Vivaldi in the Dark

by Matthew J. Metzger

  “I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jayden confessed and bit down on the impulse to dig himself a verbal grave. Darren smirked again. Maybe it was just the way he smiled. “You, um. You don’t like English?”

  “Nope.”

  Jayden twisted his fingers around his own cup. “I do,” he confessed. “I write the plays for Mum’s group.”

  Darren raised his eyebrows. “You write plays?”

  “Yeah. I mean, they’re not great, but, you know, practice, and…”

  “Back up,” Darren waved a hand. “You write plays—and they can’t be shit if they actually get performed in here—but you go to Woodbourne?”

  “I’m actually not thick,” Jayden said defensively.

  “You don’t have to be thick to end up thick, not at the comps round here.”

  Jayden flushed. Darren’s dismissive tone was…well, he should have expected it. Darren went to St. John’s. St. John’s was where Jayden longed to be: the sprawling boy’s boarding school at the very northern edge of the town. It was the kind of school that produced bestselling authors and West End stars. It was the kind of school that got its kids into Oxford and Cambridge effortlessly. It was the kind of school that cost nine thousand a term for a day student.

  It was the school Jayden intended on securing a scholarship for at the end of this year, and this violinist was sitting there bold as brass in the uniform Jayden would have killed to wear.

  “You are so lucky,” he said.

  Darren quirked an eyebrow.

  “To get to go St. John’s instead of Woodbourne.”

  “Eh.”

  “So, um, where are you from? If you…”

  “Oh, I don’t board there. Day student.” Darren shook his head. “I live on the Beauchamp estate.”

  Jayden felt profoundly jealous. Beauchamp was one step down from leaving the town entirely and going and living in one of the villages—Crossley or Heath Field or Ashington. Darren’s family must have been loaded.

  “It’s not a haven,” Darren said. “It’s not a comprehensive, but it’s not a haven.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean private school has bullies too.”

  Jayden flinched. The word was like a barb under his skin. He wasn’t bullied. He wasn’t. He just…didn’t have an easy time at school. He wasn’t…

  “A victim.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m not a victim,” Jayden mumbled, but he could hear himself and how he sounded. “I mean…it’s not that bad. I’m not, you know…”

  “Jayden. I asked if you were gay. You reacted like I’d got out a penknife and expressed my intention to carve ‘Oscar Wilde’s bitch’ into your chest.”

  Jayden clenched his jaw and stared intently at Darren’s violin on the floor.

  “That kid on Tuesday…”

  “Canning.”

  “Whatever. He the only one?”

  “No.”

  “What do they do?”

  Jayden snorted. “Call me names, mostly. I mean, it’s not fun, you know, I don’t like it, but it is mostly just name-calling. Since we got mixed up into the GCSE classes, I don’t share lessons with most of them anymore. And when I do…you know, they write on my things, they rip up my work. They’ve stolen my blazer a few times. It’s, you know, little stuff. It’s not that bad. Really, it’s not.”

  “So why do you sound like you’re trying to convince yourself, not me?”

  “Let’s not talk about this,” Jayden pleaded. He sounded pathetic and he knew it, but he didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to tell Darren what it was like—Darren, who probably didn’t have the first idea about…about being gay at a school like Woodbourne. Darren wasn’t even gay—or probably wasn’t, and if he was, anyway, surely he would have said something on Tuesday? So he wasn’t. So he had no idea.

  “You don’t know what it’s like. Everyone at school knows I’m gay.”

  “It is kind of hard to miss.”

  “How?”

  Darren shrugged. “I don’t know. It just is. You just…I don’t know. You style your hair, for one, and I mean you obviously spent a good half hour getting it right. I barely comb mine. You talk with your hands too much. It’s a little girly, I have to say it. You’re too put-together. I wouldn’t say you’re effeminate, exactly, but it’s only just. You just really don’t look like the type who’d like to get to know that barista in Costa.”

  Jayden snorted with a sudden wave of laughter, but he heard the tinge to it. He felt the tinge to it. There was a burning in his throat, and he was close to tears, but he was not going to do it. He wasn’t going to go and cry all over Darren. Not when Darren was giving him that almost-sympathetic face and coaxing the details out of him and pitying him.

