Guitar Notes (4 page)

She calls up the cello music on the computer and pushes up the volume. She tells herself that she will, in fact, practice the cello today, but only after she writes Mr. Odd her reply.

 SEPTEMBER 19. FRIDAY.

As Tripp opens the door to Room B, he hears his name and turns around.

Annie Win, violin case in hand, hops into place. “Lyla has your room on even days. If you trade with her, you would get even days, and Lyla and I could have odd days together.”

“No,” he says.

“Why not?”

“I like odd days.”

“They’re exactly the same. What difference does it make?”

Tripp shrugs. “Odd days are better than even days.” As
he closes the door, she huffs. Poor perfect girls can’t have what they want. Too bad. He has Intro to Tech and science on odd days; he needs the little room to survive.

Opening the guitar case, he smiles to see a second note, folded and tucked like the first.

The note is like the pickle in his sandwich: a tangy crunch to make the bread of his morning and afternoon classes less boring. After he plays, he’ll have fun writing a reply.

The guitar practically jumps into his arms. He loves this moment, when his fingers are ready to find something: a chord, a pleasing phrase, something worth repeating, something worth following.

 SEPTEMBER 21. SUNDAY.

Josh and his friends sitting on somebody’s couch. Josh and his friends knee-deep in snow. Josh shooting a free throw in a crowded school gym. Tripp is staring at the photos on Josh’s efriends page. He hardly recognizes his old friend. Since when did he play basketball? He looks happy in Schenectady, wherever that is.

He clicks
SEND A MESSAGE
. Then he stares at the blank box. After a minute, he clicks X to close the site. He has nothing to write about.

On the wall behind his desk is a photo he took of his dad sitting on a log in front of their tent. It’s dark, but the light from the fire shows his wide smile and lights up
all the goofy wind chimes they hung in the trees—the spoons and spatulas, the old hubcap and the bathtub faucet handles, the kiddie xylophone parts they had found by the side of the road. He can smell the smoky warmth of the fire, the scent of the loblolly pines, and the musty smell of the tent.

If they were there right now, they’d be taking one last look at the lake before they had to come back. His dad always said that: “Let’s take one last look at the lake.”

Tripp forces his gaze back to the computer. What he needs to do is learn a new riff, a new trick. He searches YouTube until he finds a good guitar tutorial and tries to follow along with the guy, but without a guitar, he just gets more frustrated. After a minute, he stands up and yells at the top of his lungs: “I NEED A GUITAR.”

He hears the heavy roll of his mom’s car pulling up the driveway, flicks off his laptop, closes it, and crawls into bed with the assigned short story for his English class. Edgar Allan Poe. “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

The main character murders a guy. Tripp is hooked. The story is gothic and full of orphaned phrases that he plans to adopt:

 … hearkening to the death watches

 … all in vain

 … Villains!

Over the wheeze of the air conditioner, he hears his mother and their neighbor Susan talking in the driveway.

“The Slater Creek Parkway Cleanup Committee needs
a chairperson, Terry; you’d be perfect,” Susan was saying. “All you have to do is sign up on the Slater site.”

“It’s a great cause, Susan, but I don’t really have the time—”

Susan. Susan. Susan. Do you really want a termite like Terry Broody on your cleanup committee? Tripp tunes them out and reads on.… In the story, the guy’s heart is beating so loud, he thinks it is his victim’s. A bizarre horror story. This kind of homework he doesn’t mind.

When he is done, he stares up at the ceiling, trying to block out the sound track of his mother’s entrance into the house, the click of her heels in the kitchen.

“Tripp … you home?”

He puts his hand on his chest to see if he can feel the beating of his heart. He cannot. Has he died in bed? He closes his eyes and tries to hear his heart pumping blood through his veins. He gets up and looks at himself in the mirror.

Boom Boom. Boom Boom. He thumps his chest with his palm. Boom Boom. Boom Boom. Over the boomboom beat, he is dying to play a searing guitar solo. But alas, it is all in vain, all in vain, because Death—in the form of his mother—has eaten away the very thing he loves. Villain! Thy name is Termite!

