Strings

Chapter One | Guinevere Cassedine

Chapter One.

I can see that my father is trying to hold back tears. He's been a mess for the past week, watching me pack, asking me over and over and over if I'm sure that this is what I want to do. Ever since my mother died from ovarian cancer when I was four, it's been hard for him to let me out of his sight, for fear of losing me, too. I don't remember my mother very well, to tell you the truth. To me, she's more of a distant aunt than a mother, but she was the love of my father's life. Some things you never quite get over.

"Don't worry dad, I'll be fine. It's only a couple of months, I'll be home in May," I try to reassure him as we're pulling bags out of the back of his old pick-up truck, but it's not working. My dad is a good man. He works at an architecture firm in the middle of Chicago, a hour-drive away from our hometown, Manteno. I always asked dad why we didn't just move to the city and save the gas, but he told me it was too dangerous and he'd rather me be safe at home an hour away. Here, at Devereaux Academy all the way in northern Minnesota, I think the distance scares him.

"I know, baby. I just wish I we had the money to get you a plane ticket to fly home for Christmas." We weren't poor, but with the gas money driving here and the tuition to pay, even with my scholarships, he was really busting his butt to get me to go to this school. A plane ticket so that I can come home for a week and then fly back up here wouldn't be worth it. Even though it kills him to see me go, I know that he knows it's best for me. I want to play cello with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and ever since my high school cut orchestra out of the music program, I've been lost. Empty. 

I started playing the cello when I was old enough to hold it up, around the time when I was seven. The first cello I used had been my mother's, although her main strength was the violin. She had a bass and a viola too, and had mastered all of them in her time playing for the New York Philharmonic. I don't play to connect with my mother, although my father swears all the time I play just as beautifully as she does. I play because it gives me a sense of reality, a sense of belonging. Something I've yet to find anywhere else. I'm quiet and reserved at school and although I've gone to school with the same group of kids since pre-kindergarten, I only have one or two people I can actually call friends. Which I guess is for the better, since most of the time I don't spend practicing the cello, plucking at a bass until my fingers bleed, or trying to teach myself to play the viola, my nose is in a book studying for advanced placement tests. I don't dare touch mom's violin, dad keeps it hidden away in his room and I think it's the only thing he has left that reminds him of her. Which is fine, the violin was her thing. I've heard her play all of the instruments, and I'm almost on her level with the cello. I could never be as good as she was at the violin, not in a million years.

The cello I'm using now is a beautiful Mirecourt that my dad won at an auction as a gift for  me instead of a car for my sixteenth birthday. I'm a lot taller than my mom was, I guess, because I'd outgrown her 3/4 size Stradivarius a couple of years ago. Which is a shame, because it was a gorgeous instrument passed down from my great-grandfather. 

As my dad begins rambling and pulling bags from the back-seat of the truck, I glance over at a girl and a guy unpacking an old van. It's the kind of van that garage bands in my town purchase to transport gear to and from shows, if they were so lucky to get them.  The girl is petite, with long black hair falling down her back, and the guy tall with blonde bangs that he keeps pushing out of his eyes and a killer smile. Another guy, with long reddish-blonde hair that goes past his shoulders, runs up to them and picks the girl up, twirling her around and kissing her on the forehead. The blonde guy just watches, shaking his head, before the other guy puts the girl back on her feet and grabs his hand, then pulls him into a hug. Why guys think holding hands while hugging is more manly than just hugging is something that I will never understand. I turn back to my dad, who's still talking.