Wild Awake (26 page)

I am a heartless monomaniac.

I don’t know what to do.

I spin on my silver heels and bomb out of there just as fast as I can possibly limp.

Sometimes, a problem looks so small
you can crush it between your fingers. Then you wake up one morning and it’s eating you alive.

When I leave the diner, it’s like the world comes unplugged. I run around pressing buttons, but nothing is working and nothing makes sense.

First, Denny and I get into a huge fight because I start practicing piano as soon as I get home without even bothering to change out of my murder-shoes or my scotch-smelling dress. I start practicing piano because I don’t know what else to do. There is nothing left to do. There is nothing left to do except what I was supposed to be doing in the first place, all summer long: practicing. I play Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and Fish, Fish, Debussy, Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach. I drown out the worries that snake through my brain. I block out the touches of spiders and skunks. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a five-piano alarm.

Denny comes down the stairs, white-hot furious with sleep-puffy eyes.

“Where the HELL have you been?”

“Battle of the Bands.”

“I drove around looking for you for TWO HOURS. Your friend’s mom called at midnight and said I had to pick you up, then you weren’t even there.”

“Leave me alone. I’m practicing.”

“It’s six o’ clock in the FUCKING MORNING.”

“It’s not my fault you sleep all the time.”

“You’re FUCKING INSANE.”

He snatches the wooden metronome from on top of the piano and throws it hard at the floor. Like everything else in the world, it explodes into a million splintery pieces. I keep playing.

“You’d better listen to me, you psycho BITCH.”

Denny’s voice has a high-pitched strain to it like wind screaming in a chimney. I don’t care. I need to practice. The International Young Pianists’ Showcase requires my presence at 2:07 p.m. on Sunday, July 30. Now that I’ve scared off Lukas and abandoned Skunk, piano is all I have left.
Triplets, triplets, left hand plays triplets. Right hand floats above
.

Denny grabs my shoulders. Before I realize what’s happening, the piano bench topples like a kicked colt. My chin cracks against the floor. I am down. I have been downed. Kiri down. An ache springs up where my jaw hit the hardwood. My head floats dizzily from the surprise fall. I hear Denny stomp back up the stairs and slam the door.

For a moment, I lie there, stunned. I get up, lurch up the stairs, and pound on Denny’s door. “Denny—”

“Piss off.”

I talk at his door in a loud, fast, choppy gurgle.

“I’m sorry, Denny. I didn’t mean to wake you up. Maybe you could wear earplugs or something. The Showcase is in two weeks, and I basically need to practice nonstop until Mom and Dad get home.”

He crashes around his room. I hear him dial a number on the cordless phone. It’s sixteen digits long, which can only mean one thing.

The cruise ship
.

“Mom? Hey. Kiri’s lost her mind.”

No
.

I grab the doorknob, but it’s locked. Denny speaks nice and loud so I can hear.

“Yeah, she never sleeps, and she starts practicing piano at six in the morning, and I’m pretty sure she’s on drugs.”

No. No, no, no
.

I jiggle the doorknob frantically and strain against the door with all my weight. “He’s lying!” I shout.

“What’s that?” says Denny, his voice dripping with responsible-older-brotherness like a switchblade dipped in honey. “Sure, you can talk to her. Hang on.”

The door pops open. Denny smirks as he hands me the phone. I snatch it and stalk down the hall to my room. By some miracle, I hear my own Responsible Voice spool out, calm and reassuring.

“Hi, Mom. I don’t think Denny understands. The Showcase is in
two weeks
.”

I sound so convincing it’s scary. I keep going, amazed at my own skill.

“I know, but he didn’t even try asking nicely. He can’t just come home out of the blue and expect me to work around his slacker schedule when I have so much to do.”

This is going well. This is going better than well. I press on. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I
told
him I was sleeping over at Angela’s last night, but he doesn’t listen to a word I say. Ha-ha. Okay. I’ll tell him. Thanks, Mom. How’s the cruise going?”

Through my bedroom wall, I can hear Denny turn up his music to drown me out. I smile ferociously into the mouthpiece, hearing precisely nothing of my mother’s reply. “Ha-ha, sounds awesome. Say hi to Dad for me. Talk to you later. Bye.”

