Frankie’s car purrs away.
I focus my eyes straight ahead again.
A loaf of bread. Ground coffee. Maybe some milk. If there’s a little money left over, I’ll buy something else for the root cellar. Something that will keep. That can be opened by feel, in the dark.
Coffee. Bread. Milk.
I pedal on, toward the grocery store.
Anders
Underground Music Studio is literally underground. It’s in the basement of an old three-story stone building, down with the roaring vents and knocking pipes. It shares an entrance with an insurance office and a custom alterations place called Nancy’s Needles, which always makes me think of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. I’m guessing the Nancy upstairs didn’t have the Sex Pistols in mind.
You step off Main Street, through a stenciled glass door, into a toothpaste-green hallway. Then, if you’re under thirty and you’re not looking for insurance or an embroidered sweatshirt, you head toward the metal door on your right. Through that door and down a flight is a big, brick-walled room full of buy-or-rent instruments and parts: guitars, drums, keyboards, microphones, racks of replacement strings, sheet music, plastic buckets with a rainbow of little plastic picks, plus some saggy corduroy couches and chairs. I’ve spent so much time in this room, waiting for my lessons, that it feels like my own living room. Just with way better accessories.
Around the room are soundproofed metal doors numbered one through four. Studio number four belongs to Flynn. Inside, its red brick walls are covered with posters, mostly from Flynn’s past tours playing backup guitar in once-huge rock bands. Spongy acoustic panels, like unfrosted sheet cakes, hang from the water-stained ceiling.
Now, at my lesson, Flynn and I sit facing each other on padded folding chairs. Flynn has a long, square chin and a close-lipped smile that’s warm even though it doesn’t reveal any teeth. He’s always so clean-shaven I wonder if he can grow a beard at all. Flynn could pass for thirty, if it weren’t for all the gray in his hair. That and the age of his T-shirts.
I’m holding Yvonne across my lap. My knuckles are still raw. There’s no way to hide them here.
But Flynn doesn’t say anything about that.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s hear that Dream Theater piece.”
I start the intro. Arpeggiated chords in an easy-to-mess-up pattern, unexpected dissonances.
“Okay,” Flynn stops me halfway through. “That’s great. But I think you can speed it up even more.”
“I was just worried about pushing the tempo too much.”
Flynn spreads his hands, smiling at me. “The other guys aren’t here. You can push it all you want.”
I grin back at him. “Yeah. Okay.”
I play it again. Almost twice as fast. My fingertips are a blur. Everything feels strong and clear, liquid, but controlled. The joy of it pulses through me.
This time Flynn doesn’t stop me. He just sits back, listening, his eyes on my hands.
I lift my fingers and break the last note.
Flynn shakes his head. He’s grinning broadly. His voice is soft. “Wow, man,” he says. “Wow.”
Flynn is pretty scanty with his praise. I mean, he’s said nice things before, lots of times. But I don’t think he’s ever said “wow” quite like this. I tuck my chin to my chest and let myself smile, too, just a little.
Flynn kicks up one foot, crossing his legs. “Hey,” he says. “Speaking of the band, how was the show last night?”
“All right. Good crowd. I think they were close to capacity.”
Flynn nods. “You must be making Ike Lawrence a happy man.”
“Yeah, he keeps threatening to pay us in actual money. Especially now that we’re going to do two nights a week.”
“‘Threatening’?”
I look down at Yvonne’s neck and pretend to adjust a peg. “Yeah. And I keep telling him no.”
Flynn’s eyebrows quirk. “Still? Why?”
“Because that would make it—I don’t know. Something it’s not.”
He smiles. “Professional?”
“No, just—we all made a deal to keep things not professional until we graduated. Plus, it’s cool that there are no expectations, you know? We can just play. We know it won’t be that way once—”
“Once you’re huge rock stars?” Flynn supplies, grinning wider.
“Well.” I shift my shoulders. “I wasn’t going to say it.”
“I know. That’s why I said it.”
