by A. Destiny
Especially Jacob’s.
His bow seemed to barely touch the strings. It was like the music was coming out of his chest or haloing around his head instead of vibrating out of his instrument. When he finished, he didn’t aim his big, beaming smile at Nanny. He shone it at me.
And when we improvised a call-and-response to birdsongs, Jacob didn’t close his eyes like the other students, the better to hear the distant trills and chirps. He looked at me.
Was he giving me those adoring looks because he thought I was cute, in a frizzy-haired, flat-chested, faux vegetarian kind of way? Was he falling for me?
Or was he just happy that I was finally ensnared in his earnest fiddler’s world and finding that it didn’t suck?
After an idyllic picnic lunch, Nanny gestured for me to help her up from the folding chair we’d brought for her.
“All right, folks,” she said. “Let’s head back.”
There was less laughing and chatting during the walk back to the cabin. After everyone had set up their music stands inside, I found out why.
“Okay,” Nanny announced. “We’re going to take everything we did out there, all that freedom, and we are going to whip it into shape. I want technique. I want precision. I want perfection. But I also want the breeze in the trees and the badminton. I want light and air and fun. Easy enough?”
Every face fell—while I pressed my knuckles against my lips to keep from laughing.
“You were holding out on me,” I whispered to Nanny. “You’re just as evil as ever.”
“Don’t think of it as evil,” Nanny said, giving me a wink. “Think of it as scarily effective.”
She began combing through the students’ playing, measure by measure, sometimes note by note. Nanny led me around the room like her own personal puppet, ordering me to show Shana how to play her sequence with more vibrato, or demonstrate to Will how a phrase could become breezier.
Sometimes, of course, Nanny had to correct me, but she’d been instructing me for so long that I could usually figure out what she wanted with nothing more than a two-word prompt.
Before long, and without really deciding to do so, Nanny and I started teaching in tandem. While she helped Victoria smooth out her bowing, I gave Will tips on his finger work. When Tamara needed help on an intricate passage, she grabbed me because I was closer. Meanwhile, Nanny tapped Harley’s music stand with her good hand to help him stay on rhythm.
But then a moment came when the most natural place for me to go was to Jacob.
He needed me too. Being in the classroom was making him think too hard again. I could practically see the wheels turning in his head, trying to be both breezy and note perfect; an artist and a technician.
I wished I could tell him that life was a lot easier when you strove for neither, like me.
But of course I didn’t say that. Instead I watched him quietly for a moment before I sidled up to him and wrapped my fingers around his left wrist.
Squawwwwwk.
Jacob’s bow skittered off his fiddle strings with such force that I had to duck to avoid a poke in the eye. Once I was crouched on the floor, it took a moment of heavy breathing before I could get up again. Apparently, that was what happened to me when I touched Jacob, even on the wrist.
Jacob, too, looked winded and his neck had blotched right up.
“$(#@, I’m sorry,” he whispered, ducking down to help me up.
“$(#@?!” I whispered back with a giggle. “Clearly you’ve been hanging out with a few too many blacksmiths.”
“Maybe one in particular,” Jacob said. “You’re a bad influence, what can I say?”
You could say that you like my bad influence, I thought, pining. Then you could toss your fiddle on the table and take me out to the woods, where we could make out like mad.
My inhale was shuddery and little sad before I said, “Anyway, I was just trying to get you to drop your wrist. I think that would loosen up your trill, loosen up everything, really.”
“Along with the flexible forearm?” Jacob said skeptically.
“Yup,” I said, trying not to sound bored by this discussion of fiddle technique. “Everything loose, everything easy.”
“Yet every note perfectly in tune and right on the beat,” Jacob said, shaking his head.
“Yup,” I said again, laughing this time. “Simple.”
Jacob shrugged and tried my wrist-dropping trick. But that made him forget to loosen his bow arm. When I corrected that, his wrist crept up again. That’s when Nanny sauntered over and watched Jacob play for a couple of measures.