  “Hey.” Darren leaned over and squeezed his knee, peering up at Jayden’s face. His eyes, Jayden noticed again, were simply stunning. “It’s just a bunch of idiots whose lives are too pathetic to be bothered with, so they go bothering yours. And eventually this Canning guy will find an equally skanky girl and they’ll settle down for about a year and half and have a baby—maybe two, if he’s quick enough with his dick—and a pit bull terrier, and then he’ll spent the rest of his life unemployed and bouncing from slag to slag until he drinks himself to death on the floor of a crappy pub in a crappy town centre somewhere. Probably here. And you’ll be off writing plays and being stupidly successful or whatever it is you people who like English do.”

  Jayden took a deep, shaking breath, and squeezed Darren’s wrist. “Thanks,” he croaked. Darren’s hand was warm through his school trousers, and Jayden frowned down at it without really seeing it for a brief second before it clicked. “Oh, my God, you have really big hands.”

  Darren rolled his eyes and withdrew it. “I’m trying to be supportive here, and you insult my hands?”

  “I didn’t insult them, I just…they’re really big!” They were. Darren’s middle finger must have been a good inch longer than Jayden’s, and his palm could actually form a cup around his kneecap.

  “Not the only thing I have a big pair of,” Darren said, draining his cup and almost rolling up out of the chair to throw it away, grace in every inch of him. Jayden went magenta at the words—and the implication—and he bit down his lip to silence that voice in his head again when it decided to notice just how fluidly Darren could move.

  “Umm…” Jayden tried.

  “I meant my feet,” Darren threw over his shoulder, tossing the cup into the bin by stage left. “Perv,” he added.

  Jayden thought his face was going to spontaneously combust. “Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I’m checking you out,” he managed by the time Darren returned to his chair. He tried for cool and condescending, but it came out as more of a squeak.

  “Shame,” Darren said. “Flirting aside, I do have to finish this composition. You’re welcome to hang around while I bore myself to death with the same four notes over and over again.”

  “Why only four?”

  “That’s the assignment.” Darren shrugged.

  “Okay.” Jayden managed to calm his heartbeat and his flushed face, gathering his abandoned bag and half-finished Costa cup and retreat to the first row of seats. “I’ll just be a tiny audience over here. Sketching out the third act while you bore yourself.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  And to you, the helpful voice in Jayden’s head supplied, and he ignored it. Or, at least, he tried.

  Chapter 4

  Just as he thought he’d gotten away with it, Darren realised he was wrong.

  On Monday afternoon, at a minute past one, Miss West dismissed the fleet of boys who might have understood her lecture on centrifugal force, but by and large didn’t care anyway. At a minute and a half past one, two hands clamped down on Darren’s shoulders, each belonging to a different person.

  “C’mon, Beethoven,” Ethan Summerskill said in his left ear. “Lunch in the back courtyard.”

>   “You have some explaining to do,” Paul Smith said in the other ear, and when Darren shrugged them off and turned, they were grinning identical grins.

  Sort of. Paul and Ethan looked completely different. Paul was a gangly already-sixteen-year-old of Trinidadian heritage who, judging by his shoe size, was going to be six and a half feet tall by the time he so much as thought about hitting his peak, and had been nicknamed ‘Tiny’ in mocking respect by the time they were thirteen. Ethan, by contrast, had been referred to as ‘Legolas’ ever since The Fellowship of the Ring came out, and was the epitome in appearance of the Aryan, polo-playing, horseriding, foxhunting, Conservative-voting toff, complete with the slightly-too-long-but-I’m-disgustingly-rich-so-it’s-fine Richard Branson style haircut.

  They still had identical wicked grins, though, and Darren knew better than to argue.

  Paul and Ethan had been Paul-and-Ethan since long before Darren came along. They’d been together ever since nursery school. Darren had been adopted, for lack of a better term, at the beginning of second year at St. John’s, when Paul had cornered Darren at the end of a football match and asked, “Are you secretly gay?”

