A Thousand Perfect Notes(33)

Is she messing with him? He glances at her, but she looks serious, as if she’s genuinely unsure what the right thing to do in this devastating situation is. Maybe August sides with Joey.

‘Probably nothing.’ Beck isn’t proud of the answer. But what else can he say? He can’t encourage Joey, but he knows full well how incriminating Joey can look. Loud, brash, mouthy and physical? The teacher informed Beck that if his mother wouldn’t come in to talk about Joey’s long list of bad behaviours, then she had no choice but to suspend Joey.

‘EVERYONE IS MEAN TO ME!’ Joey wails. ‘Mama doesn’t love me, and Bailey is just a—’

Beck covers her mouth. ‘Joey, please. August was innocent before we met her.’

August nods. ‘Not any more. Joey’s got quite a tongue.’

Joey tries to bite Beck’s hand, so he retracts.

Beck claws deep inside himself for something encouraging to say, even though his mind is spinning to what the Maestro’s going to do with Joey when she has to work and Beck goes to school. ‘Well, Mama does love you.’ Definitely. A lot more than her son, anyway.

After all, Joey hasn’t been forced on to the piano yet.

She hunches in her coat. ‘Then I want new crayons.’

August laughs. ‘You’re extraordinary, Joey. You really ought to be a superhero or the queen someday.’

Joey considers this. ‘Superhero,’ she says. ‘I want to smash things.’

She breaks into a run, pelting towards the end of the street and into the Keverich hovel, slamming the front door after her. It gives Beck a moment of peace with August. Not that he needs it, of course. It’s just August. She’s just … some random school acquaintance.

August is still smiling to herself, like Joey is the most glorious creation in the world. She rubs her hands together and blows on them. Beck wonders what it’d be like to hold her hand. Sweaty? Frozen? Would their fingers fit or would it be awkward?

‘Have you started writing my song?’ she says.

He has. He’s also abandoned every rubbish attempt. He has to work on it in small sporadic bursts so the Maestro won’t notice it isn’t Chopin.

Nothing he composes will be good enough for August.

‘No way,’ he says. ‘I told you, there is zero possibility of you hearing me play.’

August sticks out her bottom lip – it’s slightly blue. ‘You break my heart, Keverich. How about dinner? Did your mum give the affirmative?’

They haven’t even raised the subject since.

He shrugs.

‘You’re talkative today,’ August says. ‘Something eating your brain?’

Only a few things. Small things. He could be shipped off to Germany in a few weeks to live with an uncle who’s possibly worse than his mother. Or he could be strangled by the Maestro if he messes up. He could lose Joey. He could lose—

He shrugs again.

They pause on the driveway. The curtain flickers – Joey or the Maestro, he doesn’t know – and he can’t linger. But he wants to. Lingering isn’t half so awkward and emptying as saying goodbye.

‘Why do you always run?’ he blurts out suddenly. ‘After you leave here?’

August looks startled. ‘What? Oh. I don’t know.’ She chews her lip. ‘To feel alive, I guess? Don’t you want to run after sitting in stuffy classrooms for six hours? Don’t you want to do something to remember that you are a person, not a test score?’

No.

Never.

He wouldn’t even dare.

‘I guess.’ It doesn’t sound convincing even to him.

He hates how innocent her face is, how her lips are twisted in a quiet smile, how her breath puffs in globes of cold white. He hates it because she is hope and tomorrow and he’s a goodbye and the end.

She leans close, the warmth of her breath on his cheek – yeasty, because she ate sourdough bread for lunch after offering him a piece. He refused. His cornflake sandwich was so much better, obviously.

‘Write my song about being alive,’ she says.

‘It’s not going to have lyrics.’ Great. He just admitted he’s working on it.

‘What kind of song is it? Wait – oh wait.’ Her eyes sparkle wickedly, like she’s just eaten the best joke. ‘You don’t play classical piano, do you, Keverich?’

‘No,’ he growls.

She tips back her head and hoots to the frosty sky. ‘Classical! My mum would be in love with you. Classical.’ She steps back, hands on her hips, and looks him up and down. ‘You are a scrawny, bitter, nasty classical pianist and I don’t know whether that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard or just the funniest.’

‘Ha, ha. I’m dying of laughter here.’

Her eyes glint. ‘Someday I’ll do something extraordinarily spontaneous and you’ll learn how to smile.’

‘Yeah? Like what?’

She whirls and Beck half expects wings made of frost and longing to sprout from her back and fly her home. He wants to catch her, pin the wings just for a second and ask to fly with her. Ask to be saved.

‘Oh, who could know?’ she shouts over her shoulder, running down the street. ‘Maybe I’ll kiss you.’

She’s gone. The golden afternoon swallows her and leaves Beck at the end of his driveway more confused than if she’d slapped him.