The Nix(30)

“Want to see me do it again?” Bishop said as the screen flashed GAME OVER.

“Did you win?”

“What do you mean, win?”

“Did you save all the cities?”

“You can’t save all the cities.”

“So what’s the point?”

“Annihilation is inevitable. The point is delaying it.”

“So people can escape?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Do it again.”

And so Bishop was onto level six or seven in his second game, and Samuel was watching Bishop’s face instead of the game—how his face was so focused and undisturbed, even while missiles crashed down around his cities, even while his hands jerked the controller this way and that—when, from outside the room, Samuel heard something else, something new.

It was music. Clean and clear and not at all like the scratchy and digitized sounds currently coming out of the television. Musical scales, a solo string instrument going up and down a scale.

“What’s that?”

“That’s my sister,” Bishop said. “Bethany. She’s practicing.”

“Practicing what?”

“Violin. She’s going to be a world-famous violinist. She’s really outstandingly good.”

“I’ll say!” Samuel blurted out maybe too enthusiastically, a bit out of proportion to the actual conversation. But he wanted Bishop to like him. He was trying to be agreeable. Bishop gave him a brief and curious look before staring forward again, blankly, onward to levels ten, eleven, while the music outside changed from a basic scale to real actual music, a soaring and densely noted solo that Samuel could not believe was coming from a person and not the radio.

“That’s really your sister?”

“Yep.”

“I want to see,” Samuel said.

“Wait. Watch this,” Bishop said as he annihilated two nukes at the same time with one shot.

“Just for one second,” Samuel said.

“But I haven’t even lost a city yet. This could the highest scoring game of Missile Command ever. You could be watching something historic.”

“I’ll be right back.”

“Fine,” Bishop said. “Your loss.”

And Samuel left to find the source of the music. He followed the sounds through the main vaulted hallway, through the gleaming kitchen and to the back of the house, to an office where he slowly wrapped his nose around the frame of the door and peeked inside and saw, for the first time, Bishop’s sister.

They were twins.

Bethany had Bishop’s face, the same check-mark eyebrows, the same quiet intensity. She looked like an elven princess on the cover of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel: immortally young and beautiful and wise. The sharp angles of her cheeks and nose fit her better than they did Bishop. Whereas Bishop looked angry, she looked stately, statuesque. Her long and thick auburn hair, thin eyebrows crinkled in concentration, long neck and delicate arms and erect posture and the careful way she sat in a skirt, a kind of propriety and elegance and ladylike maturity that just killed Samuel. He loved the way she moved with her violin, the way the whole apparatus of her head and neck and torso seemed to glide with the movements of her bow. This was in sharp contrast to the kids in his school’s orchestra, who forced sound out of their instruments mechanically and abusively. Her playing was so effortless.

He didn’t know it then, but this would become his template for beauty for the rest of his life. Any girl he ever met from now on would be compared, in his head, to this girl.

She finished on a long note where she did that amazing thing where the bow kept moving back and forth and yet there was no break at all, just a prolonged, liquid sound. And she opened her eyes and looked directly at him, and they stared at each other for a terrifying moment until she brought the violin down into her lap and said, “Hi there.”

Samuel had never felt such uncomfortable longings before. This was the first time his body tingled like this: Cold sweat gummed up his armpits, his mouth suddenly seemed too small, his tongue all of a sudden huge and arid, a panicky sensation in his lungs as if he’d been holding his breath for too long, all of these things coalesced in his body as a kind of hyperawareness, a strange magnetic pull toward the object of his fancy that departed significantly from the way he tried to ignore or hide from most people.

The girl waited for him to say something, her hands in her lap, resting on her violin, her ankles crossed, those penetrating green eyes— “I’m Bishop’s friend,” Samuel finally said. “I’m here with Bishop.”

“Okay.”

“Your brother?”

She smiled. “Yes, I know.”

“I heard you practicing. What are you practicing for?”

She looked at him quizzically for a moment. “To get the notes under my fingers,” she said. “I have a concert coming up. What did you think?”

“It was beautiful.”

She nodded and seemed to consider this. “The double-stops in the third movement are really hard to play in tune,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And the arpeggios on the third page are rough. Plus I have to play in tenths, which is weird.”

“Yes.”

“I feel like I’m falling all over it, that third movement. Stumbling the whole way.”