The Nix(50)

The audience went mad. They stood and cheered and gave Bethany bouquets of roses so large they impeded her balance. She carried them in both arms and was barely visible behind them, waving and curtseying.

“Everyone loves a prodigy,” his mother said, herself also standing and clapping. “Prodigies get us off the hook for living ordinary lives. We can tell ourselves we’re not special because we weren’t born with it, which is a great excuse.”

“She’s been practicing nonstop for months.”

“My dad always told me I was nothing special,” she said. “I guess I proved him right.”

Samuel stopped clapping and looked at his mother.

She rolled her eyes and patted him on the head. “Never mind. Forget I said that. Do you want to say hi to your friend?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She’s busy.”

And indeed she was busy: surrounded by well-wishers, friends, family, her parents, various musicians congratulating her.

“You should at least tell her she did a good job,” Faye said. “Thank her for the invitation. It’s polite.”

“Plenty of people are telling her good job,” Samuel said. “Can we go?”

His mother shrugged. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

And they were on their way out of the hall, and they were moving slowly with the surge of people also leaving, Samuel brushing against hips and sport coats, when from behind him he heard his name. Bethany was calling his name. He turned and found her wrestling through the crowd to catch up to him, and when she finally did she leaned into him, her cheek to his, and he thought he was supposed to give her one of those fake-kiss things he saw all the adult men doing, until she brought her lips all the way to his ear and whispered, “Come over tonight. Sneak out.”

“Okay,” he said. That warmth on his face. He would have agreed to do anything she asked.

“There’s something I have to show you.”

“What is it?”

“The cassette you gave me? It’s not just silence. There’s something else.”

She pulled away. She no longer looked, as she had onstage, small. She had regained her normal Bethany proportions: elegant, sophisticated, womanly. She held his stare and smiled.

“You have to hear it,” she said. Then she dashed away, back to her parents and her throng of giddy admirers.

His mother looked at him suspiciously, but he ignored her. He walked right past her, out of the church and into the night, limping slightly in his rock-hard shoes.

That night he lay in bed waiting for the sounds of the house to disappear—his mother rattling around in the kitchen, his father watching television downstairs, then eventually the whoosh of his parents’ door opening as his mother went to bed. Then the television turning off with an electric chunk. The sound of water running, a toilet flushing. Then nothing. Waiting another twenty minutes to be sure, then opening his door, twisting and untwisting the knob slowly and tightly to avoid unwanted metallic clicks, walking lightly down the hall, stepping over the squeaky part of the hallway floor that Samuel could avoid even in total darkness, then down the stairs, placing his feet as close to the wall as he could, where there was less creaking danger, then taking a full ten minutes to open the front door—a small pull, a small tic, then silence, then another: tic—the door opening in fractions of an inch until the gap was finally wide enough to pass through.

And finally, once liberated, running! In the clean air, running down the block, toward the creek, into the woods that separated Venetian Village from everything else. His foot clomps and breathing were the only sounds in the whole big world, and when he felt afraid—of getting caught, of dangerous forest animals, of mad ax murderers, kidnappers, trolls, ghosts—he steeled his mind with the memory of Bethany’s warm, wet breath on his ear.

Her bedroom was dark when he arrived, her window closed. Samuel sat outside for several long minutes panting and sweating and watching, reassuring himself that all relevant parents were asleep and that no neighbors would see him creep through the backyard, which, when he finally did, he did so quickly, running on the tips of his shoes to avoid all ground sounds, then crouching below Bethany’s window and lightly tapping it with the pad of his index finger until, from out of the darkness, she appeared.

He could see only bits of her in the murky nighttime light: the angle of her nose, a toss of hair, collarbone, eye socket. She was a collection of parts floating in ink. She opened the window and he climbed in, rolling over the frame and wincing where the metal bit into his chest.

“Be quiet,” said someone who was not Bethany, who was elsewhere in the darkness. It was Bishop, Samuel realized after a moment of disequilibrium. Bishop was here, in the room, and Samuel was both disheartened and grateful for this. Because he didn’t know what he would do if he were alone with Bethany, but also he knew he wanted to do it, whatever it was. To be alone with her—he wanted it very badly.

“Hi, Bish,” Samuel said.

“We’re playing a game,” Bishop said. “It’s called Listen to Silence Until You’re Bored out of Your Mind.”

“Shut up,” Bethany said.

“It’s called Be Put to Sleep by Cassette-Tape Static.”

“It’s not static.”

“It’s all static.”