The One Thing (35 page)

Ben cleared his throat. “Thera,” he said finally, all casually, like he’d known me for centuries and I’d spent most of that time surprising him with meaningful gifts,
“want me to read you some of the entries?”

A laugh exploded up from somewhere deep inside me, a bubble bursting all over the room. I hadn’t realized until that very moment how badly I wanted to hear the
Q
s. “Yeah, I
do.”

I almost mowed Mason over when I walked out of Ben’s room. Evidently, and due to a filing issue in my closet, we were wearing the exact same thing—jeans and plain black
T-shirts—because he paused in the hallway for a moment and then said in a low voice, “You look a hell of a lot better in that outfit than I do.” His words slid down my spine and
made a hard landing at the backs of my knees. And I couldn’t quite recover. Even an hour later, as we lay on the living room floor and babbled about music, my legs felt spongy and inept.

“How does anyone get to the age of seventeen without hearing a single Operation Scarce song?” I said. “It’s un-American.”

“I told you,” Mason said. “I was sheltered.”

I rolled my eyes. “Please. I have one of their songs on my phone if you want to listen to it.”

“What I want to listen to,” he said, and I heard him turn on his side to face me, “is the song you played that day on the piano.”

“Oh no. No no no no,” I said, laughing. “That’s just something that’s been circling in my head lately, is all.”

“Just humor me, Maggie. Please?” he said, hitting me hard with that buttery voice.

I blinked. “Um. Okay.”

I rolled upright, taking longer than necessary to make my way to the piano bench. Probably I’d played this song a thousand times over the past several weeks. I knew it backward and forward
and backward again. But even so, Mason was a real, honest-to-God, brilliant musician, and I was just a girl who plucked notes out of the air and glued them together however she saw fit. I sat down
clumsily on the bench, my hands in my lap. Mason walked up behind me, stopping close enough for me to feel the heat coming off his body.

I didn’t move.

Reaching over my shoulder, he gently took my hands, one at a time, and placed them on the keys.

It was strangely intimate, that act.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath, tried to forget about everything but the music, and began to play. The music seemed loud for some reason, like it was rushing at me in a pair of
headphones, like I was standing in the front row at a concert next to a massive speaker. So much so that I almost didn’t hear Mason as he started singing the lyrics I’d read that day in
his room, the lyrics for “November.”

I stopped playing. “You’re singing to my music,” I said brilliantly.

He sat down on the bench beside me. His voice so close to me that I could feel the smile in it, he said, “I am. Keep playing.”

“Right. Yes, of course. Keep playing. How silly of me.” His non-reply told me he was waiting for me. I cleared my throat and forced my hands to move. He was singing again as I hit
the third key, starting smack in the middle of the second verse. I stopped again. “This is weird.”

Mason, sounding slightly embarrassed, said, “Sorry. I probably should have told you that I haven’t been able to get your music out of my head since I heard it. It just feels right
for this song, you know? Can you—can you keep playing?”

My
music. Stuck in
his
head.

I took a breath, placed my hands in position, and we staggered through the rest of the song—me, trying to match his tempo, and him, trying to find mine. When we finished, Mason let out a
little self-deprecating sigh. “This song has been sounding off to me, but I haven’t been able to pin down why.”

“It’s the rhythm,” I said.

I felt him twitch in surprise. “You think?”

“Yeah. I mean, try reworking it in three-four instead of six-eight. Your lyrics—they’re so passionate. But the rhythm? Not so much.”

“So you think if we match each other in a three-four, it would be...passionate?” he said softly.

I swallowed. Were we still talking about music? “Um. Yeah.”

“I can do that,” Mason said.

Silence floated around us for a moment.

“Right,” I said, sort of loudly. I put my hands into position. Hacked out a little cough. “So in three-four, then?”

My original plan had been to hold back a little and let Mason find me with his lyrics, but as soon as I hit the first note I realized that I wanted to put my entire world into this song. Mason
stepped in at the beginning of the second measure, draping his voice achingly over my every note. And the song spun out of us so slowly, so perfectly, so sinuously, that I wasn’t sure if we
were making the music or if it was making us. In it were our combined struggles, celebrations, losses. In it was everything we’d gone through, and every truth we’d come to know.

In it was us.

And when the last note faded away, when we turned to face each other, Mason’s shocked breath mingled with mine. Suddenly the air between us was flimsy, uncertain, yet impossibly solid.

“Wow,” I whispered, “that was...”

“Passionate,” he murmured.

I wasn’t sure how we got there—whether I leaned in or he stretched toward me—but suddenly there was no space between us and we were kissing. His lips tasted like ocean salt and
absolute submission, and I was worried that Mrs. Milton would walk in and see us, and all I could smell and feel and taste was him him him. And it was as though there were some sort of crazed
lunatic inside me that was set free, because I was dying to run my hands through his hair and over his chest and under his shirt and around his shoulders, and then—oh, God—his lips
parted and I just melted into nothingness. After my mind blew up and came back together again and then blew up and came back together again, we peeled apart.

“Wow,” he breathed.

“Wow,” I said. Or at least I thought I did. I was pretty sure my mouth made that particular motion. My mind was preoccupied, on playback, reconstructing and deconstructing the kiss,
which then made me pick apart my kissing skills, which then made me extremely nervous, which then made me suddenly blurt out, “Are you still going out with Hannah Jorgensen? The model? From
New York City?” Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was screaming at myself to shut up, but the words just kept on coming, tumbling out of my mouth before I could catch them. And what’s
worse, I could feel myself getting upset, tearing up at the thought of him with another girl. I blinked several times. “Because I heard that you were going out with her, and honestly,
I’m not the sort of person who just...makes out with a guy who has a girlfriend.”

