Chapter 4 Jamie
Jamie
Two and a Half Years Ago
The noise never fucking stopped.
It never stopped, it never relented, it just got louder and thumpier until I was on the brink of putting on my heaviest boots and jumping on the floor just to make them shut up.
“This doesn’t bother you?” I asked Ken for what felt like the fifth time. He was huddled up on his bed with headphones on and just shrugged. Which was extremely helpful.
I was well aware that I was more noise sensitive than other people, but surely this level of obnoxiousness was universally infuriating.
It was a Friday night, sure, but it was also the week before finals, when most people were nose to the grindstone trying not to fail out of Parker.
I got that people had to let off steam, but surely they could let off steam more quietly.
I crammed my headphones over my ears again and hunched over my music theory notes, desperately trying to finish my Schenkerian graphic reduction before I lost my fucking mind.
So obviously that was when my phone buzzed.
It was a text from my mom. Something incoherent, a bunch of random letters strung together.
She was drunk again, burying her grief in the nearest bottle of cheap gin.
I wanted to throw my phone across the room and scream and scream and scream until I drowned out the people below me, drowned out the stupid guilty voice in my head that told me I should’ve been be working harder, drowned out the even stupider voice that wanted to call my mom right then and there and ask if she was okay.
Fuck it.
I shoved my feet into some shoes and headed downstairs to find the room directly below mine and knock on the door.
Someone inside immediately turned the music down and I heard some muffled conversation—probably debate about whether they should have actually opened the door or not. But then there were footsteps, and the door swung open, and I found myself face-to-face with Marigold Gensler.
You, I almost said. Of course it’s you. I caught myself just in time.
“Can you turn that down?” I said instead. “I live right above you. It’s exam week. My roommate and I are trying to focus.”
She lifted both brows. “I’d think you don’t need to study, considering you’re the best student in our year. According to you, anyway.”
I didn’t remember ever saying that. I chalked it up to yet another asshole move from me that only existed in Marigold’s head. I refused to find that surprising anymore. I was smart enough to accept when I’d become somebody’s villain.
“Can you turn it down?” I repeated.
Over her shoulder I spotted Cessy, Shrishti’s girlfriend. And a couple other people whose names I didn’t know, presumably from other departments. Dance, probably, if Cessy was there. They all shared that odd, ethereal beauty of dancers.
Adam had that kind of beauty.
“Sure,” Marigold said, in a tone of voice that made it clear she had no such intention. “Bye.”
I wanted to keep fighting, now. That was a fighting kind of response. She wanted a reaction, and I knew, I knew, I shouldn’t give it to her. I bit the inside of my cheek until it hurt.
They’d already turned the music up again by the time I made it back upstairs. Predictably.
“I thought you talked to them?” Ken said.
“Yeah, I did.”
I gritted my teeth and dropped back into my desk chair, seething as I curled my body over my pages of theory. But my brain had lost the capacity to process anything so analytic. All I felt was the tension of bone grinding against bone as I clenched my teeth.
And the rage.
Who did she think she was, anyway? I supposed in her little world, there weren’t any consequences. And apparently no need to study, either. She must have been so fucking confident that she would pass. Not just pass, but thrive. She must know she had her exams in the bag.
Probably because she was cocky. But possibly for more nefarious, nepotism-related reasons.
A tiny voice in my brain suggested You know that’s ridiculous, and I stamped it out.
I wondered if Shrishti knew where Cessy was right now. I wondered if Cessy was just like Marigold. Or maybe dancers didn’t need to study; maybe their exams were entirely physical. So what did it matter to them if they ruined everybody else’s semester?
To hell with it. I didn’t see why Marigold should receive special treatment. She lived in the dorm like everybody else, even if she did have a private room.
I shoved myself back to my feet and headed out the door and down the hall to the RA’s room and knocked. When Demarius opened the door, he looked exhausted, shirt wrinkled and jaw unshaven. In short, he looked about how most of us felt this week.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry to bother you. I can come back tomorrow…?”
“No. Go ahead. I was awake anyway. What’s up?”
“I just wanted to make a noise complaint about the people in the room below mine. Room 262. They’re having a party or something, and it’s making it hard for me and my roommate to study.”
