Wild Awake (10 page)

But when I start to play the third movement, Dr. Scaliteri waves her hand to stop me. I halt, baffled, and wait for her instructions.

Dr. Scaliteri just stares at me and bounces.

An entire minutes passes, then another one. I watch the last digit on Dr. Scaliteri’s desk clock switch from a three to a four. At seventy-five dollars an hour, these are expensive minutes. We’re talking over two dollars’ worth of staring. Staring plus bouncing. I gaze around the room to distract myself, looking at the stained-glass window of a fruit bowl, stained-glass grapes and oranges made jewel-like by the sun. Who has a stained-glass window of a fruit bowl in their house? That window is the reason this room’s always so hot. It doesn’t open, so you just sit there sweating and breathing in hot, stale, exercise-ball-smelling air while you’re trying to play.

Dr. Scaliteri reaches over to her desk, picks up her calendar, and flips through the weeks. Frowning, she traces a French-manicured fingernail along the pale blue boxes representing the days until she finds what she’s looking for.

“The Showcase is July thirtieth.”

I nod. I could have told her that and saved her eighty-five cents’ worth of time, but I know that making me sit here adding up pennies while she paws through her calendar is kind of the point.

“That gives us less than six weeks.”

I nod again. She peers at me over the rims of her cat’s-eye glasses.

“You’re distracted. Why?”

I think about the Imperial Hotel, my nightmare last night, the unopened garbage bag on Sukey’s old bed. My face must betray a glimmer of guilt, because Dr. Scaliteri pounces.

“Aha. A boyfriend.”

I shake my head.

“Dog died.”

Shake.

“Grandma sick.”

Shake again.

Dr. Scaliteri scowls.

“Then whatever it is, it can’t possibly be as important as the Italian Concerto. Now let’s get to work.”

We work for three and a half hell-bent hours, until the keys are literally smeared with blood and my mind has been bleached to a glorious blankness, a lunar eclipse of the soul. The music is a castle I conjure around myself, a fortress of notes no feeling can storm. Inside it, I am powerful. I wield my own skill like a sword.

When I’m getting ready to leave, Dr. Scaliteri looks at me sternly.

“You cannot have distractions, Kiri. Piano must come first. Whoever this boy is”—she narrows her eyes—“you tell him not to call until August.”

The powerful feeling lasts all the way home. But the badness from this morning comes back when I walk in my front door, like a hornet that was waiting all day to sting me. The can of soup I heat up for dinner burns. I bang my shin on the coffee table. When I unload the dishwasher, I drop a plate, and although it doesn’t shatter, a crack spreads across it like a vindictive grin, and I don’t know whether to put it in the cupboard or throw it out. Everything feels an inch out of place, just enough to make me clumsy. The garbage bag in Sukey’s room is a boulder someone heaved into the pond of our house, disturbing the pebbly bottom and making the water rise to lick the banked canoes.

I can’t open it.

I won’t open it.

I go to bed early in an attempt to escape.

But when I’ve been lying there for forty-five minutes wide awake, I finally get up and pad down the hall to Sukey’s room.

Hi, Sukey
, I think, walking to the bed and laying my hand on the garbage bag.
It’s good to see you
.

I slowly tear the trash bag open.

Sukey had an accident
.

What I want to ask my mom is, who calls getting stabbed to death an accident?

The hole in the bag widens until its contents start spilling out. I watch while a portrait of Sukey takes shape before my eyes.

There are some things I recognize:

      -paintbrushes with red and black paint dried onto their tips;

      -a little glass jar of turpentine;

      -pencils and pens;

      -the pair of high-heeled silver shoes she wore at her art opening;

      -a half-finished tube of vanilla-scented hand cream;

      -empty CD cases:
Nevermind
,
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
;

      -a mug that says
BLACK CAT ART SUPPLY
;

      -one of the ceramic frogs that used to sit on her windowsill at home, now chipped;

      -a little kid’s painting of daisies that I recognize as mine;

      -a bag of glass paint jars with their lids stuck shut.