I feel my cheeks start to flare. Jesus. You can’t be a metal singer who blushes. “Anyway . . .” I say, looking at the pegs again. I’m so good with these excuses now, they come out like the chorus of a song. “I don’t want to make that kind of deal with the audience until we have to. Because once there’s payment, things have to change, right? Like, ‘Hey, I paid you, now entertain me.’ Or like, ‘Here. This thing I made up just sitting around in my boxer shorts deserves your money.’”
Flynn laughs out loud. “You are the least pushy lead singer I’ve ever known, you know that? You’re sure you’re not a bassist?”
“Yeah. Jezz has that taken care of.”
“You could be a two-bass band. No melodies. Just great hooks.”
“I’ll think about that.”
“Hey—maybe Ike could pay you in trade or something,” Flynn suggests. “For a guy who looks like he fronts a motorcycle gang, he’s a surprisingly good baker.”
“Yeah.” I grin. “We could be the world’s only death metal band that gets paid in cookies.”
Flynn throws his head back and laughs. “That could be your first album title. Paid in Cookies.”
“Appetite for Oatmeal Raisin.”
Flynn laughs so hard he has to wipe his eyes. “Perfect. Until Guns N’ Roses sues you.”
The tightness that’s been hanging out in my shoulders loosens a little more. Dad’s sighs, and Patrick’s words, and keeping up the act in front of Frankie all seem smaller and less important now. God, I’m so glad I have Flynn.
Flynn has known me since I was nine years old. Half of my life. He looks exactly the same as he did back then, lanky and tan and long-haired and ageless. Except I used to think he was really tall. Now I’m the taller one.
The first time I saw him play in concert was at a big outdoor music festival. My parents made the two-hour drive to northern Wisconsin to let me stand near the stage, not moving, just staring up at him like a human video camera. I stood at the front of that screaming crowd, watching and listening, and after two songs, I wanted to quit guitar forever. Not because I was sure I would never be able to play like Flynn, which was part of it. But because I couldn’t stand to imagine myself sitting in a tiny brick room picking at some crappy folk tune while this stage-lit guitar god sat on a folding chair two feet away. I felt like a worm wriggling up to a dragon and asking how to breathe fire.
But at my next lesson, Flynn was just Flynn again, with his battered Iron Maiden T-shirt and his long, messy hair. He cracked jokes. He made me feel comfortable. He taught me the opening of a Black Sabbath song. And I didn’t quit.
Eventually I stopped being intimidated. The awe faded to something warmer and more familiar, like the feeling you have for your favorite uncle or a really cool older brother. And then, last fall, there was a moment during a lesson when I noticed a flaw in his playing for the first time. It was just a slip, a split second of less-than-perfect technique. Don’t get me wrong—Flynn is still an amazing guitarist. But now I’m good enough to see the tiny imperfections. Good enough to know how to fix them. If someone threw me and Flynn into a musical battle today, note for note, phrase for phrase, I’m not sure who would win.
I don’t want to know. I’m too afraid it would be me.
Flynn sags back in his chair and crosses his arms over his ancient Alice in Chains T-shirt. He scratches his upper arm. He’s missing part of one finger on his right hand—his strumming hand. It ends at the middle knuckle with a healed-over stump. I’ve never asked him h
ow it happened. Just like he doesn’t ask me about my roughed-up knuckles or the occasional dark circles under my eyes. “You play any of your newest stuff last night?” he asks.
“Yeah. We did ‘Final Round.’ And ‘Absentminded.’ And I played ‘Deep Water’ on the acoustic. But that one’s not that new.”
“What are you working on now? Anything even newer?”
I run my hand over Yvonne’s glossy side, trying to look cool. I don’t have to wear the rock-star face with Flynn—he’s known me way too long for that—but I don’t want to seem like a psycho, either. “I wrote a few more this week.”
“A few,” Flynn echoes. “This week.”
“Yeah.”
“How many is a few?”
“Five.”