  “Are you secretly white?” Darren had replied without missing a beat, and Ethan had declared him a friend on the spot. Paul had come around perhaps three days later, when they’d discovered a mutual love of rugby.

  It was with those years of experience that Darren knew better than to argue or put up a fight, and instead let himself be frog-marched out of the sciences building and down the grassy slope to the tiny, quiet courtyard behind the horseshoe-shaped music department. It was his territory rather than theirs—Paul and Ethan collectively had about as much musical talent as Darren’s paternal grandfather, and he was dead—but it was quieter than the main courtyard, and usually near-abandoned during the day. And today was typical.

  “All right, Pavarotti…”

  “That’s a singer, not a musician,” Ethan interrupted.

  “Same difference.”

  “Um, no, totally not. My sister sings,” Ethan argued. Darren wriggled free of their hands and found a convenient patch of grass on which to set up camp. “She sucks. But she’s good at music. Ergo, a singer and a musician are not the same thing.”

  “Does it matter? What matters,” Paul dropped gracelessly down onto the grass beside Darren and threw an arm over his shoulders, “is that there are rumours about you. Pavarotti,” he added, just to make Ethan’s teeth grind.

  That got Darren’s attention, although barely. “Really,” he said, poking through the lunch Scott had ‘surprised’ him with that morning. It would have been a genuine surprise if he hadn’t made a habit of it last year. Apparently, Darren’s preference of going to the nearest fast food joint or shop of the day wasn’t healthy enough. “And what would those be?”

  “That you, my dear Chopin,” Ethan drawled, sitting cross-legged on Darren’s other side, “received a visitation on Thursday afternoon after orchestra practice by an outsider.”

  Ethan could make anything sound like a Steven Spielberg film, Darren decided.

  “Moreover, this outsider came bearing gifts, and you remained behind to speak with him,” Paul added, equally dramatically.

  Darren chewed thoughtfully on a square of ham sandwich, pretending to mull it over. Eventually, he swallowed and said, “And?”

  Paul prodded him in the cheek. “You’re an arse,” he pronounced solemnly.

  “…And?”

  “So who was it?” Ethan demanded.

  Darren shrugged. “Some kid who’s part of the drama group that have the hall after us.”

  “Some kid who brings you coffee presents.”

  “Because I bought on Tuesday.” Darren shrugged.

  “Some kid you’ve met before.”

  “Some kid we don’t know.”

  “Pft, some kid, let’s face it, there’s no way you know through any legitimate channels. You’re not exactly a social butterfly, Wagner.”

  Darren ignored them, fishing through his bag for the oranges he’d stolen out of the fridge before leaving for school. For ninety percent of the time, he wasn’t needed to feed their conspiracy theories.

  “I think he had a more exciting summer than he let on,” Paul pronounced grandly.

  “I think you’re right,” Ethan agreed, and they rolled in to sandwich his shoulders between them.

  “I think you’re both fucked in the head,” Darren said flatly.

  “Charming,” they chorused.

  “I met a Woodbourne guy at the theatre the other week. We talked. I bought coffee because I was running on empty. So he bought coffee on Thursday. Simple, done, finito, et cetera. That’s it. I’ve not had any exciting summer. I’ve not even had a remotely interesting one.”

  “Vivaldi recital in August?”

  “Terminal,” Darren pronounced, and Paul laughed.

  “We’re just saying, any time you feel like coming out of the closet, we’re here for you, man,” he said.

  “Being gay, it’s totally cool,” Ethan chipped in.

  “Why do you always have to ruin the moment?” Darren replied instead. He had no intention of confirming or denying their suspicions. Largely because it was more fun to watch them trying to wriggle it out of him.

  “So, is he a potential boyfriend?” Paul cooed.

  “No. How is your actual girlfriend?”

  “Leave Nessa out of this.” Paul waved it off. “This is about you. We accept you, Hobbit-Hair.”

  “Oh, dead accepting.”

  “Shut your face. We’re being tolerant, fucking like it,” Ethan snarked.

  “By comparing me to boring fuckers with growth problems?”

  “I bet some of the hobbits were gay.”

  “I bet some of them were straight too,” Darren said. “God, what is your obsession with me being gay?”

