Salvation's Song

by Pearl Love

  Tyrell launched right back into the interrupted conversation. “Explain what you meant by that?”

  “By what?” Jeremy looked genuinely confused.

  “You said you felt something scary when you passed the place they found that girl. What did you mean?”

  Jeremy’s expression shuttered. He looked away in an obvious attempt at avoidance. “Nothing,” he muttered as he pulled at Tyrell’s grip.

  Tyrell held fast. “It’s not nothing. When Ryan said where they found her, you looked like you were about to be sick. So what happened? And you’d better not say nothing,” he warned when Jeremy glared up at him defiantly.

  Jeremy hesitated at having been preempted. His gaze searched Tyrell’s, perhaps looking for some sign that he was being made fun of, but whatever he found must have reassured him, at least to a point. He shrugged again, though he didn’t renew his bid for freedom. Tyrell let go when he saw that Jeremy wasn’t going to bolt.

  “You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”

  “Try me.” Tyrell injected as much sincerity into his tone as he could.

  Jeremy gazed down at his desk. He was silent for a long while, but when he once again looked up, Tyrell could see he’d made a decision.

  “It’s like I told you. When I walked past the street where they found that girl, I felt something cold. Something evil. I don’t even know why I went down there. I just had to for some reason, but when I did, I suddenly couldn’t see anything, like the air around me got really dark and foggy. And I heard a voice, but it sounded like a growl.”

  Jeremy’s shoulders were tense as if he were waiting for Tyrell to heap ridicule upon him. Tyrell intended nothing of the sort. His mind reeled at the similarity of what Jeremy described to his experience at the game, though it sounded like Jeremy had gone through much worse.

  “Then what happened?” Tyrell asked, leaning forward in anticipation of the rest of the story.

  Jeremy’s eyebrows lifted, and he met Tyrell’s gaze fully, clearly shocked that Tyrell was buying his tale. “Um, well….” He scratched at the back of his neck and shrugged before exhaling sharply. “What the hell. In for a penny. Then my, uh, pendant let out this bright flash of light and everything went back to normal. After that, I got the heck out of there.”

  Tyrell scowled. “Your pendant?” He certainly hadn’t been expecting that part. The blue stone looked completely innocuous hanging from Jeremy’s neck.

  “So, do you believe me?” Jeremy’s direct gaze was full of challenge, as though daring Tyrell to scoff.

  “Yeah,” Tyrell replied. “I mean, normally I’d say you were nuts, but something similar happened to me last week.”

  Whatever Jeremy had been expecting, Tyrell’s explanation clearly wasn’t anywhere close. “Huh?” he uttered, his mouth agape as he stared at Tyrell.

  “No really,” Tyrell insisted. “It was at the football game we played at Kendall High the first day of school. I went to the bathroom during halftime, and as I was returning to my seat, I passed by the side of the bleachers. I don’t know what it was, but there was something extremely creepy under there. That’s all I can tell you, except that whatever I felt, it made me sick to my stomach. I seriously almost lost it.” Tyrell shivered at the memory. “I mean, I didn’t have any glowing jewelry to save me or anything, but fortunately, everything went back to normal after a few minutes.”

  “No shit?” Jeremy asked breathlessly.

  Tyrell held up his right hand. “God’s honest truth.”

  “Boys, don’t you have someplace else to be?”

  Tyrell felt Jeremy jump along with him at the sound of Mr. Crabtree’s voice. They both scrambled for their belongings.

  “Sorry, Mr. Crabtree,” Jeremy said. He waited until his teacher nodded and returned his attention to the papers on his desk before turning back to Tyrell. “Um, can we meet up after practice today?”

  “Okay.” Tyrell felt a surge of warmth at Jeremy’s hesitant smile even as he was excited at the chance to finally get to the bottom of what had happened to him. To both of them.

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  THE STARBUCKS was nearly empty, the breakfast crowd long gone and the after-work coffee addicts having yet to arrive. The only people there when Jeremy and Tyrell walked in were students from UIC taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi.

  “Do you want anything?” Jeremy asked.

