Our Song (19 page)

“No, no, this is
your
journey,” she said.

“O-kay,” I said. “So . . .”

“So, throw it in the water!” Annabelle declared. “Cast it away.”

I took a breath and tossed the paper into the creek. As tiny as it was, it didn't fly very far. It landed with a plop, then caught on a rock for a moment before the water whisked it away.

It was all very unsatisfying.

“Maybe I should have made a wish or something,” I observed.

“This isn't throwing a penny in a fountain, Nell,” Annabelle scolded me. “It's much more meaningful. And besides, you're not done.”

“Oh,” I said, watching as she reached again into her burlap sack. She pulled out a necklace—a black leather thong with a tiny glass jar dangling off it.

“Now,” Annabelle instructed, “open the jar and fill it with some mud and water from the creek bed.”

“Seriously?” I said.

“Nelllll.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. I squatted at the edge of the creek and scooped up a thimbleful of brown silt and mucky-looking water. As I screwed on the top and put the necklace on, Annabelle waved something at me. I breathed in a gust of acrid smoke.

“The sage smudge!” I coughed. “I was afraid of that!”

“What? It's part of the cleansing,” Annabelle insisted.

“Well, I'm cleansed enough, thank you!” I yelled.

“All right,” Annabelle said. She dipped the smudge in the creek, and the flame went out with a hiss. “I hoped it wouldn't be as gross out in the open air.”

“Well, it's the thought that counts,” I said, giving her a quick hug. I stretched my necklace taut so I could eye my little jar of creek water and silt.

“So, let me guess,” I said. “Every time I start to feel like a puddle around Jacob, I'm supposed to look at this little jar of mud and say, ‘Om'? And then I'll feel better?”

“It's not mud,” Annabelle said. “It's a remnant of your cleanse.”

“Okay, enough with the potty humor already!” I said.

Annabelle burst out laughing and gave me a shove.

“This is serious!” she said.

When my own laughter ebbed away, I gave my “remnant” a more thoughtful study.

“It's a placebo,” I noted, remembering the time I'd learned about those in my sophomore science class. There were medical studies in which some people were given a real drug, and others were given sugar pills but
told
they had the real drug. Often, the patients with the fake pills did just as well as those with the real ones, simply because they believed in them.

“A placebo? How do you figure that?” Annabelle said as she slung her bag back over her shoulder.

“It's not about the mud,” I said. “Or the slip of paper. It's about what they mean to me.”

“Well, that's right, I guess,” Annabelle said. “So do they? Mean something to you?”

I felt grateful to Annabelle for this “journey,” semi-ridiculous though it was. But I couldn't lie.

“I honestly don't know,” I said. “I like the idea of them. But will they work?”

Life would be much easier if you could just will ideas into reality. If I could know that Jacob felt the same way I did.

If I could know that being together in Nanny's fiddle class would bring us closer, instead of tearing us apart.

If we could get over this “just friends” thing—and see what was on the other side.

Chapter
Nineteen

I
expected Nanny's class to
be unpleasant.

I braced myself for that specific, flinchy pain that only happens when a fiddle string is played flat and/or screechy.

I prepared for boredom and plenty of long minutes spent gazing out the window while Nanny drilled her students.

And I resigned myself to a whole new set of sore muscles as I shifted from hauling and hammering to fingering, bowing, and clamping a fiddle between my chin and collarbone.

What I
didn't
expect was a game of badminton.

Yes, badminton.

We would have played tetherball, but Nanny cast the deciding vote.

“That's all I need is to mess up my other hand whacking
some ball around,” she said. “Badminton I can handle.”

“Okay, everyone,” Nanny ordered the students, “gather your gear and let's hit it. And don't forget the music stands this time! Remember when we had to impale our poor sheet music on those tree branches?”

Everybody busted out in gales of you-had-to-be-there laughter. Then they loaded themselves (and me!) down with their fiddles, music stands, lunch cooler, and a badminton set that had been stashed in the corner of the little cabin where Nanny held her class. Also tossed in the corner, I noticed, were a croquet set, some beanbags, and even what looked like a pair of stilts.

“Surprise, sourpuss,” Nanny said, grinning at me as she followed her students out the door. “You didn't think we just sat in that room and played scales all day, did you?”

“Um,
yeah,
sort of,” I stammered, trailing after her with my arms full of picnic blankets.

“Like I said,” Nanny said, “Camden is a magical place. You don't, how do you say it, ‘dis' magic by doing the ordinary.”

The class trooped toward the big open field behind the great lodge. It was a favorite for lawn games and picnics and lolling. As they strolled along, chatting and laughing together, I caught up with Jacob.

“So
this
is why you were desperate to get into Nanny's class?” I said. “Badminton!? How did you get all those finger cramps and calluses if you were playing
badminton
?”

“Oh, that was the first few days,” Jacob said. “The hazing, we called it. Ms. Annie didn't let up until Tamara over there passed out one day.”

“
What?!
” I shrieked as Jacob pointed at a girl wearing a kelly-green headband and cute capri pants.

“I'm kidding!” Jacob said with a laugh. “Although don't let Tamara fool you. She's only a high school freshman, but she's hard-core. She kicked my butt when we did hurdles.”

“Your bu—
hurdles?
” I sputtered.

“Hurdles are the best!” Jacob assured me. “Especially for me. You know I'm kind of hung up on counting. But you do enough hurdles, the rhythm just kind of moves into your bones, you know. Then hopefully into your music, too.
That's
the part I'm still working on.”