“Whoa.” Flynn tilts his head. Spirals of long gray hair swing sideways, falling over his shoulder. “Five. Are you getting even faster?” He looks at me wonderingly. “Five songs? Five finished songs?”
It’s not me that’s getting faster. It’s something else.
At least the way I play feels like part of me. It’s my own hands holding the guitar, my fingers on the strings.
But the songs—even when they take over completely, they’re not really part of me at all.
“They’re not all great,” I say dismissively. “And some are just solo pieces.”
“Anders.” Flynn shakes his head. He smiles again, teasingly this time. “I’ve never heard you play anything of your own that I’d call ‘not great.’”
Anything of my own. My stomach tightens.
Flynn must see it in my face. “You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Kind of.”
“Because it looks like you’re second-guessing yourself again.” Flynn watches me for a second. “You know how rare you are, right? You know how few high school bands aren’t just playing a set of crappy covers, plus two original songs that are such rip-offs of Metallica or Nirvana that they might as well be covers, too?”
“I don’t know.” I look at my raw knuckles. If there’s anyone in the world who I don’t want to disappoint, it’s Flynn. But that article is still echoing in my head, along with Frankie’s words about muses being real, and graduation is just a couple months away, and everything is starting to feel so huge that I need to let part of it out. Just the tiniest, most careful part. “Sometimes it feels like . . .” I start. “Like this was just given to me. You know?”
Flynn tilts his head. “You mean your talent?”
“Talent, yeah. If you want to call it that.”
“I want to call it that.” Flynn grins. “Okay. Is that a problem?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t that make it, like . . . less real?”
“The way you play sounds real to me.”
I meet Flynn’s eyes. “Yeah, but . . .” I’ve opened the door, but I’m not ready to step through it. I force one toe over the edge. “What about earning it? Isn’t something you earn more yours than something that’s just given to you?”
Flynn’s eyes flick, sharp, to the calluses on my fingertips. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t practice like a maniac?”
“No. I practice. But that’s what I’d be doing anyway. It’s not work. It’s not pain. It’s just me.”
“You think you need pain?” Now his eyes move to my knuckles. “You need to be the suffering artist?”
I breathe in hard. The room smells like rust.
Maybe that’s all this is. Maybe I’m only trying to hurt myself. Maybe the thing I’m so afraid of, the thing I think I have to hide, doesn’t even matter. Maybe, as usual, Flynn understands even more about me than I do.
Flynn puts his elbows on his knees and leans in. “I see you, kid,” he says softly. “I see you. Your commitment to this. Maybe it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, because you want to do it, but you’re still giving it everything you have.” He turns up his palms. “And even if talent is just something that’s given to certain people and not to others, what’s wrong with that? I mean . . . they call it being gifted for a reason.”
I look down at the guitar strings. I feel myself start to smile. “You know, sometimes coming here feels like going to confession.”
Flynn laughs. He makes a sloppy sign of the cross in my direction. “Bless you, my son. Now give me five Hail Marys and ten B-minor scales.”
And then we go back to lesson stuff.
There’s not much that I can’t tell Flynn. This makes the things that I can’t tell him seem worse.
I’ve never told him about that night in the woods beyond the Crow’s Nest.
I’ve never told anybody. It’s been long enough, almost two years, that I can tell myself different versions of the story, shifting things around until it’s all totally meaningless. I mean, what actually happened? A conversation. Two people talking. That’s it.
If things started to change afterward—the songs, the way my hands could move, things with girls like Frankie Lynde—it could all be a coincidence.
That’s what I’ve told myself, over and over and over.
I wish I could believe it.
Thea
They’re going to tear the school down.
Someday. Soon. Whenever the town finds the money to replace it.
The building is unsalvageable, all mismatched brick and leaky latticed windows and hardwood floors that groan and sag. It stands five blocks from Main Street, two blocks from the entrance to the park, not far from the leafy ravine with the old swinging bridge above the river. It’s just far enough from the woods to be safe. Mostly.
