Hours Before #2
She blinked at him and then simply added, “Prodigy Ball Day.”
And there it was, the puzzle piece he was missing. The nightmare finally clicked into its dreadful place.
“Fucking hell,” he said, immediately rubbing the encroaching horror from his eyes.
The last he had checked, the event was still two blissful months away. This breakup seemed to have taken a bigger toll than he had realized.
“Yeah, fucking hell indeed. Everyone’s already gathered at the house for the ten-year anniversary press conference.
I lied and told them you were out running errands.
Of course, given that everyone knows you never actually run errands, it was a pretty far-fetched lie.
Still, better than the truth of you being here, hungover, missing your classes to cry over someone you dated for five minutes. ”
Octavius ignored his sister’s callous words about his love life.
“I thought that if I pretended it wasn’t happening, it simply wouldn’t happen,” he replied numbly.
“In what universe would Father ever cancel the Prodigy Ball? Let alone the ten-year anniversary one, with a press conference?” Fola asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I don’t know, a universe where I’m lucky, I suppose.”
“Now, Tavi. What have I said about luck?”
“That it’s unreliable?”
“No, it’s worse than that,” Fola said, standing up from the piano stool. “It’s unmathematical, and therefore pointless to believe in.”
Octavius blinked up at his sister. “I always forget how much of a delight you are, Fols,” he said.
Fola rolled her eyes, before checking her watch. “We should get going. There’s a car waiting for us … Unless you wanted to finish that piece you were playing.”
Octavius glanced down briefly at the old piano before shaking his head. “That would defeat the point of it,” he said.
“The point of what?” Fola asked.
“The piece. It’s called ‘Pandesto: The Triumph of Time.’ I wrote it to have no end; it’s just meant to be played until the player is too sick to continue.”
Fola looked at him in the way she always looked at things that weren’t mathematical: with a mixture of bewilderment, disgust, and boredom.
“The art is in the irony—the triumph of time … But we only get worse with time?” he explained, but that didn’t seem to help at all.
“So … you’re not going to finish the piece, then?” she asked.
His gaze edged hesitantly toward the keys once again, but he nodded. “I think I’m done here.”
“Great!” Fola said, and then without any warning, she grabbed him by the arm and began pulling him toward one of the station’s many exits.
“You know I am very capable of walking myself, right?” Octavius grumbled as his sister practically dragged him across the busy walkway.
She heaved a sigh and let him go, muttering something under her breath about how slow he was as she marched on.
He was about to respond to her with a very witty retort about how scientifically he was naturally faster than her, given their height difference of over nine inches, but was stopped in his tracks by the sight of something, or rather someone, painfully familiar.
His older brother’s face. Plastered all over the front pages stacked up on a newsstand.
THE OLYMPIAN TOO brUISED TO BEAR ANOTHER GOLD, one headline read. And another: BILAL BUTTON: GENIUS FENCER FINALLY FOILED. And another: BILAL’S BLUNDER and another and another. Each headline as brutal as the last.
“I take it you heard about Bilal?” Fola asked suddenly, having stopped to observe the newsstand with him.
Of course he had. Who in the country hadn’t?
The news had only just broken, and despite being largely in his own world, Octavius hadn’t been able to miss it.
The newspapers, the rolling headlines, the loud whispers.
It was all anyone seemed to be talking about: Renowned genius fencer and the world’s youngest Olympic fencing gold medalist was facing what was potentially a career-ending injury.
Apparently, Bilal had injured himself in a freak accident several weeks ago but the details were only emerging now.
Only just leaking now, Octavius realized.
Once upon a time, Octavius would have been the first person to know about the goings-on of his brother’s life, instead of finding out about it with the rest of the world.
“Yeah, I heard about the accident,” Octavius replied numbly.
A strange look flashed across Fola’s face at the word accident, and then it was gone in an instant.
“He’ll obviously be at the press conference this afternoon, if you want to say anything to him. I imagine it has been a difficult time for him; it would be good to check in,” Fola said as they began to retreat toward the exit once again.
Octavius had thought about checking in on his brother last night, sending him a text to see if he was doing okay, but he knew the text would go unanswered.
He wasn’t sure there was anyone in the world who hated him more than Bilal did.
It was weird to think that the brothers had once been inseparable.
“Maybe,” Octavius replied, feeling the chilly November air wrap around him as they stepped outside, sending shock waves of bitter cold through his system.
He spotted the sleek exterior of an unmistakable Button town car parked outside the station, identifiable by its unique Button-shaped symbol on the license plate.
The driver stepped out of the car and opened one of the back doors.
With a gentle shove from his very temperamental sister, Octavius clambered into the car.
“Thanks for manhandling me,” he said pointedly as she got in after him.
“No need to thank me, just doing my job,” Fola replied, looking very pleased with herself.
“I thought your job involved winning chess matches against old men and solving impossible algebraic equations,” Octavius muttered, as the car started to move.
“Yes, and also picking up my dramatic younger brother from the train terminal while he sulks and plays the piano. How exactly did that piano get in there, anyway? I don’t recall Grand Central having one …”
Octavius gave an innocent shrug. “Who knows. I think they installed it a few weeks ago,” he answered, omitting the fact that he might have put in a special request to have the piano in his dorm room moved to the station.
It wasn’t like he’d gotten in trouble for it yet.
That was the wonderful thing about New York.
No one asked questions. Not even when a piano seemed to fall from the sky.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Fola muttered, in the way she did when she was in problem-solving mode.
Octavius knew that he’d eventually be found out, that his misdeeds would not go unnoticed forever. But for now, at least, they’d slipped under the radar.
As the car rolled down the busy stretch of Forty-Second Street, Octavius braced himself for the impact of whatever disaster was to come next.