Fever Pitch

by Heidi Cullinan

  Giles caught his hand in a firmer grip and squeezed. “I know. Only promise me you’ll call or text or stop by if you need anything.”

  Aaron promised.

  It was funny, he thought as he settled in at the keys, letting the music that had been dogging him unfurl. He had always felt so lonely, and he still did—except with so many people around him, he began to understand lonely wasn’t about how many people were with him, about who loved him or hated him. It was about who he was inside. All his feelings were too sharp, too heavy. His hands moved over the keys, and he thought about his mother. Pushing past the pain of her betrayal, he made himself examine the woman underneath, Beth Seavers who was overwhelmed by everything.

  The world is too hard. It had made Giles angry, but Aaron thought he understood, especially in this moment. Too much feeling. Nowhere to put it.

  Aaron had somewhere to put it. It was a little cocky, but he thought he was getting pretty damn good at taking emotions and making something beautiful out of them.

  He played for hours without realizing it. Enough people had come back that the practice rooms were in demand, and someone knocked on the door to let him know it was well past the end of his turn. To his surprise, it was almost nine.

  He texted Giles on the way to his room to let him know he was okay, and crossed the common, humming the melody to his composition, annoyed at how it kept morphing into the instrumental line from the main Frozen theme. Damn the movie anyway. He felt like he was chasing something through the fog. Sometimes he could see it, but whenever he tried too hard, it ran out through his fingers.

  When Aaron returned to his dorm, Elijah and his parents were still there.

  On the surface nothing was different. Maybe Elijah looked leaner, a little more hollow around the eyes, but that was it. They shuffled in the same way they always did, Elijah saying nothing, his parents glaring around the room. Mrs. Prince stood with her son at the window, murmuring prayers and whatnot. Mr. Prince glared at Aaron.

  Except this time the tension in the room was so unbearable it was difficult to breathe. Aaron didn’t leave the room or put on his headphones and tune them out. He sat. He watched. He played back all the other times this scene had gone down. He remembered what had happened with him at home, how Giles’s parents had reacted to it. He watched Elijah’s parents “parent” him.

  Never, not once, had Mr. or Mrs. Prince fussed over Elijah the way Mr. and Mrs. Mulder did over Aaron and Giles. They didn’t ask to make sure Elijah had enough money and clean clothes and wished him good luck on his studies. They apologized to God for his sinful nature and warned him not to associate with devils who would lead him astray. Everything about them was a cartoon, the kind of religious freakishness Aaron had always assumed couldn’t possibly be real and yet was right there in front of him—and this time he made himself marinate in it. Imagining what it would be like to live with it every single day.

  Imagining knowing, despite Emily’s buttons and Reece’s horrible T-shirts, that being gay wasn’t something he could change, and neither could Elijah.

  He remembered the pregnant moment when Aaron had come back late and Elijah had looked like he wanted to talk. His request that Aaron simply not tell his parents anything about being gay—not that there was anything wrong with his being so. He thought about Giles’s report about how Elijah whored himself out on Grindr under an assumed name…then went home on the weekends to this.

  Elijah, whatever else he was doing, was playing a seriously fucked-up game.

  When the Princes left, Aaron thought about confronting Elijah, trying to open the door between them one last time. But when push came to shove, when he stood there staring down his bristly roommate, his own wounds still raw and crazy inside him, he couldn’t do it.

  Too much feeling. Retreating into his bed, Aaron pulled out his iPad and worked on his composition some more, though he kept getting stuck on the Frozen melody lines. Making up his own was, apparently, just too hard. The same way confronting his roommate was too hard.

  Maybe you’re a lot more like Beth after all.

  Drawing the covers over his head, Aaron lay there in the dark, not sleeping while the melodies clashed inside his head.

  Giles did the best he could to take care of Aaron, but he wasn’t always sure how to go about it.