Then he gave me a sweet smile that filled me with a glowy feeling. I dared to think that maybe the whole silly cleanse plus mud talisman had worked. I was feeling a little better about Jacob. I realized that when I was with him, I couldn't help but enjoy his company, despite the yearning.

And despite the fact that in two weeks, he'd be returning to Connecticut and I'd be back in Georgia.

The fact was, I was also distracted from Jacob by Nanny's crazy class.

At home, my grandmother was a taskmaster. She made me memorize a new piece of music from day one, and then made me practice it ten times a day. Here at Camden, she was like Maria
von Trapp and that teacher from
Dead Poets Society
, all rolled into one. Nanny was
cool
.

And the badminton lesson couldn't have been more fun.

I'd always loved the game. I loved how the shuttlecock moved in slow motion and the rackets were wispy and weightless. Badminton was a sport
made
for the non-sporty, i.e., a bunch of musicians.

Although once we got the game going, I realized Jacob was right. Tamara
was
a badass. She beat the pants off the rest of us, who included Will, a boy who'd also been playing fiddle all his life, an engaged couple in their early twenties named Shana and Harley, and Victoria, a quiet classical violin major who wanted to get her Appalachian groove on.

The game worked like this. Four players worked on the Appalachian fugue, while the remaining two played badminton. The players had to keep time with the back-and-forth of the shuttlecock
and
vice versa, all of them trying to feel their way to perfect, yet organic, rhythm. When Nanny yelled, “Switch!” the badminton players dropped their rackets and ran for their fiddles, while two of the fiddlers thrust their instruments at me (when playing fiddle/badminton, apparently, the assistant's job is handling the gear) and dashed out to the court.

And of course, we all laughed hysterically through the entire thing.

Another thing we did was duck into the trees to find the perfect echo chamber for the music. The students played facing each
other and with their backs to each other, trying to infuse their playing with the breezes whispering through the leaves or with the grind of the cicadas.

It was all really, really weird. But you know what? It worked. The students' music wasn't perfect, but it had life and lilt to it. Even Jacob's.

Especially
Jacob's.

His bow seemed to barely touch the strings. It was like the music was coming out of his chest or haloing around his head instead of vibrating out of his instrument. When he finished, he didn't aim his big, beaming smile at Nanny. He shone it at me.

And when we improvised a call-and-response to birdsongs, Jacob didn't close his eyes like the other students, the better to hear the distant trills and chirps. He looked at me.

Was he giving me those adoring looks because he thought I was cute, in a frizzy-haired, flat-chested, faux vegetarian kind of way? Was he falling for me?

Or was he just happy that I was finally ensnared in his earnest fiddler's world and finding that it didn't suck?

After an idyllic picnic lunch, Nanny gestured for me to help her up from the folding chair we'd brought for her.

“All right, folks,” she said. “Let's head back.”

There was less laughing and chatting during the walk back to the cabin. After everyone had set up their music stands inside, I found out why.

“Okay,” Nanny announced. “We're going to take everything
we did out there, all that freedom, and we are going to whip it into shape. I want technique. I want precision. I want perfection. But I
also
want the breeze in the trees and the badminton. I want light and air and fun. Easy enough?”

Every face fell—while I pressed my knuckles against my lips to keep from laughing.

“You were holding out on me,” I whispered to Nanny. “You're just as evil as ever.”

“Don't think of it as evil,” Nanny said, giving me a wink. “Think of it as scarily effective.”

She began combing through the students' playing, measure by measure, sometimes note by note. Nanny led me around the room like her own personal puppet, ordering me to show Shana how to play her sequence with more vibrato, or demonstrate to Will how a phrase could become breezier.

Sometimes, of course, Nanny had to correct
me
, but she'd been instructing me for so long that I could usually figure out what she wanted with nothing more than a two-word prompt.

Before long, and without really deciding to do so, Nanny and I started teaching in tandem. While she helped Victoria smooth out her bowing, I gave Will tips on his finger work. When Tamara needed help on an intricate passage, she grabbed me because I was closer. Meanwhile, Nanny tapped Harley's music stand with her good hand to help him stay on rhythm.

But then a moment came when the most natural place for me to go was to Jacob.

He needed me too. Being in the classroom was making him think too hard again. I could practically see the wheels turning in his head, trying to be both breezy and note perfect; an artist and a technician.

I wished I could tell him that life was a lot easier when you strove for neither, like me.

But of course I didn't say that. Instead I watched him quietly for a moment before I sidled up to him and wrapped my fingers around his left wrist.

Squawwwwwk.

Jacob's bow skittered off his fiddle strings with such force that I had to duck to avoid a poke in the eye. Once I was crouched on the floor, it took a moment of heavy breathing before I could get up again. Apparently, that was what happened to me when I touched Jacob, even on the wrist.

Jacob, too, looked winded and his neck had blotched right up.

“$(#@, I'm sorry,” he whispered, ducking down to help me up.

“$(#@?!” I whispered back with a giggle. “Clearly you've been hanging out with a few too many blacksmiths.”

“Maybe one in particular,” Jacob said. “You're a bad influence, what can I say?”

You could say that you
like
my bad influence,
I thought, pining.
Then you could toss your fiddle on the table and take me out to the woods, where we could make out like mad.

My inhale was shuddery and little sad before I said, “Anyway, I was just trying to get you to drop your wrist. I think
that would loosen up your trill, loosen up everything, really.”