Our Song (21 page)

I flushed as we resumed walking. It seemed weird that
whenever Jacob made a gallant gesture toward me, it involved
meat
. But I'd take it.

“God, that seems like a long time ago, doesn't it?” I said. “That night in the kitchen?”

Jacob pointed at my palm, where my smooth pink scar was already starting to fade away.

“It seems like we've known each other for longer than a few weeks,” Jacob said quietly. “That's for sure.”

“Jacob,” I said haltingly. I was on the verge of asking him how he felt about me.

Or just telling him how
I
felt about
him
.

I would rather risk extreme embarrassment than not know what this thing was between us.

“I—”

My voice literally caught in my throat. I couldn't speak! Clearly, my body was saving me from myself.

Meanwhile, Jacob had spotted a café.

“Here's a place that smells burger-y,” he said.

“What?!” I asked breathlessly.

“Look,” Jacob said, pointing through the window. The walls of the restaurant were wood-paneled, and the tables were draped in red-and-white-checked oilcloth. Right up front, two burly guys were eating. One was shoving a fistful of fries into his mouth, while the other hoisted a massive burger. As he took a bite, some bloody-looking juice dripped onto his plate.

There was no
way
I was eating one of those in front of Jacob.
Besides, the homespun look of this place reminded me too much of Camden.

I did a slow circle to see what else was nearby. I froze when I spotted an awning on the other side of the street. It was bedazzled with bright pink, green, and orange swirls. Through the big plate-glass window, I could see rows of sleek wooden booths, brightly colored wall tiles, and mod elephants dangling from the ceiling. On the awning was a single word:
CURRY
.

“I want
that
,” I declared to Jacob, already stepping off the curb, “way more than I want a burger.”

“What's that?” Jacob said. “Indian food? Sure, I like Indian food.”

“Not just Indian food,” I said, almost skipping as we crossed the street. “Indian food in a completely cool, completely
urban
restaurant. In short, everything that the Camden School
isn't
.”

Chapter
Twenty-One

W
e trotted over to Curry's
glass door and peered through.

“The food's going to be spicy and exotic,” I whispered to Jacob. “It will definitely not involve condensed soup. I can't wait!”

When we went inside, a waitress with too many tattoos to count told us to sit wherever. We rushed to grab the last table by the front window so we could watch Asheville's hipsters, hippies, and slackers lope by.

We tucked our fiddle cases safely between our chairs and the window while we read the menu.

“I don't even recognize half these things,” I said happily. “Look, they have lime rickeys! I've always liked the sound of a lime rickey, but I've never had one. Limmmmme rickey!”

I was acting like a goofy tourist, but I didn't care. In fact, I loved that I could do that in front of Jacob, who one-upped me by saying, “I'm gonna have a mango lassssssi!”

Then we laughed so hard we both flopped over on the table.

After we'd ordered
chaat, pakoras
, and
thalis
, we gazed out the window.

We were prepared to admire cool Ashevillians, but after a couple of minutes (and the discovery that a lime rickey was even more fabulous than I'd imagined), someone started looking at
us.
It was a little girl, maybe six years old. She was young enough, anyway, to stare and point at us while tugging on her mom's skirt.

“Um, I know we're not from around here, but do we stand out that much?” Jacob murmured.

“Yeah, I thought I looked pretty local,” I said, frowning at my outfit.

When I looked back at the girl, I realized she wasn't pointing at us but at our fiddle cases. Then she jumped up and down and clasped her hands in front of her, shaking them at her mom.

“She's begging for violin lessons,” Jacob said.

“You think?” I asked, surprised.

“Oh yeah,” Jacob said, popping a bite of kale
pakora
into his mouth. “I spent a year doing the exact same thing when I was little.”

I smiled at the girl and waved at her. She got pink in the cheeks and grabbed her mom's hand, dragging her down the street.

“Aw, we should head in that direction after lunch,” I said. “I think that's where Nanny told us to go anyway. It'd be so cute to play for her. Mmm, I wonder if I should get another lime rickey to take with us.”

Jacob looked at me and shook his head.

“So you never get nervous?” he asked. “About performing?”

I shrugged and tore into a piece of naan.

“I guess not,” I said.

He stared out the window.

“I got such a rush right then,” he said. “I was all, ‘Hey, that kid thinks we're
real
musicians. Wow!' But maybe you're a real musician when you stop thinking things like that.”

He turned to look at me, his smile a little sad.

“
You're
the real musician,” he said. “Ironic, isn't it?”

“Jacob,” I said. “What does that mean, anyway? You make music. You care about music more than anything else in the world. What's more real than that?”

Jacob's face changed then, in a way I couldn't quite interpret. He looked into my eyes.

“I care about other things too,” he said quietly.

I stared back at him. Was he saying what I thought he was saying? At a moment when we were literally on display in a picture window? Where kissing absolutely couldn't happen? And when, by the way, we were only a couple of days away from saying good-bye?

I broke eye contact with Jacob, gazing into my lap as these thoughts tumbled around my mind.

“We'd better get going,” Jacob said, taking another quick bite of food. “I want to start this busking business before I chicken out.”

I swallowed hard and nodded while I motioned to our server for the check.

A few minutes later we'd finished eating. (Well, Jacob had done the bulk of the eating. I'd sort of lost my appetite.) We got to-go refills on our lime rickeys, hoisted our violin cases, and headed for the door.

