Ballad

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Before we get started, I’m going to need you all to pass forward your composition outline,” Linnet called from the front, sparing me from saying my second lamest line ever. Linnet looked even smaller and more breakable from way back here in the loser-screw-up-don’t-give-a-damn row. “I’m also collecting papers for Mr. Sullivan. I understand you have outlines due for him as well.” There was no sign of Sullivan at the front; usually he was perched on top of the desk by now.

  Beside me, Dee flipped open her notebook to pull out her outline and, as she did, I saw the piece of paper underneath it. Some sort of exam. With a big red 42 on it, circled. And F written beside it, in case she’d missed the concept of 42 being a failing grade.

  Straight-A front-row beautiful-lost Dee looked over at me as if she knew instinctively that I’d seen the exam and that I’d know right away what that 42 meant to her. Her eyes were wide and frightened and pleading for a second, and I just stared at her, not bothering to hide my shock. Dee laid her hand down on the exam, very carefully, to stop the breeze from catching the edge of the paper. Her fingers covered the grade.

  But that didn’t change the wrongness of it.

  “Back row! Pass them up please,” Linnet said, her voice unpleasant and hard around the edges.

  We snapped out of it. Dee passed her paper to the desk in front of her and Paul and I sent our identical outlines for Ballad up our rows. I folded my hands back on my desk, and as I did, I saw Paul’s slanted handwriting standing out against my blocky, square printing on my skin. He’d managed to find room to squeeze in the words females hurt my brain on my left hand. I raised an eyebrow at him and he gave me a look like, well it’s true, isn’t it?

  A 42. Damn. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Dee get anything less than a B plus, and I remembered that one because she’d called me about it. She’d been programmed for technical perfection at birth; a grade like that had to be causing short-circuits and malfunctions across her system.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  “I’d like for you to make your desks into groups of four,” Linnet called from the front. “Both sections have just finished reading and watching Hamlet and I’d like you to discuss it in small groups. I’ll be watching your participation and I’ll let Mr. Sullivan know how active you were in the discussion when he returns this afternoon.” She started rambling on about discussion questions on the board and she’d be reading our outlines while we talked and whatever, just get on with it, so we just started dragging our desks into circles which completely drowned her out with scraping metallic legs on the floor.

  We ended up in a group with Paul, me, and Dee from the back row, and a third-row student who looked less than pleased to have been assimilated into a greater-than-fifty-percent-back-row group.

  The less-than-pleased student was a girl named Georgia (who played the trumpet—I tried not to hold that against her) and she decided to take charge by reading the first question off the board. “Okay. First question. Which character from Hamlet do you identify with the most?”

  I looked at Dee, really hard—the sort of look that not only forces people into one spot but also burns holes into them big enough to stick pencils through—and said, “Ophelia, because no one told her what the hell was going on, so she killed herself.”

  Dee blinked.

  Georgia blinked.

  Paul started laughing.

  Linnet, at the front of the room, looked suspicious, because let’s face it, when it’s five minutes into a discussion about a play where practically everyone starts out dead or ends up that way, hysterical laughter sort of draws attention.

  “This is a time for discussion, not conversation,” Linnet said, glaring at us. She drifted ominously in our direction, like a jellyfish. She kept trying to not look at my hands.

  “We are discussing.” I looked back to Dee, whose eyes darted between me and Linnet. “We were talking about the real-world implications of the lack of communication between Hamlet and Ophelia and what an ass-face Hamlet was for keeping Ophelia in the dark about what he was thinking.”

  Sullivan would’ve appreciated my off-the-cuff analysis of the material—hey, at least I’d done the reading, right?—but Linnet frowned at me. “I’d prefer if you didn’t use that sort of language in my classroom.”

  I turned my attention to her and tried to sound like I cared. “I’ll try and keep it PG-13 from now on.”

  “Do that. I’m sure Mr. Sullivan doesn’t allow that in his class.” The way she said it had a distinct question mark on the end, as if she wasn’t sure.