Finally, I clamped my lips together to keep the
stupid
from coming out of my mouth.

A little bit of lighthearted air shot out of his nose. “A rumor. I don’t even know Hannah Jorgensen.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he chuckled softly, just once.

“What?” I said.

“You’re soft inside, Maggie Sanders,” he accused, swiping the pad of his finger on the corner of my eye to whisk away the wetness.

“I am
not
.”

He laughed. “You are. You try to come off all badass and sarcastic, but inside?” He leaned toward me and kissed me again. I felt him smiling against my lips as he said,
“You’re a marshmallow.”

A tap on the front door made us jump away guiltily. “Knock, knock,” a woman said, and then the door squeaked open and the sharp click of high heels sounded in the entryway.
“Teddy and Samantha wanted to stop by to drop off some balloons for Ben. Is it a bad time?”

Mason cleared his throat, sounding adorably flustered. “No, no. Come on in. Hey, Teddy. Samantha. Ben’s in his room. Follow me.”

I heard them barrel inside, heard a small set of footsteps stop beside me. “You,” Samantha grumbled.

“You.”

“I guess you aren’t going away, are you?” she said stubbornly, but I could detect a hint of tolerance hiding in her tone.

“Not a chance,” I said.

When I got home that night, I called Hilda and asked whether she could squeeze me in the next day for a lesson in public transportation. Then, climbing the stairs and shutting the door to my
room, I slid a college DVD out of its envelope and popped it into my computer, curling up under Gran’s quilt to listen.

L
ike so many other twelfth-grade girls this crisp fall afternoon, I found myself standing on a soccer field, grass jabbing at my ankles and wind in
my hair, a crowd of spectators watching. I never pictured myself here without a jersey, never thought I’d be positioned so closely to a goal without a ball between my feet.

Never thought I’d be doing something like this.

I swallowed. Wiped my palms on my jeans. The crowd here was massive—much larger than the crowd had been at Alexander Park. But then, the Loose Cannons couldn’t just saunter onto
UConn’s campus without seizing a lot of attention.

I could almost feel Ben’s smile as I shifted my weight, fingers hovering over the keyboard as I waited for David to kick off the concert. Ben had been claiming lately that the moments just
before an impressive act were more amazing than whatever followed. I was beginning to believe him.

Despite the chemotherapy cocktail that continued to slither through his veins, Ben was doing well. Yes, he was still hurling. And yes, he’d lost all of his hair, even his eyebrows. And
yes, I’d been wallowing in an unprecedented number of bald-eyebrow jokes. And yes, I still couldn’t see him, a fact for which I was perpetually grateful.

I smelled Mason before I heard him—that musky scent that I’d been tumbling into ever since the first day I met him. “Clarissa just got here,” he whispered in my ear.
“She wanted me to give you this. For good luck.” I knew exactly what it was when he placed it in my hand. I peeled the wrapper back, took an unhurried bite, and then, chewing slowly,
intently, I handed it back to him. “You aren’t going to eat the whole thing?” he asked.

“It’s the first bite that’s the best. The rest is unnecessary,” I told him, and he rumbled a low laugh, whispered good luck, and kissed me on the forehead.

Mason and I had been dating for approximately a month, fourteen days, twelve hours, and thirty-two minutes. Give or take. I’d like to say that I’d gotten used to his larger-than-life
persona, but even I couldn’t tell that lie. Last night, he’d asked me whether I felt as though I’d changed over the last several months. I’d shaken my head no. I
hadn’t changed. Not really. I was still an extraordinary smartass. I still considered cookies one of the basic food groups. I still ignored strangers when they spoke to me. I still believed
that flip-flops were my biggest fashion statement. I still got annoyed when my English teacher talked about his nutsack. What was different about me wasn’t me: it was what I noticed. What I
paid attention to. After all, circumstances don’t change us. They reveal us.

If you’d told me several weeks ago that Carlos would storm away from the group, once and for all, leaving the Loose Cannons few options except the girl who knew their keyboards by
heart—the girl who had been practicing their songs on her legs for months on end—I would’ve told you that you were insane.

But it was happening.

Right now.

David crashed the cymbals. My fingers spread across the keys and I hit the first notes of “Transcendence.” I was nervous as hell and my hands shook on the wind-cooled keys, but the
music found me anyway.

Like it had been living inside me my entire life, it found me.

Mason’s voice rang out clear in the stadium, stunning the crowd instantly. Not just because it was gorgeously compelling—
holy crap
, it was gorgeously compelling—but
also because it crooned out of every speaker in the stadium. Yesterday, Mom and I had come to the campus and cleared the concert with the dean, Mr. Seamen. I’d liked him, and not just because
he had a hilarious last name—the sort of name I couldn’t say without smirking. Fact was, he’d loved the idea of Coach Sanders’s daughter standing on UConn’s soccer
field. He’d even let the band use the stadium’s PA system.

All of which made it even more surreal.

As we segued into the next song, I heard my mother hoot my name. I smiled. Something had given way between us over the past several weeks, leaving a wide-open space that I wasn’t sure how
to fill. We still weren’t perfect, but we were more
us
than we’d been in months.

As rehearsed, the band paused dramatically before “November.” And then the song unfolded just as it had in the living room that day with Mason—the keyboard leading into the
song. I let the music unravel itself through my fingers, twisty and complicated and intense. Seconds later Mason joined me, slipping a hand in and unlocking an aching melody, and the song poured
out of us: secretive, striking, longing, dark, beautiful.

Ours.

And as I stood on the field that day, a sharp breeze in my face and the grass cushioning my feet, I wondered how I’d given up on my Thing so easily all those years ago. I hadn’t just
given up on playing music. I’d given up on everything that it was to me—emotion, expression, synergy, life, love.