Our Song (9 page)

“Eh, it's nothing,” Jacob said. “Only that apparently I've been bowing incorrectly my entire life.”

“Oh, you have not!” I scoffed. “Fiddling is really different from classical violin, you know. You just have to get the hang of it. It's not a big deal, trust me.”

“Easy for you to say,” Jacob muttered.

He was right. I'd never thought twice about my bow hold. Or my fingering. Or any number of musical techniques. I just
played
because I literally always had.

I knew saying any of this to Jacob would only make me look cluelessly entitled, and make him feel worse.

And besides, the Hobart was beeping, clamoring for me to pull out the tray.

I went to the other side of the washer and pulled the lever that raised the little garage door. Then I plunged my left arm into the steam and hooked the tray with my fingertips.

“Nell!”

Jacob's shout had barely reached me when suddenly
he
reached me. He dove for my arm and snatched my hand out of the Hobart. Then, scowling, he flipped my hand over so it rested in his palm.

“What's wrong?” I blurted.

Except my words didn't come out loud and irate, the way
blurting usually does. My voice had gone reedy and breathless.

Jacob's hands were damp and pruney. His grip was too tight. And yet, his touch still made me speak in the voice of Snow White.

Without answering my question, Jacob peered at my fingertips.

“What's wrong?” I repeated. My voice had gone back to normal, now that it was clear that Jacob
hadn't
grabbed my hand in a fit of passion.

“Nothing,” Jacob said, shaking his head in incredulity. “Your hand is totally fine, even though Ms. Betty said you'll get steam burns if you don't wear those to unload the Hobart.”

He pointed at the thick, black rubber gloves that were wadded up near the Hobart's exit door.

“Oh yeah,” I said. I glanced over my shoulder at Ms. Betty. I hoped she hadn't seen my gaffe. “I guess this is just another example of me being hopelessly type B to your A.”

“Yeah, but you're not hurt,” Jacob marveled. He poked at the tip of my left index finger. “Wow!” he said. “I guess
that's
why.”

“Excuse me?” I pulled my hand away from him and hid it behind my back.

“Your calluses are almost as gnarly as your grandma's,” Jacob said.

“Thanks a lot,” I protested.

“No, that's a compliment!” Jacob assured me. “Those calluses are awesome. But how do you still have them? I thought you didn't play anymore.”

I looked at him as if he'd just spoken to me in Japanese.

“Are you kidding? How could I get away with that?”

Jacob looked pointedly at my right hand—the one I'd burned on the anvil.

“Hello?” he said. “Didn't you trade in your bow for a sledgehammer?”

“I mostly use a cross-peen hammer,” I said, “and please. That's only for this month at Camden. Back home, I can't get away with not playing. I tour with my family on weekends and school breaks. We record. We have these endless jams on our front porch and—”

Jacob looked a little shifty-eyed as I ticked off all my fiddle-playing duties.

“—and you know all these things already, don't you?” I said.

“It's on your grandma's Wikipedia page,” Jacob protested. “Right there for the whole world to see. I'm not a stalker, I swear!”

While I tried not to laugh, Jacob turned to grab some clean dishes from the still-steaming rack.

The “still-steaming” part proved problematic for his glasses. Immediately, they fogged up.

“Whoa!” he muttered. Completely blind, he stumbled a few steps backward, knocking right into a dirty dish cart. A bowl full of flatware tumbled noisily to the floor.

Clearly mortified, Jacob looked in my general direction, with his glasses still misted over and his baseball hat askew.

That's when the laugh I'd been biting back burst forth.

Jacob swiped off his glasses and stared at the forks and spoons scattered across the tile floor.

I held my breath and tried to stop laughing, which, of course, only made me laugh louder.

“I'm sorry,” I gasped. “I'm just picturing a Three Stooges movie.”

“But there're only two of us,” Jacob said.

At once, both of us looked over at Ms. Betty, who at that moment was scraping big hunks of sticky dough off her hands and muttering, “This never happens when I make biscuits. Durn Brits!”

“Bwa, ha, ha!”

Now it was
both
of us cackling, him bent over at the waist and me stumbling around as I scooped spoons off the floor.

Then the Hobart beeped again, attracting Ms. Betty's attention.

“Listen, you two,” she called over to us. “Cute don't get the dishes done.”

I cringed in embarrassment and glanced at Jacob. He, too, quickly stopped laughing.

“All right,” I said. “Clearly we have a division of labor. You load.”

“And you, Leatherhands, unload,” Jacob said, grinning as he returned to his side of the Hobart.

“Just for that,” I said, “I'm not going to tell you my idea.”

“About what?” Jacob asked, leaning backward so he could see me around the dishwasher.

“About that bowing problem you're having,” I said lightly as
I stacked up clean plates. “I bet Nanny told you to bend the bone between your wrist and elbow, didn't she?”

“
Yes!
” Jacob cried. “I mean, seriously? That's like telling someone to breathe through their eyelids.”

“What, you can't breathe through your eyelids?” I said. “How do you do the breast stroke?”

Even though I was busy scooping forks into a metal canister, I could just
feel
Jacob gaping at me.

“
Kidding!
” I yelled over my shoulder. “C'mon, I may have E.T. fingers, but I'm not a
complete
mutant.”

Then Jacob said something, a phrase that got swept away by the
chug, chug, chug
of the Hobart and the noisy spray of the water. I couldn't discern the words, but something about the tone made me catch my breath.

It made my hands, grasping a handful of serving spoons, suddenly feel weak and shaky.

It made me turn around to look at Jacob.

I didn't need to hear his words to know that he had just paid me a compliment.