And some things I don’t recognize:

      -a rumpled denim jacket with silver hearts Bedazzled around the cuffs;

      -a plastic purple brush;

      -a cheap digital alarm clock;

      -a short leather skirt with beaded fringe;

      -a sparkly pink tube top;

      -Zig-Zag rolling papers;

      -a picture frame with no picture;

      -an empty lighter;

      -a small wooden carving of a bear.

And there are things that scare me:

      -empty orange pill bottles of all different sizes;

      -a weirdly stiff and bunched-up quilt I slowly realize is covered in dried blood;

      -an unbent paper clip with a curiously blackened tip.

That night, I don’t go back
to bed at all. I lay out Sukey’s things like holy artifacts. I can’t stop looking at them. I can’t stop touching them. I can’t leave them alone. I move from object to object like a paleontologist inspecting fossils, the same way I moved around her old bedroom touching everything I could find on the night Mom and Dad told us she died.

I try on the denim jacket with the silver hearts. It smells a little rancid, like french fry grease, probably from being buried under the trash in Doug’s closet for so long. I want so much for it to smell like Sukey that I bury my nose in the sleeve again and again, but there’s no trace of her cigarette smoke or her perfume.

I run the purple brush through my hair.

I plug in the alarm clock.

I buckle on the silver shoes and take an exploratory stroll around the room. They fit, which surprises me, and I stand there, teetering, feeling my legs lengthen like a stretched piece of gum.

I lay out the leather skirt and sparkly pink tube top on the bed and imagine Sukey wearing them. The skirt has a small yellow splatter of paint on the front. Somehow, that splatter reassures me, like at least some things didn’t change after she moved into the Imperial.

I roll a joint with one of the Zig-Zag papers and smoke it, sitting on the bed. After I smoke the joint, I question the ceramic frog. He, surely, must have some comment to make about what happened, some amphibian complaint.

Mister Frog, you have been with Sukey for so long. Did you see what happened? Did you try to stop it?

I talk to the frog for a good long time. All he does is gaze at me with dumb froggy eyes. I shake him and speak severely.

Mister Frog, we have ways of making of you talk
.

When I get tired of the frog, I pick up the wooden bear. It’s small and light, carved out of a pale blond wood, a scrap of pine or maple. It has pointy little bear ears and a doglike snout, and one of its paws has just snatched an oblong shard of a salmon. It fits in my hand like a toy.
Hey, little bear
, I think, stroking its sleek wooden back.
It’s okay
.

When I turn it over in my hand to look at it more closely, I realize there’s an inscription scratched on the underside with a knife or the sharp tip of a nail:
FOR SUKY. FROM DOUG
.

I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for sad things, I guess. I hug the bear in my hands and cry and cry.

By the time I get to the scary things, it’s well past four. The light on the ceiling buzzes faintly, as if to complain about being left on for so long. I’m still wearing Sukey’s silver shoes. I imagine they’ll bring Sukey back if I click their heels together three times, but when I try it, nothing happens. I pick up an empty pill bottle and gaze at the ruined label. The paper is rippled as if it got wet, and some of the letters have been completely rubbed off. The part I can read says
300 MG BY MOUTH
, but 300 milligrams of what? I pore over the other bottles: Percocet, Demerol, Oxycodone. They’re not Sukey’s, they can’t be Sukey’s, but why are they in the bag?

I put them down and pick up the bloody quilt. It’s stiff and bunched. I pull it apart, smoothing it out with my hands. The bloody parts look like invasions of bacteria in a petri dish, billowing clouds of black. Underneath, I can make out the scraps of flowered cotton and blue corduroy. The quilt is a horror, a nightmare in my arms, but all I can think about is how much the blood looks like paint—something knocked over and spilled by a clumsy elbow. An accident. I bundle it up carefully and slip it back into the bag, leaving everything else on the frilly bedspread.

I mean to go back to bed then. I really do. But not before touching each object one last time.

When the sun comes up at five, I am twisting the paper clip in my fingers. I am using its burnt tip to spell her name on the back of my hand.

“You seem happy today,” says Lukas
.