When I hang up, relief is coursing through my veins. I take the phone downstairs and drop it into its cradle.

“Mom says to let me practice!” I shout up the stairs.

I go to the piano, right the toppled bench, and start up where I left off without even getting ice for my chin.

Denny doesn’t come down again.

At one p.m. I take a quick lunch break, scarfing chips and salsa in front of the computer. There’s an email from my mom, saying it was nice talking to me on the phone this morning, but she just got a very worrisome email from Petra Malcywyck, who says that I seem to be having a rough time, and is there something going on that she should know about?

I reply to inform her that I have in fact been having a lovely time. I have been attending Hot Yoga classes at FitCity thrice a week, I have been learning the art of bicycle repair, I have been cooking organic macrobiotic three-course meals using the grocery money she left on top of the fridge, I have been practicing piano like a child of traditional Asian parents, I have been reading all the links to supposedly fascinating physics articles my friend Teagan has been emailing me from physics camp, and, oh yes, I have been watering the living crap out of the azaleas.

I write a similar email to Petra that is slightly more acerbic in tone.

A few minutes later, Lukas calls. I almost don’t answer. Then I do. I have a couple things to say to him. But instead of apologizing for being a treacherous narc, he says his great-grandma’s sick and they’re going up north to be with her next weekend so, um, sorry, but he can’t play our victory show at the Train Room on Saturday and is throwing everything we’ve been working on since September on the stink barge.

I tell Lukas to have fun at IndieFest with Kelsey Bartlett next weekend, whereupon he mumbles something about dropping off my gear and hangs up.

A little after noon, the phone rings again. It’s Dr. Scaliteri. I take the phone into the kitchen with me and press a pack of frozen peas to the bruised part of my chin, thinking,
Dr. Scaliteri, if you knew how much I’ve suffered for my art—does Nelson Chow have to stand up to vicious thugs every time he practices piano? Does Nelson Chow have slivers of shattered metronome stuck to the bottoms of his feet?

It turns out Dr. Scaliteri did not call to congratulate me on my fortitude.

“Kiri, I am thinking we will cancel your lessons. It has been a very bad summer for you, and I cannot be teaching you if you are not doing serious practice.”

I lift the frozen peas off my chin.

“But I
have
been practicing. I’ve been practicing constantly.”

I’ve been practicing since six in the morning, in spite of brutal beatings and an awful comedown from those yellow pills that’s left me queasy and dry-mouthed.

“Yes, yes, I understand this, Kiri, but you know, if you are not serious about piano, it is not right you should be taking lessons from me. The rest of my students, they are very serious, and it’s not fair to them. Besides this, I have received a call from the Showcase, and they tell me you are wanting to change which pieces you play.”

“Yes—I’m going to play
Sesquipaedia
instead of the Prokofiev. Remember, I showed you the music last year?”

“This is completely unacceptable.”

“It’s a great piece. Risky, sure. But I think I’m up to the challenge.”

There’s silence on Dr. Scaliteri’s end. I pace to the window and look out. Our neighbor Mr. Hardy is pulling up a shrub from his front yard. He plunges his shovel into the dirt and pries it up. Each time he pries, a little more of the tangled, woody rootstock is wrenched up from the ground until the whole plant is lying on its side, naked and wretched and impossible to screw back in. Dr. Scaliteri sighs.

“I have told this Showcase you will not be able to perform. You do not have the discipline for piano.”

My body goes numb.

“You can’t do that. You can’t withdraw me.”

“Okay, Kiri. You remind your parents to mail me the check for your last lesson when they come home.”

“Wait—I need to—”

“Ciao.”

When I take the phone away from my ear, the air in the kitchen is hot and softly vibrating, as if someone just shot a gun. In the living room, the piano looks like it did on the day the movers delivered it to my house: a beautiful bomb shelter, a flotation device in an ocean whose depths I was afraid to see. Maybe it’s not discipline I’ve been lacking all this time. Maybe it’s something simpler—something that’s been staring me in the face this whole time.

I march to the front hall and open the door. The high noon sun is blinding, and the azaleas are snickering at me. “Hey, Mr. Hardy!” I shout. “Can I borrow that shovel?”

The first azalea bush takes fifteen whacks.

The second one takes ten.

