Our Song

by Fraiberg, Jordanna

  My heart clenched in my chest thinking about Georgetown, about next year. By then everything would be back to normal, I told myself. By then, he’d see me differently, the way he used to, before that night.

  “Ollie, you’re not watching!” Noah swung his arms in front of my face, knocking over a glass of water.

  “Careful,” I hissed as it clanked over the silverware, sending water in every direction. But it was too late. Ashley looked right at me with no hint of recognition before whispering something in her mother’s ear. Mrs. O’Brien quickly glanced up, her posture straightening like a cat’s, as they shuffled to their table, only four over from ours. Derek was so engrossed in conversation with Greg and his dad that he hadn’t noticed me yet. Mrs. O’Brien made sure to keep it that way, guiding Derek to the opposite end of the table, where I had a lovely view of the back of his head.

  “There’s Derek!” Noah was already on his way to greet him, but I managed to grab hold of his arm. “Ow, you’re hurting me.”

  “Sorry,” I said, releasing my grip. “It’s just that Derek’s busy now. Show me another move. You’re really good.”

  “Why doesn’t he come over anymore?” Noah just stood there, staring at me. “Did you guys have a fight or something?”

  My heart sank and I struggled to choke back a sob. Noah loved Derek and looked up to him like a big brother. I never thought about how everything that happened, and how acting like it didn’t happen, affected him too.

  “What’s going on here?” My mother appeared, immediately mopping up the wet tablecloth with her napkin. “Noah, did you do this?”

  “It was my fault,” I covered. Taking the blame was the least I could do, if I couldn’t tell him the truth about everything else. That was the one thing my mother and I agreed on. We were both trying to protect Noah, even if it was for different reasons.

  I stared down at my plate throughout lunch, moving my food around to make it look like I was eating. Luckily my mom was too preoccupied making sure everyone else was having a good time to notice.

  Once dessert was served, she leaned into the table toward my father. “Is everything settled with the insurance claim?”

  “Not yet.” He cleared his throat, like there was something stuck in it.

  “It’s been over three weeks. What’s the hold up?”

  My stomach contorted into knots. They were talking about the accident.

  “These things take time, Marian. I said I would tell you when I got the report from the appraiser.”

  Derek was laughing at something Greg said. He still hadn’t noticed I was right behind him.

  “I sent Carolyn a flower arrangement.” She glanced over her shoulder at Derek’s mother. “But I never heard a word.”

  “That’s not necessary, Marian. It’s all being handled,” my father said. “I’m on top of it.”

  “I should go over and say something.” My mother whipped out the compact from her purse and began reapplying her lipstick. “I don’t feel right about this.”

  She didn’t feel right about it? I was the one everyone was talking about. What about me? I wanted to scream. But I remained silent, slumped in my seat, reminding myself that causing a scene wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all me.

  “Do whatever you like.” My father put his napkin on the table and got up from his seat. “But I have to go. It’s tee-off time.”

  Finding my legs, I pushed my chair back and stood to follow him.

  “Where are you going, honey?” my mother asked, as if she’d dipped her voice in a vat of syrup. She only spoke to me that way in public, when she was within earshot of others.

  “To get the cart.” She couldn’t possibly expect me to sit there while she marched up to Mrs. O’Brien, who clearly wanted me to disappear even more than Derek did.

  “I was hoping you’d help me with the egg hunt. You used to love it when you were younger. Remember?”

  “I want to go with Dad.” It wasn’t just that I wanted to escape before she did anything humiliating, but that I genuinely felt like being with him. Being the only ones awake in the middle of the night made it seem like we had some sort of secret bond. Even if I was the only one aware of it.

  “Honey, I don’t think it’s such a great idea for you to drive the cart today.”

  “But I always do. I’ve driven it a million times.”

  “Henry?” she said with a strain in her voice, trying to get my dad to reinforce her position.

  But he didn’t have to. It was obvious she didn’t trust me driving a vehicle of any kind, even one that went five miles an hour on grass.

  “Forget it. I’m going home.” I took off before she could stop me. I knew she wouldn’t raise her voice or run after me. Not here.

  I slipped out through the back of the clubhouse and started across the golf course. It was the quickest way home. I didn’t care about the risk of getting struck by flying balls. Part of me wanted one to hit me. Maybe it would knock me out of my misery for good this time.

  Even though I never played, the location of every fairway, putting green, and hole was cemented into my brain. It wasn’t just from carting my dad around, but from all the times Derek and I had sneaked off to fool around here. Practically every square inch of the perfectly manicured course contained a memory from our past. My heart ached as I got to the fairway leading up to the twelfth hole. That was where it all began. When I reached the pole with the little flag marking the cup, I dug my heel into the green. Chunks of mud and grass came flying up and scattered over the surface.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” One of the groundskeepers emerged from a nearby bunker and started lumbering toward me. “Young lady, stop!”