At school I have three classes with Anders and one without. There aren’t that many options, and there aren’t that many seniors, so our having most classes together isn’t strange. We don’t speak to each other, of course. Most days no one speaks to me at all, so that isn’t strange, either. But I know exactly where he sits. In the commons. At lunch. During every class.
I’m always on the edge. Watching.
The Anders of Greenwood High School doesn’t draw attention to himself. He keeps quiet in class. Never raises his hand. Keeps his eyes on the front of the room, so it looks like he’s paying attention, but I can see his fingers working beneath his desk, shaping imaginary chords, tapping rhythms on the denim drum of his knee. Sometimes he takes notes when there’s nothing to take notes on, and his writing comes out in columns of tight, miniature print with spaces where each verse ends or chorus begins, and then he’s not actually taking notes at all. Sometimes he falls asleep with his head propped carefully up on one arm.
The last half hour of each day, I have study hall in the library. I sit at a tiny table in the reference section, between walls of sagging bookshelves. Anders has art class just down the hall. The art room is close enough to the library that I can stand in the nook beside the chipped white drinking fountains, watching to make sure he’s gone through the art room door, and still get to my seat by the time the bell rings.
I’ve spent the semester reading Collier’s Illustrated Encyclopedia. I’m on Volume Twenty: Renner to Sibelius. The pages are whisper thin. They smell like bread dough and dust. But I don’t always keep my mind on the pages.
Because Frankie Lynde is in the same study hall.
She and her friends sit at a table in front of me and slightly to the left. When I bend over the tiny gray print, I can catch their faces, their eyes, their moving lips.
The others are Sasha, Carson, and Will. Sasha has red-brown hair and four piercings in each ear. Everything about her is sharp: her collarbones, her light brown eyes, her voice. Carson is blond and loud and big shouldered. Will has dark hair and deadpan delivery. Both guys look like they’ve wandered out of a men’s clothing catalog, polished and combed and perfect skinned.
But neither of them is Anders. They can’t even hold a candle.
I stare at the encyclopedia and listen. Their conversations are songs with five changing chords: School. Other people. Movies. The weekend. And Last Things. Everybody talks about Last Thing
s.
They’re talking about Last Things now.
“You should tell him that,” Sasha is saying as they all sit down.
“I am not going to tell him that,” says Frankie.
“Why not? They need a gimmick. And I’m sure they’d all look great in eyeliner.”
“I thought their gimmick was being younger than the songs they play,” says Carson.
Frankie smacks him playfully. “They don’t do covers anymore. That was just when they were starting out.”
“Hey, I think they should do more covers. I want to hear Anders Thorson sing ‘Blank Space.’”
“I want to hear him do ‘Happy,’” says Will. He puts on a death metal growl. “‘Because I’M HAPPY. . . .’”
Sasha and Carson laugh.
The librarian shushes in their direction.
“You know they don’t do covers anymore,” Sasha says to Carson a second later. “Weren’t you there Friday night?”
“No. I wasn’t. Thanks so much for noticing.”
“Where were you?” Sasha demands. “Why weren’t you there?”
“Because I accidentally backed my dad’s truck into the garage door.”
“So the truck’s in the shop?”
“No. The truck is fine. There’s, like, a two-millimeter scratch on the bumper. But my dad blew a gasket.”
“Why do people say that?” asks Frankie. “‘Blow a gasket.’ What is a gasket?”
“It’s the part that regulates the truck’s emotions,” says Will.
Frankie laughs.
The librarian’s voice slices the dusty air. “Keep it down over there, or I’ll have to separate you.”
“Sorry, Ms. Schmidt,” says Frankie.
“Uh-oh,” whispers Sasha. “Ms. Schmidt’s going to blow a gasket.”
“Ms. Schmidt can blow me,” mutters Carson.
Frankie smacks him again.
I turn the page. Sacajawea in faded gray ink points the way down a craggy hillside.
“God.” Sasha lets out a sigh. She flips open a textbook. “Why am I even taking physics? When am I going to use any of this?”
Last Things Page 6