seams. There’s just too many . . . memories.”
“I can see that. Where do you go?”
I hesitated. Mitch had lied to Mama for me earlier—but all the secret details of my piano lessons and how they’d come to be felt too big, too dangerous, to share, even with a friend. A best friend. “I just go ride my scooter around the neighborhood. Not too far. Mama’s just really overprotective.”
“I get that.” Mitch had taken her trademark white beanie off sometime earlier that evening, and her curly hair flew around her face like wings, all staticky from the hat but still pretty. It made her look two years younger and not nearly as tough.
“You look different,” I said. “Without your hat on. Your uniform, right? How come?”
Mitch shrugged, rolling onto her stomach and hugging a pillow to her. I thought suddenly how it was the first time I’d had a sleepover with anyone at all since before Daddy had died. It was strange, like if I turned around I would see Monica or Meredith out of the corner of my eye, their presence prickling all over my skin.
But for maybe the first time since June, being memory-deep like that felt different. Somehow, thinking about the M&Ms didn’t sting nearly as bad as it had a few weeks ago. It was like they were friends from another lifetime. Like maybe, just maybe, I could be okay without them in this one.
“My mom found it on clearance a week or two before school started,” Mitch said, and the ghosts of Monica and Meredith snapped out of being like a blink. “I liked the way it made me feel. Kind of . . . strong. Different. I don’t know.”
For the first time, I wondered if maybe Mitch’s beanie, her tough attitude, were all her own version of an invisibility cloak. Maybe Mitch had figured out that if all she showed to the world was her strong outside, nobody would ever see through to her soft inside.
Mitch hugged the pillow harder. Her face was a pale smudge in the darkness of the bedroom. “People . . . they aren’t really my strong point. I get nervous when I’m around big groups. And it’s hard for me to, you know, go up and talk to somebody if I don’t know them.”
“You came and sat by me at lunch.”
“You looked so lonely sitting there with your book. And, I don’t know, I know what that feels like. So I figured we’d have something in common.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
“Anyway. Kids were pretty mean, back at my elementary school. I went to this little private school for artsy professors’ kids. Everyone there made fun of me for my name, for the clothes I wore . . . everything, I guess. Anything they could think of. People thought I was stuck-up and rude, because I had a hard time opening up. And then, last year, in fifth grade, a bunch of the boys were really awful. I had to, um, get a bra before a lot of the other girls, and this group of boys were always snapping the straps and saying awful things about me. And some of the girls started spreading rumors. Calling me a slut. Saying I’d done a lot of things I hadn’t.”
“That sounds awful.”
“Yeah, it kind of was. I told my parents I wanted to go to a regular middle school for sixth grade. And I promised myself it would be different.”
“But don’t kids still—”
“Oh yeah, they’re all still jerks,” said Mitch, but she was grinning in the darkness. “But now I don’t care. When I put the hat on, it’s like a reminder. That it’s okay to be me. That nobody else matters. That I can be angry if I want, or quiet, or loud, or shy, or wild.”
“Like my quarter. Carrying your own luck.”
“Yeah. Kind of like that,” Mitch said. A minute later, her voice twice as quiet, she added, “Do you miss him a lot?”
“My daddy?” My fingers slipped over to the nightstand to rub at the quarter. “Yeah. A lot a lot. Sometimes it feels like I don’t know how to keep breathing with him gone, and I don’t think Mama does, either.”
“I bet.” Mitch was quiet. “Sometimes my family drives me crazy. All of us shut up in that house—Dad, Mom, Nana, Jacob. Our own little five-ring circus. But I can’t imagine any of them being . . . not there anymore.”
I pulled my hand away from the quarter
, not meeting Mitch’s eyes. “Anyway, I think you’re pretty cool. With the hat or without it.”
It was like my words were keys, reaching inside and peeling back the layers of my stony heart, opening my fingers up so that my own invisibility cloak fluttered off my shoulders and left me there alone on the bed. Me. Just Annie Lee. The way I’d always been, or maybe the way I was just starting to be.
I felt lighter. I hadn’t realized until now just how heavy all that invisibility sitting on my shoulders could be.
“Thanks,” said Mitch. “You’re pretty cool yourself, reader girl.”
32.
That weekend, the October chill that had started the week before deepened into the kind of cold that we didn’t usually get until more like December. By Monday, as I rode my scooter to Brightleaf, it felt chilly enough for frost to settle into my skin, making tracks of silver dust along the blue of my veins.
It made me think of Monica and Meredith—how once, when we were eight, there’d been a freak snowstorm in Durham the week before Thanksgiving. Our parents had let us all sleep over at Monica’s for two whole days while school was out. We’d gorged ourselves on hot chocolate and sledded down Monica’s hilly street until we’d worn all the ice off the road, then lay on Monica’s trampoline with our heads together, my yellow hair mixing with Monica’s black hair mixing with Meredith’s curling red.
Let’s make a solemn vow, Meredith had said, her voice dramatic as always. I didn’t know exactly what a solemn vow was, but it sounded important. No matter what happens, we will always be best friends forever.
Deal, Monica had said, and I’d agreed. Meredith had jumped down off the trampoline and run into the house to get paper and pens, and when she’d come back outside, she’d written up a contract and had each of us sign it, promising that nothing would ever come between us. It had felt magical, sitting on that trampoline with my two best friends, like the three of us made something so strong and tight that nothing could get inside it to hurt me.
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