Between the Notes (10 page)

I let out the breath I’d been holding. “Thank you. Thank you so much, Carla. I owe you one.”

“I better go out and greet them.”

“Yes. Okay. I’ll be home soon,” I said, staring into the receiver before placing it back in its cradle. I took a deep breath and turned to where James had been waiting, but he was gone.

“James?” I checked the sanctuary, and another room off to the side. I found a piano, but no James.

Then I heard the unmistakable purr of his car engine outside. I was in my seat and buckled in seconds, and he tore out of the parking lot.

“I
’ll drive you home instead of back to school,” said James as we passed the house with the yellow window. “Where do you live?”

I didn’t want him to see.
The truth is never as good as what you imagine.
“Actually, it’s okay. I need to grab my bike.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. It’s fine. I’d never hear the end of it, anyway, if I showed up with a strange boy.”

He tossed his hair to the side. “I am
not
a strange boy.”

I laughed, for the umpteenth time that afternoon.

“I had a really good time,” I said as he pulled into the faculty parking lot. “This was exactly what I needed.”

He smiled and said, “Me too.”

I headed in the direction of my old neighborhood first, so James wouldn’t see me pedaling toward Lakeside. Then I cut down a side street and found my way back to Jackson Boulevard. I was soon rattling down the gravel road toward our house, where I saw four figures in the yard. The two small ones were
the twins, and the woman with purplish hair was easy enough to identify. But it wasn’t until I’d rolled up close that I recognized the other one.

Lennie.

He was leaning against the front steps, chatting with Carla like they were old pals. I wheeled past them to stow my bike under the back stairs, dropping my helmet to the ground.

I went straight for Carla. “Thanks so much. You saved me.”

She waved my gratitude away like a pesky gnat. “That’s what neighbors are for.” She nodded toward Lazarski. “You know Lennie.”

I turned my head slightly but didn’t make eye contact with him. “Yes.”

Carla crossed her arms and studied us for a moment. “What have you done to her, Leonard?”

“Nothing!” He lifted his hands in mock surrender. “I swear.”

I grimaced as Brady ran over to Lennie and tugged on the front of his T-shirt. “Airplane?” My brother stuck out one foot and one arm, nearly toppling over.

“I don’t know, Brady—” Instinctively, I reached over to stop them, to protect him. It might make him dizzy. He had a hard enough time with his balance as it was. But Lennie had already grasped him by the ankle and wrist and was lifting him off the ground. Brady let his other arm and leg fly out wide as Lennie spun him around. Just once. But to Brady it was like the ride of a lifetime. He lay on the ground laughing while Kaya took her turn.

Lennie swung her around and around. Carla must’ve told him about the twins, about Brady’s disability. He seemed to know to take it easy on him. I was surprised.

“Again!” Brady said as soon as Lennie was done spinning Kaya.

Lennie wobbled over to Brady. “I need a break, dude.”

I hurried over and grabbed the twins by whatever I could get my hands on—the shoulder of Brady’s jacket and the strap of a Kaya’s jumper—and led them to the back steps. “Anyway, we have to go in now,” I said to Carla. “Thank you again for watching them.”

“Anytime.”

Brady pulled free of my grasp and ran back into the yard. “I play with Lennie.” My grip on Kaya loosened and she darted off as well. The three of them stood there staring at me, awaiting my verdict.

“You play with Lennie, too,” said Brady, looking up at Lennie. “Can she?”

“Sure,” said Lennie, grinning. “Ivy can play with me anytime.”

I gritted my teeth. “One more spin, each of you, then inside. And I mean it. Mom’ll be home soon.” I made my way up the stairs and peeked out the kitchen window to make sure they were okay.

The twins begged him for more but he stopped at one each, actually obeying my edict. They hollered, “Bye, Lennie!” about a million times and finally came in. It took a while to get them settled at either end of the coffee table with a drink and a snack
and some coloring books. Fifteen minutes later, I glanced out the window to the backyard. Lennie was lying on the grass, staring skyward. Aside from blinking occasionally, he didn’t budge.

I walked downstairs and poked my head out the door. “They’re not coming out again. You can go now.”

He kept gazing at the sky. I craned my neck to see what he was looking at, but there was nothing but clouds.

I checked the twins once more to make sure they were still okay coloring, then pulled the door closed behind me and stomped down the outside stairs. I circled around him to stand where I could keep an eye on our apartment, my arms crossed.