  Tyrell peered up at the menu. “Uh, I’ll have one of those lemonade drinks. A grande.” He handed Jeremy a five-dollar bill and nabbed a table while Jeremy went to stand in line.

  Jeremy gave the cashier his order—a Shaken Sweet Tea Lemonade for Tyrell and a Java Chip Frappuccino for himself—and stood next to the service counter to wait for the barista to hand him the beverages. He couldn’t help but sneak furtive glances at Tyrell while he stood fidgeting and tapping his foot. Not only had Tyrell seemed to believe his crazy story, but he had insisted he’d experienced something very similar. It all seemed too unreal to be true, and Jeremy kept expecting Tyrell to laugh and point and say he’d been pulling Jeremy’s leg about the whole thing. But Tyrell didn’t look like he’d been joking. During lunch and band practice, Tyrell had acted normally, but he’d kept shooting Jeremy looks as though he was as eager to speak with him as Jeremy was dreading the conversation.

  “Here you go, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Jeremy smiled at the pretty barista, noting absently that she wore her straightened hair in a ponytail just like Cynthia. He wished he’d thought to invite her along to this little meeting, though he knew revealing his secret to yet another person would have been stupid. He still regretted confessing to Tyrell, even if it had gone far differently than he expected. Out of excuses to procrastinate any further, he took a deep breath and returned to the table where Tyrell sat.

  “Thanks,” Tyrell said as Jeremy handed him the lemonade and his change. “So tell me again everything that happened yesterday.”

  Jeremy repeated his story, noticing that Tyrell kept shifting his gaze down toward his pendant while Jeremy talked.

  “I don’t get the thing about the pendant.” Tyrell frowned as he took a sip of his drink. “I mean, almost everything else is the same except that.”

  “What do you mean, everything’s the same?”

  “You remember that first day you ate lunch with us and Ryan was talking about that girl they found dead after the Kendall game?” Tyrell waited for Jeremy to nod. “Well he said they found her under some bleachers. What do you want to bet it was the same bleachers where I got that weird, creepy feeling? It was like this oppressive blast of heat was pumping out from under there, so hot and rank it made me sick to my stomach. And, like you said, I couldn’t see a thing under there at first, even though it was a bright, sunny day.”

  Jeremy felt his straw slip from between his lips as he gaped at Tyrell. “You’re not kidding?” He swallowed hard when Tyrell shook his head emphatically. “That’s nuts. But, what did you mean, you couldn’t see anything at first? What changed?”

  Tyrell paused, his fingers tapping lightly atop the table before squaring his shoulders. “Might as well tell you, since we’re being so honest with each other. While I was standing next to the bleachers about to puke my guts out, all of a sudden I heard this sound like a trumpet call. It was very clear but soft, as though it was being played from far away. I have no idea where it came from, but as soon as I heard it, everything snapped back to normal, including me.” Tyrell stared at Jeremy as if to check whether he believed him.

  Jeremy quickly left him in no doubt of that. “Wow.” He slumped back in his chair in disbelief, or maybe relief. “It’s nice to know I’m not going crazy,” he mumbled.

  “Huh?”

  “You were right. The exact same thing happened to me yesterday. My pendant did that weird light thing,” Jeremy explained as he reached down to grab the blue stone, “but I also heard something. Not a horn, though. It was more like that thing you can do with a glass? You know when you we
t your finger and run it around the rim to make that ringing sound?”

  Tyrell smiled. “Yeah. My Sunday school teacher did that with us once when I was little. She said that’s what a choir of angels probably sounded like.”

  “Really? That’s nice,” Jeremy said, intrigued at the imagery, as well as the image that formed in his mind of Tyrell as a young child. He’d probably been an adorable cutie. “Anyway, after that, the strangeness disappeared.”

  “Unreal,” Tyrell intoned softly.

  “You said it. I really thought I was suffering from another auditory hallucination.”

  “Another one?”

  Jeremy nodded. “When you and Cynthia saw me at Carm’s, looking like I’d just run a marathon.”

  Tyrell chuckled. “I knew you were lying about going to meet your sister. I mean, I love my little brother, but hell if I’d move faster than absolutely necessary when it was that hot out.”

