“Oh God.” He chuckled. “You do.”
“Shut up. I don’t.” Andrea avoided his eyes. Nate had just murdered Santa and summarily executed Rudolph with a snicker. She was never going to jump out of bed on Christmas mornings ever again. She hid her grief behind her lunch bag.
“Then why do you look like someone just died?” Nate laughed.
“I hate you.” Andrea stomped away.
“No, you don’t,” Nate called after her.
Andrea outran his voice, swearing never to speak to him again. Years later, she would forgive his skepticism. She would have scoffed at anything remotely odd or magical, too, if her mother was being treated for schizophrenia. Nate had believed his mom when she had told him about the voices in her head and the fairies flying around their living room until his grandparents explained that they were why her doctors had to take her away.
But Andrea didn’t know any of this that afternoon. She marched down the hall, swallowing a mixture of hot tears and every intention she had of telling Nate about the boy who lived in her wall.
“Dre, wait up.” Nate caught up with her. “I’m sorry.”
Andrea folded her arms and glared at him.
“Forgive me?”
“No.”
“See you on the bus?”
She walked away without answering. She didn’t need to. Whether they argued or not, they always saved a seat for each other on the bus. They spent the ride debating about the colors and shapes of songs. Even though their conversations usually ended with Andrea punching his arm and turning her back to him, they both knew that they were going to sit together again the next day. Nate made being strange a less lonely place, even if she had to keep her stranger secrets to herself.
—
Andrea couldn’t save the boy in her wall for long. Santa and his reindeer were dead and she was ten years old. Doubt had taken root and she had gotten too old for imaginary friends. Dr. Colin gave her a vanilla cupcake with purple sprinkles and asked her how she felt about her tenth birthday. Andrea told him that it didn’t feel very different from being nine—except that she knew that music couldn’t open holes in walls and that the boy who lived in her wall wasn’t real. Dr. Colin smiled, told her that it was their last session together, and gave her a red velvet cupcake to take home.
Andrea ate her cream cheese–frosted reward on her early evening walk with her dad. When she licked off the last of it from her fingers, they stopped for ice cream. Unlike a boy who lived in a wall, a chocolate-sundae detour was a secret her father was happy to keep between them.
—
Andrea rested her chin on her hands and stared at the computer screen. She rubbed her eyes and yawned. Her science report made her wish for the nights she still believed in magic. Scouring her wall for glowing cracks was more fun than researching Isaac Newton. She pushed her chair away from her desk. “Tuna? Come here, girl.”
Sylvia and her dad had given her the Persian kitten for her birthday. Tuna crept out from under her bed and curled into a small orange ball at her feet. Andrea tickled her new kitten’s tummy with her toes. Tuna purred. Next to the tinkling of four ice cubes, it was Andrea’s favorite sound.
Sylvia’s round stomach poked through Andrea’s half-open bedroom door. Andrea’s brother was due in a month and the family had taken a vote and had decided to name him Sebastian, after Andrea’s favorite composer. Sylvia peeked inside the room, her pin-straight blue-black hair skimming her waist. “How’s the science project coming along? Need any help?”
“Can you make Isaac Newton less boring?”
She smiled. “I’m afraid not. But it’s taco night if that makes you feel any better.”
“It does.” Her mouth watered. Like her tofu tacos, Sylvia had grown on Andrea. Her stepmother’s cooking had stopped tasting like liver right about the same time hugging her before she left for school had stopped giving Andrea hives. In the time that Sylvia had been married to her dad, Andrea had learned two things: Tofu was not the work of the devil and people weren’t like bags of salted caramel popcorn. She didn’t have less of her dad even if she had to share.
“I made whole-grain walnut brownies for dessert,” Sylvia said.
“It’s official. You are my favoritest person in the world. And I don’t care that it’s not a real word.”
Sylvia laughed. “I think we have just enough votes to put it in the dictionary.” She winced and grasped her stomach.
“You okay?” Andrea sprinted to her.