“What are you doing?”

He shrugged. “Nothing in particular.”

“Then would you mind doing it in your own backyard?”

He crossed his legs and laced his fingers behind his head. “Something tells me you didn’t appreciate the gift I brought you in the cafeteria on Friday.”

“Are you serious? You call that a gift?”

“I did purchase a whole new bag of potatoes for you with my very own money so, yes, technically, that’s a gift.”

I glared down at him. “No, I did not appreciate it.”

He nodded over to where my bike was leaning under the stairs. “That’s a spiffy new bike helmet you got there.”

I knew the helmet must’ve come from him, but didn’t want
him
to know I knew. “I thought it was . . . someone else. I’ll pay you back for it.”

“Not necessary,” he said. “But a thank-you would be nice.”

I glanced up at our kitchen door. It wasn’t good to leave Brady alone this long. “Thank you for the helmet,” I said quickly. “And the roadside assistance. I didn’t ask you to do that.” I didn’t know why he was being so nice to me, either.

He shrugged. “It was my pleasure.”

The way he said
pleasure
made it sound like he’d done something way more stimulating than purchase some protective headgear and fix my bike chain. I should’ve gone inside then, ignored him, but I couldn’t help noticing that his shirt had hiked up a bit to reveal his abs, and they were disturbingly six-packy.

“Stop undressing me with your eyes, Emerson,” he said.

I gasped indignantly. “I was not!”

I jumped over him to head home, but he sat up at exactly the wrong moment and my foot accidentally kicked him in the side of the head. I fell to my hands and knees.

“Ow, shit!” Lennie’s hand flew to his eye.

“Oh, my God.” I crawled to his side. “Are you okay?”

Lennie rocked back and forth holding his left eye.

I reached out to touch him. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

He shoved my hand away.

“I’ll get you some ice.” I started for our back stairs.

“Don’t bother.” He got to his feet and stalked away, still holding his eye.

“Lennie . . .” I got up and took a few steps toward him but he kept walking. “I’m sorry!” I called after him. “I really am!”

He didn’t turn back, and I stood in the yard until I heard the door of his house slam.

“Shit,” I said.

Kaya’s face was pressed to our living room window above, watching the whole thing with saucer eyes. I knew Carla had probably seen it, too. Or heard it. And Brady . . . I ran upstairs to find him curled up on the floor, bawling.

“Now look what you’ve done,” said Kaya.

I knelt beside him and spoke in the most soothing voice I could muster. “It’s okay, Brady. Everything is okay.”

He banged his fists to the sides of his head. “You hurt Lennie.”

I groaned. “I’m sorry. It was an accident. I said I was sorry.”

Kaya gave me a stern look and took over, gently rubbing Brady’s back and cooing softly in his ear as I latched the back door so he couldn’t escape. I moved next to Brady, who started crying loudly again.

“Just go away,” Kaya said.

“Fine.” I backed off. “When Mom gets home, tell her I’m in my room.”

Feeling like crap, I climbed the two flights of stairs to my attic room, sank into my bed, and pulled the edge of the comforter around me.

I
t was dark outside when I woke up—seven o’clock, and I had slept through dinner. Without my piano, sleep was my only escape. There was no fear of being found out or humiliated, of losing my best friend or falling for a boy who was too good for me. Or the wrong boy.

There was nothing.

When I went downstairs, everyone was sitting around the coffee table playing Chutes and Ladders, Brady’s favorite.

They were all crowded together on our single couch, Kaya and Brady crawling across our parents’ laps to take their turns. My father would nudge them to the side or pin them under his elbows when he reached to spin the wheel, and they’d squeal.

Back home, in our real house, we had so much space to spread out. You could get away, to think or read or breathe without the entire family witnessing your every move. Brady’s therapists used to come and work with him at our house; now Mom had to take him to their offices.

I sighed. I missed my piano room.

I missed my window-seat bedroom.

I used to sit at my window, surrounded by soft pillows, talking to Reesa on my cell phone. She’d walk over to my house with her phone to her ear and I’d wave to her as she crossed the yard. We’d keep talking until she was in the house and up the stairs and sitting next to me and we’d say bye and hi without skipping a beat.

I missed that so much. Thinking about who had replaced her as my neighbor made my stomach ache.

