Hours Before
At the center of the world’s largest train station, a boy with a broken heart sat playing the piano.
He played through the hustle and bustle of the early morning rush hour, going largely unnoticed, while the tenants of this undying city rushed hastily past him toward their departure gates. Off to live lives far away from here—or so he imagined.
The boy had come here every day before school for the past month, to this very station, at the very same time. Dressed in the same uncharacteristically shabby clothing and scuffed sneakers, with his uncombed nest of salt-white hair, all of which helped conceal his true identity.
No one would ever dare suspect that a Button Heir of all people would be here of all places, looking more than a little worse for wear.
And no one would ever dare think that the heir in question was in fact Octavius Button: third-oldest child of billionaire Leontes Button and famed teenage musician.
Octavius preferred it when his audiences were unassuming, when they didn’t come with the baggage of expectation, when they couldn’t care less about who he was or where he came from.
Not when he was just a random insignificant boy, playing a random insignificant melody that no one would recognize or care enough about to stop and listen to.
That’s what he loved most about the city. No New Yorker in their right mind cared about him or his broken heart. He was completely and utterly invisible, and he liked it that way.
Octavius’s pale, delicate fingers danced along the keys, replaying the same notes, the same song, on a loop with no definitive end.
He looked possessed, like a machine malfunctioning.
And in some ways, he was exactly that, if you were to believe what some scientists say about the human brain being one big, complicated mess of a machine.
In which case, Octavius was a computer weakened by a virus.
Faulty, glitching, and dying, his hardware completely wrecked by the evils of love and the side effects of heartbreak.
Pieces of aorta, congealed pericardium fluid, and the little that remained of his right ventricle, all left behind in love’s wake and scattered across the city, a bloodied trail following him wherever he went.
Even now, as he played, an invisible puddle of blood dripped from Octavius’s ruptured organ, pooling around his feet, and staining the white material of his beat-up Chucks a bright crimson red.
The boy, much too preoccupied with carving out a melody from the wooden piano keys, did not sense the shift in the air when it came. He did not hear the heeled boots clicking against the station’s marble floor, nor did he feel the eyes burrowing holes into the back of his head.
It wasn’t until a manicured dark brown hand jutted forward out of nowhere that he finally took notice of his intruder.
He watched as an index finger from the already-outstretched hand pushed down on one of the keys, F sharp, disrupting his flow with a single note.
He looked up through the haze of the station’s overbright lights, as the familiar dyed honey-blond curls and unimpressed grimace of his eldest sister came into view.
“Fola?” he said, as both a greeting and a question.
“Octavius,” she replied, in a way that was both an answer and a statement.
If it weren’t for the fact that his sister was known to be in a perpetual state of displeasure, between her pinched expression and folded arms, he would have assumed that she was pissed off at him or something.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, when what he really meant was, How did you find me?
“I could ask you the same question. Aren’t you meant to be in school?” his sister asked.
“Today’s my day off,” he lied. Truthfully, Octavius was barely ever in school these days.
Fola only blinked at him, dissecting his lie with her usual analytical gaze. Before she could ask him another invasive question, he beat her to the chase.
“You didn’t answer my question … What are you doing here?”
He hadn’t seen his sister in weeks, maybe even months.
He wasn’t great at tracking useless things like the passage of time.
The last he’d seen of Fola was when she’d ambushed him at Appleton Prep (his Manhattan boarding school) however many moons ago, much like she was doing now.
She’d traveled all that way just to ask him to consider returning home for the summer holidays.
He’d asked her why, and she’d simply replied: “Because I miss you.” Which had been very, very unlike his sister.
It was unlike any of his siblings, really; they weren’t the affectionate sort of family. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d spoken to Bilal, Perdita, or Romeo.
And despite Fola being one of his favorite people in the short list of people Octavius actually tolerated, his last meeting with his sister had not been an entirely pleasant one, so he imagined this wouldn’t be either.
“They sent me to fetch you, since no one else had any clue where you’d be,” she replied, eyeing the grand piano he was seated at with mild contempt.
