Chapter Thirteen #2
“I get it. I’ve always hated things like this.” Her cheeks go red. “Not that I don’t like your family or you or anything, but it’s like…the older you get, the more you hear that question. What are you doing with your life? And when you don’t have an answer, you look like…”
“A mess?”
She smiles. “Yep.”
“I used to have answers. But right now I’m trying to keep my head above water, not decide on the course of the rest of my life,” I say.
Cecily leans back onto the counter. She wraps her arms across her torso, as if holding something inside.
“I guess I’m the opposite. I’ve been dying for so long, there was no reason to decide on anything.
Making it to eighteen was like a miracle.
And now I’m staring down the barrel of a future I never expected.
I haven’t even picked a major yet, let alone a career or anything like that.
Dad keeps asking, and I keep putting it off. ”
I nod. I almost ask if she’s leaning toward anything, but it would only prove both our points on questions without answers.
“There’s always time, I guess. Until there isn’t.” Cecily bites on the inside of her cheek, forming a dimple. “It’s cliché, but it is true. You’ve got time. You can figure it out tomorrow or five years from now, you know?”
The sentiment is kind as well as true, but the words sink into my skin like sharp nails.
I have time. And that wasn’t a scary prospect before a year ago, but now every second pulls me further from Harper and the future I planned. I get older and change, but she’ll forever be sixteen.
My stomach churns, the hot dogs and wine threatening a reappearance.
“Jo?” Cecily asks.
I’ve been staring at the wall. I blink the dryness away.
I nod. “Too much wine, I think. I’m going to go lie down.”
“I’ll let your mom know,” Cecily says.
I give her a quick thanks and beeline for the stairs leading to the basement. In the past, my departure would warrant my mom checking on me, but I figure I have at least an hour before I’m bothered. With all the cheap wine flowing, maybe more.
I settle on the couch in front of the big TV and flip on a movie. Pride & Prejudice. I’ve seen it enough times it’s more mindless comfort than distraction.
“Hiding out?” a familiar voice asks. My heart leaps, settling as Finn materializes and plops at my side on the couch.
“I’m not hiding.”
“You’re so hiding,” he says. “But no shame here.” He moves his knee closer to mine, the bone passing through mine with a bump. “Feel like company?”
“What, the dinner party boring you already?”
“No fun without you,” he says.
I ignore that and shrug. It’s enough for him to settle in. Though Finn never seems to have trouble settling in anywhere.
“Nora loves this movie,” he says. “She’s probably watched it a hundred times.”
“It’s a classic.”
Finn wrinkles his nose. “It’s boring.”
“No one said you have to watch.”
“Well, now I’m invested,” Finn says. He’s slumped on the far side of the couch, but the longer the movie goes, the more he shifts my way.
I fight the instinct to tell him to scoot away.
Being near him spikes the hairs on my neck and arms and makes focusing on the TV incredibly difficult.
Fortunately, I’ve watched this movie every time I’ve been sick or sad for over a decade.
“Darcy is kind of an asshole. I don’t get the appeal,” he says.
“You’re not exactly the target demographic. And he’s not an asshole,” I say. “Or he can be. He’s…awkward. Prideful. But so is Elizabeth. That’s, like, the whole point.”
“He sabotages her sister’s whole deal!” Finn protests. For someone who claimed disinterest when he sat down, he’s been watching more intently than me. “And his whole ‘I love you, but your family isn’t good enough for me, yada yada’ thing… ” Finn shakes his head. “Dick move.”
My lips turn up. “You talk a big game for someone who tapped out of the romance game at fourteen.”
“Who says I tapped out?”
I roll my eyes, not taking the bait. Finn’s eyes linger on the side of my face for a few more seconds, but I don’t pull my gaze from the TV. Eventually, he looks away.
“I want to write music like this,” I say at the climax of the film, the score swelling.
“Didn’t peg you as a classical fan. Aren’t you more into that sad-person-with-a-guitar style?”
The observation is spot-on and makes me stiffen.
“Yeah. But that’s not what I mean. It’s like…music that makes you feel. It doesn’t even need lyrics, and even if you can’t verbalize it, you feel it. Good music makes you feel. I want to write something like that.”
Finn’s brows pull together. “Why don’t you?”
My stomach rolls.
“I used to.”
“You said you used to write with your friend. Maybe you need a new partner.”
“A new partner being…”
He pushes to his feet. “Give me two minutes.”
Then he’s gone. Three minutes later, he comes down the stairs, my notebook in one hand. I wonder if my family would have noticed a notebook floating across the house had they been inside. Paige would have proof of her haunting theory.
Finn returns to the couch, sitting cross-legged beside me, and lets the notebook fall onto the cushion between us.
His fingers pass through the pages once before he gets ahold of them, flipping to a page with one of many versions of the song I’ve been trying to finish for months. This version has the additions he left to the lyrics.
“I’ve been thinking about this song,” he says. “And I know sad is your style, but what if this song isn’t?”
I frown at him. He continues, “I mean, look at these notes. You start softer, more melancholy, but the first notes of the chorus—” He jabs a finger at the notes.
“You’ve got these minor chords, and that gives you that melancholy sound, but what if it shifts, like…
like a sad story that gets happier as it goes on?
” He scans the room. “Can you find a pen?”
Begrudgingly, I peel myself out of my divot in the couch, returning with a ballpoint pen.
“Okay, so you’ve got minor chords to start.” He points to the paper, and I scrawl down the notes. “Now, what if you start with two major chords? Then you’re back down to minors. First verse stays down, but the second starts to pick up. And by the end, you’re more hopeful than mopey.”
At my silence and what must be a stricken expression, Finn clears his throat, sitting back. “I mean, it’s only an idea. Feel free to tell me to shut up,” he says.
“I think you’re onto something,” I say.
My mouth goes dry, and my heart rate jumps.
For a moment, I feel as if I’m stomping on Harper’s grave.
This was always our thing. But before it was our thing, it was my dad’s and mine.
Music was always collaborative. And though part of me wants to throw up, the other part is starving for this feeling.
In every quiet room I hear echoes of you
And search for phantoms in vain
I’ve no clue how to breathe again
How to let the sun return after the rain
And I’ve built these walls so high
With bloody hands, brick by brick
Forgetting that up above, all along,
there’s been a sky
I’m looking for a song in the dark
A melody whispering in the wind
and through each quiet night
I’m trying to get back in the fight
Time weaves a tapestry of moments
Threading pain into passion, tangling my befores
into my beginnings
A symphony of a life, still unlived
The song is far from complete, the page full of missing notes and lyrics, but it’s more progress than I’ve made in months.
And I wonder if maybe the music isn’t entirely out of my reach.