  Jeremy perked up at the mention of Tyrell’s family. He wanted to know everything about him, but that way lay heartache. If their relationship was to remain at friend level, he would simply have to temper his curiosity. He had a feeling that the more he learned about Tyrell, the worse his crush would get. “Right. Well, I had been running, but from something not to something.”

  “From what?” Tyrell asked, his expression darkening with a deep frown.

  “That’s just it, I have no idea. At first I thought someone was following me, but I couldn’t be sure. Anyway, that’s not why I ran.”

  “Then why did you?”

  Jeremy grimaced with embarrassment but plowed ahead. He’d already given Tyrell plenty of fuel to ruin him at school for being a psycho. No point in holding back at this point. “My brother told me to. Or, rather, I heard his voice in my head.”

  “Your brother? The one that gave you that pendant?” Tyrell stared at Jeremy. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Jeremy was surprisingly unfazed by Tyrell’s insightfulness. “How did you know?”

  “The look on your face when you mentioned him, I could just tell.” Tyrell dropped his gaze. “My dad died when I was eight. He was shot while being carjacked. Your expression when you talked about your brother,” he said softly, “it’s the same way I feel whenever I think about my dad.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jeremy’s chest squeezed in sympathy as Tyrell’s pain reached out to him from across the table.

  Tyrell shook his head. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I didn’t mean to make this about me. What happened to your brother?” he asked.

  Jeremy smiled at Tyrell’s blunt attempt at tact. He mentally rescinded every mean thought he’d ever harbored toward him. “It’s okay. Christopher died two years ago. He was a freshman at Northwestern. His roommate found him in the parking lot behind their dorm one afternoon during spring semester. He was just… gone.”

  Silence stretched between them for a long moment, neither of them looking at each other as they toyed with the straws of their drinks. Jeremy allowed himself to feel the full weight of Chris’s loss like he hadn’t done in a very long time. He glanced down at his pendant, drawing on the tangible reminder of his brother for comfort.

  “That sucks,” Tyrell said finally, his voice husky with sincerity. “I take it you two were pretty close?” He sighed at Jeremy’s nod. “Man, I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to Kevin. So, um….” Tyrell cleared his throat. “Is that how you guessed the way Sam died? Because the same thing happened to your brother?”

  Jeremy blinked in confusion before remembering the conversation during lunch about the track team captain who had died under mysterious circumstances. “Oh. Yeah, I guess. I mean it sounded so similar to Chris. The school administrators thought it might be drugs no matter how much my parents argued against them. They never found anything in his system, but Chris had never been sick a day in his life. It just didn’t make any sense,” he added, choking up at the memory. His parents had taken him out of school when they’d gotten the news. It was the most devastating thing he’d ever experienced in his young life. He took a sip of his Frappuccino to wet his suddenly dry mouth. “The coroner eventually declared a heart attack as the official cause of death, but even now I’m still not completely sure what happened to him.”

  “I believe you, you know. About your brother.”

  “You do?” Jeremy sniffed. “Why?”

  Tyrell smiled wryly. “My mom is a huge churchgoer. Sometimes it gets on my nerves when she goes on and on about God and Jesus and all that stuff. I don’t know if I believe any of that, but, there is one part that I’m okay with.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Angels. My mom and Big Momma, my grandmother, always told me there are angels watching over us.” Tyrell’s expression softened. “I guess I’d like to believe that’s true. And if so, who would care more about looking out for us than our loved ones who have passed on? Like my dad and your brother?”

  Jeremy was mortified when a tear rolled down his cheek, but Tyrell merely looked politely away.

  TYRELL HATED himself for making Jeremy cry even as he marveled at how pretty Jeremy’s eyes looked sparkling with tears. He cleared his throat again, uncomfortable with both his thoughts and Jeremy’s helpless show of emotion. Turning in his chair, he propped an elbow on the table and looked out of the large picture window that formed the front of the store to give Jeremy some emotional space.

  “Sorry,” Jeremy said after a while, his voice raspy from crying.