As if on cue, his mother enters. She sees the book on his bed. “Edgar Allan Poe! Ooh. I remember those stories! Which one are you reading?”

He knows what she is doing. She is trying to engage him
in a cheerful discussion about literature so that he will forget her cruel kidnapping of his guitar. He looks at her in the mirror. “I’m sure you know the assignment, Mom. It’s posted on Edline. And, yes, I finished reading it.”

“Well … I was just stopping in because I learned something interesting today. Did you know that your school offers peer tutoring during lunch hours?”

“No. No. No. No. No.”

“It would make such sense. You hate lunch anyway. You’ve told me that.”

He can’t tell her about the practice room. She would pull the plug for sure.

“I think I should sign you up for it,” she says. “It’s a
peer
. You might hit it off. Make a new frien—”

“No. No. No. No. No—”

“I don’t understand that word.” She turns and leaves. “I’m signing you up.”

Villain!

He paces for a while, and then he opens his laptop and calls up the Slater Community Association website. After he finds the page for the Slater Creek Parkway Cleanup Committee, he clicks the sign-up button.

How wonderful of the Termite to sign up for such an important community-building event. Maybe she’ll even make some new friends!

 SEPTEMBER 22. MONDAY.

Tripp Broody has left no trash in the room, not a single piece of paper, and Lyla realizes that she was hoping for another acerbic note.

Good
, she tells herself.
I shouldn’t waste my time with him
. She sits on the bench and eats half a tuna fish sandwich and an apple and tells herself that, as soon as she is done, she will get out her cello. But after a few bites, she sets down her lunch and opens the guitar case. A note, folded, is tucked between the strings.

Lyla reads it twice, mashes it into a ball, marches into the hallway, and throws it into the trash can. She comes back in and paces, four steps from wall to wall, her heart racing. Then she pulls out her notebook.

She drops her sandwich crusts and apple core on the music stand like little bombs. She feels wicked, better somehow.

She paces. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

Through the walls, she can hear the muted sound of Patricia Kent’s French horn. She should go next door and ask if she’d be willing to switch days with Annie, but instead, she gets out the guitar.

Two big scratches run down the front. The ends of the strings at the top are messy, coiled. He didn’t even bother to wipe off the dust.

She sits down on the bench with it. There’s a worn black strap, but she isn’t sure if she should put it on. How different to hold an instrument in her arms, like a big baby, instead of resting it against her body. She lays the fingers of her right hand on the strings. No bow.

Pluck. Pluck. Pluck. Pluck. Pluck. Pluck.

Funny. She was expecting to hear the notes C, G, D, A—the four strings of the cello—plus two more. It takes her a moment to figure out the pitches of the six strings: E, A, D, G, B, E.

She studies the neck. Is it fretted chromatically? Each fret a half note? Can she play a scale?

She experiments until she finds the E major scale. Plays it up and down. Then the E minor. Up and down. Each note rings out in the little room.

The strings are new. She can tell. New strings always have a bright sound.

As her fingers move through the scale, she tells herself that everything will be all right. She is Lyla Marks. She is just playing this guitar for a moment because it feels good to play it, and then she will pick up her cello because she is a cellist, and she is an A student, and she is Annie Win’s best friend, and her heart is beating normally, and everything is perfectly fine.

When the period is over, she puts the guitar away reluctantly. She tucks her note for Mr. Odd in between the strings, closes the case, and sets it back in the corner.

“Ah, Lyla.” Mr. Jacoby startles her. “Just the person I was looking for.”

Guilt shoots through her like adrenaline, and she spins around. Did he hear her playing the guitar? Did he see the apple core and the sandwich crusts on the music stand?

He holds the door for her and she picks up her cello. He follows her to the storage room, where she puts away her instrument. “You did very well on the Bach this morning.” He laughs. “That’s an understatement. I’ve never heard anything like it. International Culture Day
assembly is October third, and Mr. Steig is hoping that a music department student will perform a short opening piece, and I’d love you to do something.” As they walk out of the storage room, he opens the file he is holding and pulls out the sheet music. “I was thinking of Allegro Appassionato by Saint-Saëns. I bet you know it. Or would you like to do another piece?”