“I think this is a wrist issue,” Nanny said, squinting at Jacob’s left hand. “You need to drop it a little and . . . Nell, show him what I mean.”
Shooting Jacob an apologetic glance, I picked up my own fiddle and played the passage with my wrist low and my limbs loose. The music was as light and fast as a bird’s wing.
“See!” Nanny said. “Simple. And impossible, I know, darlin’. But just keep working at it. One day—click—it’s gonna be right there, and you’ll thank me for all this torture.”
Jacob gave Nanny a sheepish smile. She headed over to Victoria, but I stayed put.
“You know I totally hate you right now,” Jacob whispered to me.
“I’m sorry!” I whisper-wailed.
He laughed and cringed all at once.
“Don’t be,” he said. “You can’t help it if you’re a ridiculously talented Finlayson, any more than I can help being . . . whatever I am.”
“You’re a fiddler, Jacob,” I said fiercely. “A real one. Please don’t doubt that. So yeah, you didn’t have what I had growing up. But you’ve got so much passion. And, hello, you’re here! You’re learning every day.”
“You’re right,” Jacob said, gazing at the floor. “I just wish sometimes that it didn’t have to be so hard to get what you want.”
Since his eyes were downcast, I allowed my gaze to linger on his shiny hair, his beautifully imperfect nose, his sharp jawline.
“Believe me,” I whispered. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Chapter Twenty
Here was another thing Nanny hadn’t told me about her fiddling class. On the second-to-last day of the session, they got to escape from Camden!
Of course, Nanny didn’t refer to it as an escape. She called it a field trip.
We left early in the morning, all of us piling into Camden’s big, clunky, forest-green van. We were headed for Asheville, about an hour’s drive from the school.
My family went to this little North Carolina city often to play concerts. It was one of my favorite places on earth.
On one hand, it was a cute, small town tucked away in the mountains—the kind of place you go to get away from the big city. But in many ways, Asheville was more urban than Atlanta. Where Atlanta sprawled, overrun with strip malls, downtown Asheville was packed densely with walkable streets and plazas, and awesome, quirky shops topped by lofts. It was filled with artists and musicians, many of them just a few years older than me. Rent was cheap in Asheville, so they were free to prowl the sidewalks, making renegade public art.
That’s why we were going there. Nanny (I’d learned) subjected all her Camden students to the Busking Test. They had to play on various street corners and see if they could hack performing for random strangers.
When we made it down from Camden’s mountain, I couldn’t stop myself from whooping with joy. I turned my face toward the open window, grinning as the wind did its best to breeze through my hair. (In honor of my return to civilization, I’d flatironed my less-black-than-ever bob and sprayed it into submission. I was also wearing one of my favorite shreddy tank tops and a miniskirt.)
“I have permits for each of you,” Nanny announced, passing back a stack of stapled papers, “as well as maps of all the places busking is authorized in the city. So if the police hassle you, you can just produce your paperwork.”
“Ms. Annie,” Victoria said breathlessly, “you make it sound
like we’re planning a caper instead of just playing fiddle on the sidewalk.”
“Just playing fiddle on the sidewalk?” Nanny gasped. “Vicki, nothing’s more badass than busking.”
“Nanny!” I gasped. “Did you just use the word ‘badass’?!”
“Sorry, sweetheart.” Nanny shrugged. “There’s really no other word for busking. It’s not for the faint of heart. To start with, you don’t have a captive audience who’ve bought tickets to your recital and have to be polite. Passersby are brutally honest. You play something that hooks ’em, they’ll stop and give you two precious minutes of their time. If you really wow them, they’ll drop a dollar into your fiddle case. But it’s also good if people tell you you’re noise pollution. That shows you made an impression.”
“Insults are good?” Jacob asked from his seat next to mine.
“Oh, yes,” Nanny said, nodding hard. “That’s why I harass you people every day. The only thing I don’t want to hear about is indifference. If someone walks right by you without noticing you’re there? Well, that means you’re background noise. You’re the wallpaper. And you all have too much personality for that.”