I wrap my arms around the bushes, wrestle them out of the earth, and heave them, panting, onto the lawn. Mr. Hardy gapes at me from his driveway. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing to those pretty flowers?”

“They’re diseased,” I shout back. “You should probably kill yours, too.”

I go back into the house, sweating all over and electric with holy rage, and play through my repertoire one last time. I play passionately, brilliantly, as if Tzlatina Tzoriskaya herself was sitting on the living room couch. I drain my entire being into the keys. As I play, I hear things in the music I never heard before. My grief over Sukey. My fury at my parents. My vulnerability, my savage ugliness, my playfulness, my hope. It’s all there, laid out with terrifying clarity, where anyone could hear it—where I can hear it myself.

Holy crap
, I think,
Nelson Chow was right
.

All this time, I’ve been afraid of the music, and I’m not afraid anymore.

When I’m finished playing, I lower the piano’s heavy lid and slide the curved wooden cover over the keys. Shuttered like that, it almost looks like an instrument again instead of the massive winged creature with polished white teeth it had started to become in my mind. Leaving the living room, I glance over my shoulder, but it stays like that—placid, benign—and I know the next time I play, it will be from love.

I want to see what the world looks like from the ground. I ride my bike to the Salvation Army thrift shop and buy a lime-green radio, then bike to Skunk’s house and leave it on the patio outside his door, tuned to the mystery station.

Next stop is the Imperial. I spy an old microwave someone put on the curb with a
STILL WORKS
sign and decide to bring it to Doug. On my way up the stairs, I make a list of all the things I need to remember to tell Doug about the microwave. Number one, don’t put metal in it. Metal will make it spark. Number two, don’t put anything in it for longer than five minutes. Longer than five minutes and even the rock-hardest frozen thing will be reduced to a hissing, bubbling goo. Number three, never put cat food in it. There is no reason to ever put cat food in a microwave, and I know you’re going to be drunk some night and try it. Number four, don’t let a crackhead sell this microwave for crack. Number five, do not make any part of this microwave into a deadly weapon.

When I get to the fourth floor, Doug’s not in his room. I unplug his hot plate and thunk down the microwave in its place. I plug it in and stand there, setting the time. Doug would never in a million years bother to set the time.

I’m about to pay a visit to Sukey’s rooftop when I hear a grating yowl. Snoogie has wandered out of the closet and is skulking across the room in my direction. She gets close and starts pressing herself around my legs, doing that round-the-leg figure-eight thing cats do. I bend down and scoop her up, a skinny hot bag of bones with fur like a ragged bath mat. She sticks out her legs, claws extended, and rakes them against my shirt. I flip her around so her back is against my chest and her razor collection is sticking out in front of us as protection against crook-nosed Kids who might be roaming through the hall.

“Let’s find Doug,” I whisper, and she meows in response. “He needs a microwave tutorial.”

The usual suspects are drinking on the front steps of the hotel. I say hi to Jasmine, who is wearing a stretchy purple tank top, leopard-print sweatpants, and sparkly pink eye shadow that goes all the way up to her eyebrows. She’s sucking on a cigarette like it’s a stick of honey.

“Aw,” she says. “Doug wanted you to have that kitty.”

“I brought him a microwave,” I say. “I left it in his room. Where is he?”

Jasmine stubs out her cigarette. “He’s dead, baby. He passed on Tuesday night.”

I stare at her, stricken. “What? How?”

“He’d been sick for a long time, baby. HIV. He didn’t like people to know.”

“Does he have any family?” I say, but Jasmine says no.

I hurry back up the stairs to Doug’s room, blinking back tears.
I will pack up his things; I will keep them in my closet until someone who loves him picks them up
. But when I get there, there’s a skinny, sunken-cheeked, green-skinned elf in the room with the microwave under one arm and Doug’s blanket under the other.

“Hey,” I say, and he turns and snarls at me with a face of such pure, ugly, Gollum-like desperation that I take Snoogie and bolt before he kills us both.

Snoogie doesn’t stop yowling the whole bike ride home, and I have to hold her in one arm like a tattered, flea-bitten baby to keep her from twisting away and getting run over by a bus. When we get home, I drag us to the top of the stairs and pull my bedroom door open, ready to collapse on the floor.