I picked up the remote to the small television from our old kitchen that now sat in the corner of the living room. A black screen of static blasted me when I turned it on, so I quickly muted and flicked to another channel, and another. Only a few local stations came in, and they were fuzzy. “What’s with the TV? We can’t get cable here?”

My father slid his player down a chute. “Essentials only, Ives. The less we spend, the quicker we pay off our debts.”

“And get the hell out of here?”

“Language.” Mom said sternly, snatching the remote out of my hand and turning off the TV. “Come eat some supper.”

“I don’t want any supper. I want to get out of this stupid place. I want to go home.”

“Ivy!” said Mom. “We are home. What’s gotten into you?”

“She had a fight with her boyfriend,” singsonged Kaya.

“He’s not my boyfriend, Kaya.” I stomped into the kitchen, which wasn’t particularly satisfying as far as dramatic exits go,
since it was only three steps away. I climbed onto one of the bar stools with my back toward the living room, and folded my arms on the counter so I could bury my head in them.

Mom heated up a plate of sausage risotto and slid it in front of me. It was my favorite. “You want to talk about it?” she asked.

“No.” I picked up a fork and shoved a bite into my mouth.

Mom poured a glass of milk and set it down next to my plate. “Delicious, nutritious, and affordable. Reminds me of when your father and I were first married. We hardly had two nickels to rub together, but we—”

“Can you please stop trying to make it sound like some great adventure? Because it’s not. You moved us to the worst possible neighborhood in the district. Brady’s got the freaking drug dealer next door for his new best friend, and the entire school is laughing at me. This place sucks, and nothing you say is going to make it suck any less.” I pushed my plate away so hard, it accidently fell off the counter and clattered to the floor.

Mom leaped back with a gasp. “You think I wanted this?” She bent down, scooped up a handful of risotto, and splatted it into the sink. “You think I didn’t do everything within my power to stop it from happening?”

“How would I know?” I shouted. “You’ve spent the past year telling me everything was just fine. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all!”

The expression on my mother’s face then made me stop, and she wasn’t even looking at me. She was looking at the rest of our
family. I spun around to see. Dad had an arm around each twin, hugging them to his chest and covering their ears. Brady was pounding his own hand on top of Dad’s, and his mouth was wide open in what appeared to be a silent scream. I’d never seen him do that before.

Mom rushed to them, took Brady’s face in her hands. “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s okay.” She shushed quietly until he stopped pounding and the silent scream turned to hiccupy tears. Dad kept his arms around them all, a big hug of family that didn’t include me.

I turned to the risotto mess I’d made and began wiping it up with paper towels. When I’d cleaned most of the goop off the floor, Dad appeared with a bucket and mop and handed them to me.

“Your mother is working very hard to make the best of a difficult situation,” he said quietly. “Maybe you could put a little effort into making it easier on her. Not harder. Huh?”

I nodded, feeling like utter crap . . . again. “Okay.”

He stepped closer and spoke even lower, so nobody else could hear. His jaw was tight. “I don’t ever want to hear you talk to your mother like that again. Understood?”

I nodded again. “Yes, sir.”

Daddy went back to Mom and the twins while I mopped the kitchen floor. He and Kaya resumed their game of Chutes and Ladders. Mom held Brady on her lap next to them, still shushing.

I felt my throat tightening. Tears hovered dangerously close to the surface.

Daddy caught my eye. “Join us?”

I shook my head. There wasn’t any room for me, anyway. “I’ve got homework,” I mumbled.

After the twins got so upset that first night about missing their favorite toys, Dad had started spending every evening doing something special with them, no matter how tired he was when he got home from work. They played games, or he pushed them on the swing in the park across the street, or they made up silly stories. They played “Would You Rather” and Daddy always asked if they’d rather have cake or ice cream, snowdrifts or sand dunes, kisses or hugs. My own personal version of the game was not so fun: Lakeside or Westside? Embarrassment or total humiliation? Losers or druggies?

I retreated to the attic and opened my laptop, which was the only computer my parents hadn’t sold. They agreed I needed it for homework, and I just had to let Mom and the twins use it sometimes. No cable in this joint, but at least we had internet access. A little red circle popped up on my email icon, alerting me to sixteen new messages. I scanned through them, deleting the spam and ignoring Wynn’s links to cat videos. That left three from Reesa. They had all had been sent after lunch, while I was racing through the cemetery with James. A pang of guilt rang through me when I saw the subject line of her first email:
SORRY
. I clicked the window open to find a short message.