“Do you want me to talk to them?”
I hesitated for a second. If I said yes, that was definitely escalating things. But on the other hand, why was I even here if I didn’t want the RA to intervene?
So I said, “Yeah. That’d be great, thank you. Even if they just turn it down a little bit.”
Why did I feel bad even for asking? I shouldn’t. It was an extremely reasonable request, particularly since I had already asked them in person. Politely.
Still, I felt like I was skulking as I headed back to my room, like I had somehow done something shameful.
I didn’t truly understand the consequences of my actions until later, though. Around three a.m., there was a knock at my door.
I was still awake, trudging through the same music theory work. So was Ken, who gave me a look across the room, brows arched as if to say What did you expect?
I braced myself and opened the door.
Marigold was on the other side, her face a flushed tempest of indignation. “Did you make a noise complaint on me?” she accused.
“Yeah,” I said. “I did. I asked you to turn it down, and you turned it up. So…obviously I took the next logical step.”
“You asshole,” she snapped. “Hate me all you want, but some things are beyond the pale. We have the next three years together as two of just eight piano students in our year. We aren’t going to be able to avoid each other.
Like, ever. And you just torpedoed any chance of us being able to be somewhat normal around each other. ”
That felt like an overreaction. I frowned. “Because I told the RA to tell you to turn it down? Be serious, Marigold. It’s not that big a deal.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, we had alcohol there, so when Demarius came by, he found that. And now we’re all getting written up, and I have to go to an alcohol awareness class for the rest of the year. This goes on my record. Did you know that? My permanent record. So. Thanks. You win, I guess.”
Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought it would go down like that. Marigold getting chastised a little by an overly tired RA who was already mentally checked out of this job? Fine. Seemed proportionate. Demarius wasn’t a jerk, and honestly, I didn’t think he had it in him to actually write somebody up.
Clearly I was wrong.
“Oh, no, if it isn’t the consequences of your own actions. Maybe next time you’ll think about all the people in the dorm who actually give a shit about our grades before you throw a rager at midnight,” I said, and shut the door in her face.
Fuck playing nice.
Whatever existed between us once, whatever might have been…it was over.
Present Day
Celia, of course, wastes no time bringing up my piano battle with Marigold.
“You must try harder,” she says, perennially blunt. “Listen to the masters play. Close your eyes and let the music fill you. Let yourself feel it.”
She says that like I haven’t tried a hundred times, a thousand. But I paste a smile on my face and nod anyway. “I know. I know—I’ll try.”
“Read a book first. Or watch a film. Something that will give you an emotion that you can play. The composer has written the bones of the piece for you, but the performer decides the muscle and fascia and skin. The notes mean nothing if you do not give them life.”
It’s a lecture I’ve heard too many times before. I wonder sometimes if Celia thinks I don’t take her advice seriously. But if listening to her was enough to make a difference, I’d be an emotional virtuoso by now. Instead I’m still me, plodding from note to note perfectly but soullessly.
She listens to me play the Beethoven sonata again and again. Or, at least, she listens to the beginning. I never make it past a page or two before Celia slaps a hand atop the piano and demands I start again.
“You have this in you, Jamie, I know you do. What happened to the freshman boy I taught? You used to play like you wrote the music yourself. Whatever you were doing then, I need you to do it now.”
But freshman year, Adam was still alive. I had no idea, then, how good I had it. Even when I tried to draw from loss or sadness or pain, the sources of that pain were…Well. At the time, I’m sure I thought they were important. Now, they just seem na?ve and immature. A little boy’s idea of hurt.
This pain, though? It burns too hot. I know Celia would tell me to draw from it—let my grief carry me into the music. But using that fire…it would burn me up along with it.
And using Adam’s suicide to further my own career feels cheap.
By the end of the lesson, I’m exhausted, my hands are cramping, and all I want to do is meet Shrishti at the gym and punch things.
But of course, it’s never that easy.
Marigold Gensler is waiting for me outside the practice room, leaning against the wall with a paperback book open in one hand. She folds over the corner of the page—because of course she is the kind to dog-ear her book—and tucks it back into her bag.
“Jamie,” she says, even though I’ve already started walking. “Wait up.”