  But I had already bolted down the other side of the green, the slope of the rough increasing my speed. On foot, he was both too far away and too fat to catch me. But I kept running, cutting diagonally into the shrubs behind the swampy pond that spilled out onto the far end of the parking lot. There was a service entrance a few hundred feet ahead that would land me out on the street.

  As I snaked around the lot, I heard the crisp snap of a club making contact with a ball. Instinctively, I ducked and stopped in my tracks. Looking up, I spotted the white ball arcing over a row of parked cars, its dimpled indentations glinting off the sun like a star. It was heading right for the roof of a silver Mercedes, but luckily landed in the hedges just a few feet to its side.

  Where had it come from? The ball was too far from the course to be a stray, and the driving range was all the way over on the other side of the clubhouse. A few seconds later, I heard another snap, followed by another ball flying overhead. This time, I traced its path backward: to the silhouette of a guy standing on the roof of an old Jaguar.

  Who was he and what was he doing hitting balls out here? It was definitely against club regulations, and no one ever broke the rules, at least not so blatantly. I crept closer to get a better look at him. He was tall and slender, with a mop of shaggy brown hair that covered half his face, obscuring his features. He wore a navy blazer, like he had just come from brunch, only I hadn’t noticed him inside. He reached down and pulled another ball from the bucket at his feet. Tossing it up in the air, he swung wildly. His whole body swayed in sync with his stroke, like he was putting everything he had into the effort. That’s when I noticed that he was holding the club from the wrong end, like it was a baseball bat. The ball followed the exact same path as the previous ones, landing closer to the Mercedes, like he was deliberately trying to hit it. The graceful motion of his body seemed so at odds with what he was actually doing, with the intensity and passion inherent in every stroke.

  A jolt ricocheted through me as I watched him reach for another ball. The pivoting of his hips, the flick of his head, the swing of his arm. I was certain I had never seen him before. But the electric sensation that I had, that I did know him, surged up and down my limbs like a live wire.

  Before I knew it, my legs were propelling me forward, darting between the
parked cars, leading me into the thick of trees beyond the lot where the ball had traveled, way off its target. Was it intentional? Did he mean to miss this time? Pushing the overgrown brush aside, I found the ball shimmering on a patch of mud, like it was waiting for me.

  Just then, I heard the faint sounds of a smooth, velvety voice. A male voice. I whipped around, hoping it belonged to the guy, that I would get a better look at his face, but no one was there.

  The voice grew increasingly louder. That’s when I realized why I couldn’t see who it belonged to: it was coming from inside my head, harmonizing with the melody like a siren call. Then, out of nowhere, words suddenly broke through, like clouds dissipating after a rain storm, clearing the sky.

  I see your face all over the place

  Like a haunting from above

  The only way for this to pass

  Is to let go of your love.

  All the pent-up emotion trapped in the melody came pouring out in the lyrics, his voice hanging on to each word like it might be his last. Combined—the tune, the words, the voice—it added up to something that seemed to match the mood of the boy hurling balls into oblivion, like it was his anthem as much as mine.

  And it was the first time I wanted to hear more.

  • • •

  Later that night, once my mother was in bed, I snuck out to the sunroom. Noah was long asleep and even though it was Sunday, my dad had gone to the office after dinner. It was the first chance I’d had all day to use the computer in private. My mother was already home by the time I walked back from the club, having ditched the rest of the Easter activities to keep a close eye on me. She didn’t even trust me enough to be alone in the house anymore, and hovered nearby like a swarm of wasps for the rest of the day.

  As the screen flickered to life, I went straight to Google and typed the lyrics into the search field. There was something about the way they danced in my head that made the melody not only bearable, but uplifting. It was like this mysterious voice, sweet as honey, was an organizing principle, turning the random chaos into something intelligible, something seductive.

  I scanned the results, turning the white dimpled golf ball, which I’d held on to all afternoon, around in my hand like it was a crystal ball. There were over five million hits in total. Yet not a single one yielded an exact match, or anything close to it. I clicked through the first few links. They led me to a bunch of random, unrelated websites. I tried to narrow down the results by inserting quotation marks and adding the term “song lyrics” to the search. When that didn’t help, I retyped every combination of those four lines I could think of, just in case I was remembering them wrong. But I knew I wasn’t. It was the only thing I was sure of. The voice was the clearest thing I’d heard since everything happened. Still, nothing came up, like the song didn’t want to be found. Like it didn’t exist.

  Maybe I really was going crazy.

  I gave up on the search and clicked over to Facebook. I didn’t even bother checking my page and went directly to Derek’s. I’d been stalking it daily since I’d been back, but there was nothing new. I logged on to iChat next and stared at the shadow of his name on my offline buddy list, like I could will him to appear, like the chime of him coming online would sound any second just because I wanted it to.

  I rolled the golf ball under my palm, as the lyrics echoed in my head. The image of the boy standing on the Jaguar flashed through my mind, sending the same rousing shock through my body as when I first saw him, and I wondered if I’d ever see him again.