  I smiled at her.

  Linnet’s frown deepened and she jellyfish-drifted her tentacles toward another discussion group.

  Georgia glared at me, tapped her pencil on her notebook, and said, “I think I identify most with Horatio, because—”

  “Maybe Hamlet knew Ophelia wouldn’t get it,” Dee interrupted, and Georgia rolled her eyes in disgust. “Ophelia would’ve told Hamlet right off that what he was doing was stupid, without knowing the context.”

  “You’re assuming that Ophelia didn’t know anything about what Hamlet was going through,” I said. “But Ophelia was there the first time, remember? She knows what back-stabbing freaks Gertrude and Claudius are. It’s not her first time around Denmark, Dee.”

  “Hello, what are we talking about here?” Georgia asked. “Ophelia doesn’t know anything about Gertrude and Claudius. Hamlet only knows about Claudius murdering his father because of his father’s ghost, and Hamlet’s the only one the ghost spoke to. So Ophelia doesn’t know anything.”

  I waved off Georgia and said to Dee, “Ophelia’s only clueless because Hamlet doesn’t trust Ophelia enough to confide in her. Apparently, he thinks he can do everything himself, which wasn’t true the first time and is definitely not true this time either. He should’ve let Ophelia help.”

  Dee’s eyes were a little too bright; she blinked and they cleared. “Ophelia wasn’t exactly a great judge of character. She should’ve just stayed away from Hamlet like Polonius told her to. People only got hurt by being close to Hamlet. Everybody died because of him. He was right to drive Ophelia away.”

  Georgia started to talk, but I leaned over my desk toward Dee and said, teeth gritted, “But Ophelia was in love with Hamlet.”

  Dee stared at me and I stared back at her, sort of shocked that I’d said it, and then Paul broke the mood by saying, “I just figured it out. The whole gender-opposite metaphor was throwing me off. Sullivan must be Polonius. He’s got that whole father-figure to Ophelia thing going on.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I told him, thumping back in my seat.

  Georgia gestured at the board. “Does anyone want to talk about the second question?”

  No one wanted to talk about the second question.

  I crossed my arms over my chest. I felt a sort of beautiful detachment from the scene, a sort of objectivity that I never seemed to have when Dee was around. I was getting over her. I could actually be getting over her. “I just don’t think Hamlet should be taking Ophelia’s calls if he’s only going to lie to her,” I said. “Ophelia’s slowly coming to grips with Hamlet tearing out her heart and being just friends, but even just friends don’t lie to each other.”

  Georgia made a face and started to speak, but Paul put a finger to his lips and watched Dee.

  Dee’s voice was very quiet, and it wasn’t her school voice anymore. You know how everyone has two voices—the voice they use in public and the voice that’s just for you, the voice they use when you’re alone with them and nobody else can hear. She used that one, the one from last summer, back when I really believed we’d have summer upon summer without change. “Hamlet can’t stand to see Ophelia get hurt again.”

  She looked at me. Not at my eyes, but at my scar above my ear.

  “Oh,” I said.
>
  For some reason, I never realized until that moment—when Dee looked at my scar and used that old voice—that she really did love me too. All along, she’d loved me, just not the way I’d wanted her to.

  Well, crap.

  The autumn wind that came in the tall windows along the wall seemed colder, scented with incongruous odors: thyme and clover and the damp smell that appears when you turn over a rock. I sort of sat there and didn’t say anything for way too long.

  “Could James and Paul come up here and see me for a moment, please?” Linnet was at the front desk, face ominous. She looked much more teacherly than Sullivan did, sitting behind the desk instead of on it. I made a note to never sit behind a desk. “Deirdre and Georgia, you two can keep discussing.”

  I stood up, but before I went up to the front with Paul, I touched the back of Dee’s hand. I don’t know if she knew what I meant, but I wanted her to understand that I—I don’t know what I wanted her to understand. I guess I somehow wanted her to know that I finally got it. I didn’t get to see her face after I touched her hand, but I saw Georgia frowning after me and Paul.

