Standing for Weirdo

Chapter 26

I woke up extra early the next day. The alarm sounded as soon as my eyes had managed to close, and I just wanted to turn around and curl up into a ball, dead to the world, and get a few precious minutes of rest.

But I couldn’t, of course. I had a make-up masterpiece to produce if I wanted to look anywhere close to normal, which was the reason I had set up the alarm so early in the first place. I had gone to bed late, crying, and I could not allow it to show.

All my effort went down the drain when I purposefully strode out of my house only to find Trevor camped in my driveway. I missed a step and then gathered myself, calling back to mind the Bitch Princess image he’d implanted there. I tried to hold my head up and walk past him.

I can’t talk to him now. I haven’t had time to prepare that conversation. I can’t stop to make a fool out of myself. I’ll just walk on and…

“Alice,” he said, his voice raspy and broken. I stopped dead. “I’m sorry. I had no right to react like I did.”

He had rehearsed the words, I knew. They were too fluid to be spontaneous. But the feeling behind them was real enough. Still, I didn’t say that everything was all right.

“Do you have an answer today?” I crossed my arms and stared at him. Then I blinked. “God. What’s happened to you?”

If the previous night had shown me an eerie Trevor, today he was emaciated, like a walking corpse. His usual slimness made him look sick, and the skin stretched over his bones was paper white and frail. I was afraid I’d bruise him if I touched him.

“Beatrice.” He lifted his eyes to mine and I fought to stifle a gasp. Sunken, all the light extinguished. There was a blanket of calm settled over his expression. Only, it was the wrong kind of calm. The one that meant giving up.

“That’s all I have,” he added when I stayed quiet.

“Do I know her?” I couldn’t think of any Beatrice, but maybe she was a junior or something.

He motioned for me to walk with him toward the school and shook his head. “No. I don’t think so, at least. I hope not. I don’t even know whether she’s real.”

Real? What?

“Who is she, again?”

“I haven’t slept.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

He shot me a tired look and I shrugged, letting him find his own pace through the story.

“When you were gone, I just wanted to sit down and keep on playing,” he said. “I knew the impulse was stupid, that I had to eat and sleep, but I still wanted to play again. My own guitar scared me, if you can believe that.” He laughed a bit, humorless. “So, I went out to the yard. But the melody was stuck in my head, and if I focused only a little, I could hear every nuance. I heard it played with a string quartet, and I heard how it should sound on my guitar. And I know it’s crazy, but it wasn’t my song. I thought I had been creating it, following some inspiration, but it was already written. I just had to… remember. And play it. For Beatrice. The composer made it for her.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

He’d not shed any new light on yesterday’s events. He’d just uttered a lot of nonsense. Of scary nonsense. The crazy kind of scary. But I found my fingers wrapping around his anyway.

“I believe you,” I promised. I did for some strange reason. “I’m not sure what to make of it, but I believe you.”

We walked in silence a bit longer, approaching our school entrance and garnering a lot of attention as we walked together.

“You have study hour before lunch today, right?” he asked when we stopped in the corridor.

I nodded and he pulled a crumpled paper out of his pocket. “Could you try to look this up?”

“What is it?” I said, peering at the lines and dots and letters interspersed through the note.

“The song. A piece of it, at least. The only one I can recall, to be honest.”

“Wait. You were playing it for twelve hours straight yesterday and you don’t remember how it goes?”

He looked chagrined. “I can play it, and I know how it sounds, but when I try to put it down, it gets fuzzy. The notes I write are wrong. That’s the most I’ve managed to notate.”

A suspicion invaded me. “How do you know the other parts sound wrong? Have you tried them?”

“Just a little.”

“You’re hopeless! What if you’d gotten stuck again?”

“I didn’t. I was careful. Trust me; I did not enjoy doing the transcription, not this time. But I needed to know what I was playing.” He cupped the side of my face and, no matter how badly he looked at the moment, I knew I was goners. “Please? Can you look that up? See if you can find out what it is?”

“And who Beatrice is, right?”

“Yeah. If it’s even on the net.”

I gave him a confident smile. “Everything’s on the net.”

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