  Paul went for the textbook answer. “Everyone should feel free to be themselves, and we want you to feel like you can be the flaming queer that you secretly are.” Well, semi-textbook.

  Ethan went for the blunt one. “I want a gay friend to drag to parties and attract girls for me.”

  There was a long pause, in which Paul leaned over Darren’s shoulder to stare at Ethan incredulously.

  “Mate,” he said seriously, “that’s going to take a lot more than a gay wingman.”

  Ethan punched him; Darren got out of the way, retreating to a safer patch of grass and watching them wrestle. He suspected they were still twelve-year-olds inside, especially once Paul got Ethan in a headlock and started demanding passwords and embarrassing set phrases. One of which was “I admit I’m gayer than Elton John.” Acceptance. Right.

  “I don’t know why I hang out with you,” he said seriously.

  Paul let Ethan go, scowling. “Because you love us.”

  Darren snorted.

  “We thought we were your friends,” Ethan said.

  “Wouldn’t want us to get jealous, right?” Paul echoed.

  “I’m allowed to have other friends.”

  “But you don’t,” Ethan said ruthlessly. “So where’d this friend-that-isn’t-us actually come from?”

  “Yeah,” Paul added pointlessly.

  Darren shrugged. “His mother, I’m guessing.”

  Ethan snorted and grinned anew; Paul was not so easily distracted. “Start talking, Curly,” he threatened.

  “I think,” and Ethan’s smile was wide enough to swallow most of his face, “that this isn’t a friend at all. I think our sweet, mop-headed little muffin…”

  “Our what?” Paul momentarily broke character.

  “…has a boyfriend,” Ethan finished, completely ignoring the outburst.

  “He’s not a muffin, he’s a biscuit,” Paul said determinedly.

  “Biscuit?” Ethan wrinkled his nose. “No way, muffin is so much cooler.”

  “You’re both freaks,” Darren opined, but they ignored him.

  “Muffin.”

  “Biscuit.
”

  “Muffins would totally have curly hair if they were people, so he’s a muffin.”

  “He’s not gay enough to be a muffin. Muffins are completely, one hundred percent, Elton-John-in-a-tutu gay.”

  “You’re the one who said he had a boyfriend!”

  “You two, I swear to God, are fucking married,” Darren said and managed (somehow) to extract himself from the tangle. For about thirty seconds, before Paul latched on to his wrist, Ethan to the opposite elbow, and they yanked him right back down.

  “Out with it, Biscuit,” Paul said. “Who’s the boyfriend?” he added over Ethan’s outraged, “Muffin!”

  “Nobody you know.”

  “So there is a boyfriend,” Ethan said.

  “And uh, hello, we should know him. We’re your brothers from another mother!”

  “In your case, another continent entirely,” Darren sniped.

  “Racist.”

  “Homophobe.”

  “Jerk. Muffin. Back to the question at hand.” Ethan snapped his fingers. “This boyfriend. Name, age, taste in music.”

  “If I’m a muffin, he’s a bourbon cream.”

  “Raaaaaacist,” Paul droned. “And you’re the biscuit. I’m one of those slabs of cake you can get at the coffee shop on Green Street for a quid a brick.”

  “Cheap, nasty, and bad for anything within a two-mile radius?” Darren asked.

  “Delicious,” Paul enunciated.

  “Oi! Stop letting him sidetrack you!” Ethan reached around Darren to punch Paul in the arm. “Listen up, Muffin.”

  “Biscuit!”

  “Shut your face, Cake-Slab,” Ethan shot back. “Muffin. Listen very carefully. Your boyfriend. His name…?”

  “Jayden.”

  “Now we have to meet him.” Paul beamed. “Text him. Now. Set up a coffee date or whatever it is you queers do when you’re not dogging or whatever.”

  Ethan wrinkled up his nose.

  “Same as whatever it is you black people do when you’re not listening to bad hip-hop and making gang signs with your hands. And saying ‘yo’ for some stupid reason.”

  “Pft. ‘Yo’ is totally a white thing now. Racist.”

  “My point stands. Homophobe.”