  He listened and said soothing things when Aaron told him about his aunt calling to make sure he wasn’t dying in the street—not helping, just making sure he wasn’t going to be on the news. When the controller’s office told Aaron he had until Monday to pay his bill—apparently his dad had been paying monthly installments and now stopped, and the scholarship wasn’t fully set up yet—Giles held Aaron’s hand and told him everything would be okay. But before he could call his own dad to ask for help, Nussy and Allison stormed over to Old Main, knocked some heads around, and after that Aaron’s bills were considered covered, full stop. When Aaron’s dad started emailing and calling, making vague and sometimes specific threats if Aaron didn’t stop fucking around and start toeing the line, it was Brian who set up a filtering system for the email and blocked Jim Seavers’s texts and calls from coming into Aaron’s phone.

  Giles did his best to buffer against the onslaught of well-meaning friends, doing what they could to take away some of Aaron’s pain, but ironically it was from watching this play out that Giles realized how little anyone could do. Everyone had a different tactic: some people distracted, some bled with Aaron. Some brought gifts, some tried to make him smile. Some waited for instructions. Some stood beside Giles like a protective barrier. Walter called and texted often, and Kelly sent animated Disney GIFs. The Salvo girls formed a circle around Aaron whenever they walked down a hall, his personal Amazon tribe.

  Nothing really registered. The only one who got anywhere was Dr. Nussenbaum. Where her husband all but got on his knees and pledged vows of scholarships like a supplicant, Aaron’s piano instructor smiled and asked him about his playing—and Aaron answered. Several times Giles passed them in the hall and heard him telling her about a composition he was working on, a melody line he couldn’t get out of his head.

  “The thing is, I’m copying something else.” His shoulders got tight when he said that, and his hand against the bulletin board beside him curled like a claw. “I want it to be mine, but I keep falling into other people’s songs. There’s too much noise in my head.”

  “Then clear the noise,” Dr. Nussenbaum told him. Giles hadn’t heard the rest of their conversation because Mina had pulled him away.

  The phrase echoed in his head, though. Clear the noise.

  Giles could do that.

  One Saturday in late February, Giles met Aaron at his dorm door bright and early. Aaron sat with his tablet on his lap and his headphones on, curled up in the corner of his bed. Giles had to let himself in, which startled Elijah, but Aaron didn’t even look up.

  Elijah frowned at Giles, but Giles ignored him, too focused on his boyfriend. He smiled to himself as he saw Aaron had the piano app open, his left hand picking out notes as his right hand jotted notes on staff paper. His lips were pursed tight, his eyes hollow from lack of sleep. Giles could see him chasing the tiger, the tail slipping forever out of his grasp.

  Let me help you catch him.

  He sat on the edge of Aaron’s bed. Aaron startled, as if Giles had materialized out of thin air into his realm of focus.

  Giles touched his hand. “Hey. Get your things. I have a surprise for you.”

  Aaron shuttered. “I want to work on this. I almost have it.”

  He said that every time Giles caught him composing. Giles brushed his thumb across the back of Aaron’s hand. “Bring it along. Trust me. You’re going to find it today.”

  It took a few tries to get Aaron out the door, but Giles managed it. Bundling him against the cold, Giles led him across campus.

  “It’s snowing again. I’m so fuck
ing tired of snow. Shouldn’t it be warmer by now?” Aaron hunched deeper into his coat, tugging his hood back down as a gust of wind tried to take it away. “Where are we going? We’re passing the music building.”

  “We’re going to the White House.”

  Aaron balked, stopping dead in his tracks. “Giles, I can’t. I don’t want to be around people right now.”

  Giles faced him, blinking at him through the fat flakes the wind blew against his skin. “There’s nobody there. It’s just us. They all went to breakfast, and at best they’ll be in the carriage house. They’ll come back to sleep, but if you want to stay until six tomorrow morning, the practice room and Fred are yours. All day.”

  Aaron blinked at him. “What? Why?”

  “Because I wanted to help you clear the noise.” Giles took his hand and pulled him forward. “Come on.”

  It was weird to be in the house with no one else there, but Giles liked it. Baz had already assured him they were in for the next year—space for Brian too, if he wanted to come. They could have it in June if they wanted it, in fact. Giles had to check with his parents because they’d have to cover Aaron’s half of the rent…but Giles loved the idea of going to class all day and coming home to find Aaron composing.