Sylvia exhaled through her mouth. “I think that was just your brother agreeing with me. The little guy can kick. And punch.”
“Wendy had such small hands.” Andrea regretted the words as soon as they slipped from her lips. She could not think of the brother she was going to have without remembering the sister she had sent away. She looked at her feet. “I’m sorry.”
Sylvia hugged Andrea as close as her belly would allow. “There’s nothing wrong with remembering her. I think it would make her very happy. Wendy wasn’t with us long, but she’ll always be a part of this family. Love isn’t measured by time.”
“Do you miss her?” Andrea asked.
Sylvia’s face crumpled. She clutched her tummy and groaned. “Get your dad. Hurry.”
—
Jenny de los Santos had been Andrea’s babysitter since she was six and that evening, while her dad and Sylvia were at the hospital, Jenny and Andrea had their quietest dinner together. Andrea could not fret, talk, and pretend to eat cold vegetarian tacos at the same time.
“Don’t worry.” Jenny reached across the table and patted her hand. “Everything will be okay. You’ll see.”
Andrea fixed her eyes on the crystal hearts glued to Jenny’s neon-pink nails, trying to forget the one other night that she had said those same words. It was Wendy in Sylvia’s tummy that evening and Jenny’s nails were painted lime green. Andrea nodded, emptied her untouched plate into the sink, and went up to her room.
She settled in front of her laptop and clicked on a post about Isaac Newton’s personal collection of books. Tuna staked her claim on her lap. She stroked Tuna’s back and read the article. Of the 1,752 books the scientist kept in his private library, only one was related to music, a treatise on the vibration of strings. Tuna couldn’t care less, and purred.
Andrea clicked on a link that directed her to a site devoted to Newton’s childhood inventions. She skimmed over his sundials and water clocks and stopped at an illustration of the floating paper lantern he had made to light his way to school on gray winter mornings. She imagined how it must have scared his neighbors. He wasn’t as dull as she had thought. She scrolled down the page to see his next creation.
A miniature wooden windmill with cloth sails appeared on the screen. Andrea’s hand froze over the keyboard. She tore through the text beneath the photo that explained how a twelve-year-old Newton had made a replica of a mill being constructed on a hill near his grammar school in Grantham. To keep his model from being dependent on the wind, he designed it to be powered by a “mouse miller” that ran inside its steel wheel.
Andrea’s mouth fell open. The dark-haired boy buried under a year’s worth of $150-an-hour therapy sessions climbed back to the top of her mind, his hazel eyes as bright and clear as the night she had watched him chase after his runaway mouse. This picture proved he was real. And a thief. He had stolen Sir Isaac Newton’s windmill. A “Butterfly Lovers” Concerto ringtone sliced through her accusations. Andrea grabbed her phone. “Hello?”
“Hey, kiddo.” Her father’s voice scraped the sides of his throat.
She pressed the phone to her ear. “Dad?”
He caught his breath. “Sebastian can’t wait to meet his big sister.”
She squealed. Her father’s words edged out every thought, including those about the young thief in her wall. “When can I see him?”
“You can visit him tomorrow. I love you, kiddo.”
“I love you, too, Dad. Oh…and…um…tell Sylvia that I
…uh…”
“She knows you do.”
—
Andrea dragged Nate into the music room after school the next day. “Come on. Hurry up.”
“What are we doing in here? Is your dad home?”
“Nope. He went back to the hospital to bring Sylvia a few things.” Andrea took a seat and arranged her cello between her legs. “Sit down. I want you to listen to something.”
“I thought you didn’t like having anyone around when you played.”
Andrea rubbed her hands on her jeans. Playing in front of other people turned her palms to ice, but her new baby brother was someone that she needed to celebrate with someone else. She had missed first period to visit him and had seen his tiny hands and tufts of brown hair, but he still didn’t feel real. If God saw how thankful she was for him, she figured that he wasn’t going to change his mind and take him back. “Just be quiet and listen, okay?”
Nate shrugged and settled onto her dad’s stool. He pulled a drumstick out of his backpack and twirled it. “What song are you going to play?”