  Up at the front of the classroom, Paul and I stood before Linnet’s desk like soldiers waiting to be knighted. Well, I did, anyway. Paul fidgeted. I didn’t think he’d ever been in trouble before.

  “Are you two friends?” Linnet asked. She was a tiny bird behind the desk, her hair ruffling like blonde feathers. She blinked up at us, eyes dark and wary.

  I was about to expound upon the near blood-bond between us when Paul said, “Roommates too.”

  “Well.” Linnet spread our outlines out in front of her. “Then I don’t understand. Is this some sort of cheating or plagiarism? Or some sort of very unfunny practical joke? It’s not my job to grade Mr. Sullivan’s papers, but I couldn’t help but notice that your outlines for the composition project are identical.”

  Paul looked at me. I looked at Linnet. “It’s neither. Didn’t you read them?”

  Linnet made a vague hand gesture. “They were both gibberish to me.” She pulled the title page of mine close and read it aloud:

  “Ballad:

  A Play in Three Acts,

  to rely heavily upon Metaphor,

  meaningful only to those

  who see the World as it really is.”

  She looked at us, an eyebrow arched. “I don’t see how this fits into the assignment—isn’t it a ten-page essay on metaphor? And it doesn’t explain why your outline is the same as Paul’s.”

  “Sul—Mr. Sullivan will understand.” I was tempted to take the outlines from her before she wrote something on them with the red pen lying inches away from her fingers. “It’s a group project, and the play itself is our essay. We’re writing and performing it together.”

  “Just the two of you? Like a skit?”

  I didn’t really see why I needed to explain this to her, when she wasn’t going to be the one giving us our grade. She was bending the corner of one of the outlines back and forth, her eyes on us. I wanted to smack her fingers. “Me and Paul and some others. Like I said, Mr. Sullivan will be okay with it.”

  “Are others doing projects like this?” Linnet frowned at us and then at the creased corner on the outline, as if she couldn’t figure out how the crease had gotten there. “It seems unfair to grade such a drastically different project on the same scale as other, more traditional compositions that followed the rules.”

  Oh, God, she was going to start talking about rules, and I wasn’t going to be able to keep myself from saying something incredibly sarcastic and I would get Angel Paul into trouble by association. I bit the inside of my lip and tried not to glare.

  “Mr. Sullivan is new to Thornking-Ash. Quite new to teaching as well. I don’t think he understands the ramifications of allowing students to stray too far from the boundaries.” Linnet stacked our outlines and reached for the red pen. I winced as she marked formatting/structure on the top of each of them. “I think I’ll have a talk with him when he gets back. You will probably have to redo these outlines. I’m sorry if he let you think you could interpret his assignment so loosely.”

  I wanted to snap something really cutting back, like sorry you decided to interpret “looking female” so loosely or who died and made you God, sweetheart, but I just gave her a tight smile. “Right. Anything else?”

  She frowned at me, as if I really had said my choice phrases out loud. “I know about kids like you, Mr. Morgan. You think you’re something special, but just wait until you’re in the real world. You’re no more special than anyone else, and all your wit and disdain of authority will get you absolutely nowhere. Mr. Sullivan might think you’re a shooting star, but I assure you, I do not. I watch stars like you burn out in the atmosphere every day.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said.

  I was playing like crap. I was standing on top of my gorgeous hill in the middle of the gorgeous day and everything was super-saturated with fall colors and my pipes sounded great and the air felt perfect on my skin and I couldn’t focus on a single thing.

  Dee’s big red F.

  Paul’s list of the dead.

  Nuala’s fingers on my wrist.

  I closed my eyes and stopped playing. I exhaled slowly and tried to focus on that narrow part of myself that I retreated into during competitions, but it felt like an inaccessible crack that I was too unwieldy and strung out to fit into.

