In Your Dreams (Falling #4)(13)

Jeanie leans toward the table, propping her bag up on the seat she just vacated, and pulling a pen from deep inside. She tugs a napkin loose from the holder on our table and scribbles down an address, folding it in half and handing it to me when she’s done.

“Get there around one thirty, just to make sure she’s there,” she says, closing her hands around mine and the napkin. Our eyes meet and a gentleness paints her face. “So glad to meet you, Casey.”

I thank her and follow her out to the parking lot where she waves me off as she steps into an old pickup truck, the metal bracelets on her arm jangling with her motion. I wave back, and as she pulls from the lot, I realize she’s done it—I’m smiling again, ear-to-ear, and I have no idea why I’m so happy.

Witch.





Murphy


“Miss Sullivan? I have to pee!”

Sasha, the very loud and very hyper seven-year-old, is bouncing in front of me with her fist stuffed between her legs. She’s gone to the bathroom twice already, but lord help me if I think I can call her bluff. The last time I tried, they had to close down my classroom for two days to disinfect.

“Sasha, there are three minutes left in class. Do you think you can make it?” I ask.

As predicted, she shakes her head no emphatically. I hand over the pink pass and she darts out the door. She’ll be back just in time to grab her bag and run to the curb to go home. It doesn’t matter, though, because Sasha will never go anywhere in music. I know I shouldn’t label my students, or limit their dreams, but that girl—she’s completely tone deaf. I thought once that if I could just hold her head still for long enough that maybe she’d be able to pick up on something in the class, but even at her calmest, the sounds she makes are just…well…they’re awful.

“Can I try one more time, Miss S?”

Now Bronwyn, on the other hand, is a musical genius. She is always here when I open early in the morning, and she’s asked to borrow so many instruments over the weekends. She always brings them back, and so far, the only one she hasn’t been able to sort of figure out is the trombone. I think that’s only because her arms are short and her lips are small. In a few more years, I predict she’ll be mastering that one as well.

I nod yes to her and let her play the selection from our Mozart for Beginners book on her small keyboard, which she glides through easily, her fingers effortless on the electric keys. I praise her and consider giving the next bar as an assignment to the dozen or so other kids in the summer class before the bell rings; I’m left holding the music book in the air with nobody in the room to talk to. Sasha breezes in quickly, grabbing her bag, and the door slams closed behind her.

I chuckle to myself as I clean up the aftermath of today’s set of classes. The summer school music program doesn’t pay as well as the regular classes taught during the school year. I quickly realized that my role over the summer was more about babysitting and filling in between activities until parents could come pick up their kids. But if working the summer classes keeps my foot in the door for the regular ones in the fall, I’ll manage to endure them.

Teaching isn’t my passion. I love the kids, well…at least the ones who love music, like I do. I get a kick out of seeing them succeed, and even the ones who aren’t dedicated to practicing make strides. It’s inspiring. But it’s not writing my own music and performing on stage. That’s where my heart is. Unfortunately, my confidence has yet to catch up to my heart.

My parents didn’t want me to teach over the summer. They wanted me to head to Nashville instead, to spend the summer with my cousin Corrine, maybe get a taste of what a real music town is like. I thought about it for almost a week, and worked myself into having panic attacks. As soon as I signed the contract to teach over the summer, I could breathe again.

Nope. Not ready.

It seems in the race to personal success, the order goes: heart, parents’ required belief in me, and then my own nerve.

The entire episode did open up my creative side, though. That’s how the song happened. Actually, the song is really only one of maybe a dozen that I wrote over two weeks. It was a very Taylor Swift time in my life, minus any real actual breakup. That one song, though, just happened to hit a certain nerve with people. I know it’s the one that gets me added to the list at Paul’s every week. It’s the one people have started shouting when I don’t play it, and, except for last night when I ran into Houston, it’s the one I usually give in and play.

I love that song. I wrote it as a way to clean out a lot of crap left over in my head, old feelings and frustrations from high school. It’s been four years, and really—I’m over most of it. But there are still those days where a thought penetrates my daily routine, and I think about how I never quite fit in. It’s partly my fault; I didn’t want to fit in. That was my thing, being…different. But then I realized I’d put up this strange caution tape around me by being that way, and breaking out of it was impossible.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve stepped through some weird time-travel portal because what the f*ck is Casey Coffield doing standing next to my car? And why is he kneeling next to it, running a finger along the driver’s side door? And motherf*cking hell…

“Did you…seriously just hit my car?” I ask, stopped at the front driver’s tire, my hand slung forward, my fingers pointing at the deep gash that runs about four feet along my car. My guitar strap slides from my other shoulder, and I manage to catch it before my guitar case gets cracked too.