  Tucking the ball into my pocket, I went out to the garden.

  CHAPTER 7

  A HIGH-PITCHED VOICE pierced through the music. It took a second to remember where I was: third period English. Lifting my head from the desk, I could make out the silhouette of Miss Porter looming over me. Her lips were moving but I didn’t hear a word she was saying.

  She tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to remove my headphones. I took out the left earbud and let it dangle against my hair, like a long, white, plastic earring. I forgot I was even still wearing them. I was listening to a new playlist I had put together last night. I had stayed up for hours scouring the Internet, trying to find the song, even though I knew it didn’t exist, that it was a figment of my imagination. That’s what led me to discover all these other songs. Music was usually just something I had on in the background, something I used to fill the silence. But last night, for the first time, I really listened to each song and what it was about—love and loss and heartache. Maybe it took getting your own heart broken to really understand the true power of music—and why people wrote it.

  “Are you all right?” Miss Porter whispered, crouching down so that we were on the same level. The rest of the class was busily writing in their notebooks.

  “I know I’m behind.” I pulled my mother’s tattered copy of Mrs. Dalloway from my bag. At least I remembered to bring it.

  “I’m not worried about that,” she said, smoothing over the front cover of my book. It was bent from being stuck between two others on the bookshelf in my parents’ room for so many years. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  She was the first teacher to come close to broaching the subject of my absence, like she was breaking some collective pact.

  “I’m fine,” I snapped. I knew she was only trying to be nice, that besides Annie, she was probably the only one in this entire building who was on my side. But her attention only made things worse.

  “The assignment is on the board,” she said, straightening up. “Just do the best you can, even if you haven’t finished the book yet.”

  I copied the question into my notebook—Describe how nature is an important theme in the novel and how it relates to Clarissa Dalloway. Without having read a single page of the book, it was all nonsense to me. English was normally my best subject and it was my only AP class. Derek said I would have been better off taking economics or government. He said English was a big waste of time since novels were all just a bunch of made up stories that had nothing to do with the real world. I was beginning to realize that maybe he was right. If only I had listened to him. About this class, and about everything else.

  Without my playlist to distract me, the velvety voice erupted in my head. It was deeper, huskier now, like footsteps walking over a gravel path. The lyrics came out haltingly, like candies pried from a child’s hand, as if the singer didn’t want to let them go, each word a part of himself he was reluctantly setting free. There was something brave, hypnotic even, about how vulnerable he sounded. It wasn’t until there was a knock at the classroom door that I realized I had drifted off once again.

  Miss Porter opened the door, where the hall monitor stood on the other side. He handed Miss Porter a small envelope with the school logo printed in the corner. I glanced up at the clock. There were still thirty-five minutes until the bell. But when the hall monitor interrupted class with a note, it always signaled news that couldn’t wait—urgent news. Bad news. Like when the hall monitor delivered Amy Ming a similar envelope in the middle of chemistry sophomore year, and it turned out her father had had a heart attack.

  Miss Porter read the name on the envelope, then glanced up at me. I could tell she was trying to be discreet, but it was too late. Everyone turned around all at once. That was my cue. I slid my books into my bag, pushed my chair back, and got up. Even with my head down, I could still feel the collective gaze of the class tracking me as I zigzagged my way around their desks to the front. I don’t think I could have felt more exposed, even if I were naked.

  “I didn’t get a chance to finish,” I said to Miss Porter, who was waiting by the door.

  “That’s okay,” she said, handing me the envelope.

  I turned my back and pulled out the neatly folded slip of paper. It was from Dr. Green. I was requested in her office. Immediately.

  A blunt pain penetrated my gut. Dr. Green was the school guidance counselor. Only the druggies and the seriously disturbed kids were forced to see h
er. No one ever went voluntarily.

  Her office was on the ground floor, next to the language lab. I had passed it many times over the last four years, but I had never been inside. I walked into the waiting area and stood next to a rotating rack filled with self-help pamphlets, absentmindedly spinning it around and around.

  “Olive?” Dr. Green appeared in the doorway. I nodded. “Come on in.”

  Her office was small but orderly. The soft glow of a standing lamp replaced the institutional fluorescent lights, and a Persian rug covered half the vinyl floor. But with the cinderblock walls and the standard-issue paneled ceiling, there was no masking the fact that we were still in school.

  She gestured toward the nubbly brown couch. I perched on the edge. I wasn’t planning on staying long.

  “I don’t believe we’ve formally met,” she said, settling into the armchair facing me. “I’m Dr. Green.”

  “I know.” I shifted on the couch.

  She crossed her legs and peered at me through her red horn-rimmed glasses. They were the same color as her shoes and skirt. She was famous for coordinating her eyewear with her outfits. “How’s your day going so far?”

  I glanced up at the clock, wishing I were anywhere but here. “Have I done something wrong?”