  I opened my eyes again. The hill was still empty because everyone else was in ensemble classes or private lessons. Good thing, too. Because it meant there was no one around to hear me suck. Maybe I was just a big shooting star like Linnet said, and I’d be a big nobody in a desk job when I got out of this place.

  I gazed down at my shadow, blue-green and long across the trampled grass, and as I did, another long shadow appeared beside it.

  “You suck today,” Nuala observed from behind me.

  “Thanks for making me feel better,” I said.

  “I’m not supposed to make you feel better.” Nuala moved around to face me, and I swallowed when I saw her hip-huggers and clingy T-shirt that was every color of the ocean, like her eyes. “I’m supposed to make you play better. I brought you something.”

  She held out her fist toward me and opened her fingers for the great reveal.

  “Nuala,” I said, reaching out to take her gift. “It’s a rock.” I held it up to my face to look at it closer, but it really was just a rock. About the length of my thumb, opaque white, and worn smooth by time.

  Nuala snorted and snatched it out of my hand before I could stop her. “It’s a worry stone,” she said. “Look, stupid human.” She rested the rock in her palm and rubbed her thumb and forefinger over its surface.

  “What’s it supposed to do again?”

  Nuala swapped the rock to her left hand and took my thumb in her right one, holding it the same way she’d just been holding the worry stone. “You rub it,” she said, and one side of her mouth curled up, “To relax you.” She ran her thumb and forefinger over my thumb, just as she’d done with the stone. Her fingers grazed my skin, leaving behind invisible promises and oh freaking hell my knees went weak with it.

  She grinned and slapped the stone into my hand. “Yeah. You get the idea. You rub the stone when you get anxious or need to think. I thought it might keep you from writing on your hands. Not that that will keep you from being a neurotic freak. But it’ll keep other people from being able to tell you’re a neurotic freak, until it’s too late.”

  I swallowed, again, but for a different reason this time. The worry stone was maybe the most thoughtful thing I’d ever gotten from someone. I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t had to fake gratitude for a gift, and now that I actually was grateful, thank you didn’t seem to cut it.

  It seemed wrong that the first thing that came to mind was a sarc
astic response. Something to deflect this warm feeling in my cheeks and put me back in control of myself.

  “You can thank me later.” Nuala wiped her palms on her jeans, although there was nothing on the rock to dirty them. “Next time you forget to bring a pen with you.”

  “It—” I stopped because my voice sounded weird.

  “I know,” she said. “Now, are you going to play, or what? You can’t just stop with that last jig. It was, like—”

  “Absolute crap?” I suggested in a totally normal voice, pocketing the stone and readjusting my pipes.

  “I was going to say something nicer, like … nah, you’re right. Absolute crap does it.” She paused, and her face turned into something quite different. Almost innocent. “Can we play my tune?” She meant the one she’d sent me in the dream, the one I’d played on the piano.

  I sort of hated to tell her no. I felt I should reward her brief moments of lucidity and non-homicidal behavior. “Won’t fit into the range of the pipes.”

  “We can change it.”

  I made a face. We could squash it to fit, but it would suck the life out of it. The joy of the tune was in the high bits, and those were beyond the reach of the pipes.

  “It won’t be bad. C’mon,” Nuala said. She seemed to realize that she sounded sweet, because her eyebrows arched sharply and she added, “It can’t be any worse than the jig you were just butchering.”

  “Ha. You wound me with your words like knives. Fine. Show me I’m wrong.”

  I readjusted my pipes again and Nuala stood at my shoulder. Our shadows became one blue-green shape on the grass below, two legs and four arms. I hesitated for just a moment before reaching behind me to catch one of her hands. I pulled it around me so that her fingers were stretched over the pipe chanter. Her hand looked small on the chanter, stretching to cover all the holes.

  “You know that won’t work,” Nuala said softly.

  Yeah, I knew it. Didn’t mean I had to like it. I slid my hand underneath hers and covered the holes with my fingers, her hand still resting on mine. “Then we can pretend. Where’s your other hand?”