After we arrived, Harley parked our mortifying short bus in a parking deck. We all grabbed our fiddles and stumbled out to the sidewalk.
“It feels so . . . crowded,” Shana said, clutching her violin case tightly. A small pack of people sauntered by, all of them proudly wearing that skinny, scruffy, sleepy-eyed look of college kids on summer break. One of the girls had teal hair and chipped black nail polish. The guys all wore T-shirts advertising bands that nobody had heard of yet. Their hair looked like their girlfriends had given them DIY trims with razor blades. They were so impossibly cool, I couldn’t help but stare.
I sneaked a glance at Jacob to see if he was playing it cooler than I was. But he had the exact same stargazey, yearning look on his face. It made me want to throw my arms around him and bury my face in his neck.
I didn’t do that, of course. I couldn’t do that. But I did hazard a smile at Jacob, a big, geeks-like-us grin.
Meanwhile, Harley spotted a chain coffee shop across the street about a block away.
“Shana!” he said, squeezing her arm.
“Ooh!” she cried, clapping her hands. “We are going over there right now.”
“She’s been moaning about missing her precious soy lattes ever since we got to Camden,” Harley confided to the rest of us. Shana laughed and punched his arm.
“I could go for a Frappuccino,” Tamara piped up. Murmuring in agreement, the group began to walk toward the shop. But I hesitated.
Coffee chains made me itchy. They were well lit and easily wipe-downable. The baristas wore green visors. Everybody had heard of the bands on their sound system.
“I wonder if they’ll have pumpkin flavoring, even though it’s summer?” Shana said.
Jacob held back with me, and once again, we exchanged a secret smile.
“I have a feeling that you think pumpkin soy lattes are a crime against nature,” he whispered.
“Not against nature so much as against coffee!” I said, curling my lip.
“This from the girl who likes her coffee white,” Jacob teased me.
“Beige!” I protested. “You can still taste the coffee under the milk. Faintly. How did you know how I drink my coffee anyway?”
“Do you know how I take mine?”
Without hesitation, I said, “Black, half a teaspoon of sugar.”
“See?” Jacob said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve been having breakfast together for a while now.”
I felt the same way I had that first morning Jacob saw me in a swimsuit—revealed.
But not necessarily in a bad way.
“Anyway,” Jacob went on, “I’m not feeling much like coffee right now. I’d rather eat.”
“Want an early lunch?” I proposed, glancing at my phone. “It’s eleven thirty. If we eat now, we’ll be hungry again before we head back to Camden, and we can get some gelato.”
“You know,” Jacob said, as we crossed the street, “to look at you, you would never guess how obsessed you are with food.”
“I’m only obsessed when I’ve been subsisting on a diet of meat-free casseroles,” I said.
“Well, I’m obsessed all the time,” Jacob admitted. “But I’m a guy. We’re universally acknowledged to be pigs. Most girls are all about the salads.”
“I guess I’m different from most girls,” I said with a shrug.
“You’re singular,” Jacob said.
“What?”
“You said that to me once,” he said. His neck started to go blotchy, and he avoided my eyes. “When I called you ‘y’all.’ You said, ‘I am singular.’ I’ve got to say, I agree.”
“Singular” doesn’t seem like a compliment. After “smart,” most girls would probably prefer “pretty” or “bubbly” or “hot.”
But “singular” made me swoon. Once again, I had that urge to throw myself at Jacob.
Instead I hurried over to Nanny, who was holding the coffee shop door for the other students.
“Well,” she mused, “I suppose as long as we’re here I might get myself a grande macchiato with an extra shot and a caramel drizzle.”
“Nanny!” I said. “How many more times are you going to shock me today?”
“Sweetie,” Nanny said, “exactly how old do you think I am?!”
“You are fabulously youthful,” I said, giving her a quick hug. “But you are old-fashioned.”
Nanny let the door fall closed after the last of the fiddlers had gone inside. She gave me a tilt-headed squint.