They, he thought, briefly wondering if his boarding school had suddenly begun to care about his ongoing absences and had, for some reason, sent his older sister to fetch him.
He’d always had very poor attendance, and no one had bothered him about it in his three years of being there (which he suspected was in part due to who his father was).
So no, that couldn’t be it. This had to be someone else …
Octavius’s eyebrows knitted together. “Who is they?”
“You know, the usual suspects,” Fola said, waving her hand dismissively.
The usual suspects was normally code for their father. But then again, this could be another ploy of Fola’s to lure him back to the family manor for absolutely no reason.
“Well, as you can see, I am very busy,” Octavius said, making a point to gesture to the piano. “So sadly, I won’t be able to come with you at this moment in time.”
Fola raised an eyebrow, giving him a judgmental once-over as she took in his disheveled appearance.
“Oh, I can see you’re very busy indeed. Busy pretending to be poor again, that is.
What did I say last time about cosplaying the working class, Tavi?
” Fola asked sternly, before she finally broke her resolve, allowing a small smile to trespass her usually guarded expression.
It was the smile that she only ever reserved for both Octavius and complex math equations.
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not cosplaying anyone. I’m just wallowing pathetically in self-pity. Didn’t realize that was a crime.”
She gave him another scrutinous glare, and then a few moments later ahhed as if finally sussing him out.
“Let me guess, yet another of your forays into romance has ended bitterly?”
Octavius sighed. “You could put it that way.”
“Who was it this time? A Japanese heiress? The son of a Russian oligarch? The next Miss Argentina?” Fola asked teasingly, taking a seat next to him on the short piano stool. Fola always found her brother’s failed romantic excursions ever so amusing.
“Spanish prince,” he muttered.
This wasn’t the first time Octavius had been brutally dumped before, nor the second time, nor the third.
But this one hurt for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of, especially since one of his previous suitors had gone through the great effort of dumping him via the boarding school’s ancient fax machine.
This time Octavius had at least been dumped in person, over chai lattes in Central Park.
You’d think he’d be over it by now, given that it had been weeks since the dumping.
Maybe his melancholy was because it was finally dawning on Octavius that the problem in all of his relationships was, in fact, him.
“You know, despite all this being a tad too theatrical for me … I find myself almost feeling sorry for you,” Fola said as she ruffled his platinum-white hair.
She liked to call Octavius a serial dater, as though it were his choice to get repeatedly dumped and humiliated, like his life was a sad reboot of Groundhog Day.
He didn’t choose to be dumped, it just so happened that his romantic relationships always ended the exact same way: first, with signs of mild disinterest, then with Octavius desperately trying to cling to the tail end of a ship that had long since sailed, followed by various torturous, almost barbaric, methods of severing ties.
Fola wouldn’t understand it at all. She’d never been dumped before; she was usually the one who did the dumping.
He glared at his sister. “Anyway, I told you that I’m busy, so what are you still doing here?” he asked again, trying and failing to mask his growing agitation. “Clearly it isn’t just to mock me or because you ‘missed me.’ So what is it? And how did you even know I would be here?”
“To answer all of your burning questions … you’re right, I’m not here to call you back because I’ve missed you—which, for the record, I always do, dearly, my dear brother.
I’m here because we are all being summoned back to the Manor to fulfill our yearly contractual obligations.
And lastly, I knew you were here because I know how you think.
Figuring out your movements was just one long maddening math equation, really. ”
He didn’t like that she found him so predictable; sometimes he forgot how much of a mastermind his sister truly was. She’d always catch him in a lie, even before he’d opened his mouth to speak it. She was constantly several steps ahead of everyone else. He’d learned long ago to accept it.
Octavius looked at her, confused. “Yearly contractual obli—”
“What day is it today, Tavi?” she asked, cutting him off.
He shrugged. He had no clue when he’d last considered what day it might be, not when all the days felt the same, merging into one large ball of achromatic nothingness.
“It’s Friday, November twenty-third,” Fola said, answering her own question.
He stared at her blankly.