  Like he was about to do now.

  Giles led him to the parlor, to Fred. He plunked his backpack on a side table and unloaded as he talked, setting out the bottles of water, bags of candy, meal bars, nuts. “This is your room for the day. You’ve got pencils and a sharpener. Baz brought in a card table so you could spread out notes if you wanted. I’ll set up the buffet here on the windowsill, but if you need anything else, stick your head out. I’m going to take your phone so nobody bugs you, but I’ll be in the living room the whole time, killing myself over this fucking theory assignment Allison gave me.” He picked up the empty thermos and swung it absently. “I’ll fill this in the kitchen and set it by the door with a mug. Do you want travel or ceramic?”

  Aaron stared at him like he hadn’t heard a word Giles said. “What is all this?”

  Giles fought the lump of impotent hurt and rage in his chest. “I want to help you. I want to make it all go away, but the more I watch everyone try to take away the pain, the more I realize none of us can. The only time you seem happy is when you’re composing. So compose. All day. Remember, there’s even a half bath off this room. You don’t have to come out at all. Unless you want to, obviously—but I wanted to give you this. A day with your music.”

  Because I think the only way for you to work through this pain is to play it away, to turn it into a song.

  He didn’t know what he expected—not a big smile or anything, but he was breathless, waiting for Aaron’s reaction. Please see me trying to help you. Please see me loving you. No matter what else you see or feel, know that.

  Aaron closed the distance between them and nuzzled Giles’s cheek with the stubble of his unshaven beard. He did it again, squeezing Giles’s arm before he spoke.

  “Thanks.”

  Giles brushed a kiss on his scruff. “Anytime.”

  At first he wasn’t sure it was going to work. For an hour he didn’t hear any music, and eventually, worried something was wrong, Giles got off the couch and peeked through the crack in the door.

  Aaron was curled up in the corner of the huge room, his tablet in his lap. The piano sat in the middle of the room, untouched. No headphones—when Aaron shifted, Giles saw the screen and recognized the layout of a solitaire game.

  Seriously? He’d given Aaron the whole room, for the whole damn day, and he wasn’t using it? What the fucking hell?

  He’d sent everyone away for nothing. He felt so angry, frustrated, embarrassed.

  The emptiness of the house swelled around him, all but shouting duh. Giles gathered his things and went into the kitchen. He didn’t put his headphones on at first, but the complete and utter lack of sound coming from the parlor drove him crazy, so he put on the Mozart early symphonies he used for background studying music and went to work.

  He tried to focus on his assignment, but he kept wondering how things were going with Aaron. He’d forgotten the coffee, so he took a break to make it, filling the thermos. Since he’d never gotten an answer over what Aaron wanted, he set both the travel mug and a regular ceramic on the floor by the door.

  The door beyond which silence still reigned.

  He made himself his own cup when he got to the kitchen, full of milk and sugar, and dove back into his homework.

  At noon he made lunch. The silence from the other room was so deafening he turned on the exhaust fan over the stove so he didn’t have to hear anything but white noise. This meant, though, that when the back door opened and Mina came into the kitchen, he jumped a mile.

  “You scared the crap out of me.” He put down the pan he’d pulled out of the cupboard and frowned at her. “Hey, what are you doing here? Nobody’s supposed to be here today. I cleared it with the house.”

  “I was looking for Karen.” She sat at the kitchen table. “Why, where’s everybody at? Why are you here, anyway?”

  “To be an idiot, I think.” Giles rolled his eyes at himself as he put the pan on the stove and opened the can of soup he’d brought along for his lunch. “I had this dumb idea to give Aaron the day to compose. Cleared everyone out so he could be all by himself, all day, no distractions.”

  “Aww, that’s sweet.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s in there playing cards with himself.”

  Mina laughed. “Well, sometimes that’s how it goes, I guess.”

  Giles leaned against the counter, shoulders sagging. “I just wanted to help.”