“You know,” she said, “a person who likes old music isn’t necessarily old-fashioned.”
She glanced at Jacob, who was standing a few feet behind me, his hands dug into his shorts pockets, his neck unblotching slowly.
“That was one of the things,” Nanny said, her voice low, “that I hoped you’d learn at Camden.”
“I—” I began, “I mean I—”
I didn’t know what to say, except that it was kind of hard to change a major cornerstone of your worldview while standing in the doorway of a coffee shop.
And on an empty stomach.
“I . . . think Jacob and I are going to skip the coffee,” I said. “We’re going to get something to eat instead. Then we’ll find a spot to play.”
Nanny’s smile was sweet and open.
“That’s fine,” she said. “Have fun, sweetheart. Since our phones work here, I’ll call you if I have any problems with this fancy camera of yours.”
Nanny patted my camera bag, which was slung over her shoulder. She’d asked to borrow it so she could shoot everyone while they were busking.
I gasped and slapped my back pocket. I’d gotten so used to my phone not working at Camden that I’d almost forgotten it was possible to make calls on it instead of just using it as a clock.
“Yeah, call me if you need anything,” I said, pulling my phone out. “But I’ve got the camera all set up for you on auto-everything, especially auto-focus. You should be good, even with one hand.”
“Okeydoke,” Nanny said. “Oh, and Nell. For your busking, I recommend that you go to the corner of Wall Street and Battery Park Avenue. It’s perfect for you.”
“Wall Street and Battery Park,” I murmured, pulling my map and permit out of my other pocket. “Okay, why not? See you later, Nanny.”
And then, because she’d been cool about me ditching the group—with a boy—I gave her another hug. I reached to open the coffee shop door for her, but she waved me away.
“You’ve been very helpful, Nell, since—” Nanny lifted her splinted hand and frowned at it. “I know it hasn’t been easy.”
“None of this has been easy,” I admitted quietly. I glanced over my shoulder at Jacob. “But a smart lady once told me that nothing worth doing was easy.”
I wondered if Nanny knew what I was really talking about.
“Tha
t woman was a genius,” she said, “whoever she was. Now go get yourself a cheeseburger, Nell. You look too skinny, and you’re definitely not fooling me with that silly vegetarian act.”
Jacob heard that bit and didn’t stop laughing until we were half a block down the street.
“I’m glad you find me so amusing in my anemic state,” I said.
“Nell . . .” Jacob suddenly stopped walking and turned toward me. I felt a swoop in my belly.
“Yes?” I said. It came out squeaky.
“I want to . . . ,”Jacob said hesitantly, “I want to buy you that cheeseburger.”
Okay, not the romantic declaration I’d been expecting.
“You’re not serious,” I said, giving him a shove.
“I’m as serious as a fried chicken leg,” Jacob said.
I flushed as we resumed walking. It seemed weird that whenever Jacob made a gallant gesture toward me, it involved meat. But I’d take it.
“God, that seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?” I said. “That night in the kitchen?”
Jacob pointed at my palm, where my smooth pink scar was already starting to fade away.
“It seems like we’ve known each other for longer than a few weeks,” Jacob said quietly. “That’s for sure.”
“Jacob,” I said haltingly. I was on the verge of asking him how he felt about me.
Or just telling him how I felt about him.
I would rather risk extreme embarrassment than not know what this thing was between us.
“I—”
My voice literally caught in my throat. I couldn’t speak! Clearly, my body was saving me from myself.
Meanwhile, Jacob had spotted a café.
“Here’s a place that smells burger-y,” he said.
“What?!” I asked breathlessly.
“Look,” Jacob said, pointing through the window. The walls of the restaurant were wood-paneled, and the tables were draped in red-and-white-checked oilcloth. Right up front, two burly guys were eating. One was shoving a fistful of fries into his mouth, while the other hoisted a massive burger. As he took a bite, some bloody-looking juice dripped onto his plate.
There was no way I was eating one of those in front of Jacob. Besides, the homespun look of this place reminded me too much of Camden.