“Sebastian’s.”
“Really? When did you write it?”
She drew her bow. “I’m about to.”
Every happy thought Andrea had ever had flowed into her cello. Warm apple pie and vanilla bean ice cream. Four ice cubes and Tuna’s purr. Wendy and her small pink hands. Andrea squeezed her lids shut to block the darker memories she had of her sister, but she was too late. They tumbled out of her in a rusty chain, dragging along a melody she had spent a year trying to forget. The boy’s song spilled out of her cello and pushed against the music room’s foam walls.
Nate gasped.
Andrea’s eyes flew open. A bright white crack glowed between her dad’s Vienna and New York concert posters. She stopped playing. “Nate, do you see—”
The crack vanished.
Nate blinked at the wall.
Andrea grabbed his arm. “I knew it. I knew it was real.”
“I have to go.” Nate jumped off the stool.
“What? Why?”
He scampered to the door.
“Wait. Don’t go.” Andrea chased after him. “You have to tell my dad. You have to tell everyone. Dr. Colin was wrong. I’m not crazy. I didn’t imagine it. You saw the crack, too.”
“I didn’t see anything.” He kept his head down and scurried down the hall.
“Of course you did.”
“I told you,” he hissed. “I didn’t see anything.” He rushed out the front door and slammed it behind him.
Andrea grasped the doorknob. And let it go. Nate could wait. The boy in the wall could not. This time, she was going to be ready for him. She ran back to the music room.
Andrea pressed a black marker onto a blank music sheet. A million words raced to the paper and slammed into the pen’s felt point. An inkblot spread over the page. Not a single word in her ten-year-old vocabulary seemed like the right thing to say to the boy in her wall. She settled on five letters. She angled the music stand toward the wall and planted her message on it.
The boy’s song surged down her arm and steered her bow, urging it to leap from string to string. White light ripped through an acoustic panel in the middle of a vibrato. She peered through the crack. Moonlight washed over a dark shape curled on a bed. The figure turned to its side. Light pooled over the boy’s face and glistened on the wet streaks on his cheek. Heat rose up Andrea’s nape. This was not the right time to intrude. Her hasty note seemed silly in the midst of the boy’s tears. She lifted her bow from the cello’s strings. The crack dimmed. She begged it to close faster. The boy’s eyes fluttered open. He wiped his face on his pillow and read the message on the music stand. A smile lit his hazel eyes as the crack closed.
Andrea’s heart dropped to her stomach. She gripped her cello, wishing that she had kept the wall open. She readied her bow. Four Seasons chimed from the doorbell. Andrea ignored it. She glanced at the music stand and reread her hasty note.
Hello!
She grimaced at the smiley face she had drawn on the o.
Vivaldi summoned her to the door again. She set her bow down. She and the boy would have to continue their talk when she came up with something better to say.
The cause is hidden; the effect is visible to all.
—OVID
San Francisco
Present Day
Andrea is fourteen.
Regrets, like L-shaped couches, take up a lot of space. For four years, they pushed against Andrea’s ribs. The crack refused to open after that afternoon in the music room with Nate, and there wasn’t a day that she didn’t wonder what would have happened if she had chosen the boy over answering the front door. Instead of signing for a delivery of Sylvia’s organic lemongrass tea, she might have gotten proof that she wasn’t crazy.
Some days were better than others, but all her nights were the same. They were always too short. Her failed attempts to find the boy made the sun rise sooner. She erased half of the measures she composed before collapsing into bed at dawn. She didn’t need to play them to know that they weren’t going to crack her wall open. She carved her frustration into her desk and ruined enough ballpoint pens to make her dad start buying them in bulk. On the odd night that she felt hopeful, she ventured to play her compositions. Her wall didn’t think much of her work, but Johann Sebastian Bach didn’t rub it in. He never complained when she filled his pages with updates on her progress or lack of it. He never said much, really, even when she added something entirely new to her daily report.
Dear Mister Johann Sebastian Bach,
The concert is next week. I don’t know why I ever agreed to do it. Kill me now.