  “I’m pretty sure you do help.”

  “What do I do to help? I kiss him. I sit with him at lunch. I fuck him.”

  “You listen. You do things like this. You hold him.”

  Giles let out his breath in a heavy sigh. “I want to do more. I know I can’t make it better, but I want—”

  Mina sat up, held out a hand. She waved impatiently at Giles and the fan above the stove. “Turn it off. Off. Listen.”

  Giles fumbled with the switch, then tried to listen, but all he heard was the beating of his heart. He was about to tell Mina this when he caught it—a whisper of sound. Shutting his eyes, he held his breath and leaned into the door.

  He thought he heard a distant plinking of a piano. Not all the time, and not anything big. No swelling chords. No pounding chorus. Not even a bittersweet melody line. Just notes, whispering and far away. But definitely music.

  Mina kept her gaze on the door, her expression soft and sad. “There. See? You had to give him time.”

  Giles felt foolish for his impatience even as a brand-new round of anxiety pushed him to do more. “I want to take his pain away, Mina. I don’t want him to feel like this. It makes me crazy.”

  “You can’t carry someone else’s pain. They have to walk through it on their own.” A new swell of music, a full phrase, drifted from the parlor, and she closed her eyes, riding it. “I think he’s going to do beautiful things with his, though. Truly amazing. And you help, Giles.”

  “How?”

  “By doing this.” She gestured at the kitchen, the house, the parlor. “Giving him space. Loving him.” Her eyes developed a sheen, but she laughed as she wiped at them. “See? You’re helping me with mine.”

  This again. God, was she finally going to tell him? “I’ll always help you, Mina. You know that, right?”

  She looked at him, eyes glistening then spilling over, but she laughed, and when he crouched beside her, grasping her hands, she kissed him on the cheek. “I’m fine.”

  You’re not. “Will you tell me? Even if I can’t help, will you tell me?”

  She rested her forehead against his. “I’m…in love. The same person since Christmas. Except they won’t ever love me back. Hush.” She pressed her
fingers on his lips when he tried to argue. “No. I know. I…talked to her. She’s flattered, but she doesn’t feel the same way.”

  “You told her?” The last few months played in his head, and he ached as he realized what had been in front of him the whole time. “Karen.”

  Mina nodded, wiping tears away. “She was sweet. Really sweet. She still is. Sometimes that makes it harder, but I’m not sorry.”

  Giles kept climbing over top of himself, trying to keep up. “So…you’re lesbian?”

  She tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve gone round and round in my head, and I still don’t know. I guess when I look back, maybe I was always more open-minded about attraction than I knew. I still think guys are hot. I want Marius to take me to bed so badly my teeth ache. But…when Karen moves, when she smiles, it makes things inside me dance. She says—and I think she’s right—it’s not so much that I love her but I love the idea of her. She’s how I figured out I could love a man or a woman. Because mostly I adore her. I want to worship her from afar.”

  Min. Giles pressed a kiss on her hair.

  “The funny thing is since I told her, we’ve hung out more, which I worried would make it worse…but now we’re good friends. The attraction is still there, but it’s just this thing. A soft pain.” She bit her lip. “It’s a part of me now, this little bundle I carry. Funny thing? If I think about it when I sing or play, I can feel it vibrate, making my music better. When people talk to me—like you now, telling me your frustrations, your fears—that pain in me helps me help you. Sometimes it isn’t pain anymore. It’s an extra arm or…ear. It sounds crazy, I know.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Giles stared at the closed door of the kitchen. The music had stopped again, but he could still hear it in his mind. “I get what you mean, I think.”

  She kissed his cheek and stood. “I’m going to go see if I can track Karen down. Or somebody. Hell, maybe I’ll go try and snag a practice room. You’ve inspired me.”

  He thought about what she’d said for a long time after she left, as he ate his soup and put his headphones back in. After he finished his work and did the dishes, he pulled out his phone to play a game then he heard it once more. Music. More than a few notes. It stopped, and then it played again. Holding his breath, Giles went to the door, pressing his ear to the wood.