I smiled, hoping he’d discovered it by putting his hood on.

The next email was titled
YOU MUST DO THIS
! It was the ad for the job at her country club. She wrote:

I hit
DELETE
.

Her next email was a link to a Little Invisibles video, a song called “Breathless.” I loved this band because the lead singer was a girl, and she played keyboards, right up front in the middle of the stage. She also sang with her eyes closed most of the time, like she was a little afraid to see the audience out there. And I totally got that.

I closed my own eyes and listened, mouthing the words she sang, pouring my frustrations and fear into the silent song.

When I looked up, my mother was standing in the doorway. “Were you singing?”

Was I? I snapped the laptop closed. “No.”

“Thinking about it?” She sat on the corner of my bed.

“Just memorizing some lines. For AP English.
The Canterbury Tales.
”

“Hmm.” She studied my face. “Reesa’s on the phone.”

I tensed. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

Mom padded away and I made my way down to the kitchen to take the call. My parents had vacated the living room to put the twins to bed, so I curled up on the couch with the phone to my ear.

“Hey, Reesa.”

“
Hey, Reesa?
That’s all you have to say to me?”

“Um . . . how are you?”

There was a strangled, growling sound on the other end. “Where
were
you? You were supposed to meet me in the band room after school.”

“I was?”

“You didn’t get my note?”

Since I’d joined the land of the cell-phoneless, we’d been leaving notes inside each other’s lockers. She knew my combination and I knew hers. But I hadn’t gone back there when James and I returned from the cemetery.

“Sorry. I went home early. I . . . uh . . . didn’t feel well.”

Reesa snorted. “That’s great. I waited for an hour. Molly Palmer was in there playing her clarinet.”

“Did you talk to her?” I was nervous, yet oddly hopeful. If Reesa and Molly became friends again, maybe I could stop sneaking around about everything.

“No, I did not talk to her,” Reesa snipped. “She looked at me
like she was going to bite my head off if I got too close. I waited in the hall.”

“Why were we supposed to meet there, anyway?”

“So you could practice! For the country club thingy. Auditions are next Saturday. I thought . . .”

“Wrong,” I said quietly. “You thought wrong.”

“But you’d be perfect, and the money . . .”

“It’s not happening, Rees.” Yes, I needed spending money. It would raise fewer questions if I didn’t have to decline every single activity that cost more than five dollars, which was the amount Mom had decided we could spare for my monthly allowance. But . . . no. I couldn’t sing for people like that. “Can we talk about something else?”

She huffed, gave me a few seconds of silent treatment, then said, simply, “James.”

Not the subject I was hoping for.

“I’ve been doing some research,” she said. “His car has New York tags.”

“It does?” I hadn’t even noticed that.

“So I focused my search on New York. And I found them. They’re loaded.”

“Who’s loaded?”

“The Wickertons. Ever hear of Wickerton Investments?”

“Uh, no?”

“I hadn’t, either. It’s some hedge fund or something. The owner is this guy Joseph Wickerton. He’s on the list of the richest
people in America. Number twenty-nine. Worth like nine billion dollars. I found an article about him in the
New York Times.
He and his wife are big philanthropists. They give all kinds of money to charity.”

“So what makes you think they’re related to James?”

Reesa sighed. “His name is Wickerton. And he’s from New York.”

“That’s all you got?”

“For your information, Wickerton is not a very common name. They were the only Wickertons I found. Anywhere. They have to be related. Plus, in the article, it said they had a teenage son and a daughter in college. But they didn’t mention their names. I’ll have to keep digging on that.”

A dozen questions came to mind.

“It can’t be him,” I said. “Why would he live
here
?” Sure, he looked the part. And he was well dressed and charming. But he was my secret and that would all change if he was a bajillionaire. He’d be special and I’d be . . . not.
Please don’t let it be him.

There were muffled sounds on Reesa’s end, which I recognized as her shouting to someone while holding her hand over the phone. When she came back, she said, “Mom needs me for some bullshit.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow.”

“Oh! I didn’t even tell you what happened with Lazarski.”

“What?” I forced myself not to scream into the phone.

“Coming!” she shouted, and then to me, “Sorry. Tell you
about it tomorrow. You’re gonna die.”

“Wait . . . what?”

The phone clicked and Reesa was gone. And I was left feeling as helpless as a game piece on the Chutes and Ladders board, never knowing when I’d be sent tumbling downward again.