Did he say what I thought he said?
I asked myself again. I'd been at this guessing game with Jacob for so long, I didn't trust myself to answer.

I could only hope.

•  •  •

We followed our map, stopping along the way to peek into cool boutiques, an amazing bookstore, and a spice shop where we got to taste sea salt flavored with chocolate and wine.

When we found the spot Nanny had told me about—a small courtyard at the intersection of a couple of cute, narrow streets—I burst out laughing. Plunked in the middle of the little plaza was the most tremendous feat of blacksmithing I'd ever seen. It was a shining, black, eight-foot-tall clothes iron, tipped onto its back end. The back end of the handle touched the sidewalk, creating a perfect perch for little kids to climb. Two giggling girls were crawling on it when we arrived. The bottom of the iron cast a neat triangular shadow onto the concrete.

It was the perfect place for busking.

We unpacked our fiddles and placed Jacob's open case near our feet. I pulled out my wallet and fished out a few dollars to toss into it.

“Peer pressure,” I explained to Jacob, making him laugh.

Since he was the student, he picked our playlist.

“How about we start with ‘Do You Love an Apple?' ” he proposed.

“Sure.”

We launched into the piece, with me playing harmony to Jacob's melody. In my head, I sang the lyrics. I knew Jacob was doing the same, as Nanny required.

But these lyrics were the last thing I needed running through my head.

Do you love an apple?

Do you love a pear?

Do you love a laddie with curly brown hair?

I glanced at Jacob. His hair, in the humid almost-July air, was wavy enough that you could almost call it curly.

And still, I love him,
the next line of the song went.

I can't deny him.

I'll be with him wherever he goes.

And that was just the first verse! I was sure I was turning bright red. I definitely couldn't look at Jacob. It made staying on the same beat challenging, to say the least.

Where're the songs about black lung or poisonous snakebites when I need them?
I lamented silently.

Clink.

The sound of coins hitting coins startled me. I hadn't even noticed that we had a small audience. Well, it was a tiny audience of four people, all of them gray-haired and smiling at us. I could tell they thought we were cute.

But I supposed I didn't mind being cute if they were paying us for it. I gave them a little bow to thank them for the money. Then I glanced at Jacob.

He was positively beaming. And his playing was speeding up, going from sweetly romantic to a happy little jig.

It took all the awkwardness out of the love song. By the end, we were playing it twice as fast as it was meant to be. We were almost racing.

And somehow I knew this was going to be the most fun I'd
ever
had busking.

•  •  •

We played for at least another twenty minutes before we paused.

“This is awesome!” Jacob whispered as another spectator tossed a dollar into his case. “Even those moments when nobody's watching are cool. Because then I'm trying to
attract
listeners, which is probably even harder than keeping them once they get here.”

“I never thought of that,” I said. “You're right.”

“So what do we do now?” Jacob said. “We've played all the
fiddle songs I know. I could do some classical stuff. Or should we just start over again with ‘Do you Love an Apple?' ”

“No!” I said, way too quickly.

Jacob squinted at me, confused.

“I mean . . . why not do something
really
new? Let's jam.”

“Jam?” Jacob looked even more confused.

“You know,” I said, “improvise. Just pretend this is my front porch.”

I nodded at the giant clothes iron.

“That's the magnolia tree,” I said. “And your lime rickey is now an Arnold Palmer.”

“But you don't like your front-porch jams,” Jacob said.

“Maybe,” I ventured, “I just haven't been playing with the right people.”

And then, because saying something so overt almost sent me into a panic attack, I started playing.

My improv began with a two-string shuffle, a standard fiddler's rhythm, in the key of D. I had no idea where I was going to go with it.

But when Jacob jumped in, I realized I didn't have to know. He was taking the lead. I began harmonizing to his melodies, tracking the sway of his body, the tilt of his bow, and the flash in his eyes.

Before long, this communication—part ear, part intuition—began to go both ways. Jacob followed my lead as much as I followed his.

I'd done this so many times at our jams at home, spotting the raised eyebrows or the subtle elbow swing of the other players and using that cue to take the music in a new direction. But it had never felt like this. It was like Jacob and I were talking without talking; like he knew what I was going to do a moment before I did and vice versa.

It was instinctive and exciting and . . . well, it was a lot like kissing.

But without, alas, any actual kissing.

We weren't the only ones who thought our busking was pretty amazing. As soon as we began improvising, the coins and bills really started pouring into our fiddle case. They came from the parents of little kids who danced to our songs and from more gray-haired folks who thought we were charming.

But it was when we got applause from a handful of hipsters in ironic T-shirts that Jacob and I knew we'd arrived.

Of course, we completely ruined the moment by high-fiving and jumping up and down. The cool kids rolled their eyes and marched away, but we didn't care.

“That was incredible,” Jacob said to me, his eyes shining.

“
We
were incredible,” I said.

He took a step closer to me.

I tilted my face upward.

He'd just started to lean down when my grandmother's voice called to us from across the street. What
was
it with her timing?!

“Oh, kids, that was amazing!” she said, hustling toward us. “Jacob, I'm so proud of you. You let go!”

“Did you hear that key change in the second half?” Jacob asked, turning away from me and grinning at Nanny. “You taught us that in week one! I don't know how it came back to me!”