The sudden blotches on his neck and the way his eyes couldn't bear to meet mine? Well, that confirmed it.

But I was too shy to ask him what he'd said.

And he was clearly too embarrassed to repeat it.

The next thing I knew, it was me saying something completely unexpected.

“I could show you, if you want.”

“Show me . . . ?” Jacob looked confused.

“How to bend the bone between your elbow and your wrist,” I said.

He didn't answer for a long moment.

“I promise, it's much easier than breathing through your eyelids.”

A perplexed smile slowly bloomed on his face.

“But I warn you,” I added, “it
is
harder than reading with the soles of your feet.”

He didn't laugh. Instead he looked at me curiously.

“You really want to help me?” he asked. “With fiddle?”

I shrugged, then nodded. “Sure.”

“But I thought this was your month to get away from all that,” Jacob said.

He looked pointedly at my right hand. Not the one with the calluses that he so weirdly thought were awesome. But the one I'd injured in the blacksmithing barn.

“It was,” I said haltingly. “I mean, it is. I mean . . . whatever! It'll only take a few minutes.”

Jacob paused for a long moment. He seemed to be searching my face.

I'm sure he didn't find anything clarifying there. I myself still wasn't sure why I'd made the offer. Now that I had, I didn't know if I believed what I'd said, that teaching Jacob that fiddle trick was no big deal.

In fact, maybe I'd just done something momentous.

“I'll take those minutes,” Jacob said. “How about tomorrow after class? Do you know that little river at the end of the Sap Hill trail?”

Just as I nodded, the Hobart beeped shrilly.

I quickly turned my back to Jacob and hauled the door open, happy to hide my half-giddy, half-panicked face in the resulting billow of steam.

Over on his side, Jacob got back to work too. For the rest of our shift, we didn't talk much. But we did seem to get in sync as we stacked, sprayed, washed, and unloaded the supper dishes. By the end of the evening, we'd reached a rhythm you could almost call musical.

Chapter
Nine

T
en minutes before class ended
in the barn on Friday, most of the guys were putting away their tools. But I was still pounding away, determined to finally get somewhere after an entire week of blacksmithing fails.

Maybe I was also obsessing about my ironwork so I
wouldn't
fixate on the fiddle lesson I'd promised Jacob.

The fiddle lesson that wouldn't come until the end of a very long day in the barn.

The lesson for which I'd carefully straightened my hair and planned an outfit meant to look entirely unplanned (yet still adorable).

I still didn't know exactly
why
I wanted to look adorable. It wasn't like there was anything remotely romantic about teaching
someone how to bend the bones in his forearm. Washing 150 sets of dishes seemed equally uninspiring.

And yet . . .

There was something about washing dishes with
Jacob
that threatened to turn me into a puddle of yearning. It could make the next three weeks at Camden that much more torturous.

Or,
said a voice in the back of my head,
the next three weeks at Camden could be magical.

But that seemed unlikely. What hope did I have if even
Annabelle
couldn't make the stars align for herself and Owen? When we'd gone to bed the night before, she'd admitted that she still hadn't talked to him, despite my little pep talk in the dining hall.

“There was just something about the post-dinner vibe that wasn't right,” she'd told me as we'd lain side by side in our twin beds. “You have to listen to what the universe tells you. . . . There's a saying from the
I Ching
that goes like this . . . soul mates . . . destiny.”

I drifted to sleep while Annabelle went on and on. I didn't need to listen to understand what she was saying: liking a boy was agony. It required superhuman powers of self-distraction.

Thus, my immersion in my ironwork.

Over the course of my day in the barn, I'd finally found a rhythm to my smithery. I pulled my chunk of iron from the forge, then hammered it so hard I felt the jangle travel up my arm and rattle my shoulder in its socket.

Next, I dunked my lump into the water bucket.
Sssssss.

Then I examined it and noted the infinitesimal changes I'd made with my pathetic Olive Oyl arms.

Then I did it all over again. And again. And again.

Except a funny thing happened the final time I squinted at my metal chunk. It didn't look so chunky anymore. My side-stroking blows had elongated it. My regular turns had shaped the resulting stem into a not-terribly-lopsided cylinder that culminated in a point.

At its other end was a cap that
was
pretty lopsided, but was also unmistakably flat and round.

“Coach! Come here!” I called. I had to restrain myself from squealing in excitement. Blacksmiths swear. They never squeal.

Coach walked over, smoothly and deliberately as he always did. But when he saw what I was holding, clamped in a pair of soot-stained tongs, his sweaty, dirty face lit up.

“Nell! Spike!” he said.

This wasn't some form of football lingo. He was referring to the thing I had made—a six-inch-long, three-pound, crusty-skinned iron spike, perfect for hammering down, say, a railroad tie. I mean, if this were the 1800s and my last name was Lewis or Clark. For my current life and times, the spike was pretty much useless, but at that moment, it was my most prized possession.

“I can't believe I made that!” I said, admiring the brushy hammer strokes visible in the metal.

“I knew you had it in you,” Coach said. “You beat the beast.”

That was his affectionate name for our massive, belching forge.

“And even,” he added slyly, “with a burned hand.”

I gulped and clamped my left hand over the fresh scar on my right one.

“You knew about that?” I squeaked.

“Nellie, I see everything,” Coach said. Normally, I hated when anyone called me Nellie, but when Coach said it in that dad-like rumble of his, it actually made me happy. So did the respect I saw in his eyes for the first time ever. (At least I thought I saw it. Coach's eyebrows were as bushy and grizzly as his beard, which made his eyes kind of hard to see.)