Lukas and I are walking down West Broadway on our way to a party at Kelsey Bartlett’s house. Or rather, Lukas is walking. I am hopping along beside him, tugging leaves and petals off every tree we pass. I felt a crazy burst of energy when I saw him waiting for me on the corner in front of the supermarket, and everything from last night seemed to slip off my shouldres like a heavy backpack. My body’s a little achy from not sleeping, but instead of feeling exhausted, I’m wired. The evening air smells like a pair of old jeans baking on a clothesline, and the sky is the color of a squeezed peach. I tuck a blossom behind Lukas’s ear.

“I was up all night.”

“Why?”

“I opened the bag.”

“Oh.”

He gives me a half-worried, half-encouraging glance, as if he’s afraid to ask what was inside. We’re walking down the Greek block, past the little grocery store with its shelves of canned olives and tahini. A woman in a green dress pushes the door open, and the sudden whiff of baking pita bread reminds me I haven’t eaten yet today. Lukas notices the blossom and bats it off.

“Want to know what was in the bag?”

I start to list the objects in no particular order. Lukas stops me when I get to the bloody quilt.

“I don’t think I can listen to this.”

I blink at him.

“Why not?”

“It’s horrible! He gave you a bloody quilt? That’s sick.”

I have to admit I hadn’t thought of it that way.

“He didn’t seem like a sicko.”

“Are you kidding me? He gave you a bloody murder-quilt he kept in his closet for five years.”

I shrug and do a pirouette on the sidewalk. I know I’m acting strangely for someone who spent all night sifting through a bag of pill bottles and rancid clothes, but that’s precisely the reason Lukas’s presence is making me so batty with joy. I poke him.

“He has a three-legged cat. I trust a man with a three-legged cat.”

“I thought you said he was smelly, obnoxious, and too drunk to walk.”

“Goes with the territory.”

“You
do
need some sleep.”

I pluck a daisy from someone’s front yard and stick it, boutonniere-like, in the pocket of Lukas’s shirt. It rides there for half a block like a puppy with its head out a car window before tumbling out and doing a face-plant on Kelsey’s front step.

Kelsey Bartlett lives in one of those houses that doesn’t look like much from the outside, but once you go in it’s all black leather couches and hardwood floors and a curiously invisible sound system that even plays music in the bathroom when you’re going pee. There aren’t many people there when we show up, just a few girls sitting on the couch eating celery sticks and ranch dip. When we walk in, Kelsey swoops over to greet us, wearing a purple halter dress and those stupid forty-dollar flip-flops all the girls at our school are wearing this year. Lukas’s face perks up when she appears, like he’s relieved to see someone who won’t talk his ear off about her murder scene evidence collection.

“Welcome, welcome,” gushes Kelsey. “I’m so glad you guys showed up. I haven’t seen you in forever, Kiri. How’s it going?”

Even though I secretly think Kelsey’s kind of a ditz, I give her a big smile.

“Fine. My practice schedule is positively
murderous
.”

Lukas shoots me a look, but Kelsey doesn’t notice. She makes a little face and pulls me into a hug.

“Crazy piano girl. I don’t know how you do it.”

Kelsey and Lukas start chatting about which bands they’re going to see at IndieFest this year. I try to join in, but I’ve been too busy to look at the lineup, and I probably won’t have time to go anyway. After a few minutes I wander away to see who else is here. I say hi to my friend Angela, who’s in the middle of telling a story to this girl Rhett whose dad owns the Cactus Club.

“Hey, Kiri,” says Angela, sipping her Sprite. “So anyway, he came back again yesterday, and this time he brought his friend. . . .”

I listen as Angela shares the breaking news about the latest additions to her pervert collection. Highlights at six:

      -her forty-year-old manager at the snack bar has a crush on her;

      -her old boyfriend from middle school wants to get back together;

      -Pete Vozt texted her a picture of his schlong.

I peel away from Rhett and Angela and go say hi to the orchestra kids, who are entertaining themselves by playing Chubby Bunny with the cherry tomatoes. There’s no room on the couch, so I plunk myself down on Bryan Kravchenko’s lap. He groans and tries to push me off.

“Get off me, yo!”

Instead I lean back and try to crush him against the couch.

“Help! Get her off me! She’s crazy!”

I finally get off when he elbows me in the ribs. They start talking about a TV show and I get restless again, so I mill around the house, stealing chips off people’s plates. Somebody sets up Guitar Hero and everyone clusters around the TV to watch.