Andrea
The Mariinsky Youth Philharmonic Orchestra had invited her to be their guest soloist on their U.S. tour. The chance to be led by their world-renowned conductor, Anatoli Dotsenko, outweighed any aversions she had to performing in public. As the concert grew close, the scales tipped the other way. Sweater sleeves hid her hives, but Nate saw her heart in her throat through her braces as he walked her home from the bus stop.
“So are you going to tell me what’s bothering you or what?” he said.
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.” He pushed his hair out of eyes that mimicked the color of the sky right after it rained.
“Fine. It’s the concert. Happy?”
“What about it?”
“I’m going to suck.”
He grinned. “What’s new?”
Andrea punched his arm.
“Ow. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. You’ll do great.”
Andrea rolled her eyes. “You’ve never even heard me play.”
He dropped his gaze to the pavement. “I have, remember? I didn’t get the chance to hear a lot, but I heard enough.”
Andrea stopped walking. Since the crack had appeared in the music room, this was the closest Nate had come to talking about what had happened. She searched his face for a sign that he recalled more about that afternoon than just her little performance.
“You’re good, Dre,” he said. “Really good.”
Andrea shoved her hands into her pockets. “It’s easier to be good without an audience waiting for you to make a mistake.”
“They’re not there to catch your mistakes. More than two thousand people bought tickets to enjoy your music. Don’t you think that’s cool? Even just a little?”
“Gee.” Ice filled her stomach. “Thanks for reminding me. I owe you one.”
“Not yet.”
“Yet?”
“You’ll see.” He grabbed her hand and tugged her along the sidewalk toward her house. “Hurry.”
—
Nate’s eyes roamed around the music room, his fingers absently twirling the chain of a round, coin-sized, plain metal pendant he had worn for as long as Andrea could remember. He had told her the pendant was a gift and joked that if she looked into it, she could see the future. Today, she wanted to believe him. Knowing how the concert was go
ing to turn out could help her decide whether or not to run away.
“You’re lucky.” He tucked his pendant under his shirt.
Andrea flinched. Lucky still wasn’t her favorite word.
He patted a foam panel. “You get to play in a place like this and I have to practice in a spot next to a moth-eaten couch and the spare freezer in my grandparents’ garage.”
“If you showed up for more of your cello lessons with my dad, you’d get to practice in here, too. He doesn’t offer free lessons to just anyone, you know. Except for the two of us, he doesn’t give lessons to anyone. Period.”
He shrugged. “Cello really isn’t my thing.”
“But you’re good at it.”
He planted himself on her dad’s stool. “We’re not here to talk about how good I am. We’re here to prove how good you are.”
Andrea’s eyes hardened. “What are you talking about?”
“Play for me.”
“Are you serious? No way.”
“Sorry, but I’ve got a front-row seat. You’re not canceling this show.”
Andrea scratched the hives spreading over her arms. “Let’s just stick with a pep talk, okay? Besides, I have a ton of homework and I still haven’t studied for our math test tomorrow.”
“Quadratic equations? The quiz will be a breeze.”
“For you. I barely passed the last one.”
Nate grasped numbers the way Andrea understood notes. He had tried to convince her that music and math were just different ways of expressing the same rhythm. He quickly learned that they got their math homework done faster if he kept his mouth shut and did it for her. In exchange, Andrea didn’t complain about their spy movie marathons. She even made popcorn.
“I’ll help you study.” He handed Andrea her cello. “After you play. I’m not leaving until you do.”
“And you’ll tell me if I suck?”
“I was the guy who killed Santa, remember? I’ll always tell you the truth.”
—
Nate’s stamp of approval dissolved in the pit of her stomach on the night of the concert, along with the Shake Shack french fries she’d had for lunch. The only thing that kept her from bolting out of Carnegie Hall’s emergency exit and catching the first flight back to San Francisco was the three-digit number jostling around her fourteen-year-old head: One hundred and thirty-seven.
Love and Gravity Page 4