  Tyrell shrugged, not trusting himself to speak lest he betray how much Jeremy’s grief had affected him. He might be fascinated by the odd similarities they’d experienced, but he wasn’t at all comfortable with how intense things had gotten. He supposed he should be glad Jeremy hadn’t laughed in his face at all his stupid talk about angels. But really, what other explanation was there for what Jeremy had said about hearing his brother’s voice? Tyrell had no doubts he was telling the truth about that. If he’d learned anything about Jeremy over their brief association, it was that he wasn’t one to draw attention to himself for no reason. Once he felt it was safe to do so, he looked cautiously across the table. Jeremy was crushing a napkin in his hand, and Tyrell figured that’s what he’d used to eradicate all traces of his tears from his face.

  “You okay?” he asked cautiously when he felt it was safe to do so.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Jeremy still sounded like he had a stuffed nose. “So what do you think is going on?”

  Tyrell was glad they had returned to a safer topic and then laughed humorlessly at his own characterization of the weirdness surrounding them. “I have absolutely no clue. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I mean, what are the chances we’d both have identical hallucinations?”

  Jeremy smiled weakly. “None?”

  “Exactly.” Tyrell exhaled in sharp annoyance. “Man, none of this makes any sense, but I have no idea where to even begin. It’s not like there’s anyone we can ask.” He raised a half-hopeful eyebrow. “Do you know anyone who’s ever gone through something like this?”

  Jeremy shook his head emphatically. “No. And I take it you don’t either.”

  “Nope. Shit,” Tyrell said on a growl. “This is so frustrating! I wish I knew what this was all about. I mean, sometimes I hear music out of the blue, but that’s….”

  “That’s what?” Jeremy prompted.

  Taking refuge in his lemonade, Tyrell racked his brain for a suitable response. He hadn’t meant to divulge that particular bit of information, seeing as it had nothing to do with the topic at hand. Jeremy certainly had no need to know that the very sight of him often prompted a chorus in his head.

  “Never mind,” Tyrell said finally, unable to think of anything better. “It’s not important.”

  Jeremy glared at him. “Oh come on. I just told you everything. Are you seriously holding out on me now?”

  Tyrell returned Jeremy’s stare in a silent challenge before admitting defeat. “Okay fine!” He sighed and dove in headfi
rst. “Sometimes I hear this random music for no reason.” His embarrassment turned to irritation when Jeremy laughed in his face.

  “Well, duh,” Jeremy said when he stopped laughing long enough to speak. “You’re a musician, aren’t you?”

  “Uh, well, yeah. I guess.” Tyrell frowned. “So what? I mean, you are too.”

  “Exactly. There’s always some song or other playing in my head. Music has been such a huge part of my life for so long I swear that sometimes I even think in music instead of words.”

  Tyrell’s eyes widened in understanding. “Oh. It’s like how I’m always drumming out something whether I’m listening to the radio or not. That used to bug the shit out of my mom, but I could never stop myself. It was just—”

  “Something you had to do?” Jeremy smiled, his sorrow apparently relegated to a less visible place. “I feel the same way. When I’m playing my clarinet or attending a concert or just listening to something in my room, it’s like magic. Like I could float away and become someone else. It’s—”

  “Transcendent,” Tyrell said, finishing the sentence for him.

  Jeremy nodded. “Yes, transcendent.” He suddenly let out a giggle. “Studying for the PSATs, huh?”

  A grin pulled at the corner of Tyrell’s lips. “How could you tell?” He slurped up the last of his lemonade as they lapsed into a companionable silence to mull over their shared problem.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot,” Tyrell replied.

  “What made you decide to join the band?”

  You. Tyrell ignored the answer that immediately popped into his head in favor of something equally true but far less incriminating. “Mr. Crabtree asked me to. He said I had a gift.”

  “And he was right. You’re really amazing for being so new to the drums.”

  Tyrell thought about it for a moment. “The first time I held the drumsticks, they felt so awkward and foreign in my hands. But after a little while, it was like I’d been playing my entire life.” He wondered if Jeremy thought that sounded weird, but Jeremy merely nodded as though he understood completely what Tyrell was saying. “I can’t even read music. All those weird tic marks on the page might as well be chicken scratch.” He smiled when Jeremy chuckled. “Mr. Crabtree promised to teach me but told me